Many Americans want information on how to eat a healthier diet, clean up the environment, or improve their children's education. Yet, all too often, people lack the time or background to read scientific reports for answers to these questions. Now, scientists and nonscientists alike will enjoy Headline News, Science Views, a collection of easy-to-read short articles on many of today's most important issues. These readable essays are written by some of the country's leading scientists, engineers, physicians, and other experts. The authors discuss intriguing issues in language that is understandable and compelling...without jargon. Celebrity Bill Cosby contributes an essay on "Getting the Facts Straight About Science." Television journalist Hugh Downs asks "Who Owns Antarctica?" Readers learn the many ways in which science and technology affect their daily lives. This volume makes groundbreaking scientific achievement accessible, fascinatingâ€"and fun. Bridging the gap between the experts and the public, it is a "must read" for anyone concerned about the future.

Why all the talk about biodiversity? Is malaria really making a comeback? Just what are computer viruses? Many Americans are confused about these and other issues involving science, technology, and health care. But they lack the time or technical background to read scientific reports. Headline News, Science Views II provides short, readable answers directly from the experts. Leading scientists, engineers, and others discuss today's issues in language that is understandable and compellingâ€"without jargon. This engaging book "can be warmly recommended to card-carrying scientists and laypeople alike," New Scientist wrote about the first edition of Headline News, Science Views. "Try the opening items and say goodbye to your next couple of hours." Now, in a completely new edition packed with 75 engaging articles, Headline News, Science Views II probes further into scientific issues behind today's headlines, issues like highway safety, global warming, industrial competitiveness, and women's health. Experts on these and other topics discuss where the problems lie and how to fix them. The essays originally were distributed by the National Academy Op-Ed Service and published in more than 250 newspapers. Many are tied to studies of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. Together, they make ground-breaking scientific achievement accessible, fascinatingâ€"and fun.

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

Learn data science with Python by building five real-world projects! Experiment with card game predictions, tracking disease outbreaks, and more, as you build a flexible and intuitive understanding of data science. In Data Science Bookcamp you will learn: - Techniques for computing and plotting probabilities - Statistical analysis using Scipy - How to organize datasets with clustering algorithms - How to visualize complex multi-variable datasets - How to train a decision tree machine learning algorithm In Data Science Bookcamp you’ll test and build your knowledge of Python with the kind of open-ended problems that professional data scientists work on every day. Downloadable data sets and thoroughly-explained solutions help you lock in what you’ve learned, building your confidence and making you ready for an exciting new data science career. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology A data science project has a lot of moving parts, and it takes practice and skill to get all the code, algorithms, datasets, formats, and visualizations working together harmoniously. This unique book guides you through five realistic projects, including tracking disease outbreaks from news headlines, analyzing social networks, and finding relevant patterns in ad click data. About the book Data Science Bookcamp doesn’t stop with surface-level theory and toy examples. As you work through each project, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot common problems like missing data, messy data, and algorithms that don’t quite fit the model you’re building. You’ll appreciate the detailed setup instructions and the fully explained solutions that highlight common failure points. In the end, you’ll be confident in your skills because you can see the results. What's inside - Web scraping - Organize datasets with clustering algorithms - Visualize complex multi-variable datasets - Train a decision tree machine learning algorithm About the reader For readers who know the basics of Python. No prior data science or machine learning skills required. About the author Leonard Apeltsin is the Head of Data Science at Anomaly, where his team applies advanced analytics to uncover healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse. Table of Contents CASE STUDY 1 FINDING THE WINNING STRATEGY IN A CARD GAME 1 Computing probabilities using Python 2 Plotting probabilities using Matplotlib 3 Running random simulations in NumPy 4 Case study 1 solution CASE STUDY 2 ASSESSING ONLINE AD CLICKS FOR SIGNIFICANCE 5 Basic probability and statistical analysis using SciPy 6 Making predictions using the central limit theorem and SciPy 7 Statistical hypothesis testing 8 Analyzing tables using Pandas 9 Case study 2 solution CASE STUDY 3 TRACKING DISEASE OUTBREAKS USING NEWS HEADLINES 10 Clustering data into groups 11 Geographic location visualization and analysis 12 Case study 3 solution CASE STUDY 4 USING ONLINE JOB POSTINGS TO IMPROVE YOUR DATA SCIENCE RESUME 13 Measuring text similarities 14 Dimension reduction of matrix data 15 NLP analysis of large text datasets 16 Extracting text from web pages 17 Case study 4 solution CASE STUDY 5 PREDICTING FUTURE FRIENDSHIPS FROM SOCIAL NETWORK DATA 18 An introduction to graph theory and network analysis 19 Dynamic graph theory techniques for node ranking and social network analysis 20 Network-driven supervised machine learning 21 Training linear classifiers with logistic regression 22 Training nonlinear classifiers with decision tree techniques 23 Case study 5 solution

Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.

“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

"Captures the excitement of the scientific revolution and makes a point of celebrating the advances it ushered in." —Financial Times A companion to such acclaimed works as The Age of Wonder, A Clockwork Universe, and Darwin’s Ghosts—a groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world. We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today, science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts—Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious minds from across Europe—whose studies of the natural world challenged centuries of religious orthodoxy and ingrained superstition. From gunpowder technology, the discovery of the new world, movable type printing, perspective painting, and the telescope to the practice of conducting experiments, the laws of nature, and the concept of the fact, Wotton shows how these discoveries codified into a social construct and a system of knowledge. Ultimately, he makes clear the link between scientific discovery and the rise of industrialization—and the birth of the modern world we know.