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The philosopher in the valley : Alex Karp, Palantir, and the rise of the surveillance state / by Steinberger, Michael,author.;
"Palantir builds data integration software: its technology ingests vast quantities of information and quickly identifies patterns, trends, and connections that might elude the human eye. Founded in 2003 to help the US government in the war on terrorism -- an early investor was the CIA -- Palantir is now a $400 billion global colossus whose software is used by major intelligence services (including the Mossad), the US military, dozens of federal agencies, and corporate giants like Airbus and BP. From AI to counterterrorism to climate change to immigration to financial fraud to the future of warfare, the company is at the nexus of the most critical issues of the twenty-first century. Its CEO, Alex Karp, is a distinctive figure on the global business scene. A biracial Jew who is also severely dyslexic, Karp has built Palantir into a tech giant despite having no background in either business or computer science. Instead, he's a trained philosopher who has become known for his strongly held views on a range of issues and for his willingness to grapple with the moral and ethical implications of Palantir's work. Those questions have taken on added urgency during the Trump era, which has also brought attention to the political activism of Karp's close friend and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel. In The Philosopher in the Valley, journalist Michael Steinberger explores the world of Alex Karp, Palantir, and the future that they are leading us toward. It is an urgent and illuminating work about one of Silicon Valley's most secretive and powerful companies, whose technology is at the leading edge of the surveillance state"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; Karp, Alexander C.; Palantir Foundation for Defense Policy and International Affairs.; Big data.; Businesspeople; Computer software industry.; Electronic surveillance; Technology;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Spook street / by Herron, Mick,author.;
"What happens when an old spook starts to lose his mind? Do the Services have a retirement home for people who know too many secrets but don't remember they're secrets? Or does someone come to take care of the senile spy for good? These are the questions River Cartwright must ask himself as his grandfather--David Cartwright, a Cold War-era operative--starts to forget to wear pants, and starts believing everyone in his life is someone sent by Services to watch him. However, River has other things to worry about. A bomb goes off in the middle of a flash mob performance in a busy shopping center and kills forty innocent civilians. The agents of Slough House have to figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Intelligence service;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Matterhorn / by Reich, Christopher,1961-author.;
"Robbie Steinhardt lives a peaceful life. A fixture of his small alpine village, he tends cattle, minds his own business, and doesn't dwell on his former life and the family and lover he left behind-back when he was Mac Dekker, CIA. But when he learns his son Will died following in his footsteps, he needs answers. What mission took Will up into the alpine heights, and why is Ilya Ivashka on the same trail? Ilya-his close friend, his rival in love. Ilya, who framed Mac for treason and sent him into hiding. Wiping away the years, Mac returns to the field to find the secrets Will hid and finds himself facing the Herculean task of stopping a terrorist plot that threatens thousands. But in a field of double agents, who can he trust?"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Spy fiction.; Novels.; United States. Central Intelligence Agency; Americans; Defectors; Secrecy; Sons; Terrorism;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. by Herzog, Werner,film director.; Herzog, Werner,actor.; Magnolia Pictures (Firm),dst; Kanopy (Firm),dst;
Werner HerzogOriginally produced by Magnolia Pictures in 2016.Legendary master filmmaker Werner Herzog examines the past, present and constantly evolving future of the Internet. Herzog conducts original interviews with cyberspace pioneers and prophets such as PayPal and Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, Internet protocol inventor Bob Kahn, and famed hacker Kevin Mitnick. These provocative conversations reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships. Thoughtful, intelligent and mind-blowing, through its examination of technology, LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD gives us an insight into what it is to be human. Honorable Mention winner of the One Future Prize at the **Munich Film Festival**. *"Just the kind of percolating, wry probe we need into this fast-moving, digitally monopolizing age." - Robert Abele, **The Los Angeles Times***Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Subjects: Documentary films.; Mass media and culture.; History, Modern.; Computer science.; Science.; History.; Documentary films.;
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Water from my heart : a novel / by Martin, Charles,1969-;
"Charlie Finn had to grow up fast, living alone by age sixteen. Highly intelligent, he earned a life-changing scholarship to Harvard, where he learned how to survive and thrive on the outskirts of privileged society. That skill served him well in the cutthroat business world, as it does in more lucrative but dangerous ventures he now operates off the coast of Miami. Charlie tries to separate relationships from work. But when his choices produce devastating consequences, he sets out to right wrongs, traveling to Central America where he will meet those who have paid for his actions, including a woman and her young daughter. Will their fated encounter present Charlie with a way to seek the redemption he thought was impossible--and free his heart to love one woman as he never knew he could?"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Love stories.; Romantic suspense fiction.; Man-woman relationships;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Crime in progress : inside the Steele dossier and the Fusion GPS investigation of Donald Trump / by Simpson, Glenn R.,author.; Fritsch, Peter,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages [285]-332) and index.Fusion GPS was founded in 2010 by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, two former reporters at The Wall Street Journal who decided to abandon the struggling news business and use their reporting skills to conduct open-source investigations for businesses and law firms-- and opposition research for political candidates. In the fall of 2015, they were hired to look into the finances of Donald Trump. What began as a march through a mind-boggling trove of lawsuits, bankruptcies, and sketchy overseas projects soon took a darker turn: The deeper Fusion dug, the more it began to notice names that Simpson and Fritsch had come across during their days covering Russian corruption-- and the clearer it became that the focus of Fusion's research going forward would be Trump's entanglements with Russia. To help them make sense of what they were seeing, Simpson and Fritsch engaged the services of a former British intelligence agent and Russia expert named Christopher Steele. He would produce a series of memos-- which collectively became known as the Steele dossier-- that raised deeply alarming questions about the nature of Trump's ties to a hostile foreign power. Those memos made their way to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. On January 10, 2017, the Steele dossier broke into public view, and the Trump-Russia story reached escape velocity. At the time, Fusion GPS was just a ten-person consulting firm tucked away above a Starbucks near Dupont Circle, but it would soon be thrust into the center of the biggest news story on the planet-- a story that would lead to accusations of witch hunts, a relentless campaign of persecution by congressional Republicans, bizarre conspiracy theories, lawsuits by Russian oligarchs, and the Mueller report. In Crime in Progress, Simpson and Fritsch tell their story for the first time-- a tale of the high-stakes pursuit of one of the biggest, most important stories of our time-- no matter the costs.
Subjects: Trump, Donald, 1946-; Simpson, Glenn R.; Fritsch, Peter.; Elections;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Starter villain / by Scalzi, John,1969-author.;
"Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital. It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good. In a dog-eat-dog world ... be a cat"--
Subjects: Science fiction.; Novels.; Cats; Divorced men; Human-animal relationships; Inheritance and succession; Villains;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Union Station / by Downing, David,1946-author.;
"Los Angeles, 1953. It has been five years since British journalist John Russell struck a deal with a high-ranking Soviet official, relieving Russell of his duty as double-agent for Soviet and American intelligence. Now Russell lives a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles alongside his wife, Effi, a star on an American sitcom, and their adopted daughter, Rosa, a young artist on the cusp of adulthood. He has just begun work on a book investigating American firms that did business with Germany during Nazi occupation when he notices someone is tailing him--and his wife--all around Los Angeles. Has someone not taken kindly to his research? Is it a McCarthyist freelancer, trying to dig up dirt on Effi and her family? Or, could it be that in the leadership struggle following Stalin's death, the deal Russell struck all those years ago has put him at risk yet again? When Effi is invited to the Third Annual Berlin Film Festival as a guest of honor, the two make the decision to attend--thrusting them into the political disorder of a city that was once their home and which they now struggle to recognize. It is here that Russell will come face to face with the forces that have followed him, from Hollywood to Berlin and back again"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Spy fiction.; Novels.; British; Journalists; Russell, John (Fictitious character);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Em / by Thúy, Kim,author.; Fischman, Sheila,translator.; translation of:Thúy, Kim.Em.English.;
"Emma-Jade and Louis are born into the havoc of the Vietnam War. Orphaned, saved and cared for by adults coping with the chaos of Saigon in free-fall, they become children of the Vietnamese diaspora. Em is not a romance in any usual sense of the word, but it is a word whose homonym--aimer, to love--resonates on every page, a book powered by love in the larger sense. A portrait of Vietnamese identity emerges that is wholly remarkable, honed in wartime violence that borders on genocide, and then by the ingenuity, sheer grit and intelligence of Vietnamese-Americans, Vietnamese-Canadians and other Vietnamese former refugees who go on to build some of the most powerful small business empires in the world. Em is a poetic story steeped in history, about those most impacted by the violence and their later accomplishments. In many ways, Em is perhaps Kim Thúy's most personal book, the one in which she trusts her readers enough to share with them not only the pervasive love she feels but also the rage and the horror at what she and so many other children of the Vietnam War had to live through. Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today's global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees--and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived"--
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Experimental fiction.; Immigrants; Vietnam War, 1961-1975;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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A darker reality / by Perry, Anne,author.;
"A personal trip turns perilous after the murder of a British spy in Washington, D.C., forces Elena Standish to face dark family secrets in this ... 1930s mystery ... On a family trip to Washington, D.C., Elena Standish is delighted to visit her mother's parents for their anniversary and celebrate with influential friends of her grandfather, a prominent scientist. Even Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt will attend the party. But the event comes to a sudden and tragic end when one of the guests, Lila Worth, is run over by a car in the driveway outside. Elena realizes that Lila had been trying to tell her something, and when a call from Peter Lucas back home at MI6 confirms that Lila was a British spy, Elena pairs with the American secret service to find out what vital information the young woman had in her possession. To further complicate Elena's trip, her grandfather is arrested for the murder. Desperate to clear his name and save her family from disgrace, she looks more deeply into her grandfather's scientific life and discovers that Lila had been desperately trying to keep the latest developments in nuclear fission out of the Nazis' hands. Her grandfather's business secrets run deep, it appears, and as Elena begins to question his loyalties, she wonders if she can trust anyone in this dark new world order"--
Subjects: Detective and mystery fiction.; Historical fiction.; Great Britain. MI6; British; Family secrets; Grandfathers; Intelligence officers; Murder; Nineteen thirties; Women photographers; Women spies;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
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