K. W. Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

0.3

Chris Hibbert

K. W. Jeter's Farewell Horizontal is a reasonably well-told straightforward hard SF story. The story follows a single character, Ny Axxter, as he wanders around the outside of a free-floating cylindrical habitat. He's a free-lance graffex artist, barely scraping by on the last of his savings, and the very occasional odd job. He recently abandoned life in the "horizontal" internal spaces, and has yet to find a stable role outside the cylinder, where gravity constantly threatens to pull everyone and everything down the wall.

The setting and the conflicts were moderately interesting, but Ny was a little too clueless for my taste. There were several times that Axxter blithely walked into situations that were clearly set-ups of one kind or another. Sometimes he did so against solid advice from people he'd recently met, and other times in the face of clear warning signs.

Even the resolution was a little too much of a set-up for me. Axxter is in sole possession of evidence that the universal information system that everyone trusts and relies on has been subverted, and if he passes it on to the right faction, maybe they'll do something about it, and reward him with a job! Nope, they're in it, too. But Axxter lucks out; it turns out that his private channel to the faction's leaders was leaky, and everyone in and on the habitat got the message, and decided that enough was enough.

Sunny Auyang, How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?

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Chris Hibbert

Sunny Auyang's How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? is the densest and most difficult book I have actually read all the way through. There are sections that seem brilliantly written, and sections that seem absolutely opaque. All together, I didn't learn as much as I had hoped, but I did come to understand a few points about the way QFT suggests we view the world.

"Until now almost all philosophical investigation of quantum theories have either taken the concept of objectivity for granted or prescribed it as some external criterion, according to which the theories are judged. The judgments often deny the objectivity or even the possibility of microscopic knowledge. I adopt the opposite approach. I start with the premise that quantum field theory conveys knowledge of the microscopic world and regard the general meaning of objects as a question whose answer lies within the theory. This work asks quantum field theory to demonstrate its own objectivity by extracting and articulating the general concept of objects it embodies. We try to learn from it, not only the specifics of elementary particles, but also the general nature of the world and our status in it. What general conditions hold for us and the world we are in so that objects, classical and quantum, which are knowable through observations and experiments, constitute reality?"

A large proportion of the book is dedicated to explaining Kant's Categorical Framework, which I'm willing to summarize by saying that everything in the universe consists of objects and their properties, and relations between the objects and between the properties. Many philosophers of QFT have presented a vision of quantum reality in which the quantum objects don't have definite properties except at the moment of measurement. Auyang shows that this isn't the only possible interpretation. Auyang's major goal in writing this book may have been to rescue Kant's Categorical Framework.

"The world described by quantum theories is remote to sensory experiences and is different from the familiar classical world. There are scientific puzzles, such as what happens during the process of measurement. Quantum theories disallow certain questions that we habitually ask about physical things, for example, the moment when a radioactive atom decays. [...] The working interpretation of quantum theories, which physicists use in practice, invokes the concept of observed results as distinct from physical states. [...] These factors prompt many interpreters to adopt the phenomenalist position asserting that quantum objects have no definite property [...] the observer creates what he observes."

Auyang wants readers to see how the world-view she refers to as "Kant's Categorical Framework" applies not just to the classical world, but also to quantum reality. This contrasts with the view presented by many prominent interpreters of QFT, and understood in the popular lingo as "it tells us that there isn't any truth of the matter with respect to quantum objects." Auyang shows how the quantum world can be described in the same objective way as the real world. QFT doesn't undermine our belief that everything is built up out of objects, properties and relations.

"This work presents a parallel analysis of the conceptual structures of quantum field theory and our everyday thinking. I do not try to describe quantum phenomena in substantive classical terms or vice versa. I try to articulate the categorical framework of objective knowledge, of which quantum field theory is one instance and common sense another. The categorical framework enables us to match logically the formal structures of quantum theories and everyday thinking element by element. The structural fit illuminates their philosophical significance."

The main thing I learned about the shape of the universe is that it's improper to think of space-time as fundamental and of objects (and their properties and relations) as inhabiting a pre-existing space-time continuum. Instead, according to QFT, particles and space-time itself are emergent phenomena that arise from the interplay between fermions (matter fields) and bosons (interaction fields). I've seen Feynman diagrams many times before, but I don't remember seeing a statement as clear as Auyang's "In Feynman diagrams, a matter field is [...] represented by a straight line and an interaction field by a wavy line." Section 8 contains this gem along with a table of the fermions and bosons and how they combine to form the four basic interactions (gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak forces). Auyang makes it clear that at the quantum level, the fundamental elements are the fermions and bosons, that bosons mediate all interactions between fermions, and that bosons and fermions are emergent phenomena of something more fundamental.

At the classical level, we're used to objects interacting directly: billiard balls collide and reflect in predictable directions. At the quantum level, bosons meditate the interactions between fermions. Photons, which are colloquially described as half-particles and half-wave aren't particles at all in this sense, they're the entities that mediate the electromagnetic force. Classical photons are just as much an emergent phenomena as electrons are, but they're part of the constellation of interaction fields while electrons are a kind of matter field. Auyang says "space-like separated transformations do not affect each other, for causality demands that physical effects propagate from point to point with finite velocity." That includes everything from billiard balls caroming to planets tugging on every body in the universe. (Though Auyang admits that "the gravitational interaction is not well understood.")

She goes on to explain how to think of the fields as exhausting space time:

Absolute positions are identities of events. There is no identity without an event. [...] Fields, which are spatio-temporally structured matter, exhaust the universe. It is not that the matter fills space-time; rather, the spatio-temporal structure spans the physical universe.

Auyang also attempts to explain (in § 16) how to think about QFT without invoking the consciousness of the observer. Her explanation seems plausible to me, but I'm not sure I ever understood why the standard model required a special status for the observer. Her explanation seems to boil down to arguing that the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation are confused by the claim that quantum mechanics is a complete and final theory. (Apparently the term originates in the 1935 EPR paper.) According to Auyang, later proponents pushed the definition too far, insisting that observation required an observer. Auyang says that the observer is implicit, and to the extent that QM provides a complete theory, it's only a complete theory about quantum objects, so the observation has to be at the quantum, not classical level, in order to be part of the theory. I don't know whether theoretical physicists will accept her argument, but I think that's the interesting test of her argument.

While she is talking about the general concept of objects (§ 15), Auyang makes an observation that seems relevant beyond her intention. She says "When we look around, we see objects, books and pens. The presence of objects is immediate, we do not infer them from sense data." Her point is that we learn that our senses can be in error, and that objects we perceive may not actually be present (due to optical illusions, hallucinations, etc.). But the point is more fundamental: the process of coming to awareness is a process in which our sensory apparatus learns how to lump perceptions together based on in-built notions of permanence, cohesiveness, and various kinds of conservation rules. By the time we're doing anything that can be called thinking, we no longer have (if we ever did) access to raw perceptions; we think and perceive in terms of lumpy objects. Artists have to work hard to learn to see the colors, textures, and contours that make up an image. Greg Egan illustrated this brilliantly in a passage in his novel Diaspora. Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence relies on the same effect at a different level.

Sheri S. Tepper: The Fresco

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Chris Hibbert

Sheri Tepper's The Fresco wasn't very satisfying. The plot is simple: the aliens arrive, promise to solve many of our problems, and cause a few minor disasters before resolving most social issues and welcoming us to apply for membership in the galactic brotherhood. The science is inconsistent, and other than the protagonist, the characters are fairly one-dimensional. Tepper makes a few attempts to show that some of the abilities of the ETs could be explained by nanotech or other sufficiently advanced technology, but she feels free to introduce new tools and powers whenever it suits her fancy. The solutions to social problems (which include unexplained psychological adjustments) are mostly in the too-complex-to-explain-to-the-reader category.

The conflict and action are split between the disasters on Earth caused by the conflicts among ETs about their rules of engagement with us and an exploration of the psychology of the aliens. The local disasters are side-show; the real action concerns the eponymous fresco. The society of the race of ETs that makes first contact is based on wisdom drawn from a set of ancient murals produced by a distant progenitor. The murals are holy enough that they haven't been touched—or cleaned—in many generations. The standard interpretation of their meaning comes from a revered scribe several generations removed from the drawings' creation, and there are clear indications that the murals were already illegible at that point.

The analogy to religions based on frozen interpretations of an ancient text are obvious, though Tepper doesn't dwell on them. In this case, we're merely shown that the ETs have lost any sense of the original meaning, that their society is unstable if they suddenly have to figure things out for themselves, and that an external agent (benevolent humans) can fix everything by ensuring that the accepted interpretation is a benign update of the interpretation everyone is used to.

Unsatisfying morality, unsatisfying epistemology, unsatisfying story-telling.

Tracy Kidder, House

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Chris Hibbert

A friend (thanks Hal) loaned me his copy of Tracy Kidder's House when I mentioned that we were planning a remodel. I think he intended me to take it as a cautionary tale of the hazards of underspecifying the design before beginning work, but I read it more for the interesting story of interpersonal (management) struggles and the details of design and construction.

Many years ago, I thoroughly enjoyed Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder is exceptionally good at showing what is going on when a group works together to build something that is bigger than any of them can manage on their own. There are always political struggles, but it is heartening to see everyone striving to overcome strained interpersonal relations to ensure that the house turns out the best it can.

House is about a new company formed by a small group of experienced carpenters (but inexperienced businessmen) building a house in Massachusetts for a young lawyer under the direction of an architect who is just starting his practice. The house won design awards for the architect, and the lawyer (according to Kidder's story) was happy with the house, but the builders didn't make much money for their effort. The story describes the process of building the house in a fair amount of detail, but the focus is always on negotiations about who will pay for changes, who should have foreseen their necessity, and what was agreed to up front. The builders would have been much happier with the outcome if they had understood better how to write an estimate that left them room for profit. As it was, they were constantly squeezed when the lawyer pushed back on the price of materials and asked for trade-offs to his advantage.

Most of the blame for the particular problems goes to the agreement to proceed with construction before the design was complete. This meant the builders couldn't proof the totality of the design, to ensure, for instance, that there was room for the landing of the grand staircase where the architect was envisioning it. Another acrimonious conflict involved the architect's grand vision for how the greek revival decorations would be built, but this mostly impacted the financial accounting and people's attitudes toward one another without affecting the finished house significantly.

Of course, my reading of all this is heavily influenced by the fact that my father is an architect, that I helped (a little; after the first I was mostly off at college during the construction) him build three different houses, and that I'm a software developer and development manager. I often say that one of the most important lessons for software developers to learn is how to get requirements from a customer. As Extreme Programming points out, the customer isn't in a position to actually say what she wants at the beginning of a project; the designer has to evoke the needs, and show how they might be filled in order to allow the customer to fill in the details that the designer isn't familiar with. XP teaches the developer to make the design visible as early as possible so the customer can react to the parts that work and those that aren't right. When building or remodeling, many parts are harder to change once in place, but there are still opportunities to improve and solidify the design as a project proceeds.

In our own remodel, we've been trying to explain to the contractor that we understand that he expects us to change our minds; we've left room in our budget to make changes as we see how things turn out. He doesn't seem to understand that from a different industry we could understand the kind of flexibility he has to leave himself. Maybe he deals with changes as part of an attitude of adaptiveness, rather than as an articulated understanding of how it affects planning and budgeting. He shows so much flexibility that it's hard at times to pin him down on anything. We did finally get a rough schedule of construction so we can coordinate on the things we have to specify and buy ourselves. (countertops, flooring, new stove, tub, sinks, finish details, etc.) We also have to plan for how and when we will vacate each part of the house, and when we'll have to be out of the house entirely.

House is very engaging. If you have any interest in how houses are put together, or how teams work, there is a lot of meat here. While all the parties try to be tough negotiators at key times, they all want to end up with a beautiful house. Kidder builds a beautiful story out of the process.

Remodel step 1: asbestos removal

We're having a remodel done. We started the process last fall by refinancing the house, and setting aside part of the proceeds for a remodel. (Interest on money from a refinance is deductible if it is used for remodelling. We opened a separate account and are only using those funds for the remodel.)

A few months ago, we actually started planning the details of what we wanted to do, and hired a contractor, etc. If I had thought harder, I would have realized it was going to be an adventure and started writing about it earlier. Eventually, we'll have an additional bedroom, and a refurbished kitchen and master bathroom. I may write more details about the changes in floorplan later.

This past weekend was the first of the exciting parts: before the remodel starts, we needed to have the asbestos-tainted acoustic ceilings removed. We made an appointment a few weeks ago to have the crew show up yesterday, so we knew we had to have the house cleared out by Sunday night. The asbestos removal company said we needed to have all furniture out, all the art off the walls, the drapes and drapery hardward removed and the light fixtures down from the ceilings. We spent most of the day Friday, and all day Saturday and Sunday finishing up. We normally park our cars in the garage, so there's plenty of room to pile everything there. We'll park both cars in the driveway for the next few months.

Yesterday we caught up on sleep, did some errands, and stayed away from the house. When we went by after playing softball, we found that the asbestos removal was complete. Our one surprise was that they had removed the light fixtures, leaving dangling wires. Today I reconnected most of the light fixtures (some are in areas that will be remodelled soon, and aren't worth replacing) and replaced the drapes in the bedrooms.

The cleaners come on Thursday, and we want to have them mop all the floors (the asbestos removal left minor stains everywhere), then we'll set up the bedroom again, and gradually move back in the stuff we're willing to move 4 times. (Late in the remodel, all the hardwood floors will be refinished, and everything on the floor will have to be moved out again.) Everything else will stay in the garage until it's all done.

I'll add photos of the empty house and the clean ceilings shortly.

Thomas Sowell: Black Rednecks and White Liberals

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals reads like a collection of essays. Once you get through the whole thing, it becomes evident that Sowell is marshalling many arguments toward a common point. Since he never says what the point is though, we may not all agree on the point, or even that there is one.

I think the point he's trying to make is that socialization has led America's Blacks into a backwater that stifles individual and group progress, and they need to abandon the culture individually in order to change things. There are chapters intended to show that individual progress is individually rewarding; that slavery isn't to blame for Blacks' current plight; that blacks have fared well in parts of the US in the past; and that culture can push members of a group in a common direction, but it doesn't determine outcomes.

Sowell addresses issues calmly in this book that nearly inevitably generate more heat than light. His publisher and many readers seem to give him more leeway to talk about the causes and effects of black culture than any white academic would be likely to receive. He uses the opportunity well to show how a culture that raises up sloth and an aversion to education will destroy any chance at progress, even of able members of the group. He spends a long time (and the title of the book) trying to show that the culture defended by Blacks isn't their own--Sowell traces its roots to poor white Crackers in Britain. It's not obvious that Sowell's derivation is correct, but if the argument starts the ball rolling on Blacks' coming to disown this disfunctional culture, he'll have done a major favor for all of us.

Two other sections stand out as having value for some audiences. (The history he presents wasn't news to me, but I suspect Sowell is right that Political Correctness is keeping the facts hidden from many people.) "The Real History of Slavery" points out that many other people and ethnic groups have been subject to slavery over the ages (and their descendants did fine a few generations later) in order to argue that it's unreasonable for Blacks to hold onto slavery as an explanation for their current troubles.

"Black Education" describes several high schools and colleges that have been able to routinely turn out educated and successful Blacks. Sowell shows that they did this while enrolling Blacks from all social strata, and didn't limit attendance to students who had already demonstrated academic competence. Sowell shows that in each case, the main difference between these successful schools and others at the time or other current schools was their expectations of the students and their approach to education. Schools with low expectations and lax methods don't produce superior results. Schools that accept inferior teachers (in the name of equal representation on the faculty) or that don't expel students who don't make an effort perform poorly. Sowell, quite explicitly, lays the blame for today's failing schools on "liberals" who insist that it is important to respect students' cultures even when the culture is opposed to achievement.

New Zocalo release; OpenSource JavaMail incorporated

I just published a new release of Zocalo that includes the ability for new users to register for an account. I'm writing this note to report on what I learned from integrating JavaMail into Zocalo about Sun's progress on Open Sourcing the Java libraries. More than a year ago, I started down the path to integrate email into Zocalo for new account creation. On the web today, if users are to create their own accounts without requiring intervention from an administrator, the application pretty much has to be able to send mail. (You can do it just with a captcha to ensure they're a real person, but doing a round-trip confirmation is better, since you can update forgotten passwords, and you end up with the ability to send transaction reports.)

What I discovered at the time was that Sun had announced that they were going to open source all the Java libraries, but hadn't made much progress. The mail libraries hadn't been freed up, and in order to use any of the third-party open email packages I could find, I would have had to require that people installing Zocalo manually download the base package from Sun themselves. This seemed like enough of an additional burden on the installation process that I punted. I actually implemented a rudimentary utility function that would invoke a local process to send mail. I know how to make this work on Linux machines, and it could probably have been coerced into being usable on Macintoshes, but I don't know what it would take to make it work on Windows. And then I never made any use of that functionality, since it didn't seem likely to work on most platforms.

In early July, I decided it was time to revisit the issue, and spent some time searching through the status of Sun's open source efforts. I was pleased and surprised to find that they've actually released a lot of it. (It might be all of Sun's libraries for all I know. I couldn't quickly find an overview, history, or description of the source of all this code.) It all seems to be gathered together at the GlassFish project.

I was able to find the JavaMail area reasonably easily, though figuring out what jars I would need was somewhat harder. And figuring out what the open source terms were took some reading. The license itself seems pretty impenetrable to me, but I was reassured by re-reading the Open Source Definition at Open Source.org. Since OpenSource.org thinks that Sun's CDDL meets their definition, I don't have any qualms about shipping the GlassFish JavaMail libraries with Zocalo.

I then downloaded one of the releases (GlassFish's release numbering is confusing to me; I couldn't easily figure out which version was the best stable release for basic operations), and tried adding one jar file at a time to Zocalo, to see how much I would need to get things running. The GlassFish documentation implies that you have to buy into their whole paradigm to get it to work. There's lots of J2EE stuff, and a JavaBeans Activation Framework, and I don't know what-all. All I want to do is send SMTP mail via someone else's server. The person installing Zocalo will have to specify an SMTP server, and give a password (unless there's something running on the local machine, or the SMTP server is accessed securely on a LAN, but I haven't set those up yet.) I could have included an SMTP server, but the person installing still has to make a secure connection to an external server; it isn't any easier if you're a server than if you're logging in as an SMTP client. In the end, all I needed was activation.jar and mail.jar. No extra XML configuration files, no extra VM parameters, no hassle. There are a few more configuration parameters in Zocalo's startup files, but whatever I did, you'd have to specify the SMTP server and password somewhere.

In the end I was extremely pleased with how easy it was to use Sun's recently released JavaMail package. The 2007.2 release of Zocalo Open Source Prediction Markets makes good use of it, and it wasn't too painful to incorporate.

Thomas Barnett: TED talk

Thomas Barnett (author of "The Pentagon's New Map") gave an entertaining talk for TED. I listened to it via podcast, but re-watched it later, since it was clear from the audio that it was pretty visual. The US has an unstoppable military force. But what comes after it works its magic? You can agree or disagree with his prescriptions, but at least it's a start on discussing a new strategy for the US Military. The book (and apparently his newer book) have a lot more detail and are well worth reading.)

David Warsh: Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations

0.3

Chris Hibbert

David Warsh describes the develpment of economists' models of growth and progress in his book Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations . The story revolves around the origins and consequences of a particular paper ("Endogenous Technological Change" by Paul Romer, 1990) in order to give us a view into the way economists think and the way economic theory evolves.

The book spent more time on personalities and personality clashes that I would have preferred, but Warsh apparently wanted this book to say more about how economists work than about the ideas they've developed. As a result, you have to work a little harder to keep track of how economists' models of progress evolve from Adam Smith to the present.

It shouldn't be a surprise that models of the real world (in any field) usually start simple, and accumulate details as people discover areas where the models' predictions aren't sufficiently clear to answer questions that arise. The thing that's interesting and hard to track when looking backward is remembering where the gaps were, and the order in which the problems were addressed. Warsh traces the earliest descriptions of how business works, and how progress is made to Adam Smith and his description of the division of labor in his Pin Factory example.

But the earliest economists described everything in prose. When the models were formalized, they started out simple. Until quite recently, all formal models of production in an economy were static: they assumed the means of production didn't change over time. Often the eonomists who presented these models explicitly recognized that that was an important factor that was missing from their models, but they still had to start simple in order to have models they could manage.

The path of evolution of the models next added the idea of growth, but assumed that progress was constant and outside the influence of the manufacturers in the model. This allowed the economists to model and describe more sophisticated situations, but didn't match what people could see about how developing countries advanced over time. Romer's contribution to the field was to build a model that made entrepreneurial investments change the cost of doing business and the alternatives available to actors within the model.

Romer's model assumes that the technological advances produced as a side effect of investment are general knowledge (they are non-rival goods), but that some of the benefits can be monopolized by the developer for a time (they are partially excludable). One of the major consequences of this is that the model predicts that trade barriers prevent underdeveloped countries from advancing, and that borders that are open to trade all lesser developed nations to gradually catch up with their trading partners, since they can take advantage of the greater stock of knowledge in the market.

I've read several books over the last few years that point out that the idea of progress is failry recent in human history. Romer's contribution wasn't in noticing it, it was deciding it was important, and figuring out a way of bringing it into the models that economists use. Now that invention, discovery, and the sharing and hoarding of knowledge are explicit in the models, economists' recommendations to policy makers more often point in the direction of investment in education and new technology.

Along the way, Warsh presents an interesting history, and describes other ideas Romer and his colleagues were struggling with and how they led to the particular paths chosen. If you're interested in the history of this particular idea, or how economists (or scientists in general) work, it's an engaging book.

Judith Rich Harris: No Two Alike

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Chris Hibbert

Judith Rich Harris's book No Two Alike is a followup to her previous work, The Nurture Assumption. In her first book, Harris explained that most of the non-genetic affects on the personalities of adults are a result of their interactions with peers rather than with their parents. She pointed out that many people want to believe (and prove) that parents are the major source of their children's personalities. According to The Nurture Assumption, the field of sociology has been confused for several decades and has been trying to distinguish nature and nurture, when they needed to be either distinguishing the effects of heredity from environment, or disentangling the environmental influences which include both parents and peers.

The best tool, according to Harris, for distinguishing the effects of heredity and environment consists of studies of twins. Comparing twins raised together and twins raised apart controls for genetic affects and allows us to see the effect of gross differences in environment. Comparing fraternal twins raised together with identical twins raised together holds the gross environment constant and makes it easier to see what differences are purely genetic.

In the new book, Harris focuses on why twins are so different, in order to isolate the causes of differences that aren't explained by other results. The existing literature says that some proportion of personality differences are due to genetics, and some proportion by each of various environmental causes: parents, wealth, neighborhood, etc. But a significant amount of variation remains that isn't apparently caused by any of these. Her focal example is that even siamese twins have different personalities, and they share all of their genes, and all of the environmental influences that anyone could hope to treat as responsible.

Harris' conclusion (skipping over most of her argument for the moment) is that there must be something driving each of us to be unique, and that means we have to find a distinction to enhance. The bottom line is that a significant part of personality (who we are) isn't determined by factors that we can examine or control. Each individual starts out with an endowment of heredity, and occupies an environment that isn't fully under their control, but the developing personality is still a negotiation between that individual and their context. If the strongest part of their innate tendencies is best suited for a niche that is already filled, they will look for a second best. When two identical individuals struggle to fill the same niche, some factor (random or not) will eventually determine a winner in each particular event, and at some point the effects of competition, if nothing else, will drive them to exploit different strengths. The different choices and different results in competition will magnify any differences, and over a reasonable lifetime, they will become recognizably different people.

Along the way, Harris spends a good deal of effort (successfully) demolishing other possible explanations (differences in environment, combination of nature and nurture, gene-environment interactions, environmental differences within the family, gene-environment correlations, and transferability of learning between situations). At the end she argues that she has demolished all the other possibilities and provided an argument for the one remaining theory (an innate drive for status), and so it must be true. But her argument for the specific mechanism is a little too weak, and it seems plausible that some variation or related description will fit the data a little better. I'm reasonably convinced that something drives us to differentiate, but it may not be purely a status drive. Two possible variations on her theory include drives for attention or to master something.

I found the style of Harris' presentation sometimes compelling, and sometimes distracting. She fit the presentation into the framework of a detective story. The presentation is salted liberally with examples from popular detective stories to show how attentive the detective has to be to details that have distracted other investigators. This worked for me when I was familiar with the detective in question (Sherlock Holmes, Kinsey Milhone), and didn't work when I hadn't read the stories (Alan Grant). I suspect that Holmes is the only one of these that is widely enough known that other readers would feel that they should get the references even when they don't.

On the whole, I think the book was successful in explaining that fundamental differences in personality are effectively the result of an innate drive that causes us to differentiate. The drive makes use of arbitrary differences in the material it has to work with (genes and environment). Parents do make a difference in the lives their children lead, but the ultimate person each child becomes isn't determined by parenting style at any gross level.

Safe Harbor for Prediction Markets

A group of distinguished economists wrote a public letter advocating a legal safe harbor for some small-scale academic prediction markets. I can see why they limited their goals as they did, and I agree that everything they advocated should be legal, but I think they may have limited their objectives just enough to prevent any big wins.

One thing that Prediction Market maven Chris Masse constantly argues is that Prediction Markets on dry subjects need to be accompanied by entertaining questions in order to to keep the audience's attention. The economists had good reasons for shying away from recommending that sports betting should be included, but there are many other topics that diverse markets could include that give traders a reason to check back in. The range from the obvious entertainment questions (movie earnings and oscar winners) to legislative outcomes (bills passing and control of particular legislative bodies) and introduction and market success of new technologies. While these kinds of questions might be out of place on some single-topic markets modelled after the University of Iowa's markets on elections, the internal corporate markets that they also mentioned often use them to help maintain interest. The letter's recommendations that the CFTC "allow contracts that price an economically meaningful risk or uncertainty" unnecessarily limits the kinds of contracts that would be allowed.

Back on the side of supporting the letter's authors again, I'd have to admit that if the CFTC or Congress acts to implement anything resembling the recommendation it would very likely increase Prediction Market activity greatly, and eventually lead to a broader acceptance. If the initial definition is too narrow, however, questions that don't have clear economic implications (in the view of Congress and the regulators) might be stuck offshore for a long time to come.

Helping People find Me

Every once in a while, someone contacts me and says they had been trying to reach me for a while, but had an old email address. Then I find out that the address they have is one I haven't used for a decade or more. Brian Warner suggested that people who have several old, defunct addresses should publish them on the web someplace where Google might find and index them, so people who still have the old address will be able to get back in touch. I set up such a redirector about a month ago, and my old addresses page now comes up as the first result for most of my old addresses. It hasn't yet succeeded in helping someone reach me who couldn't any other way, but it might soon, since some of the easiest places to find my name don't provide working addresses any more.