Digital Inclusion: Books for Adults

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Andrews, Gillian "Gus"

This book offers sensible advice for ordinary people about how to sustain a safe and satisfying online life. This takes some know-how, given the risks we face each day. This book offers that knowledge and empowers us to shop, share, and connect with one another digitally while protecting ourselves from identity theft, Internet addiction, fake news, and data breaches. This is a chatty, conversational, self-help book written explicitly for a non-techie audience. Readers who might be intimidated by books that are technical, bleak, or frightening, are the intended audience for this book, which translates academic research about media literacy, communications theory and history, the psychology of conspiracy theorists, digital security, and relationship violence, and helps individual citizens apply these ideas to their lives through concrete activities which empower them to navigate the digital revolution with a cool head and a trained eye.

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Article 19 and Catnip

A comic-based introduction to the technical side of the internet, including transport protocols and basic internet infrastructure. Also explains broader concepts such as security and privacy in the context of the internet.

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Cohen, Daniel

Leading economist Daniel Cohen provides a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times, underscoring what is so unsettling today. The new digital economy is establishing a "zero-cost" production model, inexpensive software is taking over basic tasks, and years of exploiting the natural world have begun to backfire with deadly consequences. Working hard no longer guarantees social inclusion or income. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and, how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society.

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DiMarzio, J. F.

This book will give Android rookies a crash-course in how to use these popular phones. You'll go beyond the basics of texting and taking photos.  It will walk you through all the pro tips and tricks for customizing your phone, optimizing all your settings, using social media (safely), and making the most of apps and widgets. 

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Eggers, Dave

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the world's most powerful internet company, she can't believe her luck. The Circle, run out of a hip, sprawling California campus, links users' online data with their universal operating system, creating a new age of civility and transparency. But the story of one woman's ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, and democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

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Evans, Claire Lisa

The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers. But the little-known fact is that female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation--they've just been erased from the story. Until now. Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize. 

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Ferrazzi, Keith

Keith Ferrazzi offers a bold new vision for what the organization of the future looks like - digital, distributed, inclusive, resilient, empathic - and the emerging best leadership practices that will redefine success in the ever-evolving world of work. Based on an ambitious global research initiative involving thousands of executives, innovators, and changemakers who have redefined their strategies, business models, organizational systems, and even their cultures, this book documents the workplace innovations that emerged during the pandemic and shows leaders how to shape their organizations and practices to remain competitive in a new, post-pandemic context.

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Isaacson, Walter

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.

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Kleiman, Kathy

After the end of World War II, top-secret research continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer - a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in twenty seconds rather than forty hours by human hand - even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. But their story, never told to the reporters and scientists who thronged the huge computer after it became public, was lost. Kathy Kleiman, through meticulous research and vivid prose, brings these women back to life, and back into the historical record.

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Marshall, Brandeis Hill

Data has enjoyed 'bystander' status as we've attempted to digitize responsibility and morality in tech. In fact, data's importance should earn it a spot at the center of our thinking and strategy around building a better, more ethical world. It's use--and misuse--lies at the heart of many of the racist, gendered, classist, and otherwise oppressive practices of modern tech.  In Data Conscience, computer science and data inclusivity thought leader Dr. Brandeis Hill Marshall delivers a call to action for rebel tech leaders, who acknowledge and are prepared to address the current limitations of software development

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Miller, Michael

Make the most of your Windows laptop or desktop computer--without becoming a technical expert! This book is a fast way to get comfortable, get productive, get online, get started with social networking, make more connections, and have more fun! Even if you've never used a Windows computer before, this book shows you how to do what you want, one incredibly clear and easy step at a time. 

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Muglia, Bob

Bob Muglia helps us understand how innovation in data and information technology have led us to AI - and how this technology must shape our future. The long-time Microsoft executive, former CEO of Snowflake, and current tech investor maps the evolution of the modern data stack and how it has helped build today's economy and society. And he explains how humanity must create a new social contract for the artificial general intelligence (AGI) - autonomous machines intelligent as people - that he expects to arrive in less than a decade. 

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Nowak, Anita

Through inspiring stories; interviews with experts, including business leaders, neuroscientists, activists, social entrepreneurs, and spiritual leaders; a new model rooted in positive psychology and coaching; and self-development exercises at the end of each chapter, Purposeful Empathy offers wisdom and practical advice to foster personal, organizational, and social transformation.

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Padua, Sydney

Meet Victorian London's most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage's plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines. But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime for the sake of both London and science. 

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Pinkett, Randal

Data-Driven DEI presents readers with science-based, technology-enabled assessments and tools that will help individuals and organizations achieve measurable lasting impact. 

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Rose-Stockwell, Tobias

Over the last two decades, there has been an inescapable rise of anger and aggression across our planet. Hate speech has become increasingly prevalent online, Western governments are turning towards authoritarianism and populism, and extremist groups are rising across both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. The cause is hidden in plain sight: for the first time, almost all of the information we consume as a species is being controlled and curated by algorithms designed to capture our emotional attention. It is the wide-cast net of social media that is propelled by tech, has been exploited by all of us, and which has been allowed to steadily replace our newspapers, emergency communication systems, town halls, churches, and more. Outrage Machine is a big-think book that explores the unintended consequences of this alarming shift in today's smartphone era--and shows us how to navigate the world we now live in. 

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Salzman, Marian L.

A little more than twenty years ago, the Y2K computer glitch threatened to bring the global economy to its knees. But instead of overnight disruption, humankind slipped into two decades of economic turmoil, ecological angst, and tribalism, all set against the backdrop of a newly global and digital civilization. So what's in store for the next two decades? In this acutely observed guide, Marian Salzman, whose past predictions have been heralded for coming uncannily close to the way we live now, unpacks the course of human life from the bumpy turn of the millennium through the pandemic era, when chaos and "together apart" seems to have become the new normal, equity has become a battle cry, and breathing space emerged as the greatest luxury of all.

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Saxena, Asha

This book will put AI, big data, the cloud, robotics, and smart devices in context. It will reveal how these technologies can dramatically multiply any businesses--including yours--by strategically using your data's latent, transformative potential. Noted business leader, data consultant, and Columbia professor Asha Saxena has distilled her twenty-seven years of experience teaching Fortune 500 leaders in this powerful and insightful book.

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Schneier, Bruce

It's not just computers: hacking is everywhere. A hack is any means of subverting a system's rules in unintended ways. Schneier takes hacking out of the world of computing and uses it to analyze the systems that underpin our society: from tax laws to financial markets to politics. If you can take advantage of loopholes - hacks- the rules no longer apply to you. Once you learn how to notice hacks, you'll start seeing them everywhere - and you'll never look at the world the same way again.

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Scott, Brett

The reach of Corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater; many of us rarely use cash these days. But what we're told is a natural and inevitable move is actually the work of powerful interests. And the great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives. In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires 'cloudmoney' - digital money underpinned by the banking sector - to replace physical cash. 

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Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that much of what we thought about people has been dead wrong. The reason? People lie, to friends, lovers, doctors, surveys -- and themselves. However, we no longer need to rely on what people tell us. New data from the internet -- the traces of information that billions of people leave on Google, social media, dating, and even pornography sites -- finally reveals the truth. By analyzing this digital goldmine, we can now learn what people really think, what they really want, and what they really do. Sometimes the new data will make you laugh out loud. Sometimes the new data will shock you. Sometimes the new data will deeply disturb you. But, always, this new data will make you think.

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Tarnoff, Ben

Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it?  In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this--it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.

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Ullman, Ellen

The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. 

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Wiggins, Chris

From facial recognition--capable of checking people into flights or identifying undocumented residents--to automated decision systems that inform who gets loans and who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power.

Summaries provided by DPL's catalog unless otherwise noted. Click on each title to view more information.