An informative dive into the history of statistics and data, providing context for the debate over information and who...
A wide-ranging examination of the evolution of statistics, mathematics, and data.
When did our personal information become a commodity manipulated by algorithms? How did marketing become so intrusive? Why does every transaction add another piece to our digital trail? Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia and chief data scientist at the New York Times, and Jones, a Guggenheim fellow and history professor at Columbia, track the process over several centuries, reiterating and expanding a course they teach. Governments have always wanted to know how many people they ruled, but near the end of the 18th century, the idea took hold that statistics could reveal rich detail about a society, including averages and deviations from norms. Military and industrial applications evolved, and the first computers were designed to turn raw figures into useful outcomes. When the internet and e-commerce arrived, there was a quantum leap in data collection, with new math techniques to underpin the concept of “data science.” Government-run surveillance systems collected vast amounts of personal material, manifested in customized, targeted advertising. Wiggins and Jones point out that all this happened without much public discussion, and they worry about the impact on privacy and democracy. “We don’t have to use algorithmic decision systems, even in contexts where their use may be technically feasible,” they write. “Ads based on mass surveillance are not necessary elements of our society. We don’t need to build systems that learn the stratifications of the past and present and reinforce them in the future.” The authors propose remedies, including the revision of the legal provisions that give platforms immunity from the effect of user-generated content, but they admit that reining in the tech giants will be difficult. The real value of the book, however, is that it provides important background for understanding the road behind and the path ahead.
An informative dive into the history of statistics and data, providing context for the debate over information and who controls it.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781324006732
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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