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Human intelligence, imperfect, whimsical, is always there

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

Information, Information Management, Information Overload No Responses »

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

Master technological distractions and get the job done!

Personal Growth No Responses »

Feb 282018

“The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, status, and happiness in life” says the author, and considers this “key insight” as the heart and soul of this book. Launch directly into your major tasks, eat that frog first, stop procrastinating, overcome procrastination with the habit of setting priorities, especially starting by putting them in writing. In practice, above all, start your productive day each day by working on your most important task. Drawing from the author’s own experience and the experience of successful people who inspired him, the book presents 21 practical ways to stop procrastinating in 21 sharp-witted chapters. As such, those ways, are “methods” or strategies to be practiced and learned. Chiefly among them, the importance of turning off occasionally technological devices, i.e. distractions, which are good servers but terrible masters. Most importantly, set clear priorities, start immediately on your most important task, and then work without stopping until the job is 100 percent complete.

Eat that frog! : 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time. Brian Tracy. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2007.

Creativity for grown-ups and companies

Personal Growth No Responses »

Feb 052018

Cruel paradoxes of our time, says one of the reviewers, where standards of living get higher while the quality of life declines. One of those paradoxes is how the world needs more creative-thinking, flexible people in a world continuously evolving at a faster and faster pace, but they are not so easy to find. The sheer unpredictability of human affairs, in this context of uncertainty and change, lies right at the author’s argument for cultivating our powers of creativity in business, education and in everyday life. The author aims at answering why is essential to promote creativity and innovation, what is the problem with adults who believe or assume they are not creative, and what is involved in developing creativity. Is everyone creative or just a select few? The author does believe that everyone has huge creative capacities as “a natural result of being a human being”, and the challenge is to develop them without privileging any selected few in particular. Creativity can be learned, but in order to achieve that organizations and above all educational systems need to be run in a radically new different ways, in keeping with the times.

Out of our minds : learning to be creative. Ken Robinson. Boston, Mass.: Capstone Publishing Ltd (a Wiley Company), 2011, 2nd Edition.

An epidemic of overdiagnosis

Medicine Practice No Responses »

Feb 052018

From the publishers: “A complex web of factors has created the phenomenon of overdiagnosis: the popular media promotes fear of disease and perpetuates the myth that early, aggressive treatment is always best; in an attempt to avoid lawsuits, doctors have begun to leave no test undone, no abnormality overlooked; and profits are being made from screenings, medical procedures, and pharmaceuticals. Revealing the social, medical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that overdiagnoses and overtreats patients, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch makes a reasoned call for change that would save us pain, worry, and money.” The author, however, is very clear: “Diagnosis is always important when people are suffering and it’s important that it be done well. None of my comments should be construed as suggesting you are better off not being diagnosed when you are sick. Finally, this book is not a condemnation of all of American medicine, nor a call for alternative medicine. I am conventionally trained in Western medicine, and I believe doctors do a lot of good. If you are sick, you should see one.”

Overdiagnosed : making people sick in the pursuit of health. Dr. H. Gilbert Welch. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2011.

From science fiction to a harsh, biting reality

Information, Information Security No Responses »

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

Health, Information No Responses »

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.

Your brain is on a new kind of psychedelic stimulant

Information Overload No Responses »

Aug 022017

This is not just a book about Internet consumerism, but rather a study in neuropsychology which exposes the other dark reality of a tool apparently we can live without: the Internet. The initial question of the author was actually “Is Google making us stupid?” and the gradual loss of our ability to sit down still and browse the pages of a book or a magazine. Besides the physiological and psychological effects of an addiction to information, how is technology messing up our brains? There are at least “7 ways technology is making you stupid:” First of all, it is screwing up your sleep and your internal clock. Two, it is making you more distracted and and even less efficient academically, if you are a student. Three, there isn’t much you can remember as your long-term memory is not appropriately fed by your transient working memory being continually interrupted. Four, you are more forgetful as multitasking technology keeps you unfocused. Five, you can’t concentrate on what you’re reading since it may get much harder to absorb information wrapped up in a multimedia format. Six, you can’t find your way around without the assistance of GPS as your hippocampus (that component of your brains involved in spatial navigation and the creation of “cognitive maps”) is not exercised. Seven, your brain isn’t unlike the brain of a drug addict or even an alcoholic person if you spend too much time on the Internet. Too much of a good thing can’t be good.

The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains. Nicholas Carr. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Related Website: The Shallows.

Data: that ubiquitous “matter” and “energy” around us

Information Management No Responses »

Jul 292017

There you are: among the many new jobs and jobs descriptions that swarm the labor market, the “new” field of Data Science stands out like a beacon signaling the promised land of a never ending job supply. Yet, this is more than a passing fad, it is simply the realization of everything the evolving information economy always had in store for IT specialists, for the economy itself and for the world at large.

With this information-rich book the authors set out to elucidate how to go beyond the Big Data hype by presenting in a very comprehensive set of chapters everything that is permeated by Data in a globalized world. At the center of it all is the “data scientist”, a data-savvy, quantitative-minded, coding-literate problem solver, who could be part of the solution of the world’s problem, as long as she is part of multidisciplinary teams. The book, intended for experienced data scientists, statisticians, science PhDs, students and those new to data science, among others, wants to describe the current state of data science as well prescribe what data science could be as an academic discipline. This must-have guide includes numerous illustrative code samples and a helpful supplemental reading list that you will definitely need to really get into doing Data Science, for instance, math, coding (R and Python), data analysis and statistical inference, artificial intelligence and machine learning, experimental design and visualization.

Doing data science : straight talk from the frontline. Cathy O’Neil, Rachel Schutt. Sebastopol, CA.: O’Reilly Media, 2013. First Edition.

You can push past all limits

Biography, Personal Growth No Responses »

May 282017

“I came across the story recounted in I’ll Push You in October 2015, a little over a year after these two men accomplished what many had said would be impossible. While their five-hundred-mile wheelchair journey through Spain is truly incredible, the most powerful part of their adventure is the undying and relentless nature of the love they possess for each other.

“All too often, men shy away from intimacy, or run from being vulnerable. However, these two have redefined what friendship means. They have challenged conventional views of what a relationship can be, and in doing so, challenge many traditional concepts. Their deep friendship has kept them from being victims, has given them the opportunity to redeem any suffering they have experienced, and has allowed a beautiful adventure of life to unfold.

“The story behind these pages reminds us that God didn’t create us to live alone. He never meant us to be solitary creatures. I’ll Push You demonstrates what it means to live in community with one another and reveals what can happen when we shoulder each other’s burdens. Justin and Patrick demonstrate the beauty that exists when we choose to be the hands and feet we are called to be. They show us the redeeming power that exists in giving others the opportunity to love all of who awe are, in spite or our flaws and imperfections.” [From the Foreword, by Donald Miller].

I’ll push you : A journey of 500 miles, two best friends, and one wheelchair. Patrick Gray and Justin Skeesuck. Carol Stream, Illinois, USA: Tyndale Momentum, 2016.

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