Leo Beranek, an Iowa farm boy who became a Renaissance man--scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, musician, television executive, philanthropist, and author--has lived life in constant motion. His seventy-year career, through the most tumultuous and transformative years of the last century, has always been propelled by the sheer exhilaration of trying something new. In Riding the Waves, Leo Beranek tells his story.

Beranek's life changed direction on a summer day in 1935 when he stopped to help a motorist with a flat tire. The driver just happened to be a former Harvard professor of engineering, who guided the young Beranek toward a full scholarship at Harvard's graduate school of engineering. Beranek went on to be one of the world's leading experts on acoustics. He became Director of Harvard's Electro-Acoustic Laboratory, where he invented the Hush-A-Phone--a telephone accessory that began the chain of regulatory challenges and lawsuits that led ultimately to the breakup of the Bell Telephone monopoly in the 1980s. Beranek moved to MIT to be a professor and Technical Director of its Acoustics Laboratory, then left academia to manage the acoustical consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman. Known for his work in noise control and concert acoustics, Beranek devised the world’s largest muffler to quiet jet noise and served as acoustical consultant for concert halls around the world (including the Tanglewood Music Shed, the storied summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra). As president of BBN, he assembled the software group that invented both the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, and e-mail.

In the 1970s, Beranek risked his life savings to secure the license to operate a television station; he turned Channel 5 in Boston into one of the country's best, then sold it to Metromedia in 1982 for the highest price ever paid up to that time for a broadcast station. "One central lesson I've learned is the value of risk-taking and of moving on when risks turn into busts or odds look better elsewhere," Beranek writes. Riding the Waves is a testament to the boldness, diligence, and intelligence behind Beranek's lifetime of extraordinary achievement.

Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry

Matt Barton:

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) are a special genre of computer games that bring the tabletop role-playing experience of games such as Dungeons & Dragons to the computer screen. This genre includes classics such as Ultima and The Bard's Tale as well as more modern games such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars.

Written in an engaging style for both the computer game enthusiast and the more casual computer game player, this book explores the history of the genre by telling the stories of the developers, games, and gamers who created it.

Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the arrival of the Internet. Two Bits also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a "recursive public"--a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.

Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that binds together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for the movement. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also shows how it is possible to understand the new movements that are emerging out of Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

In Shape, George Stiny argues that seeing shapes--with all their changeability and ambiguity--is an inexhaustible source of creative ideas. Understanding shapes, he says, is a useful way to understand what is possible in design.

Shapes are devices for visual expression just as symbols are devices for verbal expression. Stiny develops a unified scheme that includes both visual expression with shapes and verbal expression with signs. The relationships--and equivalencies--between the two kinds of expressive devices make design comparable to other professional practices that rely more on verbal than visual expression. Design uses shapes while business, engineering, law, mathematics, and philosophy turn mainly to symbols, but the difference, says Stiny, isn't categorical. Designing is a way of thinking. Designing, Stiny argues, is calculating with shapes, calculating without equations and numbers but still according to rules. Stiny shows that the mechanical process of calculation is actually a creative process when you calculate with shapes--when you can reason with your eyes, when you learn to see instead of count.

The book takes the idea of design as calculation from mere heuristic or metaphor to a rigorous relationship in which design and calculation each inform and enhance the other. Stiny first demonstrates how seeing and counting differ when you use rules--that is, what it means to calculate with your eyes--then shows how to calculate with shapes, providing formal details. He gives practical applications in design with specific visual examples. The book is extraordinarily visual, with many drawings throughout--drawings punctuated with words. You have to see this book in order to read it.

Shape: Talking about Seeing and Doing

A provocative and witty look at how our private spaces--from boardroom to bedroom--reveal our personalities, whether we know it or not!

Does what's on your desk reveal what's on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected--and unplanned--ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us.

Sam Gosling, one of the field's most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff. What he has discovered is astonishing: when it comes to the most essential components of our personalities--from friendliness to flexibility--the things we own and the way we arrange them often say more about us than even our most intimate conversations. If you know what to look for, you can figure out how reliable a new boyfriend is by peeking into his medicine cabinet or whether an employee is committed to her job by analyzing her cubicle. Bottom line: The insights we gain can boost our understanding of ourselves and sharpen our perceptions of others.

Packed with original research and fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guidebook to our not-so-secret lives.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

In the capital of Ghana, a teenager nicknamed “Condom Sister” trolls the streets to educate other young people about contraception. Her work and her own aspirations point to a remarkable shift not only in the West African nation, where just a few decades ago women had nearly seven children on average, but around the globe. While world population continues to grow, family size keeps dropping in countries as diverse as Switzerland and South Africa.

The phenomenon has some lamenting the imminent extinction of humanity, while others warn that our numbers will soon outgrow the planet’s resources. Robert Engelman offers a decidedly different vision—one that celebrates women’s widespread desire for smaller families. Mothers aren’t seeking more children, he argues, but more for their children. If they’re able to realize their intentions, we just might suffer less climate change, hunger, and disease, not to mention sky-high housing costs and infuriating traffic jams.

In More, Engelman shows that this three-way dance between population, women’s autonomy, and the natural world is as old as humanity itself. He traces pivotal developments in our history that set population—and society—on its current trajectory, from hominids’ first steps on two feet to the persecution of “witches” in Europe to the creation of modern contraception. Both personal and sweeping, More explores how population growth has shaped modern civilization—and humanity as we know it.

The result is a mind-stretching exploration of parenthood, sex, and culture through the ages. Yet for all its fascinating historical detail, More is primarily about the choices we face today. Whether society supports women to have children when and only when they choose to will not only shape their lives, but the world all our children will inherit.

More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want

Downstream is an arresting vision of the Colorado River by renowned landscape photographer Karen Halverson. The Colorado, crucial to development in the West, is at once wilderness, natural resource, recreation area, and wasteland. In seventy large-format color photographs, Halverson captures the river's natural majesty as well as the strange and unexpected beauty of its altered state. The images take us on an intimate exploration of the Colorado's entire length--from its rugged upstream canyons, to its dams and reservoirs, to where it disappears into the desert, entirely consumed. In an insightful, personal introduction to the photographs, Halverson tells how she explored the Colorado--accessing it by car, on foot, and by raft--while learning about its transformation into a complex water delivery system. In a lyrical foreword, historian William Deverell sets the photographs in the illuminating context of Colorado River history and discovery. In both images and prose, the book gives an extraordinary view of the Colorado's great and enduring splendor and a clear-eyed look at the many ironies contained in its waters.

Downstream: Encounters with the Colorado River

As our dependence on technology has increased precipitously over the past centuries, so too has the notion that we can solve all environmental problems with scientific explanations. The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge proposes an alternative to this dangerous worldview. The contributing authors argue that our reliance on scientific knowledge has created many of the problems that now plague the globe and that our wholesale dependence on scientific progress is both untenable and myopic. They conclude that we must simply accept that our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and always will.

Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson and a diverse group of thinkers, including Wendell Berry, Anna Peterson, and Robert Root-Bernstein, offer insights on the advantages of an ignorance-based worldview. Their essays explore the entire realm of this philosophy, from its origins and its essence to how its implementation can preserve vital natural resources for future generations. The Virtues of Ignorance argues that knowledge-based worldviews are more dangerous than useful and looks ahead to determine how humans can live sustainably on Earth.

The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Felice Frankel, and George M. Whitesides:

Wired, Reena Jana
...one of the year's more intriguing concepts for an art book (or is it a science book?) It's a rare yin and yang concoction that satisfies both sides of the brain.

On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science

In the fast-paced twenty-first century educational environment—with new technologies, mounting global competition for students and scholars, blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplines, and growing pressures for accountability—doctoral programs face fundamental questions of purpose, vision, and quality.

Sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Formation of Scholars distills the results of a five-year project to develop creative solutions and approaches for transforming doctoral programs. The authors outline the processes, tools, and opportunities through which faculty and graduate students can turn their habits and skills as scholars—their commitment to hard questions and robust evidence—on their purposes and practices as educators and learners.

This groundbreaking book explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and offers a plan for increasing the effectiveness of doctoral education. Programs must grapple with questions of purpose. The authors examine practices and elements of doctoral programs and show how they can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration, and collaboration. They challenge the traditional apprenticeship model and offer an alternative in which students learn while apprenticing with several faculty members. The authors persuasively argue that creating intellectual community is essential for high-quality graduate education in every department. Knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk-taking.

The Formation of Scholars issues a call to action for administrators, faculty, and students to ensure that the United States' doctoral education continues to be the envy of the world.

The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century