'Steve Jobs' Book Reveals Delay In Cancer Surgery; Vow To Destroy Android

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For his upcoming biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson conducted more than 40 interviews with the enigmatic tech leader.

With a book about Steve Jobs' life set to hit real and virtual shelves soon, his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, is appearing on 60 Minutes this Sunday. And as often happens in these cases, portions of the book have hit the web a little ahead of its Oct. 24 publish date.

In particular, the Associated Press has given it a good going-over. And you can see a preview of Isaacson's appearance on the Sunday show below. If you're wondering why 60 Minutes got the interview, please remember that its network, CBS, is a corporate sibling of Simon and Schuster, the new biography's publishers.

Update at noon, ET: You can hear Isaacson discuss his new book on NPR Tuesday, when Morning Edition and Fresh Air will bring you their interviews with the author.

CBS has put a preview of the 60 Minutes interview online:

Our original post continues:

Here are some highlights about the book (titled simply Steve Jobs), gleaned from the AP and around the web:

Cancer Questions: Jobs, who died on Oct. 5 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, reportedly delayed surgery for nine months after learning that he had a tumor indicating a treatable form of the cancer. The AP reports: "Isaacson, quoting Jobs, writes in the book: "'I really didn't want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,' he told me years later with a hint of regret."

Google: After the first Android phones came out, Jobs viewed them as using technology stolen from Apple. Isaacson writes:

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Family Life: As if the story of Jobs' family ties weren't dramatic enough — with the revelation, when he was 32, that his sister is none other than novelist Mona Simpson — it turns out that Simpson tracked down their biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali. And she told Isaacson that Jandali had met Jobs when Jandali ran a restaurant in Silicon Valley — but neither father nor son knew of their biological connection. According to CBS:

"Everybody used to come there," Isaacson says Jandali told Simpson. "Even Steve Jobs used to eat there. Yeah, he was a great tipper."

Jobs reportedly said that the early coincidence "was amazing."

Warning, And Helping, Obama: When he met President Obama late in 2010, Jobs warned the U.S. chief executive's approach to the business world meant he was "headed for a one-term presidency," according the The Huffington Post, which has also acquired a copy of the biography. But the Apple leader also "offered to design political ads for President Obama's 2012 campaign," according to the site.

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TECHNOLOGY, Twitter Analysis Reveals Global Human Moodiness

Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites are often criticized for encouraging people to share thoughts of little consequence, though social scientists are finding these electronic missives, when assembled en masse and analyzed with big data tools, can offer a wealth of new information about how people think and act.
A pair of researchers from Cornell University are the latest to mine social networks for such academic insight. Scott Golder and Michael Macy analyzed 509 million Twitter messages emitted over a period of two years by 2.4 million users across 84 different countries. From this data, they have gleaned that people have the same daily cycle of moods, regardless of their culture or language.
A paper summarizing the work, "Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures," is in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
Beyond the immediate results, the work points to a possible new path in academic research, that of mining social networks for academic insight, the researchers said.
"The paper illustrates the opportunities for doing social and behavioral science in a new way," Macy said. "The growing tendency for human beings all over the globe to interact with one another using digital devices opens opportunities for research that were unimaginable even five years ago."
"Far from seeing conversations as mundane and useless, we see value in the fact that they are real-time, time-stamped messages produced by people on the spot for sharing with their friends," Golder added.
The researchers used Twitter's API (application programming interface) to gather the messages. They set up a six-node cluster to extract the data, which arrived packaged in XML, and converted the results into flat files. They then used a 55-node Hadoop cluster, running at the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing, to analyze the dataset.
The analysis tool they used, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, links specific words to various positive and negative moods. Messages that might include words such as "awesome," "fantastic" or "pretty" could indicate a positive state, whereas words like "remorse," "abandonment," "fear" or "fury" indicate a negative state of some sort.
The results showed people tend to be more chirpy in the morning and during weekends. The messages revealed that they wake up happy and slowly grow more disgruntled and sour as the day goes on, though their affect usually rebounds in the evening. This behavior happens on both weekdays and weekends, though the weekend tweets usually start about two hours later than the weekday ones, perhaps because people are sleeping in.
Even in countries where the weekend is not Saturday and Sunday (in the United Arab Emirates, for instance, people work Sunday through Thursday), these patterns were evident.
While the findings may seem obvious, the Cornell work is actually the first full-scale study to show this behavior in empirical form, the researchers contend. Twitter proved valuable in this study because it captures the affect of the individual in real time, Golder said. Typically, clinical studies are done either by bringing subjects to a lab and watching their behaviors -- an unnatural environment for studying day-to-day activities -- or surveying them, an approach limited by fallibility of the subjects' memories.
Also, some subjects "are just not very good at being aware of what their feelings are," Golder said. "It's a big advantage to access people's words in a setting that is natural and spontaneous."
The work, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, was done under a research group led by Macy, which combines sociologists and computer scientists to pursue computer-assisted social science research projects. Golder's background is in linguistics and computer science. Prior to joining Cornell, he worked as a research scientist for Hewlett-Packard.
The project "required some engineering know-how, and that will be something that will have to be more and more important for empiric social sciences," he said.
Other parties have also been investigating this new technique of analyzing human activities through the quantitative analysis of their written output, a practice some scholars call culturonomics. In 2010, Google Labs launched a text analysis tool that allows researchers to execute numerical text analysis against Google's massive store of digitized books, which dates back centuries.
This week, Google incorporated the tool, called NGram Viewer, directly into its Google Books service.
Also this week, Twitter has released the source code for its Storm stream processing engine, data analysis software that should help researchers and other users analyze multiple Twitter feeds as they are updated.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service.

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