Jeremy N. Smith

In “Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called ‘Alien,’” Jeremy N. Smith tells a tale of computer intrigue, but not through the eyes of the black hats whose misdeeds have dominated recent political news. Instead, Smith wants you to meet the people behind the help desk — the tech gurus and security consultants standing between us and digital carnage.
Further complicating things, Smith gives every character and company a pseudonym and changes the locations of key events. We are told this is to protect their privacy, but the effect is that Alien, on whom so much is riding, feels distant. This distance is compounded by the fact that “Breaking and Entering” includes long stretches of dialogue and precise details from decades-old events. When you never quite know how much about a character is fictionalized, such precision can make the scenes feel reimagined.… (mere)

For a computer professional, this book is appallingly hard to read. I imagine it would be like reading a book billed as "the story of an elite guitarist", and finding breathless descriptions of the time they deployed a diminished seventh chord, or tuned their low E down to a D.
But in all fairness, I suspect it's not much fun for anyone else, either.

By about midway through the book, I had the strong suspicion that the author was mostly interested in the fact that he's writing a about a Girl Hacker, and in fact, one that he once vaguely knew, and that she sometimes had sex - and this latter fact seems to capture more of his attention than one would expect from a book about an elite woman succeeding in a man's world.

The book could be described as "cinematic", but only if we can use that word as a pejorative. It was hard to decide whether Smith is just a bad writer, or whether he was trying to make it easy for the transition to the screenplay, but his writing is bad in the way contemporary movies are bad. Every punch is telegraphed, characters conveniently wear halos if we're meant to like them, every success is prepped by a litany of the consequences of failure and every setback is a chance to get back up and, darn it, try again. You can hear the soundtrack playing in Smith's head, and he's not a good composer.

But mostly, you can see the set pieces that Smith knows will really kill on the screen, and you can see him writing with one hand on his keyboard and the other thinking about the film rights.

This is all a shame, because underneath the terrible writing about Girl Hacker, there is clearly a fascinating story still waiting to be told, about a real woman who is almost certainly a lot more interesting than the caricature Smith brings to the page (and inevitably, to the screen)

I would love to have that story. Perhaps the real Alien will tell it some time.… (mere)

Given that Congress is in the process of deciding which health care bill will best serve Americans, Jeremy N. Smith's book Epic Measures One Doctor. Seven Billion Patients. is a most timely read.

Although we live in the "Age of Big Data" as Smith states, where we all have Fitbits to track our every step, and you can pay $99 to have your DNA analyzed, it is remarkable that we don't have accurate statistics on what makes people ill and what they die from. In 147 of 192 countries, reliable death certificates do not exist.

Chad Murray, an Oxford graduate, came to believe that his life's mission was to "measure how we sicken and die in order to improve how we live". Murray is a physician and economist, and an extremely driven man. His interest in health care began when his family went to work at a hospital in Niger (he was ten years old).

The hospital had no electricity, water or supplies, but they had plenty of patients. Chad was the pharmacist, errand boy and assisted his father by holding the light so he could perform surgery. He learned how to persevere under difficult conditions.

Because Murray "combined the talents of a demographer and an epidemiologist, a biologist and a doctor, an economist and a policy expert", he was uniquely qualified to see the big picture of disease and mortality.

Murray's prickly personality hurt him when it came to working with others in the political arena. Worldwide organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and the UN led the way in working on health care issues, especially in the arena of childhood mortality.

Many people felt threatened by Murray's assertions that we must get accurate statistics on disease and disability in adults in order to objectively measure the health of the entire world. After working with many established organizations, Murray founded The Institute for Health Matrics and Evaluation, with the help of Bill Gates.

Murray and his staff of many around the world created a matrix that wanted to "turn information into evidence, evidence into action and action into results." They believed that global health is an instrument for social justice.

Epic Measures is not just a book that will interest statistic or math geeks, health care providers and politicians, it is a fascinating look at how the most basic human need- good health- can be achieved through getting accurate information, and once you had that, realistically finding solutions.

Fans of good narrative non-fiction, like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Hidden Figures have found their next great read. And if you want to give your Congressperson a gift, a copy of Epic Measures would help everyone.… (mere)