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

Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus

 Why do I have to wait all year for the best book?  I put this one at the top of my list for 2023 although Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperfield came close, I enjoyed the laughter and spunk of Garmus's story.

Elizabeth Zott is a scientist to be taken seriously -- though in the 1960s that isn't going to happen. Her sharp intellect is ignored or overlooked by her male colleagues.  She finds her soulmate only to move on and become a daytime TV cooking show host.  

I found myself cheering for her and her perseverance and take-no-nonsense attitude.  It's a reflection of attitudes that were and are still with us.  Add this one to your list - you won't be disappointed.   

Published: 2023  Read: December 2023  Genre: Fiction

Invisible Women - Caroline Criado Perez

 Sub-title: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

This is an important book to read to understand how the rise in the use of data has perpetuated bias toward women resulting in the loss of their potential contribution in a multitude of fields.  The author points out the well-reported lack of diversity in medical studies and goes on to address bias introduced via data to other areas of life as well.  She points out how the lack of consideration of women's needs and perspectives skews the  development of everything from phones to automated decision-making to healthcare.  

She points out in the Afterword that there are 3 themes that define women's relationship with the world:

1) the invisibility of the female body; forgetting to accommodate it in design in all fields

2) the visibility of the female body leading to male sexual violence against women and how it is measured and accounted for in design, resulting in limiting women's liberty.

3) Unpaid care work; pointing out that women are doing far and away more than our fair share of this work.  It naturalizes sex and gender discrimination to assume this is the female role.

Quotes and Notes

p 30 - Women do 75% of the world's unpaid care work and this affects their travel needs.  ..."trip-chaining', a travel pattern of several small interconnected trips that has been observed in women around the world."

p 118 - [regarding absorption of chemicals studies not taking into account] endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs)  harmful even at very low concentrations and they are found in a wide range of plastics, cosmetics and cleaners.

p 157 - There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands than men and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fit-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.

p 167 - [discussion of AI systems] used to screen resumes] Has the algorithm been trained to account for socialized gender differences in tone an facial expression?"

p 175 - [women entrepreneurs in tech world, example of pelvic floor trainer] In a field where women are at a disadvantage specifically because the are women (and therefore can't hope to fit a stereotypically male 'pattern'), data will be particularly crucial for female entrepreneurs.  And yet it's the female entrepreneurs who are less likely to have it, because they are more likely to be trying to make products for women.  For whom we lack data." 

p 180 - Across professional computing as a whole in the US, 26% of jobs are held by women compared to the 57% of jobs women hold across the entire US workforce - "sea of dudes" problem.

p 223 - Understanding Girls with ADHD states that women are underdiagnosed because of early clinical studies being done on hyperactive young white boys.

p 247 - ..."the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world."

Published: 2019  Read: December 2021  Genre: Science

Ambulance Girl - Jane Stern

I'd listened to Jane and Michael Stern's food radio program, the Splendid Table, on NPR for many years.  I must have added her memoir to my TBR list at some point and was surprised to find that she had volunteered as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and wrote about it.  My image of her as a foodie clashed with her experiences as an EMT and opened my eyes to a extremely challenging job and the reasons someone might chose to do it.  I could see the growth in confidence and self-respect that Jane gained during her time as an EMT. 

Quotes:

p. 31 "EMT is the most stressful job of all...a list of the warning signs of stress, which included anxiety, guilt, indecisiveness, isolation, fear of separation and being ignored" [was shared during training as a warning].

p 129 "Fear is a hologram.  It seems filled with substance and when you go beyond it you realize it was just an illusion."

Published: 2003  Read: January 2021  Genre: Memoir 

The Glass Universe - Dava Sobel

Sub-title: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the Measure of the Stars

I got this book just over a year ago at the Tucson book fair, a recommendation from my brother-in-law, Tom.  I really enjoyed the author's other books that I read, Longitude and Galileo's Daughter. 

This novel tells the history of the women who worked at the Harvard Observatory analyzing and cataloging glass plate images of the stars. The plates were created by images captured by the observatory's telescopes in Massachusetts, Peru and South Africa.  Over 500,000 plates were created over several decades, a collection that is now being digitized including the paper sleeves they are stored in and the accompanying notes and card files.

The original observatory's efforts were made possible by ongoing donations from Anna Draper, the wife of Henry Draper, in honor of her husband.  She was very involved throughout the rest of her life in the programs.  Many women worked as "computers" to analyze and record the information on the stars.  It made me realize that astronomy involves a lot of math and physics.  I was struck with the education and skills of these women in the late 1800's and into the early 20th century and compared them in my mind to my women ancestors of the time, most of whom did not even go to high school.

There's mention of a Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin that I'll have to research as "Yerkes" is the middle name of my 2nd great-grandfather.

The women were not treated as second-class, although their pay was far less than their male counterparts.  The author features several who received doctorates in Astronomy and were instrumental in developing techniques for quantifying and cataloging the stars and who discovered many. 

A good read and history lesson.

Published:  2016  Read: July 2018  Genre: non-fiction, science