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

    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

    Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

    It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
    Post a Comment
    Read more

    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