"This book is not about JavaScript design patterns or implementing an object-oriented paradigm with JavaScript code. It was not written to distinguish the good features of the JavaScript language from the bad. It is not meant to be a complete reference guide. It is not targeted at people new to programming or those completely new to JavaScript. Nor is this a cookbook of JavaScript recipes. Those books have been written.

It was my intention to write a book to give the reader an accurate JavaScript worldview through an examination of native JavaScript objects and supporting nuances: complex values, primitive values, scope, inheritance, the head object, etc. I intend this book to be a short and digestible summary of the ECMA-262, Edition 3 specification, focused on the nature of objects in JavaScript.

If you are a designer or developer who has only used JavaScript under the mantle of libraries (such as jQuery, Prototype, etc), it is my hope that the material in this book will transform you from a JavaScript library user into a JavaScript developer."

""

1. Best behavioral economics books of the year, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

2. Best economic history book, Alexander Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth.

3. Second best eBook of the year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.  By the way, here is my recent debate with Erik; we both agreed in advance to mix things up and generate controversy, so interpret the exchange accordingly.  In reality, Erik and I agree about many many things and Matt Yglesias notes as much.  (We do, however, seem to disagree about what this graph means.)  Arnold Kling comments on the debate itself.

4. Best economics/business book of the year: Tim Harford’s Adapt.

5. Best Austrian or Austrian-influenced book of the year: Daniel B. Klein, Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation.  It’s not out yet, I’ll cover it more when it appears, more information here.

6. Best economics textbook, Ahem!  I don’t mean my favorite economics textbook (though it is that too), rather best economics textbook.  The revised second edition of Micro just appeared, the macro is due out any day now.

Overall if I had to pick one, text aside, it might be the Alexander Field book, but this is a diverse lot with something for everybody.

I have written several times before (e.g. here and here) about how Washington insiders, politicians and staff, use their knowledge of behind the scene deals to profit in the stock market (see also Megan McArdle’s recent piece from which I stole the headline). Last night 60 Minutes reported on the story based on new research in Throw Them All Out a forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer.

Here is one bit from the transcript:

In mid September 2008 with the Dow Jones Industrial average still above ten thousand, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were holding closed door briefings with congressional leaders, and privately warning them that a global financial meltdown could occur within a few days. One of those attending was Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus, then the ranking Republican member on the House Financial Services Committee and now its chairman.

Schweizer: These meetings were so sensitive– that they would actually confiscate cell phones and Blackberries going into those meetings. What we know is that those meetings were held one day and literally the next day Congressman Bachus would engage in buying stock options based on apocalyptic briefings he had the day before from the Fed chairman and treasury secretary. I mean, talk about a stock tip.

While Congressman Bachus was publicly trying to keep the economy from cratering, he was privately betting that it would, buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down. He would make a variety of trades and profited at a time when most Americans were losing their shirts.

Even though the Congress is exempt from insider trading law, many of 60 Minutes’s findings are hugely damning, which you can tell just by looking at the stunned faces of John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi when Steve Kroft questions them about their special dealings. The video is here.

I have a new book coming out soon, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, more on that later. Here is one bit drawn from the book and a recent op-ed in IBD.

Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

The chart at right shows the number of bachelor’s degrees in various fields today and 25 years ago. STEM fields are flat (declining for natives) while the visual and performing arts, psychology, and communication and journalism (!) are way up.

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus.

Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth. Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is one of the main reasons we subsidize higher education.

The potential wage gains for college graduates go to the graduates — that’s reason enough for students to pursue a college education. We add subsidies to the mix, however, because we believe that education has positive spillover benefits that flow to society. One of the biggest of these benefits is the increase in innovation that highly educated workers theoretically bring to the economy.

As a result, an argument can be made for subsidizing students in fields with potentially large spillovers, such as microbiology, chemical engineering, nuclear physics and computer science. There is little justification for subsidizing sociology, dance and English majors.

College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.

" <br />
February 2011: We have decided to provide the draft of "How to Design Classes" (pdf) on an "as is" basis for now. You are free to download and print it.<br />
<br />
Since we may occasionally fix typos and add material, we recommend that you do not copy the file. Instead, link to it.<br />
<br />
Warning: If we decide to publish the book after all, it is likely that the publisher will ask us to remove this version of the book from the web."

This I had not known, but apparently it is old news:

The symbolic kingpin of interchangeable parts production fell in 1960 when Robert S. Woodbury published his essay “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts”…Woodbury convincingly argued that the parts of Whitney’s guns were not in fact constructed with interchangeable parts…

With Eli Whitney reinterpreted as a promoter rather than as a pioneer of machine-made interchangeable parts manufacture, it remained for Merritt Roe Smith to identify conclusively the personnel and the circumstances of this fundamental step in the development of mass production.  Smith demonstrated that the United States Ordnance Department was the prime mover in bringing about machine-made interchangeable parts production of small arms.  The national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, played a major role in this process, especially in its efforts to coordinate its operations with those of the Harpers Ferry Armory and John Hall’s experimental rifle factory, also at Harpers Ferry.

That is from David A. Hounshell’s excellent From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932.  Here is a related article, possibly gated, here is another.

This is a poem by Kay Ryan:

Most of it’s too dreary

or too cherry red.

If it’s a chair, it’s

covered with things

the savior said

or should have said –

dense admonishments

in nail polish

too small to be read.

If it’s a picture,

the frame is either

burnt matches glued together

or a regular frame painted over

to extend the picture. There never

seems to be a surface equal

to the needs of these people.

Their purpose wraps

around the backs of things

and under arms;

they gouge and hatch

and glue on charms

till likable materials –

apple crates and canning funnels –

lose their rural ease. We are not

pleased the way we thought

we would be pleased.

That poem is cited in the new and enjoyable book by David Orr, Beautiful & Pointless {A  Guide to Modern Poetry}.

Fantastic ad for reading—a book comes to life through paper cuttings.

"[W]hat you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever. [emphasis added]" trent reznor

"Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument."

"an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog."

Terrific skewering of The World Is Flat. Captures a lot of why I couldn't bring myself to finish it. To be fair, there IS something in there of modest value, but you have to wade through so much crap to find it that I just gave up.

provides free audiobooks from the public domain.

hive mind thoughts on getting book scanned

"the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast."

"You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy them or not"

"the web is having a profound impact on how we conceptualise, seek, evaluate and use information"

all your media are belong to us

a project designed to help you educate yourself about advanced business concepts. This manifesto will show you how to substantially increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost, all without setting foot inside a classroom.

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

the world's largest network of library content and services

'The future is already here,' he is fond of suggesting. 'It is just not evenly distributed.'

the largest collection of illustrated antique books on line... we think.

an online service to help people catalog their books easily.

like movielens for books

Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them.

the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate.

Excellent article on the Codex (thanks fabiomuniz)

Hadamard's survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work.

"the most influential scholar you've never heard of."

commentary on A Strange Loop

a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature.

Works from around the world

The Bartleby.com edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body features 1,247 vibrant engravings—many in color—from the classic 1918 publication, as well as a subject index with 13,000 entries ranging from the Antrum of Highmore to the Zonule of Zinn.

librarians around the country were asked the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?"

Here is the list of books that will officially induce mindfucks, sorted alphabetically by author.

Asimov thought that The Last Question, first copyrighted in 1956, was his best short story ever.

Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software

Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever, 1963 vs 1991 editions (with revisions). The 1963 edition is my own, bought for me in the late 60's when I was a toddler, and read to tatters. The 1991 edition belongs to my kids today. I was so familar with the older