A complex subject rendered in accessible terms, with good advice for using models without drowning in data.
Math-based models have become the secret machinery of our society, and this book draws back the curtain for a close look.
Reality has a way of confounding expectations, especially those of mathematicians concerned with models. Thompson is a respected statistician whose research focuses on the use of computational models to inform decision-making. In this deep exploration, she delves into the ways in which they have, in many cases, taken over our lives. They are everywhere, from finance to social media to sociology to pandemics to weather forecasts. “If data is the new oil,” writes the author, “then models are the pipelines—and they are also refineries.” However, as Thompson shows, more raw material has not necessarily created models that are better at predicting outcomes. Though data scientists love to keep adding more and more data, this can make a model less robust and more vulnerable to excluded factors. There is also the issue that models inherently reflect the values of those that build them, even if the modelers fail to recognize it. “Mathematical modelling is a hobby pursued most enthusiastically by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic nations,” Thompson writes. “WEIRD for short.” Often, problems arise not from a model itself but from the communication of its output. With climate change models, for example, there is a tendency of advocates to seize on the worst-case scenarios to garner media attention. The scientific veneer of the process can easily turn models into weapons to attack opposing views. As a response to these problems, Thompson proposes a series of questions to ask of modelers in order to identify biases, assumptions, and structural weaknesses. In the end, policymakers should be willing to include model predictions in their thinking, but they should leaven them with their own experience and judgment. The author, who clearly understands her field well enough to point out its limitations, offers sound guidance.
A complex subject rendered in accessible terms, with good advice for using models without drowning in data.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-54160-098-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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