New books

You can find the complete list of new acquisitions on the New books page. The list includes all English-language books bought by the Library in the last two month (and published in the last five years), the books are grouped according to theme and title.

Here you can read selected book recommendations from the list of the new books.

Merchants of Labor: Recruiters and International Labor Migration

Merchants of Labor: Recruiters and International Labor Migration / Philip Martin                

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 

An in-depth analysis and a detailed description of possible solutions, this book looks at the topic of migrant workers and their employees. Closely examining the low-skilled labor markets and the recruiting businesses, Martin explains the prominent role of intermediaries.

The book offers a wide array of data regarding migration costs from over 3,000 workers to show some of the major factors that determine worker costs. The data reveal the process of worker migration with all participants involved from labor brokers to travel agents and, at the end of the sequence, the businesses themselves.

After exploring the problem, the author drafts some ways to improve the situation by laying out specific incentives to induce better recruiter behavior.

Philip Martin is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. He edits Rural Migration News, has served on several federal commissions, and testifies frequently before Congress. He is an award-winning author who works for UN agencies around the world on labor and migration issues.

catalogue

labor migration

Unlocking the customer value chain: How decoupling drives consumer disruption

Unlocking the customer value chain: How decoupling drives consumer disruption / Thales S. Teixeira with Greg Piechota
New York:  Currency, 2019. 336 p.

Based on eight years of research visiting dozens of startups, tech companies and incumbents, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why consumer industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do about it—while highlighting the specific strategies potential startups use to gain a competitive edge.

There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years.

As Teixeira makes clear, the nature of competition has fundamentally changed. Using innovative new business models, startups are stealing customers by breaking the links in how consumers discover, buy and use products and services. By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn't compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves.

Illustrated with vivid, indepth and exclusive accounts of both startups, and reigning incumbents like Best Buy and Comcast, as they struggle to respond, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain is an essential guide to demystifying how digital disruption takes place – and what companies can do to defend themselves.

catalogue

marketing

The deep learning revolution: Artificial intelligence meets human intelligence

The deep learning revolution: Artificial intelligence meets human intelligence / Terrence J. Sejnowski
Cambridge, US.: MIT Press, 2018. 342 p.

The deep learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy.
Sejnowski played an important role in the founding of deep learning, as one of a small group of researchers in the 1980s who challenged the prevailing logic-and-symbol based version of AI. The new version of AI Sejnowski and others developed, which became deep learning, is fueled instead by data. Deep networks learn from data in the same way that babies experience the world, starting with fresh eyes and gradually acquiring the skills needed to navigate novel environments. Learning algorithms extract information from raw data; information can be used to create knowledge; knowledge underlies understanding; understanding leads to wisdom. Someday a driverless car will know the road better than you do and drive with more skill; a deep learning network will diagnose your illness; a personal cognitive assistant will augment your puny human brain. It took nature many millions of years to evolve human intelligence; AI is on a trajectory measured in decades. Sejnowski prepares us for a deep learning future.
catalogue

innovation

Working in a multicultural world: A guide to developing intercultural competence

Working in a multicultural world: A guide to developing intercultural competence / Luciara Nardon
Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2017. 207 p.

Measureable, data driven outcomes are not the only indicators of success in today’s multicultural and globalized workforce. How employees interact with their colleagues and customers is also a significant factor in their career development.
Luciara Nardon draws on her extensive research and international experience to guide employees and managers through the ambiguous and uncertain waters of today’s multicultural workplace. Each intercultural encounter is unique, involving different people, contexts, dynamics, and actions which general cultural protocols are unable to address. In Working in a Multicultural World, Nardon offers a comprehensive framework for understanding intercultural interactions and developing skills for successful intercultural situations. Numerous examples and exercises, including how to reconcile personal beliefs of equality with a hierarchical workplace and how to respond to perceived aggressiveness in business negotiations, enable employees and managers to embark on reflective processes that will springboard their intercultural competence. Working in a Multicultural World is an accessibly written and valuable resource for all professionals in today’s workplace as well as students and travelers interested in intercultural relations.

catalogue

business organisation

Critical thinking: Your guide to effective argument, successful analysis & independent study

Critical thinking: Your guide to effective argument, successful analysis & independent study/ Tom Chatfield
London, GB: Sage, 2018. 314 p.

 

Do you need to demonstrate a good argument or find more evidence?  Are you mystified by your tutor's comment 'critical analysis needed'?  What does it really mean to think well - and how do you learn to do it?

Critical thinking is a set of techniques. You just need to learn them.

So here’s your personal toolkit for demystifying critical engagement. I’ll show you how to sharpen your critical thinking by developing and practicing this set of skills, so you can…

- Spot an argument and get why reasoning matters

- Sniff out errors and evaluate evidence

- Understand and account for bias

- Become a savvy user of technology

- Develop clear, confident critical writing.

 

Designed to work seamlessly with a power pack of digital resources and exercises, you'll find practical and effective tools to think and write critically in an information-saturated age.  No matter whether you're launching on your first degree or arriving as an international or mature student, Critical Thinking gives you the skills, insights and confidence to succeed.

 

In your critical thinking toolkit

- Watch the 10 commandments videos – life rules to change how you think

- Smart Study boxes share excellent tips to whip your work into shape

- BuzzFeed quizzes to test what (you think) you know

- Space to scribble! Journal your thoughts, questions, eureka moments as you go

- Chat more online with #TalkCriticalThinking

 

catalogue

media, communication

Everybody lies: Big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are

Everybody lies: Big data, new data, and what the Internet can tell us about who we really are / Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
New York: HarperCollins, 2017. 338 p.

 

Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

catalogue

information economics

The paradoxes of the American presidency

The paradoxes of the American presidency / Thomas E. Cronin, Michael A. Genovese, Meena Bose
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018. 248 p.

 

The new edition of The Paradoxes of the American Presidency - now with three prize-winning presidential scholars: Thomas E. Cronin, Michael A. Genovese and Meena Bose - explores the complex institution of the American presidency by presenting a series of paradoxes that shape and define the office. Rewritten and updated to reflect recent political events including the presidency of Barack Obama, the 2012 and 2014 elections (with greater emphasis on the importance of the Presidential midterm election), and the primary and presidential election of 2016, this must-read fifth edition incorporates findings from the latest scholarship, recent elections and court cases, and essential survey research.

catalogue

politics

Experience on demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do

Experience on demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do / Jeremy Bailenson
New York: Norton, 2018. 290 p.

 

Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they’re real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace. But how does this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism? In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help readers understand this powerful new tool. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use - not to distance ourselves from reality, but to enrich our lives and influence us to treat others, the environment, and even ourselves better. In the world of VR, a football quarterback plays a game against a competing team hundreds of times before even stepping onto the field; members of the United Nations embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life; and veterans once again walk through the streets where they had experienced trauma. There are dangers and many unknowns in using VR, but it also can help us hone our performance, recover from trauma, improve our learning and communication abilities, and enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities. Like any new technology, its most incredible uses might be waiting just around the corner. Experience on Demand is the definitive look at the risks and potential of VR - a must-read for navigating both the virtual and the physical worlds ahead.

 

catalogue

psychology

Saving capitalism: For the many, not the few

Saving capitalism: For the many, not the few / Robert B. Reich
London, GB: Icon Books, 2017. 279 p.

America was once celebrated for and defined by its large and prosperous middle class. Now, this middle class is shrinking, a new oligarchy is rising, and the country faces its greatest wealth disparity in eighty years. Why is the economic system that made America strong suddenly failing us, and how can it be fixed?
Leading political economist and bestselling author Robert B. Reich presents a paradigm-shifting, clear-eyed examination of a political and economic status quo that no longer serves the people, exposing one of the most pernicious obstructions to progress today: the enduring myth of the “free market” when, behind the curtain, it is the powerful alliances between Washington and Wall Street that control the invisible hand. Laying to rest the specious dichotomy between a free market and “big government,” Reich shows that the truly critical choice ahead is between a market organized for broad-based prosperity and one designed to deliver ever more gains to the top. Visionary and acute, Saving Capitalism illuminates the path toward restoring America’s fundamental promise of opportunity and advancement.

 

catalogue

politics

Experience on demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do

Experience on demand: What virtual reality is, how it works, and what it can do / Jeremy Bailenson
New York: Norton, 2018. 290 p.

Virtual reality is able to effectively blur the line between reality and illusion, pushing the limits of our imagination and granting us access to any experience imaginable. With well-crafted simulations, these experiences, which are so immersive that the brain believes they’re real, are already widely available with a VR headset and will only become more accessible and commonplace. But how does this new medium affect its users, and does it have a future beyond fantasy and escapism?
In Experience on Demand, Jeremy Bailenson draws on two decades spent researching the psychological effects of VR and other mass media to help readers understand this powerful new tool. He offers expert guidelines for interacting with VR and describes the profound ways this technology can be put to use - not to distance ourselves from reality, but to enrich our lives and influence us to treat others, the environment, and even ourselves better. In the world of VR, a football quarterback plays a game against a competing team hundreds of times before even stepping onto the field; members of the United Nations embody a young girl in a refugee camp going through her day-to-day life; and veterans once again walk through the streets where they had experienced trauma.
There are dangers and many unknowns in using VR, but it also can help us hone our performance, recover from trauma, improve our learning and communication abilities, and enhance our empathic and imaginative capacities. Like any new technology, its most incredible uses might be waiting just around the corner. Experience on Demand is the definitive look at the risks and potential of VR - a must-read for navigating both the virtual and the physical worlds ahead.
catalogue

psychology

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