NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric—with a new afterword “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Boston Globe • Wired • Fortune • Kirkus Reviews • The Guardian • Nature • On Point We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

In this vibrant cultural history, Maryvelma O'Neil takes us on an engaging tour of Bangkok, revealing the rich ancient heritage of this fascinating city. The capital of the Kingdom of Thailand, Bangkok stands out as a place of extraordinary allure. Beginning as a floating city in a lush tropical setting, known to foreigners as the "Venice of the East," its majestic Grand Palace and glittering Buddhist temples today compete with chimneystacks and a jungle of skyscrapers. O'Neil illuminates a city rich in art, history, royal ceremony, and tradition and she uncovers fascinating pockets of traditional indigenous life and places of intense beauty hidden in Bangkok's labyrinthine lanes and alleys.

The First Amendment and Civil Liability Robert M. O'Neil A well-known First Amendment advocate explains the new threats to free expression posed by damage suits. This book explores a highly contentious set of issues involving freedom of speech and press. Until very recently, publishers and producers have assumed that, with a few exceptions like libel, freedom of expression was absolute and safe from civil liability in the form of damage awards. In the late 1990s, these complacent assumptions were sharply challenged. The case of the Hit-Man Manual signaled the shift. After a hired assassin had been convicted of a brutal murder in a Washington, D.C. suburb, it turned out he had used a book that contained graphic, detailed instructions on how to carry out an execution. When the family of the victims sued the publisher for wrongful death, a federal appeals court ruled that the book was "not protected speech" since its apparent purpose was "to facilitate murder." The publisher was thus, for the first time, potentially liable for criminal acts committed by a reader of one of its books. Later cases, especially a suit against Natural Born Killers' producer Oliver Stone, have invoked this ruling in seeking to impose liability on those who create and distribute material that causes others to inflict injury or death. Noted First Amendment scholar Robert M. O'Neil looks at seven areas where free expression is now at risk of incurring civil liability -- libel and slander (including a separate analysis of libel on the Internet), privacy (paparazzi and others who intrude), defective or dangerous "products," incitement (the claim of a link between speech and criminal acts, as in the Natural Born Killers case), advertising, news-gathering (for example, the Food Lion/ABC Primetime Live case,) and threats and incitement on the Internet (as in the anti-abortion Nuremberg website case.) O'Neil's clear exposition and analysis illuminate the issues for a broad range of readers concerned about a host of new threats to, and the limits of, free expression.

Now that people are aware that data can make the difference in an election or a business model, data science as an occupation is gaining ground. But how can you get started working in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field that’s so clouded in hype? This insightful book, based on Columbia University’s Introduction to Data Science class, tells you what you need to know. In many of these chapter-long lectures, data scientists from companies such as Google, Microsoft, and eBay share new algorithms, methods, and models by presenting case studies and the code they use. If you’re familiar with linear algebra, probability, and statistics, and have programming experience, this book is an ideal introduction to data science. Topics include: Statistical inference, exploratory data analysis, and the data science process Algorithms Spam filters, Naive Bayes, and data wrangling Logistic regression Financial modeling Recommendation engines and causality Data visualization Social networks and data journalism Data engineering, MapReduce, Pregel, and Hadoop Doing Data Science is collaboration between course instructor Rachel Schutt, Senior VP of Data Science at News Corp, and data science consultant Cathy O’Neil, a senior data scientist at Johnson Research Labs, who attended and blogged about the course.

Based on OÕNeil, Fields, and ShareÕs market-leading textbook and casebook, Cases and Concepts in Comparative Politics: An Integrated Approach integrates concepts and cases in one volume. Students get all of the materials in a straightforward, easy-to-use, and cost-effective way.

Database: Principles Programming Performance provides an introduction to the fundamental principles of database systems. This book focuses on database programming and the relationships between principles, programming, and performance. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of database design principles and presents a comprehensive introduction to the concepts used by a DBA. This text then provides grounding in many abstract concepts of the relational model. Other chapters introduce SQL, describing its capabilities and covering the statements and functions of the programming language. This book provides as well an introduction to Embedded SQL and Dynamic SQL that is sufficiently detailed to enable students to immediately start writing database programs. The final chapter deals with some of the motivations for database systems spanning multiple CPUs, including client-server and distributed transactions. This book is a valuable resource for database administrators, application programmers, specialist users, and end users.

This nicely illustrated reference for junior high and high school students offers 20-page profiles of 93 of the world's most influential writers of the twentieth century. Arranged alphabetically, each profile provides facts about the writer's life and works as well as a commentary on his or her significance, discussion of political and social events that occurred during his or her lifetime, a reader's guide to major works, and events, beliefs or traditions that inspired the writer's works.

Cases in Comparative Politics , fifth edition, is a set of thirteen country studies that describe politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Brazil, Iran, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria. This casebook applies the conceptual framework developed in the core textbook, Essentials of Comparative Politics , across countries with a consistent organisation that integrates concepts and cases, facilitates comparison and aids understanding.