Shocked by the NSA revelations? You don’t know the whole story

A review of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schoeneberger and Kenneth Cukier

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

While Edward Snowden bounces from one temporary refuge to another in search of safe harbor from the long arms of the U.S. government, the American public is starting to wake up to the reality of Big Data. The National Security Agency, long one of the pioneers in this burgeoning but little-appreciated field, has been teaching us — or, rather, Snowden, The Guardian, and the Washington Post have been teaching us — about the power that resides in gargantuan masses of data. Now here come Viktor Mayer-Schoeneberger and Kenneth Cukier with a new book that goes far beyond the headlines about espionage and invasion of privacy to give us an eminently readable, well-organized overview of Big Data’s origins, its characteristics, and its potential for both good and evil.

When we think of Big Data, we, or at least most of us, think of computers. However, the authors persuade us that the fundamentals of Big Data were laid down more than a century before the invention of the microprocessor. They point to a legendary American seaman named Matthew Maury. In the middle of the 19th Century, after 16 years of effort, Maury published a book based on 1.2 billion data points gleaned from old ships’ logs stored by the Navy that dramatically reduced the distances (and, hence, the time elapsed) in ocean voyages by both military and commercial ships. Maury used facts derived from decades of mariners’ observations to dispel the myths, legends, superstitions, and rumors that had long caused ocean-voyaging ships to pursue roundabout courses. Not so incidentally, Maury’s work also facilitated the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

If not the first, this was certainly an early application of Big Data, which the authors describe as follows: “big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationship between citizens and governments, and more.” For example, if Maury had had available only a fraction of the old ships’ logs he found in the naval archives, his task would have been impractical, since each individual log doubtless included small errors (and an occasional big one). Only by amassing a huge store of data did those errors cancel out one another.

Now, in the Digital Age, the volumes of data that can be harnessed are, at times, literally astronomical. “Google processes more than 24 petabytes of data per day, a volume that is thousands of times the quantity of all printed material in the U.S. Library of Congress.” AT&T transfers about 30 petabytes of data through its networks each day. Twenty-four or 30 of something doesn’t sound like much, unless you understand that a megabyte is a million bytes, a gigabyte is a billion bytes, a terabyte is 1,000 times the size of a gigabyte, and a petabyte is 1,000 times the size of a terabyte. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. That’s a lot of data! But even that’s only a tiny slice of all the data now stored in the world, “estimated to be around 1,200 exabytes.” And an exabyte (I’m sure you’re dying to know) is the equivalent of 1,000 petabytes. So, 1,200 petabytes could also be stated as 1.2 zettabytes, with a zettabyte equal to 1,000 petabytes, and I’ll bet that not one person in a million has ever heard of a zettabyte before. Had you?

All of which should make clear that when we talk about Big Data today, we’re talking about really, really big numbers — so big, in fact, that almost no matter how messy or inaccurate the data might be, it’s usually possible to draw useful, on-target insights from analyzing it. That’s what’s different about Big Data — and that’s why the phenomenon is bound to change the way we think about the world.

We live in a society obsessed with causality. We often care more about why something happened than about what it was that happened. And in a world where Big Data looms larger and larger all the time, we’ll have to get used to not knowing — or even caring much — why things happen.

“At its core,” write Mayer-Schoeneberger and Cukier, “big data is about predictions. Though it is described as part of the branch of computer science called artificial intelligence, and more specifically, an area called machine learning, this characterization is misleading. Big data is not about trying to ‘teach’ a computer to ‘think’ like humans. Instead, it’s about applying math to huge quantities of data in order to infer probabilities: the likelihood that an email message is spam; that the typed letters ‘teh’ are supposed to be ‘the’; that the trajectory and velocity of a person jaywalking mean he’ll make it across the street in time [so that] the self-driving car need only slow slightly.”

The authors refer to data as “the oil of the information economy,” predicting that, as it flows into all the nooks and crannies of our society, it will bring about “three major shifts of mindset that are interlinked and hence reinforce one another.” First among these is our ever-growing ability to analyze inconceivably large amounts of data and not have to settle for sampling. Second, we’ll come to accept the inevitable messiness in huge stores of data and learn not to insist on precision in reporting. Third, and last, we’ll get used to accepting correlations rather than causality. “The ideal of identifying causal mechanisms is a self-congratulatory illusion; big data overturns this,” the authors assert.

If you want to understand this increasingly important aspect of contemporary life, I suggest you read Big Data.

Viktor Mayer-Schoeneberger and Kenneth Cukier come to the task of writing this book with unbeatable credentials. Mayer-Schoeneberger is Professor of Internet Governance at Oxford University, and Kenneth Cukier is Data Editor at The Economist.

Will the human race survive climate change?

A review of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Come what may, the human race is heading toward a fall.

As Berkeley Ph.D. Annalee Newitz writes, “the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history . . . Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions, during which more than 75 percent of the species on Earth died out. And yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive under the harshest conditions.”

In Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Newitz explores what humankind must do to be among the survivors of the next mass extinction. Because, as she emphasizes, there will inevitably be a next time. If the current acceleration in species death — think honeybees and frogs — isn’t an early stage of a full-blown mass extinction, something else really, really bad will surely happen sooner or later. Thus it is, Newitz insists, “we need a long-term plan to get humanity off Earth. We need cities beyond the Blue Marble, oases on other worlds where we can scatter to survive even cosmic disasters.”

For me, as a long-time science fiction reader (and once-upon-a-time sf writer), this assertion is not news. Nor are the apocalyptic scenarios she paints, with massive asteroids or comets crashing into the Earth, megavolcanos blanketing the Earth with soot and ash that trigger an Ice Age, bursts of cosmic radiation frying all life on the planet, an incurable contagious disease gone pandemic, or, worst of all — here’s the surprise — climate change.

Yes, it turns out that the worst of the half-dozen mass extinctions science has brought to light “involved climate change similar to the one our planet is undergoing right now.” During that distant period, around 250 million years ago, “95 percent of all species on the planet were wiped out over a span of roughly 100,000 years . . .” And lest you take comfort in the hope that our brush with such a catastrophe lies in the distant future, please note that some in the scientific community date the beginning of the current mass extinction to a time about 15,000 years ago when human invaders from Asia began to exterminate the giant fauna of the Americas (mammoths, giant elk, sloths, and other species).

Newitz, a science journalist and award-winning blogger, divides Scatter, Adapt, and Remember into four sections. In Part I, she surveys the history of mass extinctions. Part II focuses on homo sapiens‘ close calls — from the population bottlenecks in the earliest days of our species in Africa a million years ago, to our recent competition with Neanderthals and homo erectus, to the horrific pandemics that have lowered our numbers, to the widespread incidence of famine throughout our history. In Part III, Newitz examines the successful strategies employed by homo sapiens and other species (including microbes and gray whales) to survive in the face of existential threats. These strategies give the book its title: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. Part IV makes the case that humanity will only survive in cities and explains “How to Build a Death-Proof City” in which every surface is used to grow food. Part V looks to the far future — a million years or more — with humanity spreading out to the stars.

 

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember features excerpts from the author’s face-to-face interviews with scientists working on the frontiers of exploration in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, materials science, and many other contemporary fields. There’s scarcely a chapter without a smattering of references to working scientists. Newitz’s views emerge from a solid base of understanding of the latest findings in a wide range of scientific inqiury.

 

However, Newitz also reveals her love for science fiction by drawing ideas and examples from the work of some of the craft’s most celebrated writers (as do many practicing scientists and engineers, not so incidentally). In particular, she calls out the work of the late Octavia Butler to illustrate the ethical quandaries posed by the threat of extinction in one possible far future for humanity.

 

Alternately troubling and inspiring, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is ultimately an intrinsically hopeful proposition from a brilliant young visionary. Annalee Newitz is a name to watch. 

 

 

Berkeley scientist questions safety of bottled water

A review of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, by Peter H. Gleick

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Put down that bottle of water, please, take a deep breath, and listen up. It’ll only take a few minutes, and when I’m done, you may never pick up a bottle of water again.

“Bottled water? This is a problem?” Yes, to Berkeley scientist Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the world-renowned Pacific Institute, “bottled water is a symptom of a larger set of issues: the long-term decay of our public water systems, inequitable access to safe water around the world, our susceptibility to advertising and marketing, and a society trained from birth to buy, consume, and throw away. . . Suburban shoppers in America lug cases of plastic water bottle from the grocery store back to homes supplied with unlimited piped potable water in a sad and unintentional parody of the labor of girls and women in Africa, who spend countless backbreaking hours carrying containers of filthy water from distant contaminated sources to homes with no water at all.”

Bottling water on a large scale is a relatively new phenomenon. “In the late 1970s,” Gleick writes, “around 350 million gallons of bottled water were sold in the United States — almost entirely sparkling mineral water and large bottles to supply office water coolers. . . In 2008, nearly 9 billion [author’s emphasis] gallons of bottled water were packaged and sold in the United States and five times this amount was sold around the world.” That’s a 25-fold increase in three decades, and “Americans now drink more bottled water than milk or beer.” (Betcha didn’t know that, did you? I sure didn’t!) Now, “data on beverage consumption reveals that on average, each of us is actually drinking around 36 gallons per year less tap water.”

Gleick notes that “when we do actually look, we find evidence that there are potentially serious quality problems with bottled water. . . [However], [t]he system for testing and monitoring the quality of bottled water is so flawed that we simply have no comprehensive assessment of actual bottled water quality.”

So, why hasn’t somebody done something about this? It turns out that the FDA is the culprit. Bottled water falls within the FDA’s purview. Gleick cites a study by the Government Accountability Office to the effect that “while the FDA does very few actual inspections of water bottlers, the few they conducted between 2000 and 2008 found problems a remarkable 35 percent of the time. Even this warning sign led to ‘little enforcement action.'”

OK, maybe you feel bottled water tastes better than water from the tap. But you’re probably fooling yourself. As Gleick reports, “test after test shows the same things: people think they don’t like tap water, but they do. Or they think they can distinguish the taste of their favorite bottled water, but they can’t.” Just check out “bottled water taste test” on YouTube, if you don’t believe this.

Here, then, are the Top Ten Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water:

10. Tap water is free, and bottled water isn’t.

9. The quality of tap water is rigorously regulated, and bottled water’s isn’t.

8. Discarded plastic water bottles end up in landfills or on roadsides by the billions. For example, “Berkeley (population 114,000) sends around six tons of PET [the plastic used in water bottles] a week to plastics recyclers — much of it used water bottles.”

7. Large scale water-bottlers sometimes drain aquifers and cause wells to run dry in communities where their plants are located.

6. Large corporations such as Nestle (Pure Life), Coca-Cola (Dasani), and PepsiCo (Aquafina) own the major bottled water brands and suck in massive profits, making them even larger.

5. Most bottled waters are marketed in a misleading way. For examples, “Yosemite” brand water is actually municipal tap water from Los Angeles.

4. “Making the plastic for a liter bottle of water actually takes three or four more liters of water itself.”

3. If you live in California “and buy Fiji Water, the energy cost of transporting the water to you is equal to the energy embodied in the plastic bottle itself.” If it’s Evian water instead, the energy expended is even greater.

2. The total energy cost of bottled water, including the materials used, the production process, and the transportation, “is a thousand times larger than the energy required to procure, process, treat, and deliver tap water.”

1. Smart restaurateurs like Alice Waters are starting to ban bottled water on their tables. And who are you going to believe if you won’t believe Alice?

So, are you ready now to reconsider the balance between the convenience of bottled water and the safety of tap water? Chances are the water from your tap is a much better bet. That’s certainly the case where I live in Berkeley.

Our own personal considerations aside, Gleick draws policy implications from his study of bottled water. He advocates five major reforms: state-of-the-art tap water systems; smarter water regulations; truthful labeling; consumer protection; and lower environmental impact.

If you’ve heard of Peter Gleick, it may be because you came across his name when he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant — or perhaps in connection with global warming, international development, national security, California’s water resources, or something else to do with water. Gleick, editor of the biennial sourcebook The World’s Water for many years, is widely acknowledged to be the world’s leading authority on that subject. However unfortunately, it’s a little more likely you heard Gleick’s name during the flurry of news awhile back — his true “15 minutes of fame” — that a group of right-wing climate change-deniers had caught him masquerading as a supporter on their website. That nasty little brouhaha soon boiled over, and sensible people — I count myself as one — never thought it amounted to much, anyway. 

So, what now? Are you going to finish that bottle of water, drink up any others you’ve still got around the house, and switch to using the tap? No? Think about it!

Operators’ manual for the people of Lake Woebegone and other shy persons

A review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re the sort of person who gravitates to the sidelines at parties, shuns speaking opportunities and the spotlight in general, and wonders how gregarious people ever got to be that way, this book was written for you. And, as it turns out, not just for me, too, but also for between one-third and one-half of the American population.

Here’s Susan Cain framing her subject: “Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality — the ‘north and south of temperament,’ as one scientist puts it — is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them.” And, of course, lots more.

The popular misconception of introversion in America is that it’s “somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” By contrast, extroversion has become what Cain calls the “Extrovert Ideal” in U.S. society, making the rest of us feel somehow guilty when we don’t measure up. Cain takes on this misguided notion with a vengeance. In Quiet, she demonstrates how each of these two personality types has its own advantages and disadvantages. She makes a clear case for including a balance of the two types in any organization, the extroverts to push the limits and the introverts to hold them back from hurtling over the edge.

The terms introvert and extrovert were popularized by Carl Jung in an influential book published nearly a century ago (1921). “Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.” In Quiet, Cain details the many ways in which the two personality types differ in the ways they work, play, invest, love, and perform just about any other function common to Americans in the here and now.

The distinction between the two types isn’t hard and fast. For example,
“[i]ntroverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas. . .  Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.” Introverts listen more than they talk. Extroverts talk more than they listen. Still, the contrast isn’t complete: these are tendencies exhibiting strong statistical correlations with distinct patterns of chemical interaction in the brain . They’re not universal guides to behavior.

Cain places contemporary views of introversion and extroversion in historical context. A century ago, during what she terms the “Culture of Character,” Abraham Lincoln was placed atop the pedestal of virtue. Today? Tony Robbins represents the ideal in the Culture of Personality. (Tony Robbins?! You’ve got to read the book.)

Quiet is endlessly fascinating, with lengthy passages and sometimes chapters devoted to Robbins, Harvard Business School, Dale Carnegie, Rosa Parks, open-plan offices, Steve Wozniak, and other icons, fads, and trends of today’s America. Throughout, the author presents the detailed findings of research in “personality psychology,” as the relevant field is called. She cites the jargon but explains everything in clear, straightforward prose.

If you want to gain insight into who you are and why you act the way you do, read this book. It’s a pleasure.

A funny book reveals more than you ever wanted to know about digestion and its byproducts

A review of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Mary Roach is a funny person, and I mean that in both senses of the word: funny ha-ha, and funny strange. For years now, she’s been writing amusing and often hilarious popular science books about peculiar subjects, including cadavers, the afterlife, the science of sex, life in space, and, now, digestion. Somehow, other science writers have tended to shy away from these topics. (I wonder why?)

So, now, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. 

You can get a pretty good sense of what Gulp is like by reading the table of contents. Check out these chapter titles, for example:

• The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
• Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff
• A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab
• Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive
• Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research

Got the picture? Good. But don’t get the impression that Gulp is just a funny book. It’s chock full of important information as well. For instance:

• You’ll learn about the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30.
• You’ll find out what Eskimos think of cats.
• You’ll know the difference between laundry detergent and the digestive juices in your stomach.
• You’ll learn which end of the cow its farts come out of.
• You’ll find out how Elvis Presley, President James Garfield, and Farrah Fawcett really died.

Gulp brims over with surprises. And the truly funny thing is, you’ll actually learn a good deal about the digestive process along the way. Mary Roach knows her stuff. This book is far more than a comic tour de force: it’s actually a superior example of science journalism. Kudos to Mary Roach!

Gulp is Mary Roach’s sixth book-length study. The first was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers a decade ago. Then two years later came  Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex three years after that. Her most recent book before Gulp was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void in 2010. My review of Packing for Mars is here, and the one for Bonk is here.

Updating McLuhan: How the Internet and the human brain can reinforce each other

A review of Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, by Tiffany Shlain

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Taking up where Marshall McLuhan left off and bringing his thinking into the 21st Century, Tiffany Shlain explores an extended metaphor in this tiny e-book published as an Amazon Single. She characterizes the Internet as “an extension of our brains — an extension of us,” just as McLuhan saw the book as an extension of the eye and electric circuity as an extension of the central nervous system. In fact, Shlain’s metaphor stands up to greater scrutiny than McLuhan’s. She makes a powerful case.

The similarities between the human brain and the Internet have been pointed out before, of course. However, Shlain delves deeply into contemporary neurological science, recent studies in childhood development, and the emergent properties of the Internet. She delivers up a convincing argument that we humans can vastly expand the scope of our understanding and insight by broadening the reach of digital media and engaging an ever-greater portion of humanity in taking advantage of the World Wide Web as a mechanism to share our ideas. Today, only about one-third of humanity — about 2.4 billion people — have access to the Internet. Shlain posits a near future when everyone who wishes may get online and share any thought with anyone else on the planet. By making judicious choices of what we share and what we read or experience online, we can literally reshape our brains.

This surprising claim is borne out by science, as Shlain reports. The human brain at birth is effectively a blank slate, composed of about 100 billion neurons, “the same number an adult brain has — but most of the connections between all those neurons aren’t there yet.” And it’s the connections that determine how we sense the world around us and how behave in response. The first 2,000 days of life — about five years — are critical, because during that time a child’s experiences determine which connections are made, which are strengthened, and which are left by the wayside. However, the process of reshaping the brain doesn’t end at age 5. Throughout our lives, the connections among the neurons in our brains continue to grow, shrink, and shift, the result of all we learn and experience and do as the years go by.

Already, digital “[t]echnology is rewiring the human brain” just as earlier technologies such as the book profoundly changed the ways we think and behave. For example, according to a California neuroscientist whose work Shlain cites, “social networking produces a burst of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for bonding, empathy, trust, and generosity.”

Hence, Shlain writes, “If we’re at the metaphoric first 2,000 days of life for the Internet, then right now is when we need to pay close and careful attention to developing its brain.” With a trillion webpages now online, about 10 times the number of neurons in the human brain, the capacity for new insight by increasing the connections among them is already vast. “Both a young brain and our young, global Internet brain are in highly creative, experimental, innovative states of rapid development — just waiting to make connections.”

Our job is to ensure that the right choices are made to nurture empathy, creativity, and sharing behavior in both. In raising children, this means minimizing the activation of stress hormones in the early years, since “prolonged activation . . . can actually reduce neural connections in important areas of the brain — such as those dedicated to learning and reasoning — while increasing neural connections in the parts of the brain dedicated to fear and aggression.” In managing digital media, we need to ensure that the Internet remains open, so that limitless connections are possible. This means rejecting attempts by corporations and rebelling against those by governments to establish control over the Internet.

Tiffany Shlain has written a thought-provoking little book, entirely worthy of the TED label that promises “ideas worth spreading.” A winner of numerous awards, Shlain is an innovative Bay Area filmmaker who founded the Webby Awards a decade and a half ago and is now pioneering in “crowd-filmmaking.”

Understand how Netflix, Wall Street, and economists use (and misuse) statistics

 

A review of Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Whelan

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

In the unfolding Age of Big Data, no one who hopes to understand the way the world works can afford to be ignorant of statistical methods. Not a day goes by that statistical analysis isn’t behind some front-page story — in politics, sports, business, or even entertainment. The statistical concepts of probability, sampling,  and statistical validity, once considered obscure and of interest only to geeks wearing pocket protectors, are now indispensable tools for the active citizen to grasp. Writing in a breezy and intimate style, with humor and lots asides to the reader, Charles Whelan attempts to unpack these concepts and explain them in English with a minimal use of advanced math, and he succeeds . . . up to a point.

Naked Statistics was published just four months after Nate Silver’s best-selling book, The Signal and the Noise, which covers much the same ground in a very different way. (I reviewed that book here.) Whelan focuses on the nitty-gritty of statistical methodology, delving into such topics as how samples are chosen, what’s meant by terms such as correlation, standard deviation, and regression analysis, and how to determine whether the results of a test are statistically valid. However, he doesn’t lose sight of practical questions, unpacking such seemingly puzzling statements as “the average income in America is not equal to the income of the average American” and spotlighting the difference between precision and accuracy. Silver instead explains how statistical methods are applied in a wide range of activities, from baseball and basketball to Wall Street. Whelan includes lots of formulas laden with Greek letters, though, conveniently, they’re confined for the most part to Appendixes that follow many of the book’s chapters and can be skipped by a non-technical reader. (I ignored them.) Silver’s book is refreshingly devoid of Greek letters.

As Whelan makes clear, perhaps unintentionally, statistics is a forbiddingly technical field. Truth to tell, if you really want to understand statistical methodology and how it can be applied, you need a fair grounding in mathematics and a tolerance for terminology that doesn’t appear in everyday English. In fact, you probably need to take the same sort of graduate school courses Whelan took years ago. This is heady stuff!

All in all, for a run-of-the-mill mathematical illiterate such as me, Nate Silver did a much better job getting across the significance of statistics and how its methods are applied to strip away the complexities of today’s often baffling, data-driven world.

Animal cruelty, pigs in shit, and the end of the human race

A review of Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a vegetarian. However, living as I do in Berkeley, California, from time to time I find myself in the minority at dinners and potlucks. So, as you might imagine, over the years I’ve come to hear most of the arguments against eating animals. 

One thing has always puzzled me about the torrent of passion that invariably erupts when I question why I, or anyone else, should become a vegetarian (much less a vegan): apart from a few rejoinders that the practice of limiting my diet to plants will improve my health, extend my life, and make me a better person overall, most — maybe 80 percent of the verbiage — concerns cruelty to animals.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like furry little animals as well as the next person. Over the course of my long life, I’ve had dogs, cats, and rabbits as well as a few less cuddly animals such as turtles and fish as (dare I say it?) pets. Nor do I kick dogs or other helpless beasts when I’m angry or frustrated with other human beings.

But why do so many people justify vegetarianism on the basis of animal cruelty when the practice of raising animals for food in factory farms promises to drown our country in shit and spew so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that it may eventually inundate low-lying coastal cities like Berkeley and make our planet uninhabitable for the human race? 

Where’s your perspective, people? Cheez! We’re already eliminating a million species a year from the biosphere by encroaching on animal habitat and screwing with the climate, and you’re worried about hurting chickens and cows?

Do I want to hurt chickens or cows? Of course not! I’ve even petted a heifer or two myself over the years. But still . . .

To give due credit, Jonathan Safran Foer does explain some of the environmental consequences of factory farming in Eating Animals. But his foray into the hidden depths of this tragically misconceived industry is almost exclusively focused on — guess what? — animal cruelty. His descriptions of the way animals are treated are purposely graphic and sometimes hard to take. PETA will love this book. If you don’t have an iron stomach, you might not.

Eating Animals is Foer’s first venture into book-length nonfiction. It’s his fourth book. The novels that preceded it, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, have attracted critical acclaim, including a number of literary awards, and both are being adapted to film. (He also produced a strange  work of fiction that was more a sculpture than a book.) For what it’s worth, I tried reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close but couldn’t get past the first few pages. However, Eating Animals is brilliantly crafted. Foer’s writing style, perhaps even his personality, come through loud and clear. He’s obviously a brilliant young man, and if he can avoid falling prey to the silly experimentalism of some of his early work, he’s got a great career ahead of him.

Oh, by the way, are you wondering why I haven’t become a vegetarian? Well, that’s another story . . .

An eminently readable book about how experts make sense of the world (or don’t)

A review of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, by Nate Silver

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Statisticians rarely become superstars, but Nate Silver is getting close. This is the guy who writes the FiveThirtyEight.com blog for the New York Times and has correctly predicted the outcome of the last two presidential elections in virtually every one of the 50 states. But Silver is no political maven weaned on election trivia at his parents’ dinner table: he earned his stripes as a prognosticator supporting himself on Internet poker and going Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s (Moneyball) one better by developing an even more sophisticated statistical analysis of what it takes to win major league baseball games. And, by the way: Silver is just 34 years old as I write this post.

The Signal and the Noise is Silver’s first book, and what a book it is! As you might expect from this gifted enfant terrible, the book is as ambitious as it is digestible. Written in an easy, conversational style, The Signal and the Noise explores the ins and outs of predicting outcomes not just in politics, poker, and sports (baseball and basketball) as well as the stock market, the economy, and the 2008 financial meltdown, weather forecasting, earthquakes, epidemic disease, chess, climate change, and terrorism.

Fundamentally, The Signal and the Noise is about the information glut we’re all drowning in now and how an educated person can make a little more sense out of it. As Silver notes, “The instinctual shortcut we take when we have ‘too much information’ is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.” What else could explain why Mitt Romney was “shell-shocked” and Karl Rove was astonished by Romney’s loss in a presidential election that every dispassionate observer knew was going Obama’s way?

Silver asserts that “our predictions may be more prone to failure in the era of Big Data. As there is an exponential increase in the amount of available information, there is likewise an exponential increase in the number of hypotheses to investigate . . . But the number of meaningful relationships in the data . . . is orders of magnitude smaller. Nor is it likely to be increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.”

Sadly, it’s not just in politics that bias clouds judgment and leads to erroneous conclusions. “In 2005, an Athens-raised medical researcher named John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.’ The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis’s hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings claimed in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves.”

In general, Silver’s thesis runs, “We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things — and we aren’t very good at it. . . We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is. We ignore the risks that are hardest to measure, even when they pose the greatest threats to our well-being. We make approximations and assumptions about the world that are much cruder than we realize. We abhor uncertainty, even when it is an irreducible part of the problem we are trying to solve.”

There’s more: Silver relates the work of a UC Berkeley psychology and political science professor named Philip Tetlock, who categorizes experts as either foxes or hedgehogs (in deference to an ancient Greek poet who wrote, “The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”). Hedgehogs traffic in Big Ideas and often hew to ideologies; these are the people who talk to the press and are frequently found on TV talk shows. Foxes are cautious types who carefully examine and weigh details before reaching conclusions. Not surprisingly, Tetlock found that “The more interviews that an expert had done with the press . . . the worse his predictions tended to be.”

In other words, Be afraid. Be very afraid. If the people who supposedly know what they’re talking about often really don’t, how can the rest of us figure out what’s going on?

Where do all those “emerging diseases” emerge from?

A review of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, H5N1 — every one of the world’s scariest diseases is a “zoonosis,” that is, a virus harbored by animals and transmitted to humans, often by other animals, in a complex minuet that often stretches out into decades.

AIDS, for example. According to the latest research, reported by David Quammen in Spillover, Patient Zero was not that French-Canadian flight attendant you may have read about who went amok in the 1970s but a hunter in Southeast Cameroon around 1908 who killed a chimpanzee and somehow unwittingly allowed the animal’s blood to seep into his own circulatory system, either through a cut or by eating his prey’s raw flesh. This is the phenomenon that epidemiologists call “spillover.” At that point, a particularly virulent form of a recently emergent simian virus found a friendly and familiar environment in the hunter’s blood and flourished, becoming what we know today as HIV-1 (the more lethal form of the virus that causes AIDS). Later, the hunter passed along the virus to one or more women through sexual contact, and the disease slowly spread, both by sex and by transmission through reused needles, undetected as anything out of the ordinary, from Cameroon into what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and other sub-Saharan countries, and thence by happenstance to Haiti. It was a Haitian harboring HIV-1 who probably passed it along to that notorious Canadian flight attendant, setting off the epidemic among gay men in North America.

In Spillover, Quammen tells tales like these in fascinating detail, relating the stories of the often-heroic scientists, physicians, and veterinarians who worked directly with deadly diseases, occasionally at the cost of their own lives. Quammen spent years writing this book. He appears to have read all the relevant scientific literature, attended specialized scientific conferences, and spent long hours tracking down and speaking face-to-face with the people who discovered these diseases, isolated the viruses, first treated the symptoms, and labored for thankless years on end in laboratories around the world to help humanity avert the next pandemic.

You may have read Richard Preston’s best-selling 2001 treatment of the emergence of Ebola in The Hot Zone. If not, I can tell you that I vividly recall the book because it was so dramatic, and so terrifying. No doubt I had nightmares about contracting Ebola. But it turns out, according to Quammen and to the eminent scientists he interviewed, that Preston’s account was sensationalized and highly inaccurate in essential details. For example, he described tears of blood, massive hemorrhages, and melted internal organs, none of which has any basis in fact.

However, Spillover, in its own way, is no less frightening. Quammen advances the popular theory that what appears to be the accelerating emergence of dangerous new pathogens became inevitable as a result of the enormous population growth of homo sapiens — because humanity has increasingly encroached on animal habitat and come into intimate contact with animals as never before. In discussions with noted biologists, he explores the concept of “breakout,” the explosive growth frequently seen in some animal species that shortly leads to sudden, catastrophic — through disease. He intimates that, with AIDS — or, all too possibly, with the next pandemic — humankind may experience something similar. Despite all the horrific details about AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, and the like, these are the book’s scariest passages.

David Quammen writes about science, nature, and travel — a total of 10 nonfiction books and five novels to date. A former Rhodes Scholar, he was educated at Yale and Oxford.