Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

  The Light of Days By:   Judy Batalion Reviewed by   Geoffrey W. Sutton The Light of Days is a harrowing and tortuous journey through Poland under the body and soul crushing acts of vicious Nazi aggression experienced by courageous Jewish women who creatively energized Jewish resistance with presence, weapons, and nourishment. Some were destroyed. Some survived. My interest in World War II stems from the stories my parents told of surviving the Nazi blitz of London. Since then, I have read various accounts of the bloody global war. And my wife and I have visited World War II and Holocaust Museums around the world as we learned about the Holocaust . The Light of Days stands out from the rest because it is about the role of women in the Jewish resistance-- a subject about which I had little knowledge. I found the book difficult to read for more than one reason. Despite previous reading about the horror of the Nazi doctors and the brutality of the Nazi invaders, I was sti

  Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment By:    Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein Reviewed by   Geoffrey W. Sutton   We are constantly exposed to opinions. Some of those opinions are judgments. And some of those judgments affect our opportunities to work, obtain healthcare, receive fair treatment by government entities, and earn fair evaluations in school. Some people are paid to make informed judgments. Unfortunately, some judgments are noisy—they vary. Noise is about the differences in judgments that affect our lives. When the authors provide examples of variation in judgments, they are writing about variability in a statistical sense. As a retired professor who taught research and statistics to undergraduate and graduate students, I’m not sure the authors were entirely clear—at least not clear enough for readers who are either new to the concept or haven’t drawn on their statistics knowledge for some years. In any event, I think the book deserves a look be