Membernormspier2001

Social Policy, Music (mostly classical with a bit of jazz), Art, Economics, Science, Math/Engineering/Statistics, Fiction

Retired freelance statistician and computer programmer, living in Northampton, MA.

I love classical music, particularly chamber music. I also enjoy many of the other arts. My books reflect my several other personal and professional interests, which are sort of academicish.

I get a lot out of books, but,as they are heavy and bulky, I do find that they weigh me down. Thus, when I decide I will not reread a book, and will not use it as reference, I get rid of it. Thus, what you see here are books on my "to read" pile, and also things I expect to refer to or use as reference in the future.

Additional Reading Source Recomendations: Journals, Some Now Available to All Even if Not Through Your Libary:

JSTOR:( http://about.jstor.org/individuals )
JSTOR is a collection of journal articles, typically excluding about the last 4 years, and covering the humanities and social sciences, but, unfortunately, not the hard sciences.
Some of us can get JSTOR at home for free via a public library for free (for instance, all Massachusetts residents can get it for free via the Boston Public Library, and otherwise, you might be able to get it at a local college or university library depending on how generous they are to non-affiliated users.
But, even if you can't get it for free, there is an option that includes most of its Journal content called JPASS which you can get for $200. a year. (Also, there is some other experimental completely free thing that they are trying out, with a smaller subset of available journals.)
Sadly, it may have taken a suicide ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz ) to make these journal articles available.

Also: DeepDyve (www.deepdyve.com) is a service that gives you a wide-ranging collection of journal articles to read through (but you generally can not download them). It runs $360 a year or $40 for a month. The collection complements JSTOR: the most recent issues are included, the hard sciences are included. It is weak on the arts, and often only the last 10 or 20 years of a journals content is included. (JSTOR, on the other hand, goes back to day 1, which is often up to 150 years ago!)

Note: for both JSTOR and DeepDyve, I've noted some issues that are browser-related, so you may wish to try a different browser if you have trouble. (On my notebook, for example, I've had problems with both services with Chrome, and these went away on Firefox.)

Also, if looking for journal articles and technical reports, note that Google Scholar is a starting point to find articles (often which you will then access on JSTOR or DeepDyve and otherwise often which are downloadable for free from somewhere that Google Scholar points you to.

-->Local ( Northampton / Amherst ) Culture Vultures: I have started a small Meetup.com group for going to local chamber music concerts with a modest dinner out before or after, and for other local and regional culture fun. If interested, see this Meetup.com link
http://www.meetup.com/Northampton-Amherst-Chamber-Concert-Goers/