Rating: 7.9/10. Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World by Brett Christophers Book about private equity, how it works on investments in housing and infrastructure, and its effect on society. Private equity has bought lots of housing and capital infrastructure, managing them in an unregulated way: eg, they are not hesitant…
All Book Reviews
The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li
Rating: 7.6/10. The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li A fairly easy-to-read memoir by Fei-Fei Li, a computer vision researcher most well-known for her work on ImageNet. The first half of the book discusses her childhood, focusing on her experiences as an immigrant to America, while…
Sampling: Design and Analysis by Sharon L. Lohr
Rating: 8.3/10. This is my notes from the second edition of the textbook from 2009. It provides a solid foundation of sampling, survey design, and statistical methods for analyzing errors and variance. Some weak points include the fact that all code examples are in SAS instead of R, which is more popular for statistical computing….
Zoned in the USA by Sonia A. Hirt
Rating: 7.5/10. Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation by Sonia A. Hirt This book examines the history of zoning, especially focusing on America and how it reached the current state where large areas are mandated for single-family house zoning, something relatively uncommon globally. The strict government regulation in this…
Optimizing Play by Christopher A. Paul
Rating: 7.7/10. Optimizing Play: Why Theorycrafting Breaks Games and How to Fix It by Christopher A. Paul Book that studies the design of video games and sports, and how players’ attempts at theorycrafting or optimizing the game to win more often lead to negative consequences for the enjoyment of the game. There is often a…
Mastering PostgreSQL 15 by Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Rating: 7.9/10. Mastering PostgreSQL 15: Advanced techniques to build and manage scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant database applications by Hans-Jürgen Schönig A fairly comprehensive overview of PostgreSQL database for developers, including many advanced features and also security and performance, backups and replication, with good descriptions of when to use each feature and examples. Chapter 1. New features…
The Tree by Colin Tudge
Rating: 8.0/10. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge Book about biology of trees and forests, containing scientific details of their evolution, lifecycle, and classification. Compared to “The Hidden Life of Trees,” this one is more scientific and denser, but is still written…
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Rating: 7.7/10. This novel is a well known piece of Nova Scotia’s literature, about the Scottish people on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It starts with the narrator, a successful dentist, visiting his older brother Calum in Toronto: Calum is an alcoholic living in a sketchy part of town and feeling lost from his…
Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Rating: 7.6/10. Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug Book published in 2014 about web usability and design. It’s fairly short, covering the basics and addressing many of the most common problems and issues with design, as well as the fundamentals of usability testing. The goal of…
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
Rating: 8.0/10. A history of the cod and its overfishing, one of the most catastrophic crashes of species caused by human activity. Previously, cod was so abundant that it was said you could almost walk across the water standing on the fish. However, after centuries of overfishing, the population has been reduced to near nonexistence…
Applied English Phonology by Mehmet Yavas
Rating: 8.2/10. Intro textbook on English phonology, starts with a general overview of the theory of phonetics and phonology, but mostly focuses on the specific patterns of consonants, vowels, stress, and intonation patterns of English, including several of its dialects. It also describes models of difficulties faced by second language speakers attempting to learn English…
The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics by Richard C. Koo
Rating: 7.6/10. The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession by Richard C. Koo Book by a macroeconomist about Japan’s long recession (the Lost Decades), which began in 1990 and lasted for about 15 years. When the book was written in 2009, Japan was beginning to recover. There were no obvious structural problems…