Short Stuff: The wAve

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane. Beane assembles a winning team on a shoestring budget, by using an analytical and scientific approach to evaluate each player’s contributions. Although the A’s have many players with atypical physical attributes and unusual hitting or pitching styles, they excel in overlooked statistical categories, like on-base percentage, that were typically dismissed by baseball traditionalists. This enables Beane to get maximum efficiency from his team, earning wins at a fraction of the price paid by the rest of the league.

As the Women’s World Cup approaches, players are embroiled in battles with officials around equal rights and equal treatment. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the recent issues and how they might affect the upcoming global tournament.

Around 1.5 billion people around the world speak English—roughly 20 percent of the human population. How has our language achieved this global status? How did English evolve over time into the language we speak and write today? What are its unique quirks, strengths, and shortcomings that set it apart from the world’s other languages? The Mother Tongue takes us on a journey through the history of the English language, exploring its richness and variety, and pointing the way toward what the future might have in store for it.

In The Silk Roads, historian Peter Frankopan identifies Central and Western Asia as the crossroads of human civilization, the birthplace of the world’s major religions, the battleground where the great empires of history rose and fell, and the garden from which today’s global economy first sprouted. He argues that understanding the East is crucial to our understanding of the world—particularly for Westerners who have lost this global perspective.

In ancient times, trade routes known as the Silk Roads first brought European merchants to the luxury markets of the East, enabling the flow of both material goods and ideas from East to West. According to Frankopan, the Silk Roads have always been history’s crucial connection point, spreading not just luxury goods like silk and spices, but also technology, religion, languages, cultures, ideologies, and even conflicts and diseases. In this guide, we explore Frankopan’s history of the Silk Roads, while also incorporating insights and feedback from other scholars to supplement his analysis.

How much do you know about the universe you live in? Thanks to scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, scientists have gained insight into many of nature’s secrets, from the origin of the universe to the nature of space and time. In A Brief History of Time, physicist Stephen Hawking explains these insights for a general audience.

In this guide, we’ll present Hawking’s exposition of modern physics through the lens of five big questions that the book answers: Is reality relative or absolute? Is the future predetermined? How did the universe begin? What is the nature of a black hole? And can you build a time machine? Where applicable, we’ll also examine how Hawking’s assertions and predictions stack up to new data that scientists have collected since the book was published.

How do you spark a trend that spreads like wildfire, or turn a product into the latest must-have item? You create a social epidemic. The Tipping Point explains how social epidemics — spreading ideas, messages, behaviors, and products — function like viruses, growing gradually until they reach a critical mass (the tipping point) and explode.

Three factors can be adjusted to tip an idea to a social epidemic: the messenger, the message itself, or the context of the message. Learn how Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Sesame Street, Airwalk skate shoes, and crime reduction in New York City began as ideas and tipped to become movements.

The science of physics studies many topics, from the gravity holding planets together to electromagnetism and the microscopic forces inside the heart of the atom. Each of these forces works by different rules, some of which contradict each other. For centuries, scientists have sought a single theory that would unify these disparate fields and provide one equation from which we can derive a complete understanding of the universe. In The God Equation, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku suggests that an approach called “string theory” may be the path to uniting all the different laws of nature.

In this guide, we’ll trace the history of discoveries that unify areas of knowledge and reveal the underlying symmetries of nature. We’ll delve into string theory and define terms and concepts to give readers an understanding of the topic. We’ll discuss research to support string theory’s claims, and we’ll touch on the philosophical implications that a theory of the universe entails.

As the Women’s World Cup approaches, players are embroiled in battles with officials around equal rights and equal treatment. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the recent issues and how they might affect the upcoming global tournament.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane. Beane assembles a winning team on a shoestring budget, by using an analytical and scientific approach to evaluate each player’s contributions. Although the A’s have many players with atypical physical attributes and unusual hitting or pitching styles, they excel in overlooked statistical categories, like on-base percentage, that were typically dismissed by baseball traditionalists. This enables Beane to get maximum efficiency from his team, earning wins at a fraction of the price paid by the rest of the league.

When you want to make a change, you come up with a strategy. That’s the easy part—next, you have to figure out how to implement the strategy. The 4 Disciplines of Execution harnesses and hones four disciplines that allow you to carry out your strategy. When you apply focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability, not only will you execute your strategies, you’ll create permanent behavioral changes as a leader and an organization.

In this guide we’ll connect the authors’ ideas with those from other popular self-help and business guides such as Awaken the Giant Within and Smarter Faster Better in order to provide a well-rounded view of the theories and techniques of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. We’ll also examine where the authors’ methods may be incomplete or unproven in practical settings. Taken together, this guide provides the background and tools to effectively tackle the processes in this book.