Books by Paul Erickson
The World the Game Theorists Made
In recent decades game theory—the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals—has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory’s ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding. Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice.
The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern’s seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory’s revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.
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How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
by Michael D. Gordin, Rebecca Lemov, Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Thomas Sturm
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed.
How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
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Don't Mess with Me The Strange Lives of Venomous Sea Creatures (How Nature Works)
Scorpions and brown recluse spiders are fine as far as they go, but if you want daily contact with venomous creatures, the ocean is the place to be. Blue-ringed octopi, stony corals, sea jellies, stonefish, lionfish, poison-fanged blennies, stingrays, cone snails, blind remipedes, fire urchins--you can choose your poison in the ocean. Venoms are often but not always defensive weapons. The banded sea krait, an aquatic snake, wriggles into undersea caves to prey on vicious moray eels, killing them with one of the world's most deadly neurotoxins, which it injects through fangs that resemble hypodermic needles.
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The Pier at the End of the World (Tilbury House Nature Book)
*THE PIER AT THE END OF THE WORLD is on the CBC NSTA 2016 Outstanding Science List*
With lyrical writing and stunning underwater photography, this picture book follows a day in the life of the denizens lurking in the cold, tide-swept waters beneath a remote pier on the shore of a northern sea.
Vivid photos of a wolf fish munching a sea urchin, a hermit crab switching shells, a sea slug arming itself with stinging cells stolen from an anemone, a 35-pound lobster guarding his domain, and other exotic creatures take us from dawn to darkness. Colorful panoramic paintings show us the bigger picture, including the eyes of nighttime predators and the creatures who are missing the following morning.
A gorgeous book for future scientists. Both lyrical and scientifically accurate, the story follows a day in the life of the denizens lurking in the cold, tide-swept waters beneath a remote pier on the shore of a northern sea. Stunning underwater photos of a wolffish munching a live sea urchin, a hermit crab switching shells, a sea slug arming itself with stinging cells stolen from an anemone, a starfish thrusting its stomach through its mouth to digest its prey, exotic-looking basket stars straining the water for food, a 35-pound hundred-year-old lobster guarding his domain, and other exotic creatures take us from dawn to darkness. Colorful panoramic paintings of the bigger picture, including the eyes of nighttime predators and the creatures who are among the missing the following morning. Includes an appendix of macro-photos showing tiny animals that are critical to the food web. Another appendix gives scientific names and brief science facts about all animals in the book. Interactive, as readers are asked to compare before-night and after-night images to discover who's missing Correlations to the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core ELA Standards available online at www.tilburyhouse.com
The Tilbury House Nature Book series brings the natural world to life for young readers without anthropomorphizing animals. Each book aims for the highest standards of scientific accuracy and storytelling magic.
Fountas & Pinnell Level T
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