Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

The Complete Robot brings together most of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the Robot series. It goes on from his early stories and some which are unrelated to the Robot series as it were, while still being about robots. As the book goes on, Asimov builds up the universe that will eventually become the backbone of his science fiction writing.

The short story format works really well for me as I can read a bit, finish a story, then come back to the book later. As a consequence, even though it was almost 700 pages long, it did not feel like a chore to get through.

Some of it is deeply philosophical. Can a robot love? Can it have rights? If you have a pet robot dog, it is less real than having an organic robot dog? How much can you bend the three laws of robotics?

The stories at the beginning were interesting and gave a nice side from everything being in the same universe, but the fiction really comes into its own as the world around it develops. Next I am going to read the Robot novels and continue on to gradually fill in the gap between this and Foundation.

Jon Ronson’s 2012 book “Lost at Sea” looks at the many weird cases he has reported on. There are loads. Over the years Ronson has covered many memorable stories and scandals.

Other times he has just gone for a nosy around. Take Deal or No Deal for example. He takes us inside the strange world of the constantly hyped up contestants. Accommodated together in a hotel in Bristol the producers report back to Noel Edmonds on how everyone is feeling. As Ronson points out:

Endomol realised that isolation makes good cults, and good television

He visits Indigo Children. These are children that have psychic powers, the next evolution if you will. They communicate telepathically, but also on the internet.

He signs up to do Alpha at the Holy Trinity Brompton Church and meets Nicky Gumbel. He does not find god, but he does go on their weekend away to see if anyone starts speaking in tongues. Lots of people do.

In an experiment to see who is offered the most credit cards and loans he sets up a dozen personalities with different magazine subscriptions and hobbies to see what happens. Predictably it is the unemployed gambler who is offed them all.

When he borrows an Aston Martin to re-create one of Bond’s journeys, he cannot help but note that everyone is checking out the car – thus would actually make a rubbish vehicle for a spy.

In a surprise twist he signs himself up to a Paul McKenna week-long workshop headed by NLP co-founder Richard Bandler and finds that NLP actually helps his anxiety. Not sure what to think now.

Finally he ends on a story about actually being lost at sea. Apparently every two weeks someone disappears over the side of the cruise ship. International waters are essentially lawless, especially as cruise companies register their ships in “flag of convenience” countries.

I really enjoyed reading the book as they were all interesting stories. Do not pick it up expecting resolutions though – most of the mysteries are just left unsolved and without conclusion.

I am pleased to unveil my new book, Finland Restaurant Guide.

It is a very short book. I have not visited every restaurant in Finland. Believe it or not, we are not even close. However we have reviewed twelve of the restaurants we visited while in Finland and will be expanding the guide over time.

It is available on Amazon now. I had intended to give it away for free. However, the Kindle Store does not support giving away free books, so I have set it at the minimum price possible – 99p.

In 1954 Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, took a load of mescaline to see what would happen. Mescaline is a hallucinogenic substance that produces a similar result to LCD.

Using his own memories as well as transcripts and records of the events as recorded by an observer he then wrote a short book about it. His conclusion is that it is quite good. Certainly superior to alcohol as it leaves you with no hangover. However, it is difficult to control the length of the trip, which is rather inconvenient.

The Virgin Way: How to Listen, Learn, Laugh and Lead is a 2014 book by Richard Branson in which he dispenses advice.

Some of it reads like a Toastmasters manual. He encourages readers to make notes constantly, and develop their listening skills. Cndense your message down to be short and to the point. Twitter is a great format for this. Keep emails short. Make a pitch document one A4 sheet at the most. Do the same thing with presentations.

Avoid “that said” as it destroys any argument you have just built up. Avoid “no comment” either as it just annoys people.

Be your own customer. He often goes around the Virgin businesses both to talk to his staff but also to play at being a customer and often to make phoney complaints to see how they are handled.

I disagree with him on some things. He is not a big fan of mission statements. I like them because they keep you on purpose. Also, I think the mission statement they came up with for Virgin Mega Stores was nonsense. He said keep it real but theirs was actually full of jargon.

He also cited Kodak as a case of when they were not forward thinking enough because they did not embrace digital. This is probably true. As Steve Jobs pointed out if you do not cannibalise your own market, someone else will. However, Kodak was really killed by the rise of camera phones, something it was difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to predict in advance.

Luck is also a tricky subject. I agree with the phrase “the harder I practice the luckier I get”. However, as Branson himself admitted it is difficult to know where the luck ends and the skill begins. Capital breeds capital so once you have been lucky one, it is a lot easier to be lucky again. That is not to say it doesn’t involve hard work as well though – it is probably both.

He discusses Netflix’s policy of not tracking holiday. I am not sure I would like this as an employee as it kind of admits there is no work life balance outside of the office and forces you to strike an awkward balance between getting your fair share and not taking too much. However, I could definitely be sold on the idea.

The core of The Virgin Way is people-centred. Put your staff first, be fun and develop a great culture in which people are empowered to take a lead. Have lots of staff parties.

Stay nimble and small. Collaboration tails off after you get more than 20 people in a team, so try nd keep projects down to that. Whatever you do, do it with passion.

As the king of atheism in Leeds (because nobody else wanted the job), On the Origin of Species felt like the kind of book that I should have read. However, I never had, partly because it is basically a biology textbook, even if it is written for a more general audience.

In an exciting twist though I discovered an abridged version by Richard Dawkins which was a manageable length.

It is still pretty dull to be honest. I mean, I am sure if I thought about it, I would have known that there was indeed so much to know about pigeons. However, it is difficult to stay focused on that. Unlike Charles, I have never been a member of one pigeon fancier club in London, let alone two.

I think part of the problem was I just knew it all already. Having been in Humanist circles for so long I had been to enough talks, read enough books and debated the naturalistic side so often that I had a good grounding of evolutionary theory already.

As I mentioned in my post about part one most A Song of Ice and Fire novels follow a predictable format of not a lot happening then a bunch of people dying. Again in part two though, there were not actually that many deaths.

George R. R. Martin has never been one for going over dramatic. The Red Wedding was a series finale in the TV series, but was just a part of the story in A Storm of Swords and while brutal, he never went into much detail or spent much time on it. Parts of A Feast for Crows felt similar – it would look much more dramatic on screen than it is written in the book.

I was never really sure whether to call myself an Aldous Huxley fan. Brave New World is one of my favourite books but does one book make you a fan?

To find out, I went back to his first novel, Crome Yellow. The plot is about a group of artists and intellectuals that seem to live out a life as pointless as a Jane Austen character brought forward into the twentieth century.

I didn’t find it that interesting, to be honest.

Amanda Owen is a hill farmer in Swaledale, at the top of the Yorkshire Dales. Typically, I saw an advertisement for her book signing at Waterstone’s two days after the event took place. I had never heard of her, or her book, but it sounded like a good read.

Turns out that it can be pretty hard work up there. Especially when you’re on the hill tops in a slightly Wuthering Heights-esc setting, albeit in the Dales rather than the Moors.

Impassable roads, being occasionally cut-off, power cuts and bats invading my house are probably near the top of my list for things I wouldn’t enjoy too much. Free range children has it’s appeal though. Letting them run around as they wish; getting stuck into farm life.

Though no doubt still a handful when you have seven! She never had long labours, but by the end it was pretty much a slip-and-slide. She would feel “a bit off” a few hours before, no contractions, then when it came time they would slide out in a few minutes. If only all labour was like that.

The book is essentially a biography of how she got from Huddersfield to Ravenseat, with plenty of details of farm life along the way. It’s a cool story.

I felt the tagline of the book was rather misleading, however.

How I left city life behind to raise a family – and a flock

She grew up in Huddersfield, which is a town rather than a city, and she was hardly a city-dweller that wanted to try country life. From an early age she wanted to work with animals and was soon doing freelance farming. Escape to River Cottage this is not.

I did enjoy reading it quite a lot though.

The family are also featured on the documentary series The Dales which I started watching a bit of after the book.

Who Gets What – And Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design is a book by Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth on market design.

He begins by pointing out that not all markets are money driven. Community markets commonly are. Food for example will typically rise and fall in price depending on supply and demand. It’s relatively simple. Many markets are matching markets however. These involve much more complicated transactions.

Take the job market for example. This is not simply supply and demand. You have to both want to go work for a company, and the company has got to want you. I cannot simply turn up at Google’s offices and announce I am starting work. Nor can they demand I come work for them. We have to be matched by agreement. This is common – university applications and martial partners are good examples. These are major issues in our lives.

He then states that a free market is one that works well because of strict rules. The free market is not one where people can do whatever they want but one were the players find a safe environment in which to transact.

This is often not the case in matching markets. Take school applications for example. When I was a kid we lived next to an okay school. However, I wanted to go a better school down the road. The risk was that if I put the good school as first preference and the close school as second preference, I would fail to get into the top school because they had other priority students and fail to get into the okay school because it was over-subscribed from people who had put it as their first preference.

Typically people will instead put the okay school as their first preference to play it safe. This is bad market design because it does not allow participants to express their true preference and often not to get what they actually wanted.

Can you fix this by implementing a market that allows people to express their true preference without the risk? It turns out you can!

Roth describes a multi-round matching algorithm that makes this possible. Here is how it could work for a school system:

• Parents list their true preferences for the schools they want
• Round one starts and each school makes offers based on the students that each school wants (typically based on proximity, or perhaps test results)
• Each student tentatively accepts the the best offer according to their preference
• In round two, the school makes new offers based on the places freed up from rejected offers in the previous round
• Students can then switch their offers if they get a better one, or hold on to their existing offer
• Rounds repeat until there is a stable match for as many people as possible

I am unlikely to have done the algorithm justice. I’m not a Nobel laureate – buy the book if you want to understand it. However, the outcome is that people can list their true preferences without the risk of losing out and everyone gets the best match possible.

Let us take continue with my school problem. I list the good school first and the okay school second. Under a traditional system I could miss out on both. Under this system, it does not matter that I listed my true preferences because the okay school would make me an offer in round one, which even if I didn’t get an offer from the good school, I could still accept. In addition it works better for the schools because the multi-round system means they get the students they most desire who also want to go attend them. Everyone comes out on top so it is in both parties interest to take part.

He also discusses unravelling. This is where a market moves further and further forward. Graduate recruitment is a good example of this. If you wait until people have finished their degree to make a job offer, they have often taken another offer. So you begin making offers earlier, and then everyone does it earlier, so you move even earlier. In the end you are making offers after their first year, without any guarantee they are going to get a good degree at the end!

The university American football bowls were a good example of this. They would often make deals with teams before the year had finished. These teams would then go on to lose a few games and thus the bowls would end up with mediocre teams in the “play-offs”. Exposing limits typically does not work. That is to say “nobody makes offers until this date” participants typically ignore it or make informal deals.

A better solution is to redesign the market so that it is not in their advantage to go early and begin the process of unravelling. In the case of the bowl series, the five major bowls combined to rotate who gets the biggest championship game each year. Getting the top teams and thus far higher viewing figures makes it well worth them only getting it one in five times.

Controls on markets rarely work as well as a well designed market. Take prohibition in the US for example. It didn’t stop people drinking, it just created a black market. Organised crime got involved. This is a big problem because when prohibition ended, the criminals didn’t stop being criminals, they just did something else.

This might be a good lesson for the war on drugs. Not only it is obviously failing to control drug use and supporting organised criminal activity, but even if we decriminalised drugs, which the evidence shows is clearly a good thing, we would also have the legacy of organised crime to mop up.

A better market is also a thicker market. One where there are plenty of buyers and sellers that can be matched. There are a number of ways to do this.

Commoditisation is one. Take coffee for example. If everyone sells individual coffee you need to build up a relationship with each coffee grower to ensure their quality is high. But if you implement national standards and grading, people can buy a specific grade coffee without this information. You can even have a futures market.

Money can be a useful tool for easing congestion in a crowded market. Ticket reselling sites are a good example of this. The ticket market is broken. Gig tickets are typically sold all at one price, even though some people want to attend an event so much that they would be willing to pay a premium. Ideally this would be done at the original point-of-sale, but it isn’t, so the ticket resale market has sprung up to fix this.

Speed is also important. eBay is a good example of this. They have transitioned from an auction format which takes time and there is no guarantee you will win. Now, most transactions are Buy It Now, matching buyers and sellers instantly. Their feedback system is also an example of an evolving market. Initially people would always leave positive feedback for sellers, because otherwise the seller would retaliate. Now, only buyers can leave feedback, so they are free to be honest about bad experiences.

Filtering can also be an issue in over-crowded markets. If you are an attractive woman in online dating, you may receive more messages than you can respond to. Or for popular jobs, a company will receive more applicants than it can sort through. Roth suggests that one way in which a degree can be valuable is almost like a peacock’s tail. If you can show you can deliver on a three year project, it doesn’t matter that it might not be relevant to the job you apply for.

In summary, many markets are not just simple money-driven commodity markets. matching markets are complex and often do not work well or safely. This is a major problem because matching markets affect huge areas of our lives – education, jobs and love! Therefore it is important that we design these markets in such a way as to make them work as well as possible for all participants. Importantly, it is possible to do this with good market design.