"JoAnne Yates writes with impressive clarity about the incredibly complex origins of the information age. By focusing on the life insurance industry and by stressing both continuity and change, she provides a key to understanding the crucial relationship between technology vendors and users."--Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World

Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology.

JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms -- where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial -- adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation.

In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century

"Starred Review" from Publishers Weekly:
The pace of Walker's narrative replicates the frantic advance of August 1945. BBC filmmaker Walker won an Emmy for his documentary on the bombing of Hiroshima and brings precision jump-cuts to this synesthesic account of the 20th century's defining event. Beginning his story three weeks before August 6 (with the first test of a bomb some of its creators speculated might incinerate the earth's atmosphere), Walker takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through the memories of American servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians, and the polyglot team of scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project under Gen. Leslie Groves. He establishes the doubts, fears and hopes of the bomb's designers, most of whom participated from a fear that Nazi Germany would break the nuclear threshold first. He nicely retells the story of Japan's selection months before as a target, reflecting the accelerated progress of the war in Europe, and growing concern among U.S. policymakers at the prospect of unthinkable casualties, Japanese as well as American, should an invasion of Japan's "Home Islands" be necessary. Walker conveys above all the bewilderment of Hiroshima's people, victims of a Japanese government controlled by men determined to continue fighting at all costs.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Those who revere John Hersey's Hiroshima as a classic piece of reporting about an act unprecedented in human history -- the instantaneous annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians by human agency -- may approach a new book on the subject with lowered expectations. But in Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (HarperCollins, $26.95), Stephen Walker has painted on a larger canvas, beginning this tale of both ghastly destruction and a gamble to end a protracted war by visiting the site in the New Mexico desert where the atomic bomb was first tested. From then on, he switches back and forth from the United States to the doomed Japanese city, from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to the so-called "Little White House" near Potsdam, Germany, where President Harry Truman got a briefing on the new weapon's progress in late July 1945.

In Hiroshima, Walker zeroes in on the experience of a soldier named Toshiaki Tanaka. Separated from his wife and child by his military duties when the bomb fell, Tanaka went searching for them the next day but knew there was no hope once he found a neighbor, recognizable only by a telltale belt buckle he had worn. Then Tanaka saw "two figures, like charcoal sticks, fused together on the ground, facing what was once the doorway [to the family-owned liquor store]. One of the figures was much smaller than the other, a tiny, shapeless bundle pressed against the other's back, as if somehow clinging to it. He knew immediately this was his wife and baby daughter.

"He stood perfectly still, staring at them. Despite the terrible burns their bones stood out. They were extraordinarily white. He could not understand how it was possible they were so white. He bent down beside them. Then he picked up the bones, placing them one by one in his handkerchief. . . . He walked out into the street that no longer existed and took the bones of his wife and child all the way back to the barracks in Ujina. There he placed them, still in their handkerchief, on a shelf above his bed in his quarters. It was the only home he had left."

See also: Nuclear weapons, then and now. and A portrait of our scary world, 60 years after Hiroshima.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

This book comprehensively surveys the results of research investigation and technologies used to secure, verify, recognize, track, and authenticate objects and information from theft, counterfeiting, and manipulation by unauthorized persons and agencies. This book will draw on the diverse expertise in optical sciences and engineering, digital image processing, imaging systems, information processing, computer based information systems, sensors, detectors, and biometrics to report innovative technologies applied to information security issues. Optical and Digital Techniques for Information Security is the first book in a series focusing on Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. The Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications series focuses on research monographs in the areas of: -Recognition and identification (including optical imaging, biometrics, authentication, verification, and smart surveillance systems) -Biological and chemical threat detection (including biosensors, aerosols, materials detection and forensics) -Secure information systems (including encryption, and optical and photonic systems).

Optical and Digital Techniques for Information Security

Human societies have not always taken on new technology in appropriate ways. Innovations are double-edged swords that transform relationships among people, as well as between human societies and the natural world. Only through successful cultural appropriation can we manage to control the hubris that is fundamental to the innovative, enterprising human spirit; and only by becoming hybrids, combining the human and the technological, will we be able to make effective use of our scientific and technological achievements.

This broad cultural history of technology and science provides a range of stories and reflections about the past, discussing areas such as film, industrial design, and alternative environmental technologies, and including not only European and North American, but also Asian examples, to help resolve the contradictions of contemporary high-tech civilization.

"Hubris and Hybrids is an extremely important book for opening the debate on technology, democracy, science and society, knowledge and responsibility in a period when technology and science are reengineering the earth and our lives."

"Hubris and Hybrids subverts the varied ‘grand narratives’ commonly told about modern technology and science. Hård and Jamison offer an alternative set of well-crafted ‘small narratives’—ranging widely from Denmark to Detroit and from Czechoslovakia to China. These new stories of science and social movements, machine-breaking environmentalism, and the politics of development lay the groundwork for a bold and much needed cultural assessment of technology and science."

Hubris And Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology And Science

Readers who gobbled up Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines and Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open will find more intriguing food for thought here. Hawkins does a good job of outlining current brain research for a general audience, and his enthusiasm for brains is surprisingly contagious.

"[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence,"

Hawkins presents his ideas, with help from New York Times science writer Blakeslee, in chatty, easy-to-grasp language that still respects the brain's technical complexity. He fully anticipates—even welcomes—the controversy he may provoke within the scientific community and admits that he might be wrong, even as he offers a checklist of potential discoveries that could prove him right. His engaging speculations are sure to win fans of authors like Steven Johnson and Daniel Dennett.

Hawkins virtually encapsulates for a popular audience the scientific literature on how the neocortex constructs a model of the world. The author becomes quite detailed in his explanations of memory formation yet never digresses from his core precept that intelligence is prediction. His argument is complex but comprehensible, and his curiosity will intrigue anyone interested in the lessons neurobiology may hold for AI.

On Intelligence

Where did pop physchology come from, and what are its promises-and fallacies? How is it that we have elevated people like Phil McGraw, Theodore Rubin and Wayne Dyer. Stewart Justman traces the inspiration of the pop psychology movement to the utopianism of the 1960s and argues that is consistantly misuses the rhetoric that grew out of the civil rights movement.

Through the channels of the mass media, celebrity psychologists urge us to realize that society has robbed us of our authentic selves. That every moral standard or prohibition imposes on our selfhoods. That what we have inherited from the past is false. That we ourselves are the only truth in a world of lies. That we must challenge "virtually everything." That we must "wipe the slate clean and start over." Each of these "principles" is a commonplace of pop psychology, and each has almost unimaginably radical implications. Where did pop psychology come from, and what are its promises—and fallacies? How is it that we have elevated people like Phil McGraw, Theodore Rubin, Wayne Dyer, M. Scott Peck, Thomas Harris, John Gray, and many other self-help gurus to priestly status in American culture?

In Fool's Paradise, the award-winning essayist Stewart Justman traces the inspiration of the pop psychology movement to the utopianism of the 1960s and argues that it consistently misuses the rhetoric that grew out of the civil rights movement. Speaking as it does in the name of our right to happiness, pop psychology promises liberation from all that interferes with our power to create the selves we want. In so doing, Mr. Justman writes, it not only defies reality but corrodes the traditions and attachments that give depth and richness to human life. His witty and astringent appraisal of the world of pop psychology, which quotes liberally from the most popular sources of advice, is an essential social corrective as well as a vastly entertaining and stimulating book.

Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology

This report builds on a series of roundtable discussions held by CSIS. It provides a basic description of how data-mining techniques work, how they can be used for counterterrorism, and their privacy implications. It also identifies where informed policy development is necessary to address privacy and other issues.

Data Mining and Data Analysis for Counterterrorism [PDF]

... as a collection of bossa nova versions of new wave classics by fetching French and Brazilian chanteuses ...

This unlikely, but mostly happy, marriage of new wave and bossa nova will probably disappoint or displease purists who believe that every version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" should have the brooding intensity of the original, but everyone else can enjoy the album's playful elegance.

Selected dates of live performances:

SAT 09/10 NEW YORK: Joe's Pub
TUES 09/13 NEW YORK: Joe's Pub
WED 09/14 NEW YORK: Canal Room - CMJ
SAT 09/24 SAN FRANCISCO: Bimbo's
MON 09/25 LOS ANGELES: the Hollywood Bowl with DEAD CAN DANCE

Nouvelle Vague

I think you'll find that the insights of this 1998 interview still resonate with many of our current affairs. Often the best advice is timeless and broadly applicable.

Brand: You say in Imagined Worlds that the two human institutions that can think about long-term issues are science and religion. And you raise the question in the book -- a little more than you answer it -- of long-term ethics. It's an area that I'm acutely interested in. How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: But if they're going to be long-term ones, you'd better have some agreement. This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

I'm working on a project, The Long Now Foundation, to encourage long-term responsibility. Esther's on that board, too. We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

Dyson: I'm accustomed to living among very long-lived institutions in England, and I'm always surprised that the rest of the world is so different. At the beginning of Imagined Worlds, I mentioned the avenue of trees at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is an extremely wealthy foundation, founded by Henry VIII with the money he looted from the monasteries. He put his ill-gotten gains into education, much to our benefit. So we pray for his soul once a year. I went to the commemoration feast last March and duly prayed in appropriate Latin. Trinity is an astonishing place because it has been a fantastic producer of great science for 400 years and continues to be so. Beside Henry VIII, we were celebrating the 100th birthday of the electron, which was discovered there by J. J. Thomson. He was appointed professor at the age of 28.

Anyway, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

If you haven't read this book, you might be interested in Rudy Rucker's review of Imagined Worlds. You can also read the first chapter of Imagined Worlds.

Freeman Dyson's Brain, by Stewart Brand | Wired 6.02

Lance Armstrong and his team's abilities to meld strength and strategy -- to thoughtfully plan ahead and to sacrifice today for a big gain tomorrow --- seem to be such fading virtues in American life.

Maybe we have the leaders we deserve. Maybe we just want to admire Lance Armstrong, but not be Lance Armstrong. Too much work. Maybe that's the wristband we should be wearing: Live wrong. Party on. Pay later.

Upon reading this op-ed by Tom Friedman, I was immediately reminded of a 1998 article from Wired Magazine, in which Stewart Brand interviewed Freeman Dyson. The article was entitled Freeman Dyson's Brain. It is worth reading (or rereading) in its own right, so I'll file it separately.

Learning From Lance