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Latest Read: How Innovation Works

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley. Matt is a British journalist best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics in The Times. He holds a seat in the British House of Lords.

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

Matt is certainly writing against government regulation and big business across many established and emerging fields: energy, transportation, food, and computing. Regulation and big businesses are hampering innovation due to oversight. He also addresses early innovations including farming and taming animals including dogs.

Every chapter is certainly intriguing. Vast amounts of stories and historical facts drove each innovation. Matt obviously makes it certainly clear that innovation is within democratic countries where freedom allows for ideas to flourish, leading to inventions.

Chapter 2, focusing upon Public Health innovation certainly reminds the reader how vaccines developed to curb the loss of lives across many continents in our global history. A very refreshing chapter for our COVID era. On the other hand, this would be publishing in May 2020, at the beginning of our pandemic.

The first airplane

Chapter 3, Transport has a particularly great recollection of The Wright Brothers innovation. Unquestionably, this storyline is parallel to Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and reveals more details to the road both brothers took in finding success at Kitty Hawk.

Many readers will be captivated by the research Matt delivers in round after round of amazing stories of innovation not by the inventor, but rather by those who saw a vision of how inventions lay the foundation of innovations.

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Latest Read: Algorithms of Oppression

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble. Safiya is an associate professor at UCLA and is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. Safiya’s research as a result, considers how bias has been embedded into search engines.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

Clearly, search engine algorithms are not neutral by any means. This was indeed proving to be a very disturbing issue at the time of publication in 2018.

So, how did this happen in the first place? It is rather shocking to understand that a seemingly simple search term “black girls” results in such disgusting results.

Safiya certainly reveals this unforgiving gap and Google has made efforts to fix their errors. The result of her work has brought about the term algorithmic oppression.

Safiya explores how racism, especially anti-blackness, is generated and maintained across the internet, yet is focused squarely on Google.

In addition, Safiya reveals the impact of AdWords, Google’s advertising tool. I found it interesting that since search results are altered by paid advertising, Google is more of an advertising company than a search engine company.

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Education Globalization Google Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest Read: Algorithms To Live By

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Brian is the author of The Most Human Human, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, New York Times editors’ choice, and New Yorker favorite book of the year. Tom is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Princeton University. In addition, he directs the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

At first glance the idea of brining algorithms into our daily lives seems a bit too much, even for a budding computer nerd. At the same time, Brian and Tom prove that most of us are already doing this daily.

I recall spending many hours programming SQL while living in Chicago and realizing how much more efficient my grocery shopping would be if I actually transformed my shopping list into a SQL table:

SELECT * FROM FoodGroup
ORDER BY GroceryStoreIsle;

So I can certainly agree. Yet this idea still may seem daunting. If you begin thinking about repeating tasks you perform, even laundry should certainly make you believe there is a better way.

Algorithms will certainly make this possible. Therefore, you may be spending too much time repeating tasks. This is where the book reveals how you can become efficient, by sharing the history and development of many common algorithms. You will certainly discover a few frameworks.

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Latest Read: What Algorithms Want

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn. Ed is an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. He also serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU, New America, and Slate Magazine.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

I really appreciate reading this book as a follow up to The AI Delusion. What Algorithms Want takes a liberal arts approach. This is very appealing and brings a valued perspective.

Ed is communicating that society innocently believes magical algorithms as a tool to a better life. For this purpose, Ed shares that Eric Schmidt indicated that people do not want Google to just provide search results. Rather, they “want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” I find this difficult to believe.

However, Ed also is viewing this from a practical perspective. His view is that algorithms are not only for mathematical logic, but rather for philosophy, cybernetics, and creative thinking.

Accordingly, there is a gap that Ed identifies between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. This is a view outside of traditional computer science books.

Clearly, most users are not aware of how Facebook’s timeline and Google search queries are executions that benefit their data collection and profits. Many would not even consider the impact of Facebook’s timeline as nothing more than the latest news from friends, when in reality it is far from that idea.

Machine Learning

What Algorithms Want takes a deeper dive on Google’s efforts to drive profits from the data mining services across every service they deploy. What is also emphasized is the automatic assumptions by society that Google has their own interests protected because of a flimsy “do no evil” pledge.

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Latest Read: The Premonition

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. A tough, certainly insightful look at men and women who understood and directly confronted the pandemic at the beginning. At the same time, they ran into bureaucratic roadblocks. Their efforts to save the country is the story of this book.

the premonition a pandemic story

For instance, as early as January 2020, Dr. Charity Dean, the assistant director of the California Department of Public Health in 2020. She certainly understood the coming pandemic and began warning California State officials. Surprisingly, Charity Dean was even prohibited from publishing the word “pandemic” in her research reports. Furthermore, as stunning as it may seem, her boss and the state locker her out of planning meetings.

Dr. Carter Mecher, senior medical advisor to the Veterans Administration initially helped craft the Bush Administration’s pandemic response plan. As a result, at the very beginning stages in January 2020, he observed similarities to the 1918 Influenza flu. Indeed, Carter was the early advocate to shut down schools to reduce spread. Tragically, he lost his own mother to COVID.

At the same time, Joe DeRisi PhD, a biochemist at UC San Francisco was involved in the development of the ViroChip. This is used to rapidly identify viruses in bodily fluids. He led a team to develop a very early COVID-19 testing facility at the outbreak of pandemic.

Dr. Richard Hatchett an epidemiologist was another who warned early on about the coming pandemic. He also contributed to the Bush era pandemic response plan. This book is a sobering reality of what could have been. These medical professionals were stopped by the same system they were trying to save. Michael certainly makes it very clear the US does not have a healthcare system.

Tipping point ignored

Surprisingly, President George W. Bush read The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. As a result, he triggered a plan to confront the next pandemic with Rajeev Venkayya, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher. This plan continued through the Obama Administration, but stopped under Trump.

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