Category: Education

Latest Read: How Not to Be Wrong

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date April 10, 2020

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg is a really fun read. Let’s re-think mathematics today.

Bill Gates gave the book quite a boost when he blogged How Math Secretly Affects Your Life. Ellenberg won the 2016 Euler Book Prize, awarded annually for an outstanding book about mathematics. Jordan is a math professor at UWMadison.

Look beyond the title. Math holds special psyche on many of us.

Yet it is critical now in the age of covid-19 to consider how math allows us to think profoundly to answer today’s challenges.

Jordan demonstrates how math empowers us. Many readers will ask “When Am I Going To Use This?”

Well how about now as we confront the covid-19 pandemic?

Or consider chapter four: How Much Is That In Dead Americans. Jordan addresses widespread miscalculations assessing war dead. Times may change but standards must remain.

Reading How Not to Be Wrong as covid-19 is devastating major cities across our country seems the exact right time to think mathematically.

Tags abraham wald, analytical thinking, jordan ellenberg, mathematics

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Latest Read: The Perfect Weapon

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date April 4, 2020

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger is an amazing read. To be frank this book is very quite unnerving, yet should be certainly mandatory reading. We have been at war for a couple of years on an electronic battlefield. This seems to be acting as a deterrent to actual war on a global scale.

Above all, we live today in a more complex world now regarding COVID-19. Recent cyber attacks and the flattening of attack tools is unquestionably changing the world right in-front of our eyes.

Sanger’s book will help you see it even more clearly: today a perfect storm is forming across the internet.

Therefore, The Perfect Weapon reveals so much in the opening chapters regarding successful Russian attacks upon US military and government networks.

On the contrary, the previous generation was driven by nuclear mutually assured destruction. In contrast, cyberwar or ‘cyber conflict’ is very different.

Russia’s penetration of the Pentagon’s secret network in 2008 in fact, is very upsetting reading. Sanger recalls how NSA’s Debora Plunkett discovered rogue USB sticks, left scattered across a US military base parking lot in the Middle East provided Moscow’s entry into the Pentagon networks.

WannaCry ransomware

North Korea is the boldest example of this book’s theme: A backwards third world country hacking Sony? Yes. In addition, North Korea launched the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack. On the other hand, their ransomware was unleashed across global hospitals and schools. Can you imagine WannaCry 3.0 locking down hospitals in the mist of stopping coronavirus?

Tags cyberwar, david sanger, facebook, malware, nsa, olympic games, paul manafort, stuxnet, the perfect weapon, wannacry, zero day

Cloud Design Education Flat World Globalization Google Innovation OpenSource Reading Rich media Tablet Technology TED

Latest Read: When Gadgets Betray Us

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date March 29, 2020

Robert Vamosi wrote When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of Our Infatuation With New Technologies in 2013. Today in the age of COVID-19 this book remains very relevant. Upon his book release, Robert spoke at Microsoft Research.

When Gadgets Betray Us is really about the internet of things (IoT) and the explosion of cheap gadgets.

This is a two fold problem: the impulse of human behavior to jump right into a new, innovative, ‘shiny’ devices. We more often skip reading the manual. Who reads manuals anyway these days?

However the ability for a nation state to remotely hack building controls and manipulate industrial machines seemed like stuff from a Hollywood movie, even back in 2013.

Clearly Vamosi could not have considered the impact of Stuxnet, the attack by Israel and the US NSA to destroy centrifuges in an underground facility in Iran. My review Countdown to Zero Day will surprise many readers.

This is a good starting point for many readers. Generally When Gadgets Betray Us reveals how our devices (phones, cars, smart watches, home thermostats and even baby monitors leaked location data. Worse, baby monitors permitted hackers to hijack the video feeds meant for remote grandparents, family and friends.

Tags david beckham, hacking, hardware, IoT, medical device, ransomware, Robert Vamosi, stuxnet, when gadgets betray us

Education Innovation IoT Maker OpenSource Technology

Raspberry Pi Imager

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date March 28, 2020

Recently the Raspberry Pi group has released a new installer for all Pi devices called The Raspberry Pi Imager. This is a step in the right direction for the platform. Yes, believe it or not the Raspberry Pi is a platform.

When downloading new versions of Raspbian or Noobs the process for many users was cumbersome at best. This removes the need for new users to learn Etcher. By itself Etcher is a fine utility. I do not plan on deleting Etcher from my machine.

Imager is just a more polished version that pulls all latest releases in the background. I believe this utility helps enhance the Pi platform. Just look at how we pull Windows updates and deploy across organizations.

The new Imager makes life simple when crossing multiple computers: Windows, Mac, or Linux. Presto!

Tags imager, noobs, rasbian, raspberry pi

Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Flat World Globalization Google Innovation Internet2 Network Reading Technology WiscNet

Latest Read: The Shallows

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date March 27, 2020

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr remains a powerful book (published 2011) regarding how our brains have re-wired in the age of the internet. I began reading just as COVID-19 began taking hold. How will our brains react to this pandemic?

Over the course of Carr’s chapters the world instantly became remote workers.

According to Carr’s conclusions, our brains will re-wire again adjusting to our new global working environments. Actually this will occur within a very short period of time.

The source for his book originated from an article Carr actually wrote for The New Yorker called “is google making us stupid” back in 2008. There is a chapter dedicated to Google Search.

Does The Shallows reveal new internet changes to human behavior? No, Carr shows that history’s ‘drastic changes’ regarding access to new technology dates even beyond Nietzsche and Freud. Their technology change? The typewriter was a very dynamic change from Gutenberg’s printing press. Approaches to cognitive thought was drastically changed by the technology available to Freud’s era: powerful microscopes.

Tags brain, change, Google, human behavior, internet, nicholas carr, research