1648 Book Reviews
The Politics of Big Data: Big Data, Big Brother?
A.R. Sætnan, I. Schneider and N. Green (eds),
2018
London, Routledge
346 pp., £105
ISBN 987-1-138-29374-8
Everyone wants their two pennyworth on ‘big data’,
whether or not they have anything insightful to say,
so the sociologists’ contribution in this volume is
surprising for its detail and relevance to statisticians.
The authors immediately recognize the transfor-
mative potential of data, pinpointing ‘aVailability’
(adding another ‘V’ to the established quad of
‘Variety’, ‘Velocity’, ‘Volume’ and ‘Veracity’) of
data to private organizations. For them, exploita-
tion supports the well-worn aphorism ‘data as the
new oil’, but they go deeper, identifying big data as
a promise rather than a commodity, asking whether
this is just imaginative rhetoric. The book derives
from a European conference stream on the subtitle,
focused on impacts on real people, each being the
intersection of several social categories, rather than
abstract measure of inequality between groups. The
chapters range across critical reviews of other schol-
arship and new theoretical developments about
governance and rights, as well as simple cases of
the impacts and experiences.
Individual contributions early on exemplify the
challenge of a book about big data—it is very dif-
ficult to be current given the time taken to produce
it. Although worthy, criticizing a definition of big
data from 2008 does not yield much insight; but
the (2015) blog post published as a chapter is most
apt. Critical depth, social (as opposed to techni-
cal) analysis and synthesis work rather better: they
review deeper impacts on our society, not recent
preoccupations. Compelling writing unravels the
business sentiment and the power relations in the
hype, as well as the security that is gained by collect-
ing every data point against uncertain and strategic
threats—complete security is unattainable. Having
more data motivates for further surveillance which
is itself more about the purpose—an evolved form
of ‘social sorting’: big data disrupt analytical prac-
tices rather than making them simpler.
The authority of academic critiques relies on
their being well informed on technical and insti-
tutional issues, but some of the chapters in this
volume appear to lack that expertise. Most
obviously, the definition of ‘data’ is given cur-
sory attention without much reference to statisti-
cal views—statisticians will need to engage much
more with societal understanding and impacts of
data use.
The authorities cited on the technical nature
of data analytics are rather dated, but a chapter
compellingly sets out the complacent and elitist
language of European institutions about their
transformational potential. The chapter on media is
more interested in people and personalities, includ-
ing international relations, than the issues of gover-
nance and propriety: the stories lack a handle. This
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shows why Edward Snowden’s revelation of govern-
ment surveillance practices has been so difficult, as a
suddenly revealed ‘unknown unknown’ which took
academics by surprise.
The authors know the sociology, and history, of
the topic of each specific chapter very well. Thank-
fully the editors have permitted only minor excur-
sions into Hegel, keeping the book focused on im-
pact on society. In particular, privacy is related to
political autonomy; suggesting this is neglected in
sociology is fair, and in ethics more generally the
conceit of consent needs to be pricked.
Surveillance by interception or intrusion does not
require infrastructure (we transmit our communi-
cations openly, and sensors do the rest), which dis-
tributes its power, affecting young people especially.
And the naivete of the typical Netflix customer is
a useful way of thinking about how people bene-
fit from a service by contributing data. This is a
risk–benefit balance to be struck. Education for dig-
ital literacy has introduced society to ideas of bias,
conspiracy and fakes without instilling more criti-
cal consumption, which needs political rather than
individual action.
The case for big data as a sociological, not tech-
nical, phenomenon is strong: this book serves as
a bridge to understanding for researchers, alerting
statisticians to wider concerns than methods. Statis-
ticians should be pleased if this indicates that the
focus on big data has shifted from sheer size to the
impact on society.
Tom King
E-mail: tk.socstats@gmail.com
Reliability and Availability Engineering: Modeling,
Analysis, and Applications
K. S. Trivedi and A. Bobbio, 2017
New York, Cambridge University Press
726 pp., £63.19
ISBN 978-1-316-16304-7
This book thoroughly examines the dependability
of computing systems and communication net-
works as well as the reliability and availability
aspects encountered in modern systems. It presents
a variety of models and numerous techniques
for analysing such systems. It presents the no-
tion of dependability and provides examples that
assess various dependability measures using

measurement-based and model-based evaluations.
These measures include time to failure, availabi-
lity, reliability, mean time to failure and failure
rate.
One advantage of this book over predeces-
sors is the inclusion of several real world system
case-studies. The book contains all the basic models
developed for system reliability and availability
assessment together with the corresponding algo-
rithms and relevant mathematical details.
The coverage includes non-state-space models,
which are also called combinatorial models, such
as reliability block diagrams, network reliability
and fault trees, system models that can be decom-
posed in elementary, statistically independent
components, and state space models such as
continuous time Markov chains, binary decision
diagrams, dynamic fault trees, Bayesian belief
networks and stochastic Petri nets.
A chapter is dedicated to the study of classical
queuing systems by using continuous time Markov
chain representations. A full three chapters on re-
liability and availability engineering are devoted
to examining non-exponential failure distributions:
one on non-homogeneous continuous time Markov
chains, one on semi-Markov and Markov regen-
erative processes, and one on phase-type expan-
sions.
The authors show how to combine submodels
that capture the behaviour of component and sub-
Book reviews 1649
systems, to build a single comprehensive multilevel
model that can then be applied to case-studies.
An interesting feature is the inclusion of avail-
ability and reliability analysis of various real world
systems. Case-studies include the Boeing 787
airplane, IBM’s blade server system, IBM’s im-
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plementation of the session initiation protocol on
WebSphere, Sun Microsystems’ high availability
platform and Cisco’s router. Several illustrative
examples are presented of software aging,
failure, rejuvenation and recovery—together with
various solution methods. The book also addresses
topics ranging from survivability and performa-
bility (which refers to the combination of
performance and availability metrics) to paramet-
ric uncertainty propagation and cyber security.
The authors demonstrate how complex reliability
models can be solved either analytically in closed
form expressions or numerically by using a software
package. Each chapter contains a list of related
studies as useful supporting material.
This is a very thorough and worthwhile book that
can assist engineers and researchers to assess system
reliability and availability and can serve as a valu-
able resource to educators in the field.
Ilias Iliadis
IBM Research
Zurich
E-mail: ili@zurich.ibm.com