Archives de catégorie : Popular Science

SUPREMACY de Parmy Olson

SUPREMACY will reveal the truths behind Big Tech’s exploitation of the greatest invention in history, who those players are, and why their work deserves far more scrutiny. We are entering an age where the world’s biggest monopolies are amassing even more power through tools that threaten our economies and culture. It is time to push back..

SUPREMACY
AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Changed the World
by Parmy Olson
St. Martin’s Press, July 2024

In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was a chatbot called ChatGPT. OpenAI launched it quietly, letting anyone who registered experiment with the new tool. The word spread. ChatGPT was unlike anything people had experienced before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. It could tell you where snowy owls lived or give you a recipe for French onion soup in plain language, as if a real person was writing the answer. It could give health advice and write letters of condolence. ChatGPT’s sister tool, called DALL-E 2, creates images from any text prompt. OpenAI wanted to combine those tools to make an even more powerful system that would create all kinds of content, like magic. In Supremacy, Parmy Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence: the silent, profit-driven spread of flawed-technology into industries, education and medicine. OpenAI and soon Google are selling their language models to law firms and consulting firms across the globe to help implement them into businesses. Despite the rush, nobody seems to know what the misinformation rate is for these tools or how many employees are behind the modeling.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of We Are Anonymous.

42 REASONS TO HATE THE UNIVERSE de Chris Ferrie

From bestselling author Chris Ferrie comes an out of this world pop science space book on how the universe is, indeed, trying to kill us all.

42 REASONS TO HATE THE UNIVERSE
(And One Reason Not To)
by Chris Ferrie
Sourcebooks, February 2024

Yes, the Universe is beautiful. And, despite all our scientific progress, it’s still pretty mysterious. But you know what? The Universe is also kind of an asshole.

Consider that you are just a group of atoms structured in a specific way that you can try to understand this thing we call existence. Those same atoms could have just as easily been used to make the dog shit you are cleaning off your shoes. The fact is, when you zoom out and look at the Universe and how it functions, you’ll see that it’s usually not in our favor. Many of the laws of physics are just kind of… dick-ish.

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a Masters in applied mathematics, BMath in mathematical physics and a PhD in applied mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.

SLOW DOWN, TAKE A NAP de Duopress Labs, illustré par Marina Oliveira

Science says that a quick afternoon nap habit can recharge and relieve tired brain, so let’s fight burnout and seize the nap!

SLOW DOWN, TAKE A NAP
A Celebration of the Siesta
by Duopress Labs, illustrated by Marina Oliveira
duopress/Sourcebooks, November 2023

There’s a lot of love for napping, and a lot of science that supports it, but … it has a bit of a bad reputation, even though it’s an important part of many cultures! So instead of celebrating them, they’re a secret obsession for many work-fromhomers or corporate (under-desk) nappers. But naps don’t have to be stigmatized any longer! SLOW DOWN, TAKE A NAP will reclaim the siesta as self-care, in a funny, quirky, and sweetly illustrated way.

Packed with content ranging from the serious and data-driven to the hilarious and entertaining, SLOW DOWN, TAKE A NAP includes quotes (“Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap. —Barbara Jordan”), definitions (What is sleep inertia anyway?), fun facts, flow charts, illustrated scenes, profiles of great nappers in history, and more.

Duopress Labs creates innovative books and gifts for children and adults. Recent titles include the TummyTime®, Terra Babies, SmartFlash™, Pop Out, and High-Contrast series; The Belly Sticker Book; 100 Pablo Picassos; My Fridge, and A Good Deck.

Marina Oliveira is the artist and designer behind the design brand Cottonflower Studio. With a degree in architecture from Northeastern University and more than 10 years in aircraft interior design, Marina has found herself designing patterns and illustrations of all sorts. She has collaborated with companies such as Publix, Camelot Fabrics, Note Card Café, Prima Designs, Blueberry Pets, Uppercasemagazine, Pictur a Cards, FabFitFun, and Flowmagazine. She currently lives in Brazil with her husband, her son, two cats, and a dog.

STRENGTH & POWER de Starre Vartan

STRENGTH & POWER will explore the groundbreaking current research that examines the myths and shatters our misconceptions relating to the ingrained belief that still very much holds sway today: men are physically stronger than women.

STRENGTH & POWER:
The Untold, Ignored, and Belittled Science of Women’s Bodies
by Starre Vartan
Seal Press/Hachette US, 2025
(via The Martell Agency)

Vartan undertook the project of looking for the scientific evidence to back this proposition up and…couldn’t find it. The book will examine the actual data, the history of “male only” baselines in past studies, and the extensive body of current research that proves that women aren’t “weaker,” in fascinating, eye-opening counterintuitive detail, such as:

• women’s muscles retain strength over time better than men’s;
• women’s fat and metabolism are huge advantages for any pursuit that requires endurance;
• the biology of women’s brains makes women far more resilient in the face of stress.

The bottom line is that men’s bodies are generally good at certain physical pursuits—while women’s are generally better at others. But how you get from there to the idea that men are overall stronger? That is the crux of this challenging and provocative book that will draw on cutting edge studies and touch on a wide range of topics: women’s athletic training, women’s performance in long-distance events across multiple sporting disciplines, women’s longevity, the role that menstruation, hormones and distribution of body fat play in women’s physical power and, of course, the profound cultural influences that have long governed society’s view of women’s physical capabilities.

Starre Vartan is the ideal person to write this book. Her science background and proven effective interaction with researchers with two decades of writing, a decade of founding and running a popular women’s health and lifestyle website and social media platforms, and recent work in investigative journalism, all point to her expertise as an independent science journalist with deep media experience, with a range of contacts both in the science publishing space, and in the women’s health and lifestyle area. On the science side, she has written on health for CNN and biotechnology and health for Scientific American, is a contributor to such publications as Nat Geo, Treehugger, Slate, Gizmodo, The Daily Beast and New York magazine. Her long-form investigative piece on the scientists exiting the Trump administration was published at the end of 2020 in Undark and a piece of investigative journalism for NatGeo in early 2022 on how the DNA technique used to catch the Golden State Killer is being used to track elephant ivory smugglers and convict wildlife criminals.

THE END OF REALITY de Jonathan Taplin

A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

THE END OF REALITY:
How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of The Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
by Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs, September 2023
(via Writers House)

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In THE END OF REALITY¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of « The Four, » the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends. 
THE END OF REALITY is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of « The Four » with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

“Persuasive and insightful, this cutting portrait of America on the verge of oligarchy hits home.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. His extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service  and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little Brown 2017) was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Medium, the Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.