Books

Zero to One, is one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read in a while. Thought provoking in that it challenges and structures entrepreneurial activities. Alternatively this book is about the lies people tell. ‘Zero to one’ begins a single, simple, question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Generally an easy answer to this question is also a bad answer. Bad because: they are not important, not a truth, or already agreed by lots of people. ...

tl;dr Adapting to technical change is the best strategy, but how should structural unemployment be tackled, and will there continue to be enough new jobs? “Technical change and employment”, was published in 1979 and still bears strong resemblance to technical change and employment discussions today, albeit for rather different technical changes. At the time of writing the advent of electronics was a key driver of discussion, whereas the coming of artificial intelligence and machine learning are key drivers of today. ...

tl;dr A book detailing the architecture of data-based graphics For my first review I wanted to start with one of my favourite books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. This book covers, with excellent detail, the world of ‘graphs’ in particular graphs that deal with numerical (quantitative) information, hence the name. Tufte argues that a well designed and presented visualisation or graphical display of information delivers far more value than a table of values would or could ever produce. For example Anscombe’s quartet is a set of 4 datasets with nearly identical descriptive/summary statistics but which are very clearly widely different when visualised (mean, variance, linear regression equation, and correlation co-efficient are identical to 2 decimal places) ...