This edition has 363 words which will take you about 2 minutes to read.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” – Herbert Simon.
Data Exchange podcast
- Key AI and Data Trends for 2021 Our managing editor Jenn Webb organized a mini-panel composed of myself and my podcast co-organizer, Mikio Braun. We preview our annual free Trends Report to be released in Jan/2021. Go to the episode notes to sign up and we’ll send you a copy.
- A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams We speak with Jesse Anderson, Managing Director at the Big Data Institute, about trends in data engineering and about his recent book on Data Teams.
For this end of the year edition I deviate from this newsletter’s standard format. What follows is a collection of books we enjoyed this past year. Many of these titles were featured in previous editions of this newsletter. I hope you enjoy these titles as much as we did and see you in 2021!
Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning
- The Ethical Algorithm
- Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments
- Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future
- Dark Data: Why What You Don’t Know Matters
History, Biography and Profiles
- Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, A Global Manhunt, And The Most Mysterious Market Crash In History
- Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power
- Humankind: A Hopeful History
- The Powerful and the Damned: Lionel Barber’s new diary/memoir, spans his tenure (2005-2020) as editor of one of my daily reads – the Financial Times.
- Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami
- In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century A tour de force that covers the relationship between China, the U.S., and the individual countries that comprise the ASEAN.
- The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
Security and Big Tech
- Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers
- The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, And Our Health–And How We Must Adapt
- No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
- Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
This has been a challenging year and I often found myself perusing photographs and videos I took from past years. Here’s a video from early 2019, taken at Ras Al Khaimah’s Jebel Jais, the longest zipline in the world. Bye 2020 and Happy 2021 to all!
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