Where Are The 'Hackers' Now? from NPR Podcast Science Friday

In his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, author Steven Levy profiled some of the personalities whose work brought PCs to the people, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Levy discusses his book, recently reissued, and hacker ethics in the Internet age.

Download the podcast here. See also: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, On The Path



MIT's periodical, "Technology Review," recently said this about the anniversary edition of the book: "In Hackers, Captain Crunch shows up primarily as an adjunct to the nascent Apple computer company, where he was briefly employed to create a circuit board that, when connected to a phone, could enable an Apple II to reproduce his feats of phone hacking. Fearing legal entanglements, the board was never released, and Captain Crunch didn't last long at the fledgling company, but the "blue box" on which the board was based became the workhorse of the phone hacker "phreaking" community." See that TR article here. Pair the Hackers book with the movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley." Note: "Hackers," starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, is not as relevant.

When To Test For Prostate Cancer? from NPR Podcast Science Friday

Ads urge men of a certain age to get screened for prostate cancer. But is "test early, test often" the best approach? Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and Mark Scholz, author of Invasion Of The Prostate Snatchers, discuss other approaches.

Download the podcast here. See also: The Decision: Your prostate biopsy shows cancer. Now what?: Medical insight, personal stories, and humor by a urologist who has been where you are now., Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide to Prostate Cancer (The Johns Hopkins Patients' Guide), Surviving Prostate Cancer Without Surgery, Prostate Cancer Survivors Speak Their Minds: Advice on Options, Treatments, and Aftereffects



In "There Will Be Blood Pricks: Diabetes has forced me to become a self-tracker, and I can't stand it", Hanna Rosin at the Slate.com writes about the book:

I gravitate toward medical stories such as the one told by Mark Scholz in his recent book Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. The screening test for prostate cancer, by quantifying a certain cancer indicator in the blood, has caused thousands of men—my father among them—to have operations they probably did not need. The test was effective at detecting cancer, but it could not distinguish between the lethal kind and the benign kind that grows slowly over time and never does any harm. The test, it turns out, was answering only half the question. In the face of a frightening disease, numbers can be very soothing. But they sometimes obscure what you really need to know. Something like this is also happening with diabetes.

And at that, there comes to mind a pairing. The other day, we blogged about "Wrong." The book and author's main thesis is that you can't trust in these studies and metrics blindly; you have to move forward with skepticism. And of course, there's The Emperor of All Maladies, which fashions itself as "biography" of cancer.

Pairing Ron Paul with Paul Krugman - Economics and Politics

Texas congressman Ron Paul has long been a fierce critic of the Federal Reserve. In fact, last year he published a book called End the Fed, calling for an end to the central bank and a return to the gold standard. Now, Paul has been appointed head of the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy, which, among other things, oversees the Federal Reserve. So, does Paul see this as his chance to try to end the Fed? "In a partial sense, but not directly," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "What I'm really asking for is competition, to get rid of the monopoly power of the Fed, because they don't have legitimate power to do what they do."

This snippet's from NPR's All Things Considered. The podcast for this show can be found here. The full All Things Considered story can be found here. Here are some other books that are also by Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, Liberty Defined: The 50 Urgent Issues That Affect Our Freedom, Pillars of Prosperity. According to ABC News, Paul recently said, "Now that doesn't mean that the first week in January I send over a subpoena for (Fed Chairman Ben) Bernanke and demand that he come over with a pile of papers, I don't think that would be logical." View that full ABC story here. Paul Krugman opposes Ron Paul's ideas. [Funny how they both have "Paul" in their names.] He writes a regular column at The New York Times, and recently, he's said that "[Paleomonetarism] I used that term — it’s probably not original, but who knows? — in a recent post about the increasingly obscure meaning of the money supply. The best example would surely be Ron Paul, who’s now going to have oversight over the Fed. If you read his stuff, it’s very clear: money is a well-defined quantity that the Fed controls, and inflation comes from — indeed is defined as — increases in that quantity." Read that full NYT post here. Here are a few Krugman titles that you can pair Paul with: The Conscience of a Liberal, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (Updated and Expanded), A Country Is Not a Company (Harvard Business Review Classics)

Symbolism and Pragmatism: "How We Got From Estate Tax To 'Death Tax'" from NPR's The Two-way

Don Gonyea speaks with Columbia Law School's Michael Graetz (update at 10 a.m. ET: he's also a professor emeritus and lecturer at Yale law School) about the history of the tax for Morning Edition. Graetz is co-author of the book Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth. [...] Graetz tells Don that the estate tax in its current form was passed by Congress in 1916, just three years after the start of the federal income tax. Roosevelt supported the tax as an instrument for enforcing the equality of opportunity in the U.S. by making it more difficult to pass great fortunes from one generation to another. Graetz says that the public accepted the tax as a another progressive-era reform. "It was the beginning of the progressive era," says Graetz. "The income tax had just come in, in 1913. So, the public was very interested in progressive taxation and the estate tax was a natural piece of that kind of system." Significant opposition first appeared in the 1920s when Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil tried to repeal the estate tax during his stint as secretary of the Treasury during the Coolidge administration. Then, in the 1940s, Graetz says that opponents started labeling it the "death tax" in a bid to gain wider support for the repeal movement. The movement never succeeded. But the 1990s saw a resurgence in efforts to kill the tax, with an emphasis on how it affects family farms and small businesses. Graetz tells Gonyea, however, that the estate tax has rarely affected these types of small family operations and that opponents eventually fell back to the position of advocating a complete repeal. In the end, Graetz says the debate over the tax seems more symbolic than anything else in light of the fact that it has never produced more than 2 percent of federal revenues in any individual year since World War II.

Read the full Two-way post here. There was also this Morning Edition radio show on the topic. "Symbolic." Politics is all symbolism these days, and so much of the inflated U.S. economy is about political gestures, i.e. purely symbolic gestures, in an attempt to win a philosophical argument or debate: we buy organic to make a statement, more than anything else; we buy books; we use certain sorts of social media. This book cuts to this symbolism, and at that, there's a pairing here. There's a paring with the pragmatism of Obama, which is best understood through the book, Reading Obama.

"'The Gun': How AK-47s Changed The Nature Of War" - from NPR News and the NPR program, All Things Considered

The image is iconic: the stubby barrel, the inverted arc of the banana clip. Osama bin Laden included one in his video after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Saddam Hussein had a pair with him when he was captured. It appears on the flag of Mozambique and Hezbollah. The AK-47 — or versions of it — can be found in every major conflict of the past 50 years. In his new book, The Gun, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter C.J. Chivers traces the history of the lethal firearm. Chivers, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, tells NPR's Audie Cornish the gun is one of the principle weapons of insurgents in Afghanistan, where he's been reporting.

Download the podcast here. Read the full NPR All Things Considered feature story, here. Newsday posted a few pages of the book, here. And The New York Times had this to say about the book, recently:

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

Find that Times piece, here. The Los Angeles Times also plugs the book:

If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fourth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. C.J. Chivers makes a convincing case in "The Gun" that a far more lethal and consequential weapon was devised at about that same time in a sprawling Soviet military design facility — the first Avtomat (Automatic) Kalashnikov assault rifle. "The Gun" is the author's exhaustive history of the rifle's origins, development and astonishing influence on global security. The banana-clipped Kalashnikov is by now a familiar sight to anyone who watches a few minutes of television news footage; it's the weapon clasped to the chests of Kim Jong Il's goose-stepping legions, waved high by Somali pirates, clutched by Africa's wretched child soldiers, leaning up against a mud-washed wall in Osama bin Laden's infamous videos.

You can find the Los Angeles Times mention, here (it's a few paragraphs; nothing meaty). And the New York Post had this to say about The Gun:

In his fascinating book, “The Gun” (Simon & Schuster), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.J. Chivers shows how the world was forever altered by the pursuit of automatic weapons and especially the invention of the Kalashnikov — an easy-to-use automatic rifle that allowed any one man to possess the firepower of an army.

Finally, for a little over a year now, Chivers has been maintaining this blog at The New York Times. The blog's central theme is war and small arms. And on that note, there's a pairing that we can do here, though not with another book; a 2005 film starring Nicholas Cage, "Lord of War." The movie's theme is closely aligned with the sentiments in Chivers' book, and it's hard to not think of the movie, while reading the book, and vice versa; mainly because of the weight of the AK-47, the credit and the responsibility that's placed on this sole item. IMDB carries this storyline description:

This film charts the rise and fall of Yuri Orlov, from his early days in the early 1980s in Little Odessa, selling guns to mobsters in his local neighbourhood, through to his ascension through the decade of excess and indulgence into the early 90s, where he forms a business partnership with an African warlord and his psychotic son. The film also charts his relationship through the years with his younger brother, his marriage to a famous model, his relentless pursuit by a determined federal agent and his inner demons that sway between his drive for success and the immorality of what he does.

Find the that IMDB profile here. Wikipedia has this to say, about the film's historical accuracy:

Plot details on the illegal arms market, particularly regarding purchases for Tropical Africa in early 1990s, are closely based on real stories and people originating from the former Soviet Union. The main protagonist's name, Yuri Orlov, corresponds to the last name of Oleg Orlov, a Russian businessman arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of smuggling missiles to Iran. The real Orlov was strangled in Kiev's Lukyanivska Prison in 2007 during the investigation.[7] The character Andre Baptiste, Sr. is partly based on Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia until 2003.[8] The character of Colonel Oliver Southern is evidently hinting of Oliver North, most famous for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. However, the scenes of direct shipping of weapons from Ukraine's army storages is fictional.[7] Portrayal of the Interpol as an acting security agency is also entirely fictional.

Amnesty International supported and endorsed the film. There's an internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB (sort of like the IMDB, no relation). The site lists all of the firearms, along with the AK-47, that were featured in the film.

"The Master Switch": Is the Internet due for a takeover? - from Slate.com - by Laura Miller

In "The Master Switch," Wu assembles all of these stories and reframes them as battles in a shifting landscape of high-stakes industrial warfare, from Ma Bell's dastardly campaigns against small independent phone companies to the conquest of every aspect of the movie industry -- from talent and production to distribution and theaters -- by the ruthless moguls of the studios' heyday. He scrutinizes the postwar years when AT&T was treated like a shadow agency of the federal government, and recounts how the Machiavellian head of RCA, David Sarnoff, double-crossed an idealistic old friend to suppress the introduction of FM radio (a technology whose capabilities have yet to be fully explored) for decades. These industries -- "the defining business ventures of our time," according to Wu -- "have from their inception been subject to the same cycle of rise and fall, imperial consolidation and dispersion." Furthermore, "the time has come when we must pay attention" because we are now, with the Internet, "on the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has always begun to swing in the opposite direction -- toward greater control and centralization." And while Wu strives for balance, acknowledging that monopolies can provide seamless service, efficiency, high-quality content and sometimes even lower prices, his heart is clearly with the wild and woolly (if also sometimes scruffy) nature of the wide-open model that currently abides online.

Read Miller's article at the Slate, here. David Leonhardt at The New York Times' Sunday Book Review, also covered the book the other day:

It was one of the more extraordinary instances of Ma Bell’s involvement with Uncle Sam. The company owed its very existence to a favorable federal patent ruling in 1878, which saved it from an early death at the hands of Western Union, the dominant telegraph company then trying to crush its new rival. A little more than a century later, Washington broke up AT&T. But regulators soon allowed many of the company’s parts to merge back together. This consolidation, Tim Wu argues in “The Master Switch,” probably allowed the Bush administration to conduct its wiretapping program in secret for so long. AT&T is the star of Wu’s book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew.

Read that New York Times article, here. Also, a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post sat down with the author, and offered this introduction to the author:

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University, author of the (excellent) new book "The Master Switch" and chairman of the board of Free Press. Oh, and he coined the term "net neutrality" in 2003. He spoke with me from Canada, where he's promoting his book, about the net neutrality rules that Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, outlined this week. A lightly edited transcript follows.

The interview focused on the issue of net neutrality. Read a partial transcript of that interview at the Washington Post. The Atlantic also covered the author, the issue of net neutrality, and his book (of course):

What Faulkner once said about the American South -- "The past isn't dead. It's not even past" -- is now true of tech and telecom policy as well. The perennial Great Divide in tech policy is about the merits of applying existing regulatory models to the latest technology. The question of the moment is about whether and how government should regulate Internet broadband. And the debate is now roaming into lessons-from-history thanks to a fascinating new book, The Master Switch, by Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School.

Pair Tim Wu with Gerald Sussman. Sussman is a bit more academic, in terms of reading. The book we're suggesting here, "Communication, Technology, and the Politics in the Information Age," can come off as heavy reading over the weekend. It's often assigned at media and sociology of science and technology courses at universities. Sussman is a friend of some of our editors, and a professor to others of ours. But other than that, and the pennies we get in affiliate income from "the bookstore," we're pairing Sussman because in this title in particular, you have something of a Michael Pollan about technology and industrial science here; that is to say, you're presented with a narrative context, enveloped in economics, statistics, historical facts, events, dates, about momentous waves and social patterns in Sussman; and you get this with the more contemporary take, by Tim Wu. It pairs a bit heavy to the academic side, but as is the case with most heavily academic pairings, it's a couple of titles that you can languish over, that you can reread, and reference over and over again, through the years. That's incredibly difficult to say about texts these days, that cover such pertinent, current, and relevant issues as net neutrality and public policies about technology and industrial sciences. See Wikipedia's take on Gerald Sussman, here.

Pair "Googled" with Programmed"

You’ve got to pair these two books together. You can read them in tandem; a chapter from Googled, followed by another from Programmed. Both flow well together, and aren’t entirely written in dissimilar ways; they complement each other very well. Each is driven by healthy skepticism. There are these ever more pervasive technologies in our life (say, web search on the one hand), and unlike “disruptive” technologies in the past (as Auletta’s said in his first few pages), you’re not really talking about something concrete here, say the advent of the commercial airliner, or a microwave. Instead, you’re dealing with abstract things, i.e. ideas, information, “knowledge” (Googled). When you couple that with what sociologists have known for years about media—that it intrinsically socializes us, “programs us,” Rushkoff would say—you’ve got a very dangerous mix; that is, potentially dangerous anyway. So it’s important to read both, and they’re not very difficult reads at all. They’re worth buying because, like other well written journalistic pieces, the narratives age well. In fact, Googled was published a couple of years ago, at this rate. And it’s only grow in its contextual relevance, as Google makes its ways onto TV and other spaces of traditional media (“encroaching” Auletta says).

Check this post out. See also: Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, The Highwaymen, World War 3.0 : Microsoft and Its Enemies