"With reality tv shows, glossy bridal magazines, and fanciful Pinterest boards leading the way, it can be easy for a recently engaged couple to slide from wedding planning into wedding madness. Inspiration and ideas abound; what couples really need is clear guidance on how to assess this information and sort the useful from the disastrous. Enter A Practical Wedding Planner, the (practical) companion volume to A Practical Wedding. Meg Keene walks couples...

Technology and science are evolving at a blistering, almost incomprehensible pace. The Human Genome Project took eleven years and $2.7 billion dollars to complete. Today, it would take two days to finish, and cost less than getting a pizza delivered. It is estimated that forty percent of the current Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist by 2025. In 2005, half a billion devices were connected to the Internet. By 2030, that number will reach one...

"A smart, lively history of the world economy, seen through the crucial inventions that shaped it. Who thought up paper money? What was the secret element that made the Gutenberg printing press possible? What is the connection between The Da Vinci Code and the collapse of Lehman Brothers? In [this book], author and economist Tim Harford paints an epic yet intimate picture of economic change by telling the stories of the ideas, people, and tools that...

"In Only Humans Need Apply, Thomas Hayes Davenport and Julia Kirby reframe the conversation about automation, arguing that the future of increased productivity and business success isn't either human or machine. It's both. The key is augmentation, utilizing technology to help humans work better, smarter, and faster. Instead of viewing these machines as competitive interlopers, we can see them as partners and collaborators in creative problem solving...

"Many economists and policy makers take a narrow view of demographics restricting attention only to age and population numbers. This book will challenge such conventional thinking with wide ranging applications across macroeconomics, investments, policy, and sustainability. The author's macro-perspective, presented in the book, has three differentiating features. First, he interprets demographics broadly as "people characteristics" -- those as consumers...

A cofounder of the popular makerspace TechShop discusses the growing maker movement, describing how ordinary individuals are using previously unavailable tools and technologies to create innovative products and successful businesses. "A revolution is under way. But it's not about tearing down the old guard. It's about building, it's about creating, it's about breathing life into groundbreaking new ideas. It's called the Maker Movement, and it's changing...

Discusses how data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior and shares predictions for how data will revolutionize the market economy and make cash, banks, and big companies obsolete. --Publisher "In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, bestselling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for...

"From San Francisco to Shanghai, many of the world's most innovative places are highly unequal, with the benefits going to a small few. Rather than simply asking how we can create more high-tech cities and nations, Innovation for the Masses focuses on places that manage to foster innovation while also delivering the benefits more widely and equally. In this book, economist Neil Lee draws on case studies of Taiwan, Sweden, Austria, and Switzerland...

"Why we need to think more like economists to successfully combat terrorism If we are to correctly assess the root causes of terrorism and successfully address the threat, we must think more like economists do. Alan Krueger's What Makes a Terrorist, explains why our tactics in the fight against terrorism must be based on more than anecdote, intuition, and speculation. Many popular ideas about terrorists are fueled by falsehoods, misinformation, and...