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My 2016 in Books

January 2, 2017 / Luke / 0 Comments

These are the books I read in 2016.

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

14 books, 6,782 pages. Some great books!

Here is a look at the reading over the course of the year. The book in green (The Tell- Tale Brain) is a carryover from 2015. The 3 books in tan (Good to Great, Smarter Faster Better, and The Upright Thinkers) are books that I have not finished.

It’s interesting to see how it’s not 100% serial. There is a fair amount of overlap. For example, I started 4 and finished 3 books while reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is sort of in a class by itself. I found it to be an intense and fascinating read. It never slowed (which is impressive for a 1250 page book). (on a side note, here is a textual analysis I did for that book.)

I also greatly enjoyed Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It covers a wide swath of the research Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Israeli phycologists) undertook. We are bad at thinking statistically, so we create these shortcuts / rules of thumb that inevitably lead by biases in how we made decisions.

The Undoing Project (which is in some ways a follow-on to Money Ball) looks at decision making and tells the story of Kahneman and Tversky. It certainly covers much of their research (with great anecdotes), but also tells the personal side of the two as individuals and as a partnership.

Thaler, who wrote Misbehaving, worked with both Kahneman and Tversky. He’s an economist, but a bit of an iconoclast. He coined the terms Econ and Human to refer to the theoretical “rational actor” vs the actual person who behaves as they do (not necessarily as they “should”).

Superforecasting was also great (and it turns out I know a Superforecaster – top forecaster in Tetlock’s IARPA-funded Good Judgement Project). Successful forecasters are ones that are not tied to a specific world view (and thus do not feel the need to fit world events into their box of pre-conceptions) and change their predictions as they learn more (not wedded to previous predictions). It is interesting that the loud voices in punditry are not the people that are the most accurate prognosticators, but rather the ones that exude confidence (making the viewer see them as likely right) and are experts at conforming whatever happens into their world view (through their telling, the past always makes sense as part of their world view).

The last book I will mention is The Righteous Mind. Haidt does a good job of digging into the different moral intuitions people have and how it influences their view of the world. And there is an interesting discussion of his research on harmless taboos (e.g. the Julie and Mark story).

Oh, and of course, The Martian. Fantastically fun read.

Below shows the number of pages in each of the 14 finished books. This totals 6,782 pages (average of 484).

And here is graph showing the pages read per day by book. I averaged about 19 pages per day, but as you can see there is quite a swing. Some of these books were read in a continuous fashion; others were read in spurts.

Lastly, here are the Goodreads ratings along with my ratings. Goodreads allows a score of 0 to 5 (whole numbers only). Across the 14 books, I gave an average rating of 3.9 out of 5.

Python Timing Compare

October 30, 2016 / Luke / 0 Comments

As part of a recent PyData talk, I did some timing tests to compare the performance of various methods of translating a large number of geographic locations represented as ECEF XYZ to latitude / longitude / altitude.

I ran this for both 10,000 points and 1,000,000 points using the following methods:

Native Python (using built-in lists)
Numpy
Pandas
Numba (using Numpy array then Pandas DataFrame)
Numexpr (using Numpy array then Pandas DataFrame)
Cython (with Numpy array)
Cython Parallel (with Numpy array)

You can find the code here in a Jupter notebook.

The results are below. There is an issue worth noting (that I haven’t had time to run to ground) and that is that clearly the parallel Cython implementation is not correct since it is virtually identical in timing to the non-parallel implementation.

PyData Talk

October 6, 2016 / Luke / 1 Comment

I had the pleasure of attending PyData Carolinas 2016 a couple of weeks ago. I learned a lot and also had the opportunity to give a talk. The nice folks at PyData have put the talks up on YouTube.

A Textual Analysis – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

October 5, 2016 / Luke / 1 Comment

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

William Shirer was a foreign correspondent with UPI and CBS stationed in Europe before and during World War II. After the war he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which was first published in 1960. As the title suggests, the book covers Hitler’s and the Nazi’s rise to power through their downfall at the end of World War II. It is a brutal and agonizing journey.

Here is Shirer’s closing:

The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping at midnight on May 8-9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settled over the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the intervening five years, eight months and seven days millions of men and women had been slaughtered on a hundred battlefields and in a thousand bombed towns, and millions more done to death in the Nazi gas chambers or on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen pits in Russia and Poland – as the result of Adolf Hitler’s lust for German conquest. A greater part of most of Europe’s ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble, as the weather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.
No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jack boot of the goosestepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirted masses or the shouts of the Fuehrer blaring from the loudspeakers.
After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this great nation and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.

A painful part of our collective history.

To state the obvious, this book is filled with a multitude of characters and I thought it would be interesting to see who plays large rolls and, since the book (for the most part) proceeds chronologically, when the characters come on and off the stage. This led me to parse and analyze the text. I parsed the 1990 edition which is 1,029 pages. Below is a textual analysis of this book.

I parsed and analyzed the text using python and pandas. I used a superset of stop words from here and here. The graphs are in plotly. And the word clouds were made using Andreas Mueller’s generator. All of the code is in github.

Some basics about the text:

Number of words: 571,387
Number of words (sans stop words): 244,881
Number of unique words: 22,748
Number of unique words (sans stop words): 22,266

No Slackers

September 3, 2016 / Luke / 0 Comments

I remember listening to a talk by Martin Fowler (although it could have been Kent Beck) recently where he mentions the Facebook poster that says “Nothing at Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” It’s posted all around the company. He tells an anecdote about the Facebook mobile app and how the entire company uses the beta app so as to find all of the bugs before it goes to the masses. If one was ever to say (and occasionally a newbie does) “this beta is painful to use… I am going to go download the legit release from the AppStore” then the FB culture shines through. “No, you most certainly will not. You will use the beta like everyone else, so that our customers see as few bugs as possible. If you are frustrated by a bug, then fix it.”

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Too often within an organization there is a tendency to lay the blame for the problem at the feet of others. This tendency can fester and begin to seep into the culture. Rather than being one team with one goal the organization becomes snipping factions.

Churchill

June 2, 2016 / Luke / 0 Comments

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From The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a great quote from Winston Churchill. This was June 1940 right after the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old. (June 4, 1940)

Picking up with the author’s (William L. Shirer) commentary:

Why should Great Britain fight on alone against helpless odds? Especially when it could get a peace that would leave it, unlike France, Poland and all the other defeated lands, unscathed, intact and free? This was a question asked everywhere except in Downing Street, where, as Churchill later revealed, it was never even discussed, because the answer was taken for granted.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say; “This was their finest hour.” – Churchill (June 18, 1940)

Flak

June 2, 2016 / Luke / 0 Comments

TIL, flak comes from the german “fliegerabwehrkanonen” meaning anti-aircraft gun (really aircraft defense cannons).

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Data Smart Sans Excel

April 15, 2016 / Luke / 0 Comments

This is very much a work in progress, but I am process of working through the exercises in Data Smart using python in an IPython notebook.

Data Smart is a data science book written by John Forman (of MailChimp). The book is very hands-on, with lots of exercises / examples. John wanted it to be a “code free” book (at least for the first few chapters), so he uses Excel as the primary data tool. I thought it would be a helpful learning exercise to work the problems in the book with python.

It lives here: Data Smart Sans Excel Notebook