Claude shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed the first wearable computer, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. They summon the right level of awe while stopping short of hyperbole. Financial times "jimmy soni and Rob Goodman make a convincing case for their subtitle while reminding us that Shannon never made this claim himself.

The wall street journal "Soni and Goodman have done their research. A mind at play reveals the remarkable human behind some of the most important theoretical and practical contributions to the information age. Nature "a mind at play shows us that you don't need to be a genius to learn from a genius. Winner of the neumann prize for the history of mathematics**named a best book of the year by Bloomberg and Nature** **'Best of 2017' by The Morning Sun** "We owe Claude Shannon a lot, and Soni & Goodman’s book takes a big first step in paying that debt.

San francisco review of books "Soni and Goodman are at their best when they invoke the wonder an idea can instill. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age. In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Soni and Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time.

With unique access to shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and always playful genius to life.

Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow Refiguring American Music

The blues were African American. Such links among race, region, and music were new. By the 1920s, these depictions were touted in folk song collections and the catalogs of “race” and “hillbilly” records produced by the phonograph industry. Rural white southerners played country music. Segregated sound emerged slowly through the interactions of southern and northern musicians, record companies that sought to penetrate new markets across the South and the globe, and academic folklorists who attempted to tap southern music for evidence about the history of human civilization.

In a cultural history filled with musicians, scholars, and business people, listeners, Miller describes how folklore studies and the music industry helped to create a “musical color line, ” a cultural parallel to the physical color line that came to define the Jim Crow South. Black and white artists alike had played not only blues, Tin Pan Alley tunes, ballads, but also nationally popular sentimental ballads, minstrel songs, and string band music, ragtime, and Broadway hits.

Focusing on the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Miller chronicles how southern music—a fluid complex of sounds and styles in practice—was reduced to a series of distinct genres linked to particular racial and ethnic identities. In segregating sound, karl hagstrom miller argues that the categories that we have inherited to think and talk about southern music bear little relation to the ways that southerners long played and heard music.

Contending that people’s musical worlds were defined less by who they were than by the music that they heard, music, Miller challenges assumptions about the relation of race, and the market.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, John Pierce, Claude Shannon, Bill Shockley, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs.

In the idea factory, jon gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. The definitive history of america’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologiesFrom its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, Bell Labs-officially, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world.

Penguin Books. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs.

How Music Got Free: A Story of Obsession and Invention

Penguin Group USA. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store. Journalist stephen witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the german audio engineers who invented the mp3, and, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, finally, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.

Through these interwoven narratives, witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online—when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. Finalist for the 2016 los angeles Times Book Prize, the 2016 J.

Penguin Books. In the page-turning tradition of writers like michael lewis and lawrence Wright, factory workers, executives, Witt’s deeply reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.

An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself. Anthony lukas book prize, and the 2015 financial times and mckinsey business book of the yearone of billboard’s 100 greatest music books of all timea new york times editors’ ChoiceONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS: The Washington Post • The Financial Times • Slate • The Atlantic • Time • Forbes“How Music Got Free has the clear writing and brisk reportorial acumen of a Michael Lewis book.

Dwight garner, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, The New York TimesWhat happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, moguls and tech-savvy teenagers.

The Mathematical Theory of Communication

The university of illinois Press is pleased and honored to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory in the Bell System Technical Journal more than fifty years ago.

It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. Penguin Group USA. Penguin Books.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

O. Vintage Books. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, images, and blogs.

Along the way, and claude shannon, samuel morse, including Charles Babbage, Gleick profiles key innovators, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, Ada Lovelace, but how we live. A new york times notable booka los angeles times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the YearWinner of the PEN/E.

Penguin Group USA. From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer james Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness.

Wilson literary Science Writing Award Penguin Books.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir

The fascinating story of how Unix began and how it took over the world. Penguin Group USA. Vintage Books. Brian kernighan was a member of the original group of Unix developers, the creator of several fundamental Unix programs, and the co-author of classic books like "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming Environment.

Penguin Books.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. Part intellectual history, part popular science, the shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes―Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, and part cultural criticism, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive―even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche.

. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. Penguin Books. Finalist for the 2011 pulitzer prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind. Michael agger, in a celebrated atlantic monthly cover story, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us.

As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”―from the alphabet to maps, the clock, to the printing press, and the computer―Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel.

Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic―a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. Simon Schuster. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J. C. R. Penguin Group USA. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Penguin Books. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist.

Vintage Books. With defense department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Where wizards stay up late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone.

Taking readers behind the scenes, genius, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.

The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

In this completely revised and updated edition of The Chip, T. R. Vintage Books. Jack kilby and robert noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000 Penguin Books. This is the story of how the digital age began.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The world’s brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Reid tells the gripping adventure story of their invention and of its growth into a global information industry.

The chip by Reid T R. Barely fifty years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. Penguin Group USA. Simon Schuster.

Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Written in an informal style, with a comprehensive glossary and tutorial appendices, this text is an ideal primer for novices who wish to learn the essential principles and applications of information theory. Penguin Group USA. Information Theory A Tutorial Introduction. Vintage Books.

Online matlab and python computer programs provide hands-on experience of information theory in action, and PowerPoint slides give support for teaching. Penguin Books. Simon Schuster. Originally developed by claude shannon in the 1940s, information theory laid the foundations for the digital revolution, and is now an essential tool in telecommunications, linguistics, genetics, brain sciences, and deep space communication.

In this richly illustrated book, accessible examples are used to introduce information theory in terms of everyday games like ‘20 questions’ before more advanced topics are explored. The chip by Reid T R.