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La société de provocation: essai sur l'obscénité des riches (Lettres libres)
Par Dahlia Namian. 2023
Bernés par les prestidigitations des ultrariches, nous regardons ceux-ci, stupéfaits, dilapider les ressources de la planète. Dans son roman Chien…
blanc, Romain Gary appelle "société de provocation" cet ordre social où l'exhibitionnisme de la richesse érige en vertu la démesure et le luxe ostentatoire tout en privant une part de plus en plus large de la population des moyens de satisfaire ses besoins réels. Ce pamphlet cinglant énumère et analyse les mille façons qu'ont les ultrariches de nous nuire, et invite à rompre avec cette société de provocationThe war below: Lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our future
Par Ernest Scheyder. 2024
An unprecedented look inside the global battle to power our lives from acclaimed Reuters reporter Ernest Scheyder. A new economic…
war for critical minerals has begun, and The War Below is an urgent dispatch from its front lines. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of necessary materials, and no one understands the complexities of these issues better than Ernest Scheyder, whose exclusive access to sites around the globe has allowed him to gain unparalleled insights into a future without fossil fuels. The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether some places are too special to mine or whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches. With vivid and engaging writing, Scheyder shows the human toll of this war and explains why recycling and other newer technologies have struggled to gain widespread use. He also expertly chronicles Washington's attempts to wean itself off supplies from China, the global leader in mineral production and processing. The War Below paints a powerfully honest and nuanced picture of what is at stake in this new fight for energy independence, revealing how America and the rest of the world's hunt for the "new oil" directly affects us allOur Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis
Par Gregor Craigie. 2024
An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC…
Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution.Building a cyber risk management program: Evolving security for the digital age
Par Brian Allen. 2024
Cyber risk management is one of the most urgent issues facing enterprises today. This book presents a detailed framework for…
designing, developing, and implementing a cyber risk management program that addresses your company's specific needs. Ideal for corporate directors, senior executives, security risk practitioners, and auditors at many levels, this guide offers both the strategic insight and tactical guidance you're looking for. You'll learn how to define and establish a sustainable, defendable, cyber risk management program, and the benefits associated with proper implementation. Cyber risk management experts Brian Allen and Brandon Bapst, working with writer Terry Allan Hicks, also provide advice that goes beyond risk management. You'll discover ways to address your company's oversight obligations as defined by international standards, case law, regulation, and board-level guidance. This book helps you: understand the transformational changes digitalization is introducing, and new cyber risks that come with it; learn the key legal and regulatory drivers that make cyber risk management a mission-critical priority for enterprises; gain a complete understanding of four components that make up a formal cyber risk management program; and implement or provide guidance for a cyber risk management program within your enterpriseNomadland: Surviving america in the twenty-first century
Par Jessica Bruder. 2017
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people…
who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers." Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement," which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily." Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans?many of them single women?who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better lifeLe sucre rouge de Duplessis
Par Stéphane Lussier Johnson. 2023
Jamais un Premier Ministre québécois n'a suscité autant d'intérêt que Maurice Duplessis. Son règne a été étudié, analysé, raconté de…
long en large, immortalisé dans des publications écrites par des historiens, des journalistes, des collaborateurs, des opposants, des amis, des ennemis. Mais jusqu'à maintenant, personne ne s'était penché sur son rôle dans l'industrie du sucre au Québec, ni sur la manière dont il a délibérément réussi à la saboter. Alors que l'inflation fait un bond de 60% entre 1946 et 1962, cette industrie aurait pu à elle-seule assurer la prospérité de la province dans cette période où elle en avait tant besoin. Du moins, en théorie. Mais à cause de manigances et politicailleries de l'Union Nationale, nous ne le saurons jamais. Rencontrez Louis Pasquier. Ingénieur agronome français que l'on fait venir au Québec dans le but de sauver l'industrie du sucre de betteraves. Et que l'on détruisit ensuite pour avoir commis le crime d'y être parvenuHacker culture can be esoteric, but this entertaining reference is here to help. Written by a longtime hacker, this fun…
reference introduces you to key people and companies, fundamental ideas, and milestone films, games, and magazines in the annals of hacking. From phreaking to deepfakes, and from APT (advanced package tool) to zombie malware, grasping the terminology is crucial to understanding hacker culture and history. This book from Kim Crawley (8 Steps to Better Security) is written in a conversational style and organized from A to Z. If you're just getting started on your hacker journey, you'll find plenty here to guide your learning and help you understand the references and cultural allusions you come across. More experienced hackers will find historical depth, wry humor, and some perhaps surprising facts about familiar cultural touchstones. This book will help you understand the relationship between hacker culture and cybersecurity; get to know the ideas behind the hacker ethos, like "knowledge should be free"; explore topics and publications central to hacker culture, from 2600 Magazine to Cult of the Dead Cow; appreciate the history of cybersecurity; learn about key figures in the history of hacker culture; and understand the difference between hackers and cybercriminalsThe Emergence of Organizations and Markets
Par John F. Padgett, Walter W. Powell. 2013
A dynamic framework for studying social emergenceThe social sciences have sophisticated models of choice and equilibrium but little understanding of…
the emergence of novelty. Where do new alternatives, new organizational forms, and new types of people come from? Combining biochemical insights about the origin of life with innovative and historically oriented social network analyses, John Padgett and Walter Powell develop a theory about the emergence of organizational, market, and biographical novelty from the coevolution of multiple social networks. They demonstrate that novelty arises from spillovers across intertwined networks in different domains. In the short run actors make relations, but in the long run relations make actors.This theory of novelty emerging from intersecting production and biographical flows is developed through formal deductive modeling and through a wide range of original historical case studies. Padgett and Powell build on the biochemical concept of autocatalysis—the chemical definition of life—and then extend this autocatalytic reasoning to social processes of production and communication. Padgett and Powell, along with other colleagues, analyze a very wide range of cases of emergence. They look at the emergence of organizational novelty in early capitalism and state formation; they examine the transformation of communism; and they analyze with detailed network data contemporary science-based capitalism: the biotechnology industry, regional high-tech clusters, and the open source community.Nature: An Economic History
Par Geerat Vermeij. 2004
From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth…
unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle. Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members. Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things.Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition
Par John Von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern. 2004
This is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based. What began more than sixty years ago as…
a modest proposal that a mathematician and an economist write a short paper together blossomed, in 1944, when Princeton University Press published Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In it, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern conceived a groundbreaking mathematical theory of economic and social organization, based on a theory of games of strategy. Not only would this revolutionize economics, but the entirely new field of scientific inquiry it yielded--game theory--has since been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations. And it is today established throughout both the social sciences and a wide range of other sciences. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes not only the original text but also an introduction by Harold Kuhn, an afterword by Ariel Rubinstein, and reviews and articles on the book that appeared at the time of its original publication in the New York Times, tthe American Economic Review, and a variety of other publications. Together, these writings provide readers a matchless opportunity to more fully appreciate a work whose influence will yet resound for generations to come.Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter--and More Unequal
Par Brink Lindsey. 2013
Why the rich are getting smarter while the poor are being left behindWhat explains the growing class divide between the…
well educated and everybody else? Noted author Brink Lindsey, a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation, argues that it's because economic expansion is creating an increasingly complex world in which only a minority with the right knowledge and skills—the right "human capital"—reap the majority of the economic rewards. The complexity of today's economy is not only making these lucky elites richer—it is also making them smarter. As the economy makes ever-greater demands on their minds, the successful are making ever-greater investments in education and other ways of increasing their human capital, expanding their cognitive skills and leading them to still higher levels of success. But unfortunately, even as the rich are securely riding this virtuous cycle, the poor are trapped in a vicious one, as a lack of human capital leads to family breakdown, unemployment, dysfunction, and further erosion of knowledge and skills. In this brief, clear, and forthright eBook original, Lindsey shows how economic growth is creating unprecedented levels of human capital—and suggests how the huge benefits of this development can be spread beyond those who are already enjoying its rewards.Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings
Par Amy N. Langville, Carl D. Meyer. 2006
Why doesn't your home page appear on the first page of search results, even when you query your own name?…
How do other web pages always appear at the top? What creates these powerful rankings? And how? The first book ever about the science of web page rankings, Google's PageRank and Beyond supplies the answers to these and other questions and more. The book serves two very different audiences: the curious science reader and the technical computational reader. The chapters build in mathematical sophistication, so that the first five are accessible to the general academic reader. While other chapters are much more mathematical in nature, each one contains something for both audiences. For example, the authors include entertaining asides such as how search engines make money and how the Great Firewall of China influences research. The book includes an extensive background chapter designed to help readers learn more about the mathematics of search engines, and it contains several MATLAB codes and links to sample web data sets. The philosophy throughout is to encourage readers to experiment with the ideas and algorithms in the text. Any business seriously interested in improving its rankings in the major search engines can benefit from the clear examples, sample code, and list of resources provided. Many illustrative examples and entertaining asides MATLAB code Accessible and informal style Complete and self-contained section for mathematics reviewThe Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters - Revised Edition
Par Diane Coyle. 2010
For many, Thomas Carlyle's put-down of economics as "the dismal science" rings true--especially in the aftermath of the crash of…
2008. But Diane Coyle argues that economics today is more soulful than dismal, a more practical and human science than ever before. The Soulful Science describes the remarkable creative renaissance in economics, how economic thinking is being applied to the paradoxes of everyday life. This revised edition incorporates the latest developments in the field, including the rise of behavioral finance, the failure of carbon trading, and the growing trend of government bailouts. She also discusses such major debates as the relationship between economic statistics and presidential elections, the boundary between private choice and public action, and who is to blame for today's banking crisis.The classic history of economic thought through the ages—now fully updated and expandedHesiod defined the basic economic problem as one…
of scarce resources, a view still held by economists today. Diocletian tried to save the Roman Empire with wage and price fixes—a strategy that has not gone entirely out of style. Roger Backhouse takes readers from the ancient world to the frontiers of game theory, mechanism design, and engagements with climate science, presenting an essential history of a discipline that economist Alfred Marshall called “the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” Backhouse introduces the many fascinating figures who have thought about money and markets down through the centuries—from philosophers and theologians to politicians and poets—and shows how today’s economic ideas have their origins in antiquity. This updated edition of The Ordinary Business of Life includes a new chapter on contemporary economics and the rest of the book has been thoroughly revised.Pillars of Prosperity: The Political Economics of Development Clusters (The Yrjö Jahnsson Lectures)
Par Timothy Besley, Torsten Persson. 2011
How nations can promote peace, prosperity, and stability through cohesive political institutions"Little else is required to carry a state to…
the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data, this book reinterprets Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters—places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes.To achieve peace, the authors stress the avoidance of repressive government and civil conflict. Easy taxes, they argue, refers not to low taxes, but a tax system with widespread compliance that collects taxes at a reasonable cost from a broad base, like income. And a tolerable administration of justice is about legal infrastructure that can support the enforcement of contracts and property rights in line with the rule of law. The authors show that countries tend to enjoy all three pillars of prosperity when they have evolved cohesive political institutions that promote common interests, guaranteeing the provision of public goods. In line with much historical research, international conflict has also been an important force behind effective states by fostering common interests. The absence of common interests and/or cohesive political institutions can explain the existence of very different development clusters in fragile states that are plagued by poverty, violence, and weak state capacity.Yield Curve Modeling and Forecasting: The Dynamic Nelson-Siegel Approach (The Econometric and Tinbergen Institutes Lectures)
Par Francis X. Diebold, Glenn D. Rudebusch. 2013
Understanding the dynamic evolution of the yield curve is critical to many financial tasks, including pricing financial assets and their…
derivatives, managing financial risk, allocating portfolios, structuring fiscal debt, conducting monetary policy, and valuing capital goods. Unfortunately, most yield curve models tend to be theoretically rigorous but empirically disappointing, or empirically successful but theoretically lacking. In this book, Francis Diebold and Glenn Rudebusch propose two extensions of the classic yield curve model of Nelson and Siegel that are both theoretically rigorous and empirically successful. The first extension is the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model (DNS), while the second takes this dynamic version and makes it arbitrage-free (AFNS). Diebold and Rudebusch show how these two models are just slightly different implementations of a single unified approach to dynamic yield curve modeling and forecasting. They emphasize both descriptive and efficient-markets aspects, they pay special attention to the links between the yield curve and macroeconomic fundamentals, and they show why DNS and AFNS are likely to remain of lasting appeal even as alternative arbitrage-free models are developed. Based on the Econometric and Tinbergen Institutes Lectures, Yield Curve Modeling and Forecasting contains essential tools with enhanced utility for academics, central banks, governments, and industry.When Insurers Go Bust: An Economic Analysis of the Role and Design of Prudential Regulation
Par Guillaume Plantin, Jean-Charles Rochet. 2007
In the 1990s, large insurance companies failed in virtually every major market, prompting a fierce and ongoing debate about how…
to better protect policyholders. Drawing lessons from the failures of four insurance companies, When Insurers Go Bust dramatically advances this debate by arguing that the current approach to insurance regulation should be replaced with mechanisms that replicate the governance of non-financial firms. Rather than immediately addressing the minutiae of supervision, Guillaume Plantin and Jean-Charles Rochet first identify a fundamental economic rationale for supervising the solvency of insurance companies: policyholders are the "bankers" of insurance companies. But because policyholders are too dispersed to effectively monitor insurers, it might be efficient to delegate monitoring to an institution--a prudential authority. Applying recent developments in corporate finance theory and the economic theory of organizations, the authors describe in practical terms how such authorities could be created and given the incentives to behave exactly like bankers behave toward borrowers, as "tough" claimholders.Strategic Investment: Real Options and Games
Par Han T. Smit, Lenos Trigeorgis. 2004
Corporate finance and corporate strategy have long been seen as different sides of the same coin. Though both focus on…
the same broad problem, investment decision-making, the gap between the two sides--and between theory and practice--remains embarrassingly large. This book synthesizes cutting-edge developments in corporate finance and related fields--in particular, real options and game theory--to help bridge this gap. In clear, straightforward exposition and through numerous examples and applications from various industries, Han Smit and Lenos Trigeorgis set forth an extended valuation framework for competitive strategies. The book follows a problem-solving approach that synthesizes ideas from game theory, real options, and strategy. Thinking in terms of options-games can help managers address questions such as: When is it best to invest early to preempt competitive entry, and when to wait? Should a firm compete in R&D or adopt an accommodating stance? How does one value growth options or infrastructure investments? The authors provide a wide range of valuation examples, such as acquisition strategies, R&D investment in high-tech sectors, joint research ventures, product introductions in consumer electronics, infrastructure, and oil exploration investment. Representing a major step beyond standard real options or strategy analysis, and extending the power of real options and strategic thinking in a rigorous fashion, Strategic Investment will be an indispensable guide and resource for corporate managers, MBA students, and academics alike.Numerical Algorithms for Personalized Search in Self-organizing Information Networks
Par Sep Kamvar. 2011
This book lays out the theoretical groundwork for personalized search and reputation management, both on the Web and in peer-to-peer…
and social networks. Representing much of the foundational research in this field, the book develops scalable algorithms that exploit the graphlike properties underlying personalized search and reputation management, and delves into realistic scenarios regarding Web-scale data.Sep Kamvar focuses on eigenvector-based techniques in Web search, introducing a personalized variant of Google's PageRank algorithm, and he outlines algorithms--such as the now-famous quadratic extrapolation technique--that speed up computation, making personalized PageRank feasible. Kamvar suggests that Power Method-related techniques ultimately should be the basis for improving the PageRank algorithm, and he presents algorithms that exploit the convergence behavior of individual components of the PageRank vector. Kamvar then extends the ideas of reputation management and personalized search to distributed networks like peer-to-peer and social networks. He highlights locality and computational considerations related to the structure of the network, and considers such unique issues as malicious peers. He describes the EigenTrust algorithm and applies various PageRank concepts to P2P settings. Discussion chapters summarizing results conclude the book's two main sections.Clear and thorough, this book provides an authoritative look at central innovations in search for all of those interested in the subject.More stimulating mathematics puzzles from bestselling author Paul NahinHow do technicians repair broken communications cables at the bottom of the…
ocean without actually seeing them? What's the likelihood of plucking a needle out of a haystack the size of the Earth? And is it possible to use computers to create a universal library of everything ever written or every photo ever taken? These are just some of the intriguing questions that best-selling popular math writer Paul Nahin tackles in Number-Crunching. Through brilliant math ideas and entertaining stories, Nahin demonstrates how odd and unusual math problems can be solved by bringing together basic physics ideas and today's powerful computers. Some of the outcomes discussed are so counterintuitive they will leave readers astonished.Nahin looks at how the art of number-crunching has changed since the advent of computers, and how high-speed technology helps to solve fascinating conundrums such as the three-body, Monte Carlo, leapfrog, and gambler's ruin problems. Along the way, Nahin traverses topics that include algebra, trigonometry, geometry, calculus, number theory, differential equations, Fourier series, electronics, and computers in science fiction. He gives historical background for the problems presented, offers many examples and numerous challenges, supplies MATLAB codes for all the theories discussed, and includes detailed and complete solutions.Exploring the intimate relationship between mathematics, physics, and the tremendous power of modern computers, Number-Crunching will appeal to anyone interested in understanding how these three important fields join forces to solve today's thorniest puzzles.