The Finish Line

This post has gotten a little wonky, trying to do updates while also not adding new posts. At this point it’s in reverse order, with the most recent stuff at the top. Whatever. That’s not really important.

I think I had a pretty successful Bloggiesta. I ended up with 17 things on my list and managed to cross off 11 of them and partially complete another four. I’m most happy with the fact that I got my About Me and Review Policy pages updated. I also added a contact form with a plugin, which will be nice to have.

But that’s about it. I’m blogged out. Happy Bloggiesta, everyone!

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Title: Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations
Author: Charlene Mires
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2013
Publisher: New York University Press
Acquired: From the publisher as part of a TLC Book Tour
Rating:

Review: At the end of World War II, the newly-created United Nations was on the hunt for a headquarters. Well, sort of. The leaders of the United Nations were trying to figure out how to make their organization work. A headquarters was low on their priority list. But enthusiastic government officials, business leaders and citizens from cities around the United States recognized that, eventually, the United Nations would need a to find a headquarters.

Not the type of people to stand back and wait, these civic boosters — leaders from San Francisco to Boston to the Black Hills of South Dakota — threw themselves into an unofficial contest to prove that their hometowns would be the best place to house the new world center for global democracy. In Capital of the World, history professor Charlene Mires tells a story of how differing visions for the Capital of the World threatened to undermine the goals of the United Nations before they even had a building and the diplomats who worked to hold the organization together.

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Title: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
Author: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Genre: Nonfiction
Year: 2013
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: Everyone who has ever tried to comment on a website (or comment on several websites in a row) has, at some point come across Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) — those seemingly random strings of letters and numbers site administrators use to try and make commenters prove they’re human.

Although inventing Captcha brought 22-year-old Luis von Ahn plenty of fame and fortune (including a MacArthur “genius” grant worth $500,000), he eventually started to feel bad about all the time people were wasting typing in random letters each day. Von Ahn worked to modify the program and eventually came up with its successor: ReCaptcha. Now, instead of random letters, the program presented people with two words from text-scanning projects (think Google Books) that a computer’s character recognition program couldn’t understand:

One word is meant to confirm what other users have typed and thus is a signal that the person is a human; the other is a new word in need of disambiguation. To ensure accuracy, the system presents the same fuzzy word to an average of five different people to type in correctly before it trusts it’s right. The data had a primary use — to prove the user was human — but it also had a secondary purpose: to decipher unclear words in digitized texts.

If book digitizers had to hire people to figure out these words, it could cost more than $1 billion per day. Instead, ReCaptcha harnesses what users are already doing on more than 200,000 websites to solve big data problems.

While this story may not make you feel more excited about typing in random words to leave a comment on a blog, it is an example of one of the many fascinating anecdotes about the changing world of information in Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier. In the book, Mayer-Schönberge and Cukier explore the implications of living in a world where we have the power to collect, analyze, and act on more information that we’ve ever had available before.

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Whew, section two of this read-a-long was a doozy. It was slightly more pages than the first section, and boy, did that chapter with the letters take awhile to get though.

Anyway, I liked the format from the last recap, so I’m going to use that again. (If you missed it, here are my thoughts from chapters 1 through 6). You can also catch my co-host, Lu’s, thoughts on this section here.

Our Story So Far (Chapters 7 — 13)

This section felt rather disjointed to me, as if each of the chapters was doing something completely different and it wasn’t until I got to the end of chapter 13 (and snuck ahead through chapters 14 and 15) that the story seemed to come back together again. So, briefly, here’s what happened in each chapter:

Chapter 7: We meet Beatrice Nest, and “indisputably solid, and nevertheless amorphous” scholar who has been working, for years, on studying the diary of Ash’s wife, Ellen. Roland goes to visit her to look for clues in Ellen’s diary, then gets an invitation to go back to the LaMotte estate to read the correspondence between Randolph and Christabel (after another awkward encounter with Val).

Chapter 8: Roland and Maud head back to the estate to read the letters. While stranded overnight, they have an awkward (or perhaps romantic?) encounter outside the bathroom — scandalous! Maud also receives some letters from fellow scholars that she considers.

Chapter 9: This is a short story by Christabel LaMotte that I don’t know what to make of.

Chapter 10: Finally, the correspondence! This chapter is exclusively the letters between Randolph and Christabel, which go from very formal to quite dramatic. This chapter took me several days to read but boy did it get good at the end. I cannot wait to find out what transpired off the page.

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