Pam Baker has written a very useful resource for AI beginners and experts alike. Don’t let the “Dummies” title fool you into thinking otherwise. This is also a book that is hard to get your hands around – in that respect it mirrors what GenAI itself is like. Think of it as a practical tutorial into how to incorporate GenAI into your working life to make you a more productive and potent human. It is also not a book that you can read in some linear front-to-back sense: there are far too many tips, tricks, strategies and things to think about as you move through your AI journey. But it is a book that is absolutely essential, especially if you have been frustrated at learning how to better use AI.

Underlying it all is Baker’s understanding on what the winning formula for using GenAI is – to understand that the output from the computer sounds like a human. But to be really effective, the human must think like a machine and tell GenAI what you want with better prompt engineering. (She spends an entire chapter on that subject with lots of practical suggestions that combine the right mix of clarity, context and creativity.  And so you will find out there is a lot more depth to this than you think.) “You must provide the vision, the passion, and the impetus in your prompts,” Baker writes. Part of that exploration is understanding how to best collaborate with GenAI. To that end, she recommends starting with a human team to work together as moderators in crafting prompts and refining the results from the GenAI tool.” The more information the AI has, the more tailored and sophisticated the outputs will be,” she writes.

To that end, Baker used this strategy to create this very book and was the first such effort for its publisher Wiley. She says it took about half the time to write this, when compared to other books that she has written on technology. This gives the book a certain verisimilitude and street cred. This doesn’t mean ripping the output and setting it in type: that would have been a disaster. Instead, she used AI to hone her research and find sources, then go to those citations and find out if they really exist, adding to her own knowledge along the way. “It really sped up the research I needed to do in the early drafts,” she told me. “I still used it to polish the text in my voice. And you still need to draft in chunks and be strategic about what you share with the models that have a public internet connection, because I didn’t want my book to be incorporated into some model.” All of this is to say that you should use AI to figure out what you do best and that will narrow down the most appropriate tools to use to eliminate the more tedious parts.

Baker makes the point that instead of wasting effort on trying to use GenAI to automate jobs and cut costs, we should use it to create rather than eliminate. It is good advice, and her book is chock full of other suggestions on how you can find the sweet spot for your own creative expressions. She has an intriguing section on how to lie to the model to help improve your own productivity, what she calls a “programming correction.” The flip side of this is also important, and she has several suggestions on how to prevent models from generating false information.

She catalogs the various GenAI vendors and their GenAI tools into how they craft different text, audio and visual outputs, and then summarizes several popular uses, such as in generating photorealistic artworks from text descriptions, some of which she has included in this book. She also explodes several AI myths, such as AI will take over the world or lead towards massive unemployment. She has several recommendations on how to stay on top of AI developments, including continuously upskill your knowledge and tools, become more agile to embrace changes in the field, have the right infrastructure in place to run the models, and keep on top of ethical considerations for its use.

By way of context, I have known Baker for decades. We were trying to figure out when we first began working together, and both our memories failed us. Over time, one of us has worked for the other in numerous projects, websites and publications. She is an instructor for LinkedIn Learning, and has written numerous books, including another “Dummies” book on ChatGPT.

Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

• The 1904 World’s Fair which can be seen in modern Forest Park (and this exhibit at the local history museum further documents) and
• The construction of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which first opened in 1859. The garden worked with Frederick Olmsted on a 1890s-era redesign and is a vibrant oasis of natural beauty in the present day.

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Han is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

• The 1904 World’s Fair which can be seen in modern Forest Park (and this exhibit at the local history museum further documents) and
• The construction of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which first opened in 1859. The garden worked with Frederick Olmsted on a 1890s-era redesign and is a vibrant oasis of natural beauty in the present day.

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Hahn is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Normally, I try to write reviews without any spoilers, but the main spoiler has already been revealed in the blurb about this very inventive and realistic novel about a very modern relationship. She has inherited her family business, and falls in love with a handsome gentlemen. What saves this from being another romance is that the business is a casket showroom, and he is actually a representative of Death. His job is to visit someone who is about to die and comfort them in their final moments. It is an interesting conceit, and his business doesn’t get revealed to her until halfway through the novel, at which point their love affair has fully blossomed. The book nicely deals with mutual trust, sharing one’s feelings, and one’s place in the family in a way that is fresh and interesting. This novel could border on the trite or the macabre, but doesn’t. And the topic of death for me personally is a tough one, having lost my adult son a few years ago to cancer. But Evans treats the topic with a great deal of sensitivity and verve, and I won’t give away the ending but this is a book that is interesting and well worth your time as well as well-written. Highly recommended.

Three women nearing 50 share a vacation to celebrate one of them getting divorced. The three share a common tragedy 20-plus years ago involving a grisly mass murder scene in a guesthouse and have since bonded over the experience. This isn’t the most unique plots for a thriller until the bodies start dropping when the vacation turns sour, relationships strain, and the trio meets a mysterious couple of newlyweds. Then things get interesting, and we learn more about the backgrounds of all the parties and try to solve both the original mystery that brought the women together as well as what is happening in the current timeline. One of them puts it quite eloquently when she says she has been listening to the soundtrack of life and she is caught up in her grief over the original grisly murder scene — which somehow she escaped. The characters are finely drawn, and this is the first murder mystery that hinges on an artificial intelligence plot twist which was cleverly conceived. Highly recommended.

I am of two minds with this novel, which chronicles a fictional Jewish family on the north shore of Long Island and how they devolve after the father is kidnapped for a week. The three children are tracked as they grow up into dysfunctional adults with addiction problems, with marital problems, and with various other issues in trying to cope with their father’s ordeal. The Long Island Compromise is really a devil’s bargain — having lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs in America, after escaping the Holocaust, after dealing with numerous anti-semitic people, places, and circumstances. Having grown up on Long Island’s south shore and raised my daughter on the North Shore in a community that mirrors what is described in fictional terms in the novel, this story resonated with me. The excesses experiences with the family’s wealth, and with trying to out-Jew their neighbors is all too real.

So is their reaction to the father’s kidnapping, which manifests itself in different ways to each family member. Some choose avoidance : “any reference to a thing that could later be a trigger to discuss The Thing” — the kidnapping — is a very apt way to describe grief and the fragility of those who are grieving.

So what is there not to like about this book? It isn’t that it cuts too close to home. It isn’t that its scenes of BDSM or drug abuse or numerous hooker and mystic encounters are (as I imagine) too realistic. The descriptions are sometimes just so filled with irony and accuracy that I would often pause while reading to let them sink in. But they could be hard to take for some readers. And for those of you who grew up in suburbia, or who are Jewish, this could be entertaining, poignant, or both. Certainly, its treatment of how families confront their destinies and future potential is laid bare in a way that I haven’t seen very often, and is quite genuine.

The novel is based on this actual kidnapping that happened in the 1970s. Read it here.

One of my guilty pleasures has been watching the videos of Brent Underwood, a 30-something dreamer who for the past four years has been living in the high Sierra ghost town of Cerro Gordo and filming a series of videos for his YouTube Channel. There is now a book that he wrote about his experiences.

I am a big fan of what he is doing, not that I would want to uproot my very comfortable life in St. Louis and move to a place where there is hardly any running water, where you are at the mercy of massive weather systems that can flood or block a torturous eight-mile dirt road for days at a time. A place that is a study in contrasts: at one point, the town’s mines were responsible for creating great wealth in extracting silver, zinc and lead deposits, yet like Ozymadius, very little remains of the town apart from numerous abandoned buildings and lots of memories of the thousands of its former inhabitants.

What resonates with me about Underwood’s personal journey is that he is very honest and articulate about his experiences. The book captures more of his philosophies and musings about human nature. These don’t really come across in the video episodes, which usually center on various construction challenges or averting near-disasters as he is snowed in, flooded out, or at the mercy of contractors that decide to not show up for a promised work session.

Some of these events have been heart-breaking. The old American Hotel, once a centerpiece of the town, burned down at the height of the Covid pandemic. Rebuilding it has required immense quantities of concrete, steel, lumber and water that needed to be trucked up that dirt mountain road and put in place with dozens of volunteers who came to help out the effort. The floods that hit Death Valley also took out the town’s access road not once but twice in quick succession, as the road follows what is normally a dry wash through the mountains and was transformed into a raging river. And the town’s main water source is a creaky Rube Goldberg collection of antique spare parts that is connected 700 feet below ground inside one of the mine’s tunnels. Any one of these things would have sent a normal person heading back down the mountain to seek some less challenging life, but Underwood persists in his quest to bring the town into the modern era.

Underwood often gives himself various challenges: how to operate a backhoe, how to refine silver from the raw ore-bearing rocks he digs out of his mine, how to build a deck from scrap 140-year old wood that has been exposed to the elements, learning how to create a successful video series. “Mastery comes from learning a variety of skill sets and combining them in a way nobody else can,” he writes in his book, which is a theme that I realize I also live my own, somewhat less-frantic life. “I was learning what I loved and learning how to make a living doing that.”

One of the main characters in the book is an elder named Tip who has a great deal of knowledge of local lore and takes Underwood under his wing and share his perspective. Along the way, Tip helps him unlock many of the secrets of the town and its environs, and helps him learn more about himself in the process. Their relationship is astounding, given that many of the  lessons learned happen on the steep cliff sides of the Sierras and hundreds of feet underground as they try to navigate the century-old caverns and tunnels.

Tip is taciturn and dying of cancer but his Jedi wisdom seems to be delivered to Underwood at just the right moments that can be appreciated and where he can learn some important lessons. But unlike the plot lines of numerous movies, this is real life, wrought large at 8000 feet.

“Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life.” You might be surprised to find out that this quote is more than 130 years old, from a law review article co-authored by Louis Brandeis, and inspired by the invention of Kodak film. It appears in a new book “Your Face Belongs to Us,” by Kashmir Hill, a tech reporter for the NY Times. She chronicles the journey of digital facial recognition software, focusing on Clearview AI Inc. from scrappy startup to a powerful player in the field, and exposes their many missteps, failures, and successful inroads into becoming a potent law enforcement tool.

Clearview wasn’t the only tech firm to develop facial recognition software: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Amazon all had various projects that they either developed internally or purchased (Google with Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition and Apple with Polar Rose for example). In either case, these projects were eventually stopped because they were afraid to deploy them, as Hill writes. Facebook, for example, had face recognition projects as early as 2010 “but could afford to bide its time until some other company broke through.” But Facebook didn’t delete the code but merely turned it off, leaving the door open for some future time when perhaps the technology would be more accepted.

She documents one of the biggest challenges: being able to identify people in various candid poses, with dim lighting, with poor resolution street surveillance cameras, and looking away from the ever-seeing lens. Another challenge is legal, with lawsuits coming at Clearview from literally all corners of the globe. Leading the charge is ACLU lawyer James Ferg-Cadima and the state of Illinois, which was an early adopter of biometric privacy.

Clearview has also brought many activists to protest and lobby for restrictions. One shared his opinion that “face recognition should be thought about in the same way we do about nuclear or biological weapons.” Clearview soon “became a punching bag for global privacy regulators,” she writes, and describes several efforts in Europe during the early 2020’s that resulted in various fines and restrictions placed on the company.

Police departments were early adopters of Clearview, thanks to today’s smartphone users that post everything about their lives. That has led to one series of legal challenges which was self-inflicted. Hill documents many cases where the wrong person was identified and then arrested, such as Robert Williams. “It wasn’t a simple matter of an algorithm making a mistake,” she writes. “It was a series of human beings making bad decisions, aided by fallible technology.” She wrote that one for a NY Times article entitled, “Wrongly Accused by an Algorithm.” In many of these wrongful arrest cases, the accused were black men, which could be tracked back to inadequate training data of non-white images. (Facebook had this problem for many years with its image recognition algorithm.)

Some of Clearview’s story is inextricably bound to Hill’s own investigations, where early on she tipped off the company about her interests and was initially blocked from learning more about their technology. Eventually, she would interview Clearview’s CEO Hoan Ton-That numerous times to connect the dots. “It was astonishing that Ton-That had gone from building banal Facebook apps to creating world-changing software,” she sums up his career.

The company was determined to “scrape” the web for personal photos, and today various sources claim they have accumulated more than 30 billion images. All of these images, as she points out, were collected without anyone’s explicit permission. This collection would become infamous and exemplify a world “in which people are prejudged based on choices they’ve made in the past, not their behavior in the present,” she wrote. You could say that on the internet, everyone knows you once were a dog.

She finds that Clearview created a “red list” which would remove certain VIPs from being tracked by its software by government edict. “Being unseen is a privilege.” Unfortunately, it is getting harder and harder to be unseen, because even if you petition Clearview to remote your images from their searches and from public web sources, they still have a copy buried deep within their database. Her book is an essential document about how this technology has evolved, and what we as citizens have to do to protect ourselves.

Accidental superspy Emma is back in this second volume, which can be read independently of the author’s first book chronicling her adventures eluding her Russian counterparts. This time she is put on a Russian’s oligarch’s yacht to try to figure out the cause of one of her fellow secret agent’s death in London. Emma is a delightful character and this book adds to her allure as someone who can kick ass when she needs to but still figure out the subtle tells of the spies around her. The yacht is sailing between Monaco and Barcelona and is the site of numerous near-mishaps and espionage moments that are just a joy to read. The supporting cast from the first book is back making the plot points even more compelling. Highly recommended.