Archive for book review
mappa grafica [book (re)view(s)]
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags book review, Corsica, data graphics, exploration, Greenland, Gulf of Mexico, maps, myth, quotes, Robert Louis Stevenson, stork on April 15, 2025 by xi'an
the polls weren’t wrong [alt book review]
Posted in Statistics with tags applied mathematics, April fool, book review, CHANCE, Chapman & Hall, conspiracy theories, CRC Press, Donald Trump, FiveThirtyEight, political polls, polls, Significance, statistical literacy, US elections 2016, US elections 2020, US elections 2024 on April 1, 2025 by xi'an
the dark side of Asilomar
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Asilomar conference centre, bioweapon, book review, California, DNA, drug company, family trip, Genetics, Monterey, Nature, patent, recombinant DNA, US politics, USSR on March 28, 2025 by xi'an
Stories of your life and Others [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, University life with tags 1950's, AI, alien intelligence, alternative reality, Amazing Stories, Babel tower, book review, calliagnosia, CHANCE, cover, eugenism, evolutionary biology, Genetics, golem, Kurt Gödel, linguistics, Nature, Pascal's wager, Philosophy of religions, steampunk, Ted Chiang, Victorian society on March 18, 2025 by xi'an
Just finished the book Stories of your life and Others by Ted Chiang, which like the later Exhalation I deeply enjoyed. The book was published in 2001, with some of its stories appearing as early as 1990, hence this book review is of little relevance when many reviews and commentaries have been published, including academic reviews. (No chance for CHANCE, then!)
“Perhaps you have not noticed that the lower classes are reproducing at a rate exceeding that of the nobility and gentry (…) Consequently, our nation would eventually drown in coarse dullards.” (p.186)
While the original cover seems to cater to old-fashion science-fictions books and magazine of the 1950’s, like Amazing Stories, the contents are much more philosophical than science-fiction-al, even when the universe (or the physical laws that) Chiang creates relies on elaborate construction based on science. (Same thing happens with Exhalation.) With a take on religions and their logical loopholes that I particularly enjoy, like Hell is the Absence of God, where the central character is no given the choice of Pascal’s wager. And the nonsense of attributing handicaps and hardships to dog’s testing impacted individuals, as well as the involuntary humour in the innocent casualties resulting from angels visiting Earth. Some stories I liked less, like Understand, about a superhuman emerging from drug tests since the end cannot keep up with the premises. But others I really appreciated, from Babel, set in a naïve (very medieval) version of the World, with a flat Earth and a solid sky. To Division by Zero, where a Gödelian mathematician pushes the impossibility theorem to ruin all of mathematics, and to the superb Seventy Two Letters, that mixes cybernetics, Kabbalists’ golem, genetics and eugenics, in a Victorian setting that could make it pass for a steampunk story, but I disagree with this label since the novella somewhat runs backwards by returning to a freedom of choice that trumps eugenic goals, while aligned with the Victorian perception of science. The same with Story of Your Life, about constructing communication channels with a perplexing if peaceful alien race, whose purpose for this attempt is never clear, which is not an issue with enjoying the built-up of an understanding, as well as the disrupted time-frame of the narration. Or even the short (Nature) story, The Evolution of Human Science, which reflects the very real concern that AI could take over research, into directions that would escape human understanding (not a good signal for i!). Leaving hermeneutics (of AI research) to humans. And the final Liking what you see, a clever variation on the issues of “lookism”, the “burden” of beauty, and an imagined condition called calliagnosia that makes people insensitive to beauty or lack thereof in a person.
handbook of sharing confidential data [book review]
Posted in Statistics with tags Bayesian privacy, book review, Census Bureau, CHANCE, Chapman & Hall, CRC Press, deep learning, differential privacy, EU, GDPR, handbook, LaTeX, machine learning, PRNG on March 12, 2025 by xi'an
A new Chapman & Hall handbook appeared on the most current issue of confidentiality and privacy, which has been edited by Jörg Drechsler, Daniel Kifer, Jerome Reiter, and Aleksandra Slavković. The forty authors of the 18 chapters are mostly from the U.S., with a few outliers from Edinburgh (involved in two chapters on protecting the Scottish Longitudinal Study and the U.S. IRS tax data) and Tallinn (for a chapter on secure multi-party computation applications). This means a more U.S. centric focus for realistic implementations as, e.g., with the Census Bureau (which employs 25% of the authors), than those implied by EU regulations, for instance.
Overall, I enjoyed reading these chapters and would certainly use the book as a first entry to a graduate course on privacy (as opposed to some books I recently reviewed). The first two chapters are 100% formula-free and thus more surveys than informative entries to the field, imho. The following Part II on formal privacy techniques covers the expected standards of differential privacy, local vs. global design, single vs. multiple queries, consequence on learning machines and statistical procedures. Concerning Bayesian aspects, Chapter 7 about private machine learning has two paragraphs on the privacy properties of MCMC algorithms albeit not exposing clearly enough that privacy vanishes as the number of iterations grows to infinity. Chapter 8 concentrates on statistical differential privacy, much along my own perception of the requirements for a genuine statistical approach, with Bayesian aspects not sidelined. If less critical of differential privacy than I. Chapter 9 focusses on system issues, investing a dozen pages into the specifics of pseudo-random generators. Part III is about synthetic data, with some overlap between the first two chapters. (I would deem DP need not be introduced by Chapter 12.) I find the section rather superficial, mostly formula free, and lacking in the statistical impact.
As an aside, I am disappointed at the poor rendering of (mathematical) equations making me wonder which type of LaTeX, if any, was used. There are even genuine typos that seem to result from cut and past encoding errors (see, e.g., the final accentuated c of Sklavković). The reference lists are plentiful, see e.g. the 164 entries for Chapter 7, to the point it would have made more sense to regroup them into a single bibliography. (The predictable reply being that chapters are sold separately and need their respective reference lists.)
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version of it could possibly appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE.]
