Category: Flat World

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Latest Read: Countdown to Zero Day

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter is an amazing story. The NSA and Mossad worked to derail the nuclear weapons program of Iran. This begins an amazing story regarding stuxnet. In the end this is a wonderful story about imagination.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

The history Kim traces is deeper than anyone could first imagine. Think about your favorite spy movie and technology. Countdown to Zero Day is going to shake you up as I found this book difficult to put down.

The International Atomic Energy Agency learned that centrifuges at an enrichment plant in Natanz were failing at an unprecedented rate. The US and Israel were able to deploy Stuxnet to Siemens industrial control systems in Iran.

Zetter opens this story in Belarus. A computer security firm with customers in Iran found what they initially thought was a rootkit. The virus was causing systems to repeatedly crash and reboot. When they could not resolve the issue they called Sergey Ulasen.

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Latest Read: Everybody Lies

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote Everybody Lies Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Seth holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He is a former quantitative analyst at Google. Seth also writes for the NYTimes. The stories are similar to Freakonomics but are based upon much larger datasets.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Everybody Lies is able to utilize Google search data that reveals in the opening chapter that we live in a very racist society.

Seth reviews search results from the 2016 Presidential election. Data mining via Google Search revealed hard truths that most would not say in mixed company.

Search at at work or home, Google data clearly indicated racists supported Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.

The outcomes of data mining Google search, Wikipedia, Facebook, Pornhub and Stormfront. The results are somewhat surprising if you simply follow analog driven surveys popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Clearly the mobile revolution and search provides real insights to the sway of the country or just specific sets of groups.

Everybody Lies tackles some interesting topics with vast amounts of data sets:

  • How much sex do people really have?
  • How many Americans are actually racist?
  • What should you say on a first date if you want a second?
  • Is America experiencing a hidden back-alley abortion crisis?
  • Where is the best place to raise kids?
  • Can you game the stock market?
  • Do parents treat sons differently from daughters?
  • How many men are gay?
  • Do violent movies increase violent crime?
  • How many people actually read the books they buy?

Like Freakonomics, the results will surprise you.

One of the more interesting data sets is within chapter three: Bodies as Data and involved a great story of American Pharoah. What makes a great racehorse? Actually the percentile of the left ventricle. Jeff Seder found the way to measure success of a racehorse. A great story is here. Seder, a Harvard trained lawyer took his hedge fund experience and applied it to his love of champion racehorses.

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Latest Read: The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis wrote The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Change Our Minds. This story is about the lives of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Honestly I am not sure why it took me so long to read this book. Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow was very enjoyable (my review here) and one that I think about often.

Lewis acknowledged this story was a result of his bestseller Moneyball.

He learned the insights to data he was seeking about baseball was already available from Kahneman and Tversky.

Daniel accepted the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work. He acknowledged it should have been a joint award with Amos, who died from cancer eight years earlier.

Kahneman and Tversky focused on behavioral economics known as heuristics in judgment and decision-making. Their unique collaboration proved how unreliable human intuition can be. The results of their research can be staggering. For over twenty years they worked to prove our minds play tricks on us. This is simply based upon inaccurate memories and false stereotypes.

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FarmBot: Open­source precision farming

FarmBot is an open­source and scalable automated precision farming machine and software package designed from the ground up with today’s technologies. The world’s population is growing and is projected to surpass 9 billion inhabitants by 2050. As a result farms must increase production by about 60 percent to meet demand which is stunning since many believe we have reached the limits of traditional farming.
FarmBot

In comparison to desktop digital 3D printers and CNC machines FarmBot extends the idea of X, Y, and Z directions and applies it to plows, seed injectors, water and sensors in order to accurately and efficiently grow plants and soil. I think that I would like to try this out in my own backyard.

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Latest read: Corporate Agility

How do organizations compete today?  Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World provides a good reference on how major US companies have adopted a new business model for competing in a flat world.

corporate agilityAfter reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century book series on globalization and the breakthrough work by Jerry Wind and Victor & William Fung in Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.

I found chapters in Corporate Agility a fit perfectly to the above works.  Corporate Agility supports business case studies throughout the book that span a wide range of industries with lessons for all who are seeking new models for business in the 21st globalized century.

The strongest chapter is early in the book surrounding the shift in company buildings and the move to a mobile workforce that permits companies to break expensive building leases and create smaller ‘offices’ with limited administrative staff and resources.

I have experienced these efforts directly in working with clients who have been forced to trim staff and yet end up in an dry office complex with over 50% of their office cubes empty.

Actually I’m reminded of a PR company who hired temporary workers to “work” in all their empty cubes while a potential client made an office visit.  Needless to say they did not understand the basics of a company’s need for agility as described in the book.

I feel the early chapters of Corporate Agility is an expansion of The World Is Flat while the book’s case studies just touch the surface that is presented in detail by Competing in a Flat World.

Corporate Agility’s book website