Reviews for Understanding Psychology

The average rating for Understanding Psychology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-09 00:00:00 Edward Brown I was expecting a book about the people who are exploiting "big data". I expected to hear about the people who analyze the huge data sets that are proliferating through our society. There is a little bit of that, but mostly I read about the technology itself, and the myriad of ways in which it is being used in all facets of life. Very interesting, but the title is misleading. The problem is that the author is a journalist, and he writes the book like a memoir of some of his interviews. He mentions some of the buzz words like neural networks, support vector machine, Bayesian inference, but he does not show any understanding of these concepts. The author could have gotten some help from a real technologist, to co-author the book and explain these concepts. There is a lot of discussion about the applications for big data, but very little about the how the algorithms work. I guess my problem is that I am prejudiced against journalists writing books on subjects for which they are not experts. I much prefer to read books by experts in the field, who are also good communicators. On the other hand, the book casts a wide net over many applications for big data. The chapter on medical information was fascinating. Sensors in our homes, and perhaps even in our bodies may allow doctors to remotely monitor our health. The trick is to filter the immense amount of information, and summarize it in an easy-to-digest format. Send out an alert when something isn't right, but make sure that false alarms don't prevail. Big data is being used by politicians, by companies large and small, by retailers, intelligence agencies, and online dating sites. The author describes an interesting experiment he conducted with his wife. They both enrolled on an online dating site, to see if the algorithms would find that they are a good match for one another.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-10-19 00:00:00 Philip Lee well. i thought this would be the next malcolm gladwell, steven levitt masterpiece, but instead it's a book that has a catchy title/cover and even a great premise, but the author (Stephen Baker) fails to deliver much new information about how 'the world is watching our every move.' could've condensed the entire book to a magazine article.