Category Archives: Technology

Like Printing Money by R.A. Cramblitt

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You may have a pretty good guess what the wonks working after hours at 3D printing company 3Make are up to—after all, only a few activities are likely to be Like Printing Money, the name of RA Cramblitt’s new technological crime novel. But, don’t worry, the technology isn’t so dense that it obscures the basic human motivation at work here—greed.

Set in Baltimore, Maryland, the story does evoke the city’s row houses and freeways and the backwoods countryside that’s not really that far away. Baltimore is coming into its own as a location for crime stories, building on the success of author Laura Lippman and the television series, Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire. It’s definitely a city, it has distinct neighborhoods, but it’s not so big as to be fictionally unmanageable—it doesn’t take three hours to drive across town, for example.

An interesting set of characters, Black and white, negotiate Cramblitt’s city streets, and you can be forgiven for not spotting who the star of the show is going to be. At first you may think it’s Bernard Jamal, college hoops player and successful venture capitalist, who’s kidnapped in the first chapter, his long legs folded into the uncomfortable confines of an automobile trunk. In fact, however, the story’s main character is Charlaine Pennington, an investigator in a private detective agency.

Charlaine is working on a case assigned to her by the detective agency owner, Tony Mancuso. It involves 3Make in some way, but she’s received precious little information about what the job entails. She doesn’t like it and objects, and if there’s one thing Charlaine is good at—several things, actually—it’s sticking up for herself. It turns out that Tony himself doesn’t know as much as he’d like to about why the sketchy Russian has hired them.

Something is very wrong at 3Make, and Charlaine and Tony are determined to find out what that is, even before they find the first body. And Jamal may have escaped his captors, but he hasn’t shed his desire to find out who they were and what they were up to. I loved the charming elderly Black man who helps him. Great character!

Cramblitt has a habit of overloading the narrative with back story. He’s good at showing, and I for one could do with a lot less telling. I like to see a novel’s characters in action and figure out their strengths and weaknesses for myself. Like Printing Money is Cramblitt’s first crime novel, though, and he may realize he doesn’t need all that history. The narrative screeches to a stop every time. You can certainly hope there aren’t any technological wizards like 3Make’s Barrett and Chen, working after hours on projects akin to the one exposed in this novel, but the sad truth is, there undoubtedly are. The book gives you fair warning.

confiscated drug money
Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

What Were They Thinking?

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Could the image of a four-drawer filing cabinet, whose drawers extend backwards into, well, near-infinity help explain some of society’s current communication disconnects? In a recent New Yorker article, Jill Lepore suggests you can divide all human knowledge into these four drawers: The little paper label on the top drawer says “Mysteries,” the second is “Facts,” the third is “Numbers,” and the bottom drawer is “Data.”

In her analogy, the Mysteries drawer (drawer 1) contains things only God knows, “like what happens when you’re dead.” In the past, this drawer would have been crowded with speculations on such matters as how distant are the stars, what happened to the dinosaurs, how do cells and molecules and atoms work? Thanks to advances in the sciences, these topics have been moved into the Facts drawer (drawer 2). That drawer “contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment.” The Numbers drawer (drawer 3) holds what you might think: censuses, polls, averages—stuff that can be counted.

It’s drawer 4 on the bottom, “Data,” that captures most of Lepore’s and society’s attention today. Humans cannot know data directly, in her metaphor, but must derive it from a computer. This drawer used to be empty but is now jammed full. More full than we can use with all practicality.

Not only do the drawers collect different types of knowledge and information, they work differently. They follow different logics. You learn about mysteries by revelation and the discipline that studies them is theology. You collect facts “to find the truth” and you study them by way of law, the humanities, and the natural sciences. Numbers are collected in the form of statistics, acquired through measurement, and you study them through the social sciences. Data analysis by computer enables prediction, pattern detection, based on data science.

For any complicated question (the example she uses is mass shootings in the United States), she says “your best bet is to riffle through all four of these drawers.” Each has something useful to contribute. However, the default in recent years has been to reach for that bottom drawer, as if data science contains the only answers. I saw evidence of the shortcomings of this approach in a news story last week about American students’ declining test scores in history and civics. One commentator noted that the data do not point to reasons for the decline. “Ongoing debates over how to teach history may well be getting in the way of actually doing it,” he said. Once the data are there, then what?

Data science certainly doesn’t preclude the need to open the other three drawers; nor does it demand that we renounce “all the other ways of knowing,” Lepore, a historian (drawer 2), says. Her article goes on to discuss other topics, but she also might have considered whether the main reason people today can’t seem to reconcile differing points of view is that they are basing their views on the contents of different drawers.

Another cultural columnist, Virginia Heffernan, writing in the current issue of Wired, pulls all this together in a way that emphasizes the importance of data science in an article about the complexities of manufacturing modern silicon chips, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory.” She calls these chips “the engine of nearly all modern abstraction, from laws to concepts to cognition itself” (drawer 2). The global economy of semiconductor chips (drawer 3) is “as mind-boggling as cryptocurrency markets and derivative securities (drawer 4). Or as certain theologies, ones that feature nano-angels dancing on nano-pins” (drawer 1).

Another danger of over-reliance on technoscience and the hubris that goes with it is one familiar to people as far back as the ancient Greeks, whose myths addressed the world-changing intervention of fire. Just ask Prometheus how that worked out for him.

Further Reading
How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones
Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society, by Sun-ha Hong
“Frankenstein’s warning: the too-familiar hubris of today’s technoscience” by Richard King, The Guardian 30 Apr 2023.

AI: Wild Hopes, Desperate Fears, and Plot Ideas

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Generative artificial intelligence taking over what we thought were uniquely human activities offers of-the-minute plot lines for mystery and crime writers. We’re accustomed to robot reporters covering high school sports and company earnings reports, but ChatGPT and its kin producing the Great American Novel-To-Be? What about AI creating art, video, and audio that mimics specific human voices? Whole new realms of possible crimes open up. A recent Washington Post article calls this an era of “wild hopes and desperate fears.” If the genie isn’t already out of the bottle, it’s certainly punched through the top.

“The capacity for a technology to be used both for good and ill is not unique to generative AI,” the Post article says. Other types of AI tools have downsides too. One that immediately raised skeptical questions is the idea of deploying AI in policing. A recent Guardian article by Jo Callaghan starts by describing the questions such a move would raise. While it makes sense to continue the long-standing practice of sending a robot to check out suspicious packages, San Francisco’s board of supervisors has planned to arm robots with lethal explosives, before pushback caused them to take a step back, maybe only temporarily.

Public confidence in the police has declined sharply in recent years, not just in the United States, but in England and Wales too, Callaghan reports. Meanwhile, it’s a job that “requires hundreds of judgments to be made each day, often under conditions of extreme pressure and uncertainty.” These decisions are informed by a lot of factors unrelated to the situation confronting the officer: past experience, recent trauma, temperament, attitudes and prejudices absorbed from the rest of society. Could AI, presumably relieved of all those extraneous factors, do better? Operate more fairly and efficiently? Maybe, maybe not.

“Narrow AI,” Callaghan explained, can perform specific tasks, like identifying the bomb in that abandoned backpack; “general purpose AI” makes more complicated judgments and decisions, even the kinds public safety personnel must make. The deep learning that enables general purpose AI results from feeding the system huge amounts of data. For example, having been fed millions of photographs of human faces, facial recognition AI can pick out suspects. We see this and other examples of AI creeping into novels and TV cop shows, where, for example, GPS data are used not only to develop “heat maps” of where crimes are likely, but also to predict specific suspects’ likely location or where to look for a missing person. You can see why some authors prefer to set their stories before 1970. The technology is a lot to keep up with.

Callaghan concludes, “Instead of debating what AI will or will not be able to do in the future, we should be asking what we want from our criminal and justice system, and how AI could help us to achieve it.” These are questions crime writers wrestle with too.

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Look It Up!

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Colleagues who heard University College of London professor Dennis Duncan was writing a book about indexes regarded him skeptically, saying, “Isn’t that a bit . . . niche?” He described the experience in a recent American Ancestors Webinar.

His cleverly titled Index, a History of the, turns out to be livelier than those people may have anticipated. Its significance was underscored when it appeared on the front cover of the New York Times Review of Books last February. What’s more, the history of the index is still developing. When we do a Google search, for example, we are not searching the entire Web, we are searching Google’s index of the Web. The possibility that such an index could be manipulated to provide or obscure certain results has thrust indexing into the political arena.

Having an index was such a good idea, Duncan says, that monks invented it simultaneously in two different places, around the start of the 13th century. One of them (Hugh of St. Cher, pictured; the glasses are an anachronism) was based in Paris, and the other (Robert Grosseteste—“big head”) was in Oxford.

St. Cher wanted to index the Bible by recording the occurrences of every word in it. Starting with “a  a  a  a,” which appears four times, the list was alphabetical and was created to facilitate preaching. As long as monks used their Bibles to read and meditate, an index wasn’t necessary, but once they started preaching they needed to navigate the Bible more efficiently. This type of index was like using Control-F, Duncan says.

Grosseteste, by contrast, created an index much more like the ones we’re familiar with. It was a subject index. But he went far afield with the concept, including in his index all the books he’d read. It was a parchment Google.

For the next approximately 150 years, every copy of every book was still hand-lettered (manu-script, manus being Latin for hand). And the copy was not necessarily the same size as the original. As a result, the page numbers and index were copy-specific; what’s on page 50 in the original may be on page 70 in the copy, if the pages are smaller. Once printing was invented, copies were duplicates, page numbers were consistent, and scholars referring to specific content could be sure they were “all on the same page.”

From the beginning, naysayers criticized people for being “index-readers,” rather than working their way through an entire text. This questioning of colleagues’ scholarly rigor reminds me of today’s critics of Wikipedia users and headline-scanners (guilty).

Several well-known battles between intellectuals broke out in indexes. “Brown, Jeremiah, his dullness, 24, 40-45, 213” and the like. A more recent tweak in an index resulted after Norman Mailer refused to let William F. Buckley quote from his letters in Buckley’s book, The Unmaking of the Mayor. When the book came out, Buckley sent Mailer a copy and in the index, next to Mailer’s name, he wrote “Hi!,” knowing that would be the first thing Mailer would look for and calling him out on it.

How a Book Is Made

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Readers and writers alike may enjoy this interactive New York Times feature from a few months back, ICYMI, which shows step-by-step how a book is made. Elizabeth Harris and photographer Thomas Prior followed the progress of Marlon James’s book Moon Witch, Spider King, from its beginning as a Word document somewhere in the cloud to a finished hardcover book you can hold in your hand.

The first step (after Marlon finishes his cloud magic) is producing the brilliantly colored jacket, which is run on a six-color press, 8,000 sheets of paper in a batch. Next, the aptly-named press that prints the actual book pages. It weighs 200,000 pounds, and the rolls of specialty paper books require weigh 800 pounds each—no supply chain paper shortages here!

It’s probably a good idea that authors are nowhere near these presses. Watching the flying ribbon of paper is almost scary, as is wondering whether the pages will arrive at the bindery in the right order. (Eeek! The gathering machine! Trimming! Gluing!) It’s amazing how rarely these pieces of the process do mess up. As many books as I’ve read, handled, skimmed, etc., I’ve seen out-of-order pages or bad trimming once in a very blue moon.

The cardboard covers (call one a “case,” and you’ll pass for a printing insider) then go on. The striking jacket wrappers are folded onto the books. Boxes of finished books are wrapped, sealed, labeled, and ready to ship. Fini! This is a lot more than I knew about producing a book when I was 10, and my mom found me pecking on my sturdy Underwood. “Writing is so hard!” I complained. “It’s almost impossible to make the right side of the lines come out even!”

Who Are You, Really?

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Being bitten by the genealogy bug gives you a ticket to the vast carnival midway of life, with all its delights, haunted houses, and proofs of strength. You can wander into any number of enticing alleyways, all in the name of “research.” Recently, I participated in a Zoom lecture by author Paul Joseph Fronczak who’s written books about his strange history, which was made into the CNN documentary, The Lost Sons.

Ten-year-old Paul Fronczak found some newspaper clippings from the mid-1960s hidden in the family attic. They described how a woman disguised as a nurse had kidnapped a day-old baby boy from the maternity ward of a Midwestern hospital.

Fifteen months later, a toddler boy was found abandoned in northern New Jersey, identified as the missing child, and returned to his parents. The stories he’d found were about him, Paul Fronczak. Although raised in a loving home, Paul always felt like an outsider. In later years, he convinced his parents to get a DNA test, to make sure he was really their missing child. Short answer: he was not. But who was he?

He embarked on a quest to find his biological parents and, if possible, the kidnapped Paul. Again, DNA provided answers as well as new questions. The author Paul’s birth name was Jack Rosenthal, and he was born in New Jersey. (Ironically, he’s grateful to have grown up in the Fronczak home, because the Rosenthal family “was a nightmare.”) Jack Rosenthal’s birth certificate revealed a new mystery. He had a twin sister, as yet unidentified. After six years of effort, Paul did find the Fronczak’s biological son, called Kevin, living in Michigan.

If the Fronczak case weren’t convoluted enough, The Washington Post (paywall) recently covered the story of the Bryntwick family of Montreal. Anne Bryntwick was a single mom in the 1950s, who for a decade had an occasional liaison with a man named Mike Mitchell. Apparently she saw him frequently enough, because, as her son Bob says, she gave birth like clockwork “every year, year and a half.”

Anne raised five children herself, but six of her babies disappeared. As DNA-testing became more popular, information on what happened to these babies began to appear when two of the adopted-out siblings found each other. And they found their brother Bob. All but one of the adopted-out siblings were raised as only children, and, even though they are now in their 70s, they enthusiastically embrace their new-found brothers and sisters.

It seems Mitchell, their father, was selling some of Anne’s babies for $10,000 apiece to U.S. and Canadian couples desperate for adoption. Laws at the time didn’t ban such sales, and poor, uneducated women like Anne were ripe for exploitation. Meanwhile, Mitchell was married to another woman, with whom he had eight more children.

“DNA doesn’t like, people lie,” says one of the adopted-out sisters. And lying was easier when people didn’t discuss certain things. Some families still don’t. The other Rosenthal children are not interested in meeting their brother Paul, nor are most of the Bryntwick half-siblings, children of the married couple. Both of these sagas are eye-popping reads!

True Identity by Paul Fronczak

Power in the Blood

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Highly recommended is debut fiction author Hiawatha Bray’s entertaining new techno-thriller, set mostly in Boston. Like Bray himself, his protagonist, Weldon Drake, is a technology reporter for a leading newspaper, and both are deacons in an African-American Baptist Church.

Late one night, MIT graduate student Astrid Nelson is stabbed in the basement of Drake’s church. The motive for the attack is unclear, but the victim’s phone and laptop are missing. Days later, when she can finally talk, she tells Drake she’s been working with an international team of hackers on a secret botnet protection project. The day she was attacked, another member of her team was murdered in Germany.

She explains to Drake they are trying to thwart a botnet created for a worldwide attack on the banking industry. Bray’s descriptions of the botnet and other elements of the cyber attack are not overly technical but convincingly convey their dangers, and there’s plenty of danger to come in the physical world as well.

As he pursues leads from Astrid, Drake concludes her team members are not trying to protect the banking system. Rather, they seem more interested in increasing the attack’s destructiveness. Finally, Astrid confesses that, as launch time neared, she and the German hacker got cold feet and tried to call it off. In a flash, they went from insider to expendable. Now Drake is a target too.

The character of Drake has a number of interesting attributes. He says he has antisocial personality disorder, but what he’s really missing seems to be empathy. At least he says he doesn’t care about other people’s problems and that his church activities are a way to compensate.But I don’t quite buy it. For example, Drake has good relations with his friend, Boston PD detective and fellow deacon, Damon Carter, and they candidly discuss the tricky issue of how a black man must behave in encounters with white police officers. You may wonder whether a lifetime of such experiences has contributed to Drake’s tamped-down emotional responses.

The author has written for The Boston Globe, Wired, and Fast Company, so you’d expect him to write well, and he does. You keep cheering Drake on in part because he’s quite funny and shows excellent psychological insight. And I haven’t even mentioned his intriguing descriptions of how he uses a flight simulator to overcome his fear of flying.

The dangers of cybercrime are front and center in this book, along with the risks involved in an increasingly connected world. If you worry that the Powers That Be don’t take these risks seriously enough, this story won’t reassure you. Not only has the author crafted a timely adventure, he’s peopled it with believable, complex characters. You’ll be rooting for Weldon Drake all the way. A great read!

Can Hardware Help You Write?

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Discussion boards for fiction writers frequently discuss book-writing software, and writers weigh in on their favorites—Scrivener, Final Draft, and others, including LivingWriter, which was named “Best Book Writing Software of 2021” by Ameridian. These programs are designed to overcome the shortcomings of “the No. 2 pencil of the digital age”—that is, Word. Word, some authors say, is simply not designed for them, with its distracting toolbars, its ease of making changes that invites endless revisions, the hyperlinks that encourage disappearing down research rabbit-holes. Could “distraction-free” writing apps help?

Is it time for a rethink of the whole word processing thing? In a recent New Yorker article, Julian Lucas seems to say “yes,” and he’s not the only one. The industry has heard the complaints—even shares them—and has responded with focused writing tools and devices. For example, some have developed tools that make it harder to make constant revisions, in some cases going so far as to eliminate the backspace key. (Yet, I’m reminded of why the ability to make changes is so valuable. In her letters, Flannery O’Connor, miserable with lupus, repeatedly complained about needing to retype whole novels in order to accommodate her changes.)

In general, these new writing devices are stripped-down. Distractions discarded. Lucas’s first such device was the Swiss-developed iA Writer. It was designed to do one thing right—write. Or, as its developer hoped, “eliminating the agony of choice.”

The Freewrite Smart Typewriter (pictured above) is a stand-alone word processor that shows only ten lines of text at a time. Rewriting as you go is difficult. The machine encourages you to just keep going. Text is saved to the cloud and synced with your “real” computer for later editing.

If you like to mark up your text with scribbles, arrows, and underlines, word processing is a clunky way to do it. The reMarkable is “digital paper” that responds to a special stylus, “a computer disguised as a non-computer,” Lucas says. Call it an antidote to distraction, as described in this promotional video. Apparently academics especially are attracted to the improved mental focus and are taking up the remarkable. Competitors are appearing.

Lucas’s article contains more examples of dedicated work-processing hardware, as companies try to adapt writing devices “to our selves and to our circumstances.” For myself, I’ve never thought of distraction as a problem. When I’m in the middle of writing and need to look something up, I switch over to the Internet to answer my question and learn more. Not doing so is a little niggling loose end that’s more distracting than the menus and toolbars. Everyone has to find their own best toolkit.

Amazon: All About Customer Experience?

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Millions of people have benefited from Amazon’s single-minded quest to create frictionless commerce. Pretty much everything it might occur to us to want—from a book to laundry detergent to a snow blower—arrives, if not overnight, well before we’ve forgotten ordering it. Customer reviews, price comparisons, and Q&As guide our choices and let us weigh in with praise or complaints.

Behind that wall of customer-facing information is a lot of other information. About us. Information we have trusted the company with. Yet it seems Amazon has done a remarkably poor job minding that particular store. In the current issue of Wired, Will Evans writes about “Amazon’s Dark Secret”—one that’s been obscured by Amazon’s disingenuous assertions that privacy is “sewn into” everything the company does. (Read the full eye-popping article from Reveal and Wired here.)

Too many of the company’s 575,000 employees worldwide have access to customer data. This has allowed low-level employees to snoop on purchases made by celebs, to use customer data to help third-party sellers sabotage their competitors, to mess with Amazon’s product review system, and to enable sale of low-quality knock-off products.

Our data were so readily available that, for years, Amazon didn’t even know where the relevant databases—including credit card numbers—were. Funny, hackers could find them. If a design team wanted a database, it was readily available to them. If they made a copy, no one in the company security apparatus knew. In short, “Amazon had thieves in its house and sensitive data streaming out beyond its walls.”

Management for years turned a blind eye to these problems. Raising a red flag was a good way for an employee, including members of the too-small security staff, to get shut down or shut out. The whole edifice became shakier when the EU established its General Data Protection Regulation, and Amazon, like every other company dealing with EU members’ citizens, had to comply by the May 2018 deadline.

Amazon spokespeople deny the general tenor of the article and emphasize progress that’s been made, but you might want to read the whole electrifying saga. Bits and pieces of this story have been coming out for several years, but like Gerald Posner’s excellent God’s Bankers, pulling all these stories together in a coherent narrative, as here, makes for a compelling indictment.

The 21st Century P.I.

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Writers who focus on stories about crime are doubtless aware that the job description of today’s private detective has expanded dramatically. Tyler Maroney in his book: How Corporate Intelligence is Reshaping the World, looks far beyond the old-fashioned gumshoe, sitting in his beater, chain-smoking and sipping from a flask outside a no-tell motel. In fact, several of the books I’ve enjoyed most this year take advantage of investigators’ diverse roles–like New Jersey Noir: Cape May, and The Measure of Time.

Says Maroney, who has his own firm, Quest Research & Investigations, America’s 35,000 private investigators “are everywhere,” working for a long list of clients–large companies, government agencies, A-list movie stars, professional athletes, non-profits, sovereign nations, media organizations, and business tycoons. They work for lawyers preparing cases and politicians running for office. Why are they hired? To uncover wrongdoing, right wrongs (real or perceived), satisfy curiosity, and find someone or something, for revenge or competitive advantage. Sometimes the hiring is in a worthy cause, and sometimes it’s merely to feed paranoia.

The book describe a series of interesting cases, among them, helping a civil rights law firm free a wrongly incarcerated client, using computer forensics to ferret out employee fraud, conducting background checks on company executives before a client invests, recovering assets from American debtors hiding abroad, and negotiating with foreign strongmen. In the chapter on a surveillance assignment, he says (and this will be contrary to every television show you’ve ever seen), investigators cannot lie to a subject, they cannot impersonate or deceive. In many states, they cannot fabricate their identities. Despite the many prohibitions, Maroney says, “about once a month in my job, someone asks me to break the law.”

There are good stories here and no doubt equally good ones buried in some of those illegal requests. Enough story ideas to last the decade!

The sheer variety of the work is fascinating, especially for those who write about crime and what it takes to ensure an investigator’s clients “get the hidden information they need. We are lubricant, bandage, and weapon.”

Find it on Amazon or at your local indie bookstore.