Skip to main content

Authors - V

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z


Luigi Vacca

Shannon Valor

Borin van Loon (with Jonathan Miller)

Borin van Loon (with Nigel Benson)

Tony Veale (with Mike Cook)

Vlatko Vedral

Mark Vellend

Nieske Vergunst (with Bennie Mols)

Surendra Verma

Alice Vernon

  • Ghosted: a history of ghost hunting and why we keep looking ****

    • Frank Verstraete (with Céline Broeckaert)

  • Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics (and everyone needs to know something about it) **

    • Timothy Verstynen (with Bradley Voytek)

    Giovanni Vignale

    Alex Vilenkin (with Delia Perlov)

    Gaia Vince

  • Nomad Century: how to survive the climate upheaval *****

    • James Vincent

  • Beyond Measure: the hidden history of measurement from cubits to quantum constants *****

    • Andrew Viner

  • Venn that Tune ****

    • Sherryl Vint

    Claudio Vita-Finzi

    Ron Voller

    Mark Vonhoenacker

    Bradley Voytek (with Timothy Verstynen)

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

    In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

    This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

    Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
    Post a Comment
    Read more