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shanth's reviews
936 reviews
With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
4.0
Fun, thoughtful YA-ish read with the protagonist a lantix chef in training, what's not to like?
Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys
4.0
I picked this up without having read the "prequel", [b:The Litany of Earth|21943848|The Litany of Earth (The Innsmouth Legacy, #0.5)|Ruthanna Emrys|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398031519l/21943848._SX50_.jpg|41247953], and ages since I've picked up any Lovecraft so I'm sure I missed a fair bit of it but the world-building in top-notch, and I really like the upturning of the Lovecraftian fear of the other by showing us the religion from the point of view of an Innsmouth descendent. The ending got a bit convoluted and difficult to follow or felt somewhat unevenly paced but all in all a worthy read, maybe I'll come back to this after reading the rest of the Innsmouth Legacy series.
Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank by Charles B. Ward, Steven Skiena
4.0
Using quantitative analysis (somewhat similar to Google's pagerank) on the english-language Wikipedia's entries to rate historical personalities, the authors come up with a quantifiable measure of their significance. This is an interesting undertaking in and of itself, and while such data mining isn't a replacement for traditional social science (and neither do the authors suggest that), it can be a very useful tool to complement more traditional assessments of the influence/importance of historical figures.
What is interesting is that even though one would expect such an analysis to inherit the biases and blindspots of the dataset they are working with, it actually highlights some of those shortcomings. For instance the authors found that of all the men and women mentioned in Wikipedia, the average significance of women (even though there were far fewer of them) was higher than that of men, implying that the threshold below which people are considered insignificant to warrant encyclopedia entries, is much higher for women than men.
It would be interesting to see the same analysis extended to other large datasets which would give insight into who is considered significant by other cultures and groups of people.
What is interesting is that even though one would expect such an analysis to inherit the biases and blindspots of the dataset they are working with, it actually highlights some of those shortcomings. For instance the authors found that of all the men and women mentioned in Wikipedia, the average significance of women (even though there were far fewer of them) was higher than that of men, implying that the threshold below which people are considered insignificant to warrant encyclopedia entries, is much higher for women than men.
It would be interesting to see the same analysis extended to other large datasets which would give insight into who is considered significant by other cultures and groups of people.