Rating: 7.3/10. A Ticket to the Grand Show: Journeys Across Cultural Boundaries by Neil McKinnon A collection of travel notes from various countries that the author visited, mostly in the 80s-90s, and reflections on how cultures differ in ways that are non-obvious. Through numerous examples, both Canadians and other cultures perceive surprising differences, and being…
Category: Topics
The Shopify Story by Larry MacDonald
Rating: 7.3/10. The Shopify Story: How a Startup Rocketed to E-commerce Giant by Empowering Millions of Entrepreneurs by Larry MacDonald Book that tells the history of Shopify, from a humble online snowboard store to one of the largest e-commerce companies and the largest tech company based in Canada. It is meticulously researched, offering extensive details…
Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution by Christoph Biermann
Rating: 7.7/10. Book exploring the efforts of data scientists to analyze top-level football, primarily focusing on European teams, and how they use data and statistics to gain small advantages for their teams. One of the difficulties in analyzing football with data is that many ratings are subjective, determined by a sport commentator’s or journalist’s opinion…
U.S. Immigration Made Easy by Ilona Bray J.D.
Rating: 7.6/10. Book for people interested in U.S. immigration, covering a wide variety of the most common and many of the less common visas for both immigrants and non-immigrants. It provides a good understanding of the differences between categories and how the immigration system works as a whole. Most of the chapters are relatively independent…
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
Rating: 8.4/10. Book covering the history of the Polynesians and how we came to know about them. The prologue begins in the Hawaiian Islands, first discovered by Cook in 1778 (one of the last major European discoveries. Cook’s arrival coincided with a festival, so he was initially warmly welcomed, but he was later killed there….
Introduction to Time Series Analysis and Forecasting by Montgomery, Jennings, Kulahci
Rating: 8.2/10. Textbook on classical statistical methods for working with time series, mainly focusing on autoregressive, moving average, exponential smoothing, and regression-based models. This book is overall fairly easy to read while being mathematically rigorous and provides examples of working with time series in various statistical packages like JMP, SAS, and R. The examples are…
A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration by David M. Bressoud
Rating: 8.0/10. Book on measure theory and integration and serves as a good complement to the book “Measure, Integral, Probability.” I liked it because, rather than being technical all the time, it justifies the theory from a historical context – nobody really set out to invent measure theoretic integration, instead all these ideas were first…
Tangi by Witi Ihimaera
Rating: 7.6/10. A notable New Zealand novel, published in 1973, it is one of the first novels by a Maori writer. It describes a tangi (a funeral), and there is not much plot in the novel, instead it follows the protagonist as he discovers his father has died, prompting him to return to his home…
Measure, Integral and Probability by Marek Capinski and Ekkehard Kopp
Rating: 7.8/10. A textbook on measure theory, which serves as the foundation of probability and also has applications to integration and mathematical finance. A measure essentially defines the length or area of a set in a formal and consistent way, even with infinite sets that arise in continuous probability. When defined in a naive way,…
Generations by Jean M. Twenge
Rating: 7.7/10. Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents – and What They Mean for America’s Future by Jean M. Twenge This book examines generational differences and how values have changed over time, focusing on America. Overall, differences in generations are caused by major world events and technological advancements,…
The Future is Degrowth by Schmelzer, Vetter, Vansintjan
Rating: 7.3/10. The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan Book about the degrowth movement, which has gained some support in activist communities. There are different conceptions of what degrowth entails, but we generally propose the idea that GDP growth should be decoupled from progress…
All of Statistics by Larry Wasserman
Rating: 8.3/10. All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference by Larry Wasserman This textbook is as an introduction to statistics for those who have a solid foundation in mathematics but lack knowledge of statistics. It covers a wide range of topics quite rapidly within 400 pages, resulting in a rather brief treatment of…