A fascinating view of the future of social networks that offers intriguing possibilities but also the potential of a...
Pentland (Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, 2008, etc.)—the director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory who was named “one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world”—attempts to justify large-scale monitoring of individual behavior.
The author claims that collecting large amounts of personal data reveals how social networks can be engineered to operate most effectively in “our new hyperconnected world.” Hidden patterns of behavior become clear by assembling and analyzing massive amounts of data. He and his associates have pioneered the development of digital monitoring devices that record face-to-face and online social networking. His first venture into what he calls “reality mining” began 15 years ago, with the “world's first cyborg collective in which everyone lived and worked with wirelessly connected computers on their bodies and computer displays in their glasses.” Currently, the author is studying how “the flow of ideas and information, [translates] into changes in behavior” in a corporate setting. “Measurements are made by collecting digital bread crumbs such as the sensors from cell phones, postings on social media, purchases with credit cards, and more.” Volunteers from corporations participating in the program wear “a sociometric [identity] badge” and carry smartphones that closely monitor their behaviors—e.g., the times and locations of their social interactions, phone calls and emails, as well as the number, times and places of job-related interactions. By analyzing this data and observing the social dynamic in small-group meetings, Pentland demonstrates how social networking can be used to boost the collective intelligence of a group open to testing new ideas, if it is not suppressed by a hierarchical corporate structure. Though the author recognizes the threat to privacy implicit in such monitoring when it is not voluntary, “the potential rewards of…a data-driven society,” he writes, “are worth the effort and the risk.”
A fascinating view of the future of social networks that offers intriguing possibilities but also the potential of a dystopia greater than that portrayed by George Orwell in 1984.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-565-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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