update and giveaway
I just graded 99 papers about a baseball! Now on to mortgages.
Free to good home if you take ‘em all: Jack of Fables 1-16, Anita Blake 1, The Stand: The Night Has Come/Hardcases/No Man’s Land.
Distressing analysis of the US's military situation in Afghanistan.
Jay Smooth: “You've never paid dues, you barely pay taxes.”
John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy: Bowe writes about non-sex slavery in America (though sexual abuse makes appearances, as you’d expect), from Florida to Kansas to Saipan. He argues that slavery is in its essence about power rather than just about saving money; power unsupervised invites abuse and is abused. Repeatedly the perpetrators justify themselves by saying that the victims are poor and couldn’t do better anyway, even when-as with the Kansas case-they’re well-trained and jobs with better pay and conditions are also available to them. Bowe argues that mainstream Americans have made a choice not to know how our oranges, clothes, and devices are made-something the recent reporting on Foxconn has also made clear. It’s an engaging and enraging read, and Bowe does one very powerful thing that makes me wonder why everyone else doesn’t: he tells you the race/nationality of every person in the book, not just the nonwhites/non-Americans. By disrupting the default, he makes clear how much privilege matters to people’s perspectives on labor issues without even needing to say so explicitly.
Eamon Javers, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage: Not so many secrets. It turns out that lots of former CIA etc. employees (and even current CIA employees, due to a cozy little rule that lets them work on the side) are in the private investigation business and will trail people and go through their trash for the benefit of business competitors. For all the personal detail, there was very little insightful about what this access means, nor was there much in the way of tradecraft or revelations about specific secrets that had been discovered.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: I love Bayesian probability, and here's a book about it! Actually it's mostly about the people and the politics surrounding the Bayesians' fight against frequentists (who didn't believe in using the subjective probabilities that full-on Bayes/Laplace analysis requires). McGrayne tracks the various uses of Bayes to solve problems across multiple fields, from cryptography to finding lost submarines, but I really wished it had been mathier: I felt like a lot of times I was taking her word that Bayes made the problem at issue easier to solve than frequentism. Concededly, it can be super hard to explain this--I have had hour-long discussions with very smart people over the Monty Hall problem. But I wished she'd tried more; her explanation of Monte Carlo modeling was clear and easy to follow.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Free to good home if you take ‘em all: Jack of Fables 1-16, Anita Blake 1, The Stand: The Night Has Come/Hardcases/No Man’s Land.
Distressing analysis of the US's military situation in Afghanistan.
Jay Smooth: “You've never paid dues, you barely pay taxes.”
John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy: Bowe writes about non-sex slavery in America (though sexual abuse makes appearances, as you’d expect), from Florida to Kansas to Saipan. He argues that slavery is in its essence about power rather than just about saving money; power unsupervised invites abuse and is abused. Repeatedly the perpetrators justify themselves by saying that the victims are poor and couldn’t do better anyway, even when-as with the Kansas case-they’re well-trained and jobs with better pay and conditions are also available to them. Bowe argues that mainstream Americans have made a choice not to know how our oranges, clothes, and devices are made-something the recent reporting on Foxconn has also made clear. It’s an engaging and enraging read, and Bowe does one very powerful thing that makes me wonder why everyone else doesn’t: he tells you the race/nationality of every person in the book, not just the nonwhites/non-Americans. By disrupting the default, he makes clear how much privilege matters to people’s perspectives on labor issues without even needing to say so explicitly.
Eamon Javers, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage: Not so many secrets. It turns out that lots of former CIA etc. employees (and even current CIA employees, due to a cozy little rule that lets them work on the side) are in the private investigation business and will trail people and go through their trash for the benefit of business competitors. For all the personal detail, there was very little insightful about what this access means, nor was there much in the way of tradecraft or revelations about specific secrets that had been discovered.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: I love Bayesian probability, and here's a book about it! Actually it's mostly about the people and the politics surrounding the Bayesians' fight against frequentists (who didn't believe in using the subjective probabilities that full-on Bayes/Laplace analysis requires). McGrayne tracks the various uses of Bayes to solve problems across multiple fields, from cryptography to finding lost submarines, but I really wished it had been mathier: I felt like a lot of times I was taking her word that Bayes made the problem at issue easier to solve than frequentism. Concededly, it can be super hard to explain this--I have had hour-long discussions with very smart people over the Monty Hall problem. But I wished she'd tried more; her explanation of Monte Carlo modeling was clear and easy to follow.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.