The Next Factory of the World. How Chinese Investment is Reshaping Africa. Irene Yuan Sun. 2017.  ISBN 9781633692817.  A thoughtful analysis of the similarities of Africa and China in how Africa could replicate China’s jump from an agrarian to a manufacturing country in a very short order.  The author makes some very good , logical points as to how this could be achieved. IN many ways Africa is exactly like China was just one generation ago.  The same Chinese businessmen who made this jump in China are now doing the same in Africa.  And Africa does have the poverty level farmers who would see a low wage industrial job as a step up. Plus by working for these Chinese businesses the Africans can learn how to do run a factory and eventually have factories of their own. The Chinese have recent experience with corruption at home so they know how to deal with African corruption.  I was interested to read that the bulk of investment is from private Chinese firms, not the famous Chinese zombie state enterprises.   From a Western perspective we may be losing sight of how simple this could be as we are too far along the technology path. A delightful and useful read.

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Use of Force. Brad Thor.  2017. ISBN 9780476789385, To the Cussler fans comes another author in the thriller, special forces genre. fast paced, recognizable characters and topical this is a decent book for your summer reading.  The research seems germane and the pace does not let up.

Rethinking the Internet of Things. A scalable approach to connecting everything. Francis daCosta. 2013. ISBN 978043025740053999.  This book won the 2014 Jolt award. It is available as a free download from Springer.    A proposed architecture of the Internet of things based on the sheer numbers of the sensors that are and will be available being not suited to a traditional TCP/IPv6 architecture. The author sees a tiered collection approach. Sensors  ( some to many ) that “chirp” connect to collectors  ( usually one way) to propagator nodes (with IPv6)  to and then on to integrator/analyzer functions.  Its a fascinating read that makes some good arguments for this type of architecture.  Does this match with the growing push for the Iot to be a bottom up, open architecture that is not tied to any vendor cw proprietary  technologies remains to be seen.

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