“In this exploration of the changing economics of our information-based world, Lanham . . . proposes the problem with the information economy is 'information doesn't seem to be in short supply. Precisely the opposite. We're drowning in it.' . . . Lanham's points are strong and well-researched . . . clear, jargon-free and forward-thinking.” —Publishers Weekly

The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard A. Lanham, an excerpt

A growing number of innovators recognize the intellectual benefits of gaming and seek to use video games for educational or therapeutic ends.

In Praise of Video Games | OpinionJournal - Taste

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston's Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters' personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science. (Feb. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
This intimate portrait of life in a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, revolves around a scientific mystery: the groundbreaking, too-good-to-be-true discovery of a virus that fights cancer. Cliff, the rakish, headstrong post-doc responsible for the discovery, is on the verge of dismissal when his tumor-ridden mice exhibit stunning rates of remission; meanwhile, Cliff’s co-worker and former girlfriend, spurred by personal and professional jealousy, begins to harbor suspicions about his lab work. The somewhat transparent plot is made compelling by the aesthetic delicacy of Goodman’s writing—furless lab mice are "like quivering pink agar"—and by the care with which she sketches the social world of the lab. The omniscient narrative nimbly shifts perspective among a small number of complex characters, to produce a Rashomon-like inquiry into truth and motive.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Intuition, by Allegra Goodman

This volume is an important complement to Wasserman and Faust's Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge, 1995). The authors, leading methodologists, present the most significant developments in quantitative models and methods for analyzing social network data that appeared in the 1990s. They review recent advances in network measurement, network sampling, analysis of centrality, positional analysis or blockmodelling, analysis of diffusion through networks, analysis of affiliation or "two-mode" networks, the theory of random graphs, and dependence graphs.

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis presents the most important developments in quantitative models and methods for analyzing social network data that have appeared during the 1990s. Intended as a complement to Wasserman and Faust's Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, it is a collection of original articles by leading methodologists reviewing recent advances in their particular areas of network methods. Reviewed are advances in network measurement, network sampling, the analysis of centrality, positional analysis or blockmodelling, the analysis of diffusion through networks, the analysis of affiliation or 'two-mode' networks, the theory of random graphs, dependence graphs, exponential families of random graphs, the analysis of longitudinal network data, graphical techniques for exploring network data, and software for the analysis of social networks.

Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis

Review
Dan Rockmore, Dartmouth College : This excellent collection of papers will provide great one-stop shopping to those working in the evolving world of network research. It may very well become a standard resource for the growing number of courses on networks now beginning to pervade curricula. Indeed, a current difficulty in teaching such a course is that there are no good texts, and a quick look around the Web reveals that almost all these courses are taught using research papers, many of which appear in this collection.
Sergei Maslov, Brookhaven National Laboratory : I read this anthology with great interest. The editors took pains to locate (and even translate) a significant number of papers predating the recent surge of interest in the science of networks, and they do a fine job of clarifying what exactly is new (and what is not so new) in the modern approach as reflected in the vast literature on the subject. The introduction to each section nicely summarizes the main findings of the featured articles.

Book Description

From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept--and the reality--of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields--including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology--have been pursuing these questions and building a new "science of networks." This book brings together for the first time a set of seminal articles representing research from across these disciplines. It is an ideal sourcebook for the key research in this fast-growing field.

The book is organized into four sections, each preceded by an editors' introduction summarizing its contents and general theme. The first section sets the stage by discussing some of the historical antecedents of contemporary research in the area. From there the book moves to the empirical side of the science of networks before turning to the foundational modeling ideas that have been the focus of much subsequent activity. The book closes by taking the reader to the cutting edge of network science--the relationship between network structure and system dynamics. From network robustness to the spread of disease, this section offers a potpourri of topics on this rapidly expanding frontier of the new science.

The Structure and Dynamics of Networks

From cell phones to Web portals, advances in information and communications technology have thrust society into an information age that is far-reaching, fast-moving, increasingly complex, and yet essential to modern life. Now, renowned scholar and author David Luenberger has produced Information Science, a text that distills and explains the most important concepts and insights at the core of this ongoing revolution. The book represents the material used in a widely acclaimed course offered at Stanford University.

Drawing concepts from each of the constituent subfields that collectively comprise information science, Luenberger builds his book around the five "E's" of information: Entropy, Economics, Encryption, Extraction, and Emission. Each area directly impacts modern information products, services, and technology--everything from word processors to digital cash, database systems to decision making, marketing strategy to spread spectrum communication.

To study these principles is to learn how English text, music, and pictures can be compressed, how it is possible to construct a digital signature that cannot simply be copied, how beautiful photographs can be sent from distant planets with a tiny battery, how communication networks expand, and how producers of information products can make a profit under difficult market conditions.

Information Science

The American ENIAC is customarily regarded as having been the starting point of electronic computation. This book rewrites the history of computer science, arguing that in reality Colossus--the giant computer built by the British secret service during World War II--predates ENIAC by two years.

Colossus was built during the Second World War at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Until very recently, much about the Colossus machine was shrouded in secrecy, largely because the code-breaking algorithms that were employed during World War II remained in use by the British
security services until a short time ago. In addition, the United States has recently declassified a considerable volume of wartime documents relating to Colossus. Jack Copeland has brought together memoirs of veterans of Bletchley Park--the top-secret headquarters of Britain's secret service--and
others who draw on the wealth of declassified information to illuminate the crucial role Colossus played during World War II. Included here are pieces by the former WRENS who actually worked the machine, the scientist who pioneered the use of vacuum tubes in data processing, and leading authorities
on code-breaking and computer science.

A must read for anyone curious about code-breaking or World War II espionage, Colossus offers a fascinating insider's account of the world first giant computer, the great great grandfather of the massive computers used today by the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Colossus : The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Code-breaking Computers

Evolution has long shaped human behavior. Yet just recently have we learned that evolution based on natural selection is not the continuous process Darwin assumed. It is instead a two-part process of change and stability called punctuated equilibrium, with natural selection operating mainly on the frontiers of change.

Taking account of biology’s latest understanding of evolution, it becomes clear that culture evolves by a similar process. This is important because over the past 30,000 years most human evolution and the behavioral changes that go with it have occurred in our cultures–not in our genes. Knowing the process by which culture evolves clarifies the origin of many of our current problems, both within and between cultures. The author contends that new technology drives cultural evolution much as mutations change our DNA. The problem is that technology is now coming at us so fast that it is inducing "circuit overload" in cultures all over the world, leading to conflict. Techno-Cultural Evolution, which builds on the insights of such bestsellers as Jared Diamond’s GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL and COLLAPSE, explains how this process works—and what it means for all of us.

Techno-Cultural Evolution: Cycles of Creation and Conflict

Warsh, who had a long-running economics column in theBoston Globe, here journeys through the discipline's history en route to an analysis of an influential 1990 technical paper. Written by Paul Romer, "Endogenous Technological Change" is described by Warsh as mathematically formidable, which is the way modern economists like their fare, begging the question of why its story would be of general interest. First, hundreds of thousands annually enroll in university-level economics courses; second, Romer's paper, pertinent to the information revolution that is our zeitgeist, is clearly explained by Warsh; and third, Warsh reveals the occupation of economics to the benefit of those who aspire to it. After historical exegesis of Adam Smith and his successors, Warsh depicts post-1945 schools of thought, biographically summarizing figures such as monetarist Milton Friedman and Keynesian Robert Solow, and those of Romer's generation now in their career primes. Appraising the intellectual lineage and gestation of Romer's paper, Warsh imparts in a comprehensible way the engagement many have with economic thought.

Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery

It took 2,000 years for punctuation and spaces between words to enter written language, so can the continued evolution of how information is packaged, filtered and consumed be doubted? In this exploration of the changing economics of our information-based world, Lanham, professor emeritus of English at UCLA and author of The Electronic Word, proposes the problem with the information economy is "information doesn't seem in short supply. Precisely the opposite. We're drowning in it." Lanham posits that as society moves from a world defined by "stuff" to one defined by "fluff," people are increasingly in need of filters to weed through the information glut. Enter the arts and letters. Citing sources from the art world to Madison Avenue, Lanham delves into the increasing amount of importance placed on a product's packaging rather than the product itself. Lanham's points are strong and well-researched, as shown through his "background conversations," substitutes for endnotes included at the end of every chapter. If style is going to increasingly operate as the decision-making arbiter, Lanham should be commended on his: clear, jargon-free and forward-thinking.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.

The Economics of Attention : Style and Substance in the Age of Information