Category: Books

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You: Scott E. Page

From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren’t enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models–from linear regression to random walks and far beyond–that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page’s "many-model paradigm," which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.

Source: www.amazon.com

Charting the Next Pandemic

This book provides an introduction to the computational and complex systems modeling of the global spreading of infectious diseases. The latest developments in the area of contagion processes modeling are discussed, and readers are exposed to real world examples of data-model integration impacting the decision-making process. Recent advances in computational science and the increasing availability of real-world data are making it possible to develop realistic scenarios and real-time forecasts of the global spreading of emerging health threats.

The first part of the book guides the reader through sophisticated complex systems modeling techniques with a non-technical and visual approach, explaining and illustrating the construction of the modern framework used to project the spread of pandemics and epidemics. Models can be used to transform data to knowledge that is intuitively communicated by powerful infographics and for this reason, the second part of the book focuses on a set of charts that illustrate possible scenarios of future pandemics. The visual atlas contained allows the reader to identify commonalities and patterns in emerging health threats, as well as explore the wide range of models and data that can be used by policy makers to anticipate trends, evaluate risks and eventually manage future events.

Charting the Next Pandemic puts the reader in the position to explore different pandemic scenarios and to understand the potential impact of available containment and prevention strategies. This book emphasizes the importance of a global perspective in the assessment of emerging health threats and captures the possible evolution of the next pandemic, while at the same time providing the intelligence needed to fight it. The text will appeal to a wide range of audiences with diverse technical backgrounds.

Charting the Next Pandemic
Modeling Infectious Disease Spreading in the Data Science Age
Ana Pastore y Piontti, Nicola Perra, Luca Rossi, Nicole Samay, Alessandro Vespignani

Source: link.springer.com

Linguistic Bodies

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language.

Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy.

Linguistic Bodies
The Continuity between Life and Language
By Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari and Hanne De Jaegher

Source: mitpress.mit.edu

Network Science In Education

Network Science In Education
Transformational Approaches in Teaching and Learning
Edited by
Catherine B. Cramer, Mason A. Porter, Hiroki Sayama, Lori Sheetz, Stephen Miles Uzzo

Source: link.springer.com