Tag: Books

Numbers Rule

I wanted to read Numbers Rule ever since I spotted a review of it at Mike Trick’s blog (by the way a theorem by Mike Trick is mentioned in the book).

The book is a concise history of voting systems, be it a majority voting system that deals with electing a leader, or with the proper apportionment of parliament seats. While doing that, using high school mathematics, it explains the algorithms that are used to appoint seats in a parliament (narrating the story of how the US Congress decided on the same issue) and gives a brief biography of key persons in the history of voting systems. The book stars Plato, Pliny the younger, Ramon Llull, Cusanus, Borda, Condorset, Laplace, Lewis Carroll, Willcox, Hill, Huntington, Arrow, Gibbard, Satterthwaite, Balinski, Young, Bader and Ofer. Von Neumann also! And I am always fond of books that mention von Neumann.

Reading this book was both educating and amusing. I understood why for some votes Robert’s Rules requires a 2/3 majority, instead of the simple 50% plus one vote. Do you really think that a 50% + 1 is a selection that represents the will of the people? Think again. The book is full of examples of why this is not the case, including strategic voting. It was amusing enough for me while discussing fair apportionment methods because I always had in my mind the proponents of this magic voting system in Greece (which has never been put to the test) that allocates members of parliament is a fair manner. It struck me that for so many years the proponents always mention the fairness of the system but I have never ever seen the mathematics of it documented anywhere. And it is not that it is complex or complicated stuff. But hey, if you put it down on paper you have to deal with reality and the fact that a seat in the parliament cannot be fractional.

The book is heavily focused in the history of the apportionment of seats in the US Congress, but it also makes a brief passing from Eurovision (although the author makes a small error about the voting points) and also discusses the Swiss and Israeli methods of apportioning seats in a Parliament. The Israeli method of party alliances is really interesting. One should not be let down by the heavy US orientation of the book. It is used by the author as an excellent vehicle in order to present apportionment paradoxes.

Arrow’s paradox takes about a chapter in the book, and the author manages to explain to the layman what Arrow proved with his thesis (and with specific references to certain pages of it). If you want to have a quick explanation of why Arrow’s theorem is important start from this chapter.

In the end I liked this book, because it added two more books in my reading list: The Arrow Impossibility Theorem and Fair Representation.

A lot of people speak the word Democracy. Few understand it. Start testing your understanding by reading this book.

Beggars in Spain

“Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. […] Beggars need to help as well as be helped.”

I never knew about Nancy Kress until I listened to the techwise episode where she was the invited guest. And although I still read the IEEE Spectrum, I somehow skipped Someone to watch over me. So I set out to check her work. And I bump into the Beggars in Spain.

Years ago I had a discussion with my good friend N. about whether sleep is a waste of time or not. I still maintain that within the day we’ve got 8 hours for sleep, 8 for work and the rest for commute and life balance. Well, the Beggars in Spain caught on me because they deal with how life could be if we did not need sleep. They deal with the creation (and introduction in our society) of a human species that does not need sleep and hence they get the 8 hours advantage. What would that mean to the economy? What would it mean to the “sleepers”? Would there be discriminations against the “sleepless”? I think I have a lot of liberal friends who would love to read the book. I find it hard to comment on the book without spoilers, but it felt like a nice vacation reading and it has been a long time since I read about science fiction dealing with genetics.

I am now waiting for Yesterday’s Kin.

Anthem

I finally got the time and read Anthem, the 1937 Novella by Ayn Rand. I began reading it from the Project Gutenberg copy, but bought the cheap Kindle edition because it was easier to read on the device. Random thoughts that passed through my mind while reading this fascinating work:

– Gollum
– 1984
– Yoda
– Raft
– Kolmogorov
– Sergei Korolev

and finally:

Chuck D singing “United we stand, yes divided we fall”.

I understand where Rand came from (timeframe and fleeing from Soviet Russia) and why she wrote what she did. But I do not have to agree with her last two chapters.

Flash Boys

“All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. It’s hard to figure this stuff out. There’s no book you can read.”

I first heard about high frequency trading more than 10 years ago from a bright person who occupied the desk next to mine at the lab. I thought it was interesting but I could not foresee what it would come to mean today.

Flash Boys is a book by Michael Lewis that deals with the implications of HFT and dark pools to the stock market. It chronicles the journey of Brad Katsuyama from when he first notices that the market view on his computer screen is an illusion, his effort to understand the mechanisms that rule the market, building a team for the task and ultimately quitting his well paid job in order to create a fair marketplace for the investors. That marketplace is the IEX. I would call the IEX a white pool though.

I like the book for a number reasons: First it is about a good regulator (the cybernetic term). Katsuyama wants to understand something so complicated and complex that no one else really understands. He needs to create a market view that is explainable to investors to the microsecond and according to the book this is done.

The story behind team formation is interesting too. Every member in the team has something in their life worth reading about and they offer value to the team formed. I found lessons in team formation there.

There exists this interesting term called the Regulatorium: a complex system of rules and requirements where each rule is necessary because of another, related rule. This leads to collusion between regulators and those regulated preventing change. And the Flash Boys wanted to change the system.

The moral values of Katsuyama appeal to me. A potential investor asked: “Why does a person take the harder path? It’s a different situation from what you typically see. If it works, he will make money. But he’ll make less” than if he had stayed at RBC.

The technical problems they faced I understood and I loved some of the solutions (“coil the fiber”). I could actually follow this fast paced, well-written chronicle with just a bit of googling for a few financial terms (and I have never dealt with a stock market).

I finished the book with a “damn, I want to work with these guys!”. So Brad, if you ever read this and in need of a remote worker in a different timezone, ping me :)

The Elements of Computing Style

I bought The Elements of Computing Style on an impulse, mainly because it is written by dds and I do not own any of his other books. So I did not even pay attention to the subtitle:

190+ Tips for Busy Knowledge Workers

So what I expected was a book with advise on writing code, or on choosing certain algorithms for solutions of certain (small compared to Big Data) sizes. But this is a productivity book of another kind. It offers advise from when to read email in order to make the most of your available worktime to whether your chair should have arms or not and why. It is written in a clear flowing style and if you’ve ever heard dds speak, you almost listen his voice while reading it. It is not heavy stuff and this makes it an excellent companion for the bus.

Given my aversion to certain word processors I particularly enjoyed advise on how to handle documents with them and picked up a few helpful tips along the way. Travelling advise was fun even though it does not affect me and I find chapter 2 (Work Habits) the most important one since it offers ways to deal with interruptions of the flow:

It can take us more than 15 minutes to enter into such a state of focused attention, and only a trivial interruption to exit from it.

Best advise from the book: LOG YOUR CHANGES

The book is available from Lean Publications which makes it an interesting experiment as it has both a minimum and a suggested price and as you decide how much you’re going to pay for it, you are immediately informed how much of your money goes directly to the author.

Thank you Packt Publishing

I was going through my copy of “Nginx HTTP Server, 2nd edition” when I located a typographical error regarding WordPress installations with nginx. I used the errata submission form provided by the publisher to inform them. A few days later, they replied confirming the error and they offered me a complimentary copy of any of their titles. And so I got “Haskell Financial Data Modeling and Predictive Analytics” :)

Thank you Packt Publishing!