Book Review — The Traps of Big Data Revealed in “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil: The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit un…
Source: sspnet.org
Good read - The Path. A quick overview of 5 Chinese philosophies making them relevant to how we should think about how we live today. I've not read much about them and assumed they were pretty much ancient and irrelevant, reduced to one-liner aphorisms, but Michael Puett has been teaching a popular...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Book review from Sciencebasedmedicine - Statistics Done Wrong, And How To Do Better.
Source: sciencebasedmedicine.org
Good read. The most good you can do by Peter Singer. This is about effective altruism. If you are going to give away your money how can ensure you give it to the most effective resources? More than that if you've decided to give away money what is the best job that you can do? There are some extreme...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Word of the day: Pokèmonomics - retail outlets paying to attract customers with virtual creatures. Wonder when we'll start seeing delegates use them to attract visitors to their booths at conferences? "Come and see our Pokémon on #A26 and try out new drug / machine / website."
Source: next.ft.com
Good read. "Humanising healthcare" by Dr Margaret Hannah. Great ideas briefly and clearly explained. The book outlines an approach in Fife to reduce winter pressures on beds by encouraging patients, staff, and community to seek better health care. The ideas are based on Alaska's Southcentral Foundations's...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Nearly half of U.S. adults get news on Facebook, Pew says: More than 40 percent of American adults get news on Facebook, according to a report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation. (Disclosure: Knight is a supporter of the Lab.)
Two-thirds of Facebook users access...
Source: niemanlab.org
Just finished reading 'not exactly: in praise of vagueness' by Kees Van Deemter. Fantastic concepts and well explained but I found it really hard going. He seemed to want to dive in to all the logic, theoretical background, and notation of the topic but then it would have felt more like a textbook. ...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Incredibly focused Japanese author describing her tidying technique. Basically get rid of everything that you don't really, really like and then store things where you can see them all. The KonMari technique. I enjoyed the argument she gave about sorting out your stuff. You can do it now, do it at some...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Just read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. Sparkling account and interesting perspective of the history of humankind. Full of stories. Learnt about Montezuma, learnt a lot about the agricultural revolution, the affluence of hunter-gatherers, and a lot about our disregard for other animals. Basically we haven't...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Climate change is corroding our values, says Naomi Klein: The need for fossil fuels is destroying regions and communities, causing war and famine in the process, argues the activist and author
Source: theguardian.com
Jeremy Hunt doesn’t understand junior doctors. He co-wrote a book on how to dismantle the NHS | Frankie Boyle: Frankie Boyle: The health secretary’s name is so redolent of upper-class brutality he belongs in a Martin Amis book where working-class people are called Dave Rubbish
Source: theguardian.com
Read this lovely short book "On Bullshit". It succinctly and elegantly describes what it is. Very useful if you want to better understand whether you (or someone else) is lying or crafting some finely wrought bullshit.
Source: princeton.edu
Inspiring read. Naomi Klein. This changes everything. A tirade against the very inconvenient truth that climate change is ultimately due to capitalism. A destructive capitalism that extracts from nature recklessly thinking growth can be without limit on a finite planet. However, the book ends with...
Source: amazon.co.uk
AI helps answer thousands of health queries in Zambia via SMS: UNICEF is testing a machine learning system to boost the quantity and quality of health advice provided via a popular text-based service in Zambia and Uganda
Source: newscientist.com
Just read the "Happy Life" story - saving abandoned children on the streets of Nairobi. This is about a children rescue centre in Nairobi started 14 years ago and has now expanded to caring directly for around 100 children across two sites. They have offered for adoption over 170 children. The city...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Good read. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. A powerful book on animal rights written 40 years ago (updated 20 years ago and re-issued recently with an introduction by Yuval Hariri) and having stood the test of time and debate. It is called 'the bible' of the animal rights movement and rightly so ......
Source: amazon.co.uk
Great read! We can eat almost anything, but we are uncertain what we should eat. This omnivore's dilemma has not only vexed our ancestors trying to avoid poisonous foods it continues to occupy much of our time. We seem incapable of deciding what to have for lunch without consulting to dietary guidelines,...
Source: amazon.co.uk
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is an amazing insight into strategy and human nature - even more so given that it was written 2500 years ago. Cast aside all those management books and just reflect on the sayings of Master Sun.
Source: amazon.co.uk
Junk DNA - a thorough but accessible account of modern genetics covering discoveries since mapping the human genome and epigenetics. Genomic imprinting, non-coding RNA, telomeres and ageing, etc. Everything discovered (or I forgot about) since I left medical school basically. Everything was explained...
Source: amazon.co.uk