The Rainbow:A Novel - Yasunari Kawabata

I picked this up because the author had won the Pultizer Prize.  It was a dreamy book, translated from the Japanese.  It tells the story of three half-sisters survival after the bombing of Japan in WWII, in an indirect, referential way.  I didn't care for the story and the writing was very sparse.  Not recommended.

Published:  1951  Read: February 2024  Genre: Fiction

The Prospectors - Ariel Djanikian

 This is a book of historical fiction, based on the Bush/Berry family who became millionaires from their claims on the Eldorado in Alaska.  The author takes us back and forth from the present day, with descendants of the family attempting to make reparations to the native Alaskans exploited by the family, to the story of Clarence Berry and his wife, Ethel, and her sister, Alice during their establishment of the claims.  It took me several chapters to get into the story.  I particularly didn't like Alice, who eventually married Clarence's brother, Henry to cement the family ties.  As the story unfolded, my feelings were justified as I learned of her scheming and its outcome.  

I really enjoyed the book overall and recommend it as background on the 1800's gold rush to Alaska and the long reach of fortunes made at the expense of others.

Published: 2023  Read: February 2023  Genre: Historical fiction

The World I See - Dr. Fei-Fei Li

 Sub-title: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

This was a wonderful read that sheds a bright light on the early innovations in AI and one of its fascinating developers.  Dr Li weaves the story of her immigration and experiences in the US with the evolution of the technology.  She beautifully illustrates the power of family, mentors, and self-determination on realizing the intellect of a brilliant woman.  Highly recommended.

Quotes/Notes:

[on her mentor helping her and learning about her culture]..he read Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.

"But the failures are not in vain.  Mistakes trigger corrective signals, rippling across the network's tens of millions of constituent parts, each assessed for its contribution to the results and pushed, proportionately, to behave differently next time.  It's the simplest form of learning--to do less of whatever failed, and more of whatever didn't."

[on psychologist Eleanor Rosch and categorization and creating a vocabulary for understanding hierarchy - made me think of looking at DNA this way] "..superordinates and subordinate categories ..when taken as a whole, such hierarchies look like trees.  Moving toward the root means less specificity and differentiation, while moving toward the leaves, the farthest ends of each branch means more. "

[Anatol Holt] "AI was a technology that can make the perfect chess move while the room is on fire".

[on Jeremy Wolfe, cognitive scientist - made me think of doing a study on how blind and deaf perceive the world] "...concept of 'gist' ...directly confronted the question of what, exactly, humans perceive when they glance at the real world"  

"adversarial attacks" -  feeding information to directly confuse the AI

"explainability" or "explainable AI" - reducing neural networks' almost magical deliberations into a form humans can understand.

Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Science