Nonfiction grab bag
Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story: Cohen tells the story of three Jewish partisans who went from the Vilna ghetto to the forests, where they killed Nazis and sympathetic peasants, and then to Palestine/Israel. Also they were apparently a threesome, though this is never all that explicit. It’s a story of horrific losses, of persistence and bitter determination, and survival when fighting back was brutally dangerous. Reading about the successive purges of the Vilna ghetto was very hard, especially given the collaboration of some Jews who thought that by showing the Nazis that Jews could be useful some would survive. It’s an amazing story, but not a nice one. (Things ebooks can’t do to you: my reading experience was marred by some helpful person who’d decided to correct the book whenever s/he disagreed with stylistic choices such as comma placement or casual use of “like” for “such as.” Would have been more tolerable if volunteer editor had known that “prised” is just as much a word as “pried” is, and equally appropriate, and that May 15, 1948 is a perfectly correct date to give for the invasion of Israel by the Arab armies. It got so that I was extremely sad when the correction of a German spelling was accurate. Wish I’d had an eraser as I went through.)
Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns: Very detailed history of the modern data-focused campaign, using microtargeting to make sure each potential voter is “touched” in just the right way, and yes it is in some sense that creepy. The detailed portrait of entrenched resistance to better means of finding relevant voters is useful in showing yet again that even a committed partisan can have trouble accepting new facts if those facts will threaten his (essentially always his) income stream, since it’s the consultants here who array themselves against innovation (in the form of other consultants). Issenberg tracks the Republican data/mobilization advantage of 2004 and its dissipation in 2008; much of this story has been told in the popular press, but Issenberg at least contextualizes it. One takeaway is that you can’t work miracles with data alone-though consultants are looking for the best way to phrase appeals for funds, they are also working off a support score (how likely you are to support a particular candidate) that is responsive to changes in the salience of public issues. People will still vote differently in a recession than in good times; targeting is mostly about making the most of your possible universe of voters. Issenberg leaves to others the rest of the story: the way in which issues and rhetoric are shaped by electoral demands.
William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor: Gibson likes Japan and writing fiction, dislikes email and writing nonfiction. There, I saved you some time. His biggest prediction is that people in developed countries will confront objects that are all general-purpose computers-your toothbrush, your refrigerator, your car. For some much more interesting and scary thoughts about that, see this article about remotely hacking insulin pumps, tires, etc. Excerpt from the article:
[R]esearchers from the University of Washington and the University of California-San Diego were able to “spoof” (fake) the signals from a tire-pressure E.C.U. by hacking an adjacent but entirely different system-the OnStar-type network that monitors the T.P.M.S. for roadside assistance. In a scenario from a techno-thriller, the researchers called the cell phone built into the car network with a message supposedly sent from the tires. “It told the car that the tires had 10 p.s.i. when they in fact had 30 p.s.i.,” team co-leader Tadayoshi Kohno told me-a message equivalent to “Stop the car immediately.” He added, “In theory, you could reprogram the car while it is parked, then initiate the program with a transmitter by the freeway. The car drives by, you call the transmitter with your smartphone, it sends the initiation code-bang! The car locks up at 70 miles per hour. You’ve crashed their car without touching it.”
Systematically probing a “moderately priced late-model sedan with the standard options,” the Washington-San Diego researchers decided to see what else they could do. ... They compromised the hands-free microphone and recorded conversations in the car as it moved. ... They used Bluetooth signals to start cars that were parked, locked, and alarmed. They did all this with instructions sent from a smartphone.
There was nothing to stop them. “Except for medical devices,” Stuart McClure, chief technical officer of the anti-virus company McAfee, told me, “nobody regulates any of this stuff.” And medical devices are regulated for safety, not security.
Further from the article: Erector Sets with Web cams can be taken over remotely! The possibilities are endless, which is great for thriller writers but not necessarily for the rest of us.
David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞: This is Wallace at his most far-out, which is far indeed. What you need to know is that Wallace repeatedly refers to this 305-page (not counting endnotes) text as a “booklet,” and that the only chapter heading in the book is labeled “Small But Necessary Forward.” While my ancient math background wasn’t enough for me to follow very far, I am going to give a copy to my math-geek dad.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns: Very detailed history of the modern data-focused campaign, using microtargeting to make sure each potential voter is “touched” in just the right way, and yes it is in some sense that creepy. The detailed portrait of entrenched resistance to better means of finding relevant voters is useful in showing yet again that even a committed partisan can have trouble accepting new facts if those facts will threaten his (essentially always his) income stream, since it’s the consultants here who array themselves against innovation (in the form of other consultants). Issenberg tracks the Republican data/mobilization advantage of 2004 and its dissipation in 2008; much of this story has been told in the popular press, but Issenberg at least contextualizes it. One takeaway is that you can’t work miracles with data alone-though consultants are looking for the best way to phrase appeals for funds, they are also working off a support score (how likely you are to support a particular candidate) that is responsive to changes in the salience of public issues. People will still vote differently in a recession than in good times; targeting is mostly about making the most of your possible universe of voters. Issenberg leaves to others the rest of the story: the way in which issues and rhetoric are shaped by electoral demands.
William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor: Gibson likes Japan and writing fiction, dislikes email and writing nonfiction. There, I saved you some time. His biggest prediction is that people in developed countries will confront objects that are all general-purpose computers-your toothbrush, your refrigerator, your car. For some much more interesting and scary thoughts about that, see this article about remotely hacking insulin pumps, tires, etc. Excerpt from the article:
[R]esearchers from the University of Washington and the University of California-San Diego were able to “spoof” (fake) the signals from a tire-pressure E.C.U. by hacking an adjacent but entirely different system-the OnStar-type network that monitors the T.P.M.S. for roadside assistance. In a scenario from a techno-thriller, the researchers called the cell phone built into the car network with a message supposedly sent from the tires. “It told the car that the tires had 10 p.s.i. when they in fact had 30 p.s.i.,” team co-leader Tadayoshi Kohno told me-a message equivalent to “Stop the car immediately.” He added, “In theory, you could reprogram the car while it is parked, then initiate the program with a transmitter by the freeway. The car drives by, you call the transmitter with your smartphone, it sends the initiation code-bang! The car locks up at 70 miles per hour. You’ve crashed their car without touching it.”
Systematically probing a “moderately priced late-model sedan with the standard options,” the Washington-San Diego researchers decided to see what else they could do. ... They compromised the hands-free microphone and recorded conversations in the car as it moved. ... They used Bluetooth signals to start cars that were parked, locked, and alarmed. They did all this with instructions sent from a smartphone.
There was nothing to stop them. “Except for medical devices,” Stuart McClure, chief technical officer of the anti-virus company McAfee, told me, “nobody regulates any of this stuff.” And medical devices are regulated for safety, not security.
Further from the article: Erector Sets with Web cams can be taken over remotely! The possibilities are endless, which is great for thriller writers but not necessarily for the rest of us.
David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞: This is Wallace at his most far-out, which is far indeed. What you need to know is that Wallace repeatedly refers to this 305-page (not counting endnotes) text as a “booklet,” and that the only chapter heading in the book is labeled “Small But Necessary Forward.” While my ancient math background wasn’t enough for me to follow very far, I am going to give a copy to my math-geek dad.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.