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Invest in a foreign country, then underestimate its talent

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Sep 062025

China would not be China without Apple? That’s the implication of this thoroughly researched book.

“After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products—in staggering volume and for enormous profit.

“Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized.

“Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”—the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”—devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.”

[Excerpts from the Amazon store]

Apple in China : The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. Patrick McGee. New York: Scribner, 2025.

How a visionary young woman launched the digital age

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Dec 102023

This is the real-life story of a woman’s struggle to have her revolutionary ideas heard in a male-dominated 19th Century Britain. Originally published in 2015, this is an updated edition with new material.

Over 150 years after the death of Ada Lovelace, a widely-used scientific computer program was named “Ada”. Lovelace, considered the first programmer in history, wrote extensive notes about the machine, including an algorithm to compute a long sequence of Bernoulli numbers, which some observers now consider to be the world’s first computer program. Despite opposition that the principles of science were “beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

Based on ten years of research and filled with fascinating characters and observations of the period, not to mention numerous illustrations, Essinger tells Ada’s fascinating story in unprecedented detail to absorbing and inspiring effect.

Ada’s Algorithm : How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age. James Essinger. London: Gibson Square, 2022.

An old technology made evident with IT prowess

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Dec 102023

Nothing new under the sun, just its awe inspiring manifestation through generative artificial intelligence, capable of generating text, images, or other media. However, artificial intelligence (aka AI) has been embedded into general applications for years, only that when an application becomes useful enough and common enough is no longer labeled AI.

Quoting the author: “Surely, AI machines will help us think new thoughts and dream new dreams, functioning as prosthetics for our feeble brains. For me, AI cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the limits of thought, the future of humanity, and our place in the vast space-time landscape that we call home.”

Artificial intelligence : an illustrated history : from medieval robots to neural networks. Clifford A. Pickover. New York: Sterling, 2019.

Getting unhooked on tech or how to reclaim your humanity

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Jan 072022

“Technology: your master, or your friend? Do you feel ruled by your smartphone and enslaved by your e-mail or social-network activities? Digital technology is making us miserable, say bestselling authors and former tech executives Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever. We’ve become a tribe of tech addicts—and it’s not entirely our fault.
”Taking advantage of vulnerabilities in human brain function, tech companies entice us to overdose on technology interaction. This damages our lives, work, families, and friendships. Swipe-driven dating apps train us to evaluate people like products, diminishing our relationships. At work, we e-mail on average 77 times a day, ruining our concentration. At home, light from our screens is contributing to epidemic sleep deprivation.
”But we can reclaim our lives without dismissing technology. The authors explain how to avoid getting hooked on tech and how to define and control the roles that tech is playing and could play in our lives. And they provide a guide to technological and personal tools for regaining control. This readable book turns personal observation into a handy action guide to adapting to our new reality of omnipresent technology.” [From the publisher’s website]

Your Happiness Was Hacked : Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain — and How to Fight Back. Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever. Oakland, CA: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2018.

Will mathematical models and algorithms decide our fate?

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Dec 292021

$Weapons of Math Destruction$

“Weapons of Math Destruction traces the arc of a person’s life, from school to retirement, and looks at models that score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole and prison sentences, and monitor our health. The models being used are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: if a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his race or neighborhood), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. O’Neil has dubbed these harmful models Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs. In our society, where money buys influence, WMD victims are nearly voiceless. These models are propping up the lucky and punishing the poor and oppressed, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy. But the poor are hardly the only victims of WMDs. They hit the middle class, too. Even the rich find themselves microtargeted by political models.” [From the Publisher’s website]

Weapons of Math Destruction : How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Cathy O’Neil. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2017.

Learn mathematics the right way this time

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Oct 172021

“Mathematics for Information Technology is written to help students develop the specific math skills and understanding they need to succeed in electronics, computer programming, and information technology (IT) programs. With topical coverage tailored to important IT applications, this text delivers easy-to-understand and balanced mathematical instruction for students in 9- to 12-week college courses. A wealth of illustrations, examples, applications, and exercises will guide students toward an understanding of the content from a number of different angles.
The authors’ combined experience teaching this material in live classrooms and in online/distance learning formats has uniquely qualified them to develop this text for a variety of learning environments. Whether students are learning in a classroom or online, in a 9-week course or a 12-week semester, or in an electronics, computer programming, or IT department, they will find Mathematics for Information Technology an invaluable resource throughout their studies.” [From the Preface]

mathematics for Information Technology. Alfred Basta, Stephan DeLong, Nadine Basta. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar, Cengage Learning, 2014.

Human intelligence, imperfect, whimsical, is always there

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Apr 062019

Behind all technology feats in the intricate and infinite world of information technology that engulfs every human activity or endeavor in the world, there is always way back behind the scene, within a digital realm, a primal bricklayer, a blue collar worker putting together the structures, the wiring and the circuits to make it all work. Speaking of bricks, think of millions, even billions of lines of code, assembled together in such a way that they become a functional skyscraper, that is, a program, better yet, an “application” (or app) like a Web application. That character, that builder, is called a coder (aka, previously, computer programmer) and this book is sort of an anthropological and psychological portrait of the members of this new tribe of digital laborers (yes, there are digital sweatshops out there). This journalistic work reads like a brief history, though well documented, of programming or rather coding, the very human nature of its heroes and heroines (yes, there has always been women thriving behind well known digital enterprises, though many a time, in the midst of a brogrammer culture) and how humongous and successful creations, like Facebook, came to be. Just the section dedicated to the corresponding footnotes of each of the 11 chapters of the book is a very useful bibliographic compilation of famous quotes, happenings, eureka moments and milestones. “[…] unlike in every other type of engineering—mechanical, industrial, civil—the machines we make with software are woven from words. Code is speech; speech a human utters to silicon, which makes the machine come to life and do our will.”, explains the author referring to how coding is a special kind of engineering, one that indeed is remaking the world.

Coders : the making of a new tribe and the remaking of the world. Ryder Carroll. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.

In a digital world, back to the almighty pen and paper

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May 062018

So much information, apps, social networks to maintain, plus so many gadgets plus the to-do lists (if you have a modicum of organization) and in the meantime your life is happening. “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”, is a saying attributed to John Lennon, but it was actually the American journalist and cartoonist Allen Saunders who said it first. No, I’m not digressing.

The Bullet Journal Method, now in the form of a book, “the analog method for the digital age”, is for anyone struggling to find their place in the digital age. It will help you get organized by providing simple tools and techniques that can inject clarity, direction, and focus into your days. As great as getting organized feels, however, it’s just the surface of something significantly deeper and more valuable, says the author. It’s all about tracking the Past, ordering the Present and designing the Future. There are many a follower of this sort of cult productivity system which, if we are to believe them, it actually works. For instance, this article in the Financial Times, Why I started a bullet journal — and so should you.

The bullet journal method : track the past, order the present, design the future. Ryder Carroll. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2018.

Related Website: Bullet Journal

From science fiction to a harsh, biting reality

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Dec 292017

This is perhaps the new battlefield, in a virtual world, but closer than ever to a harsh and biting reality: cybersecurity. We need not look hard to find examples of this unleashed war, or cyberwar, in the past few years in which governments, hacktivists and hackers for-hire target industrial complexes (e.g. “Stuxnet”), perform corporate espionage (from East to West and vice versa), or, as of late, attack private companies (Sony) with devastating results, to name just a few. Cybersecurity is a mammoth booming business, one of the fastest growing industries in the world. However, as the authors point out, this is no longer the stuff of science fiction or solely a concern for industries, companies or governments. It also involves you, the Average Joe user, that is, just about anybody who connects to the Internet, by any means: enterprise networks, PCs, tablets, smartphones. With this book you will find not only answers to all your questions regarding this new reality of our times, but you will also find information you never knew you had to know. The book consists of three parts describing in an informative and instructive way how it all works, starting with the definition and scope of cyberspace and the Internet, why cybersecurity matters, its global reach and the US approach to cyberwar, and finally, what we can do to protect ourselves and the government and institutional roles in this new frontier.

Cybersecurity and cyberwar : What everyone needs to know®. P.W. Singer, Allan Friedman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Some schemes that can make you sick

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Sep 172017

Collaboration is the name of the game. ‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life…Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors…the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe. The patients don’t realise that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn’t been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry…If you don’t think the system is out of control, then please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death…If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus, or even one hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.’ [From the Introduction]. Be prepared to be shocked reading about confessions from an insider, the hall of shame for ‘big pharma’, conflicts of interest at medical journals, the corruptive influence of easy money, forceful and insistent drug advertising, too many warnings and too many drugs, the drug industry’s paradise (psychiatry) and a big etcetera.

Deadly medicines and organised crime : how big pharma has corrupted healthcare. Peter C. Gøtzsche. London: Radcliffe Publishing Ltd, 2013.

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