An accessible account of how Wi-Fi tech became a crucial part of our work, society, and lives.
The story of the creation of Wi-Fi, an epic journey of turning complexity into simplicity.
Younger readers may not even remember when the internet was a technology of wires, cables, and plugs. Wi-Fi connectivity has become so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it, but as this book shows, it was a long haul to get there. Ennis was at the center of it, first as one of the authors of the technical proposal that became the foundation for Wi-Fi systems and later as the vice president of technology for the Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry association that handles certification and compliance issues. The seed for it was a project to create a system for the Chicago Board of Trade, known for its chaos and corruption. Ennis and his associates were faced with a range of technical and regulatory restrictions. However, once the local area network was built, they could see the potential for expansion and began working on rules to allow for compatibility of hardware and software. The outcome, after much pushing and shoving within the emerging field, was a set of standards known as IEEE 802.11. Going global presented new challenges, but the standards eventually caught on, and the introduction of mobile phone connectivity and video streaming cemented the place of Wi-Fi. Ennis explains all this with the authority of an insider and largely avoids the trap of jargon. He estimates that there are currently 18 billion devices using Wi-Fi, but with a solid set of protocols in place, he sees no limits to growth. “The economic value of Wi-Fi to the world…is expected to be nearly $5 trillion by 2025,” he writes. “More than four billion new Wi-Fi devices are sold every year. The likelihood that Wi-Fi will be replaced anytime soon is very small indeed.”
An accessible account of how Wi-Fi tech became a crucial part of our work, society, and lives.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781637587485
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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