The reviewer may have been making the same comment in the 2nd and 3rd sentences with "[...] in more sophisticated detail than any other work in print," and, "The book will be of interest [...] to anyone interested in understanding what a [work of this kind] can look like." And in the 2nd-to-last paragraph as well, "Gerken takes great care -- perhaps a bit too much care at times".
In the US criminal justice system (and likely most others), there is no standard for how to systematically compare fingerprint images--as distinguished from scanning a finger itself. The biometric machines are good at saying, "the surface being scanned has the features I'm looking for." But they can't take a latent print (e.g. lifted from a drinking glass or door knob) and match it to another (including one made "professionally" with an ink blotter) in a defensible way.
It turns out that fingerprint examination depends hugely on examiner judgement. That judgement is quite susceptible to several biases, such as a detective saying, "hey, we've got prints and someone in custody, can you match the prints?"
TV shows like CSI etc. have trained us to think of fingerprint identification of criminals as something like public/private key signing, but it's not nearly that trustworthy. The error rate is in the neighborhood of 15-30%!
The result is that fingerprint-comparison results are presented as facts when they are closer to guesses. This ends up convicting innocent people and letting guilty people go free.
If you would like to work on this, please contact me!
What about engaging her in a get-to-know-you conversation? Maybe you'd discover a different way to help (or how to send the money! :) ). Maybe she has something to offer you!
Oh yeah, Dollar Street (what that talk is based on) is a great project!
"In the news people in other cultures seem stranger than they are.
We visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos.
We sorted the homes by income, from left to right."
Good question. Or maybe in the direction of Professor Xavier's machine that (IIRC) taps him into zillions of people's experiences in parallel, but also with bar graphs? Feel everything and then zoom in to the specific?
A pretty effective approach is something like ICIJ has done https://projects.icij.org/fatalextraction/
We're working on generating those efficiently from collected data, but you still need an author of sorts.
Ultimately that's still in the slide deck realm, though.
A possibly less familiar solution is what's called Executive Briefing Centers that can get pretty Minority Report-like: a wall of screens with an interactive display (mouse/keyboard/script driven). Those presentations are curated and composed (think $100k slide decks or maybe a 1-off immersive video game) to get deep into understanding how a customer segment would experience a new product in a new store (is what I've seen).
Folks like IDEO have done some experiments with 3D cameras and VR.
When I've tried it, I found the non-eye-contact disturbing ("And you can't smell the shit," as a friend put it). It's one thing to not speak the language. Quite another to not know what the ritual you're observing means to the participants (the VR scene I'm thinking of dropped you into a "sacred African dance around a fire").
An important distinction here is about reporting vs interacting.
We say interaction is paramount. But it doesn't really scale--numbers do. That's kindof the point of the article: both have their place.
The goal isn't to traumatize _more_ people, it's to communicate--effect a sharing of worlds--with the hope of breaking cycles of trauma and violence. Like some counseling techniques, maybe numeric abstraction provides a necessary distance from the immediacy of experience that allows us to get a handle on things and make change.
Insight Share and the participatory video folks are pushing the limits with current tech. There you get into enabling folks to solve their own problems, no need to convince donors.
There's an empowering irony in using iPhones or Occuli to interview tantalum/coltan/tin miners. But I bet if we asked them, they'd have some pretty sweet ideas for where/how to direct the talent and resources being used to develop the devices to help them...
Did a quick skim through what Amazon Look Inside provides. It definitely looks worth checking out (all copies are in use at the SF pub lib).
I think I've seen Mr Rosling's presentation on birthrates before, IIRC something to the effect of: Our "first world" assumption that might drive policy decisions is that "all the poor people" are having seemingly unlimited babies, when actually e.g. Bangladesh is at or almost below replacement. Global population will peak at ~10 billion in 2050 and then decline. Africa is still a variable. (These are from foggy memory, but match what I skimmed).
It's compelling and hopeful work!
The projects I have in mind are monitoring & evaluation ones that some of our customers have done. (This gets a little deeper into methods, but still extends the conversation)
E.g. as follow-up on World Food Program food distribution projects: A standard food security questionnaire asks something like, "when you're out of food, do you starve, borrow, or steal?" On paper that's all you get, those 3 dimensions.
A different approach had an evaluator show video clips of local people talking (scripted) about doing those things. Beneficiaries are asked to pick which video best matches what they do. Then the evaluator interviews them about why they made their choice. It opens up dialog. The best example was the man who said, "Oh, I'm fine about food. But the video I picked showed that all tress are cut down in the background. We like your food, but it would be better if you would plant trees so we could go back to farming the way we know how." ...the recommendation and ensuing follow-up was a tree planting campaign!
So, to connect it back to the article, maybe, "Do all those people want to be riding buses, living in sky scrapers, ...?"
From a different angle, that brings to mind Seth Chase's excellent doc "We Will Win Peace" (https://www.kanopy.com/product/we-will-win-peace). Looks at the "popular" perception of conflict minerals economic issues in central Africa vs reality, ensuing US policies based on perceptions, and ensuing negative impact. (BTW If you ever need a filmographer, Seth is great!)
We run into similar challenges of scale and experience in humanitarian/aid work. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers of suffering people when the primary dimension of representing them is something like "food consumption." Stats are vital for the logistics of meeting acute needs, but they erase (abstract out) the rich dynamics of human life.
You might think photos would help, but the endless stream of images of "starving people" ends up being cumulative, compounding the matter.
Projects that systematically dig into the lived experience of beneficiaries and treat them as complex social beings start to bridge that gap. They not only dignify the people involved (providers and beneficiaries both), but also often discover systemic issues that "the numbers" would never reveal.
I wonder what conversations the author had with people who lived there (genuine question, not a criticism).
The .db file can change, even if the data/records don't.
One approach is to dump the sql to text and store that in git. (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/846665)
"Generally accepted" by whom? In General Aviation (think 4-seat "Cessnas" as opposed to commercial/airlines), you are far less likely to be involved in an accident than if you are driving a car. But GA accidents are likely to be much worse than auto accidents.
Auto drivers take the same kind of weather and maintenance risks when trying to conform to a schedule (when is the last time you went over 55mph on the 101 in the rain to catch a flight?). GxP for pilot training and cockpit management implore a "Safety First" approach, but it all still comes down to pilot decision making (which must be distinguished from "licensing rigor").
"Motorcycle with a parachute" is a pretty good way to describe this (although really it's a dune-buggy with a parachute--it has a roll cage and seatbelts). Looks less dangerous than a fixed-wing aircraft for the pilot and passengers (parachute landing at very slow speeds). Certainly less dangerous for the human and other "obstacles." So, low risk to you (less than your neighbor's SUV, for sure).