Braun has a particular fondness for debunking headline-making research that is not supported by following studies or where the headline soundbite misses important qualifying aspects of the research (perspective is applied to the factoids “alcohol kills brain cells,” and “red wine reduces risk of heart disease,” for instance).

On a personal note, I’m entering day six of my attempt to ratchet down my own caffeine consumption. A key fact from Braun’s book that the “half-life” of caffeine in the body is roughly 5 hours has helped me establish my transitional caffeine schedule.

One caveat: Buzz was published in 1996 and has not been revised; I’m certainly not qualified to assess how scientific understanding has changed in the intervening years.

Dept.-of-neither-here-nor-there: Buzz is the first book I’ve noticed that is available for the nook but not the Kindle, but it’s a whopping forty-one bucks in Barnes and Noble’s e-book format. Can you say “hello, library!”? I can.

needs more demons? Not really, but a glossary might not have been amiss for readers who (like me) have a smidge of trouble keeping receptors and organic compounds straight after a while.

Standage with opens Herschel’s discovery of Uranus by way of background, pays some attention to the contention-fraught business of planet naming, discusses “Bode’s law” and the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, and goes beyond Neptune to Pluto and other similar objects that were never called planets — and even beyond that to extrasolar planets, which take the radical idea to its ultimate conclusion: since planets around other stars are too distant to observe directly with an optical telescope, the only way to find them is through the pertuberances of orbits. (Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system don’t actually orbit the sun; the sun and the planets orbit their mutual center of gravity. Since the sun is far more massive than the sum of the planets, this basically means the sun wobbles a little bit, and through similar wobbles the presence of planets around other stars can be detected.)

The previous two books of Standage’s that I read, The Victorian Internet and The Turk were so lively and well-written that I recommended them to pretty much anyone, not just those with an interest in history. The Neptune File perhaps has less sizzle. I wouldn’t push it on someone with no interest whatsoever in astronomy, or someone with no tolerance for history. But if the phrase “astronomical history” makes your eyes light up a little (instead of glaze over…) this is a definite must-read.

needs more demons? no.

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

The Ghost Map is smart and ambitious, but it’s also remarkably accessible and readable, even gripping. Johnson impressively juggles human and intellectual interest throughout.

My only real criticism is that I wish the endnotes were footnoted in the text. Since they’re not, reading The Ghost Map required two bookmarks, one for my place in the text, and the other to for my place in the endnotes. You will note the underlying implication: even the endnotes were (often) interesting.

needs more demons? not a bit of it.

Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright date is 1998).

Standage’s capable hands bring to life the colorful personalities of the architects of the “Victorian Internet” — not only Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, but also Claude Chappe, one of the developers of the pre-electric telegraphs; William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, the rivalry-locked British counterparts of Morse, and the hapless Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, who played a ill-starred role in the struggle to lay transatlantic cables.

Along the way, Standage provides ample evidence to support his titular conceit: that the impact of the telegraph on the late 19th century was remarkably like the impact of the Internet on the late 20th century. He provides numerous examples of how technological change caused social change in ways that will seem familiar to modern readers: increasing the pace of business, advancing egalitarianism, online dating, online scamming, government attempts to regulate cryptography with limited success, and so forth.

Standage’s balance of human interest with history and science is, for my taste, just about perfect. He provides enough technical perspective on the electricity that makes the telegraph possible that the book doesn’t feel glib or lightweight, but the narrative is fast-paced and engaging throughout.

needs more demons? Nope.

The connections to Potter’s magical universe often seemed awkward and forced to me, if not actually intrusive. Highfield makes a few specific suggestions, for instance, that Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat could have a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID for short) inside it. I suspect these will draw the same reaction from many readers as explaining the physics of rainbows to people who would rather just think they’re pretty. So if I’m correct that people who’d just as soon read a science book will be annoyed by the Potter-isms every few pages, and true Potter fans will be put off by explaining away the magic of the books, I’m really not sure who’s left.

It did, however, feature a rather unfortunate paragraph that raised my eyebrows a bit:

But if you overhear a conversation and hear the words ball, Hermione, and stranger, it could mean that Hermione either is asking a stranger to a ball or is asked by a stranger to come to a ball. Here word order is important. Indeed, the precise meaning of the word “ball” would also be context-dependent. This sort of conversation uses the grammatical structure of language to the full.

I’m a little surprised that some editor didn’t gently point out that there’s are some precise meanings of the word “ball” that might make it worth substituting an example that’s ambiguous, but not that ambiguous.

needs more demons? needs more something

The Turk recounts the amazing true story of a machine that purported to play chess, and which was seldom beaten except by the top players of its era. “The Turk” and its operators enjoyed a long and colorful career that intersected (and sometimes inspired) the lives of political and scientific figures including Joseph Marie Jacquard, Charles Babbage, Ben Franklin, Napoleon, and Edgar Allen Poe.

From its inception many understood that it had to be a trick, with a human being guiding the machine somehow. But, ironically, no one fully divined “The Turk”’s secrets until the age of machines that actually can play chess.

Standage opens with some background on other automata of the era, including Vaucanson’s amazing creations, and wraps up his book with some interesting perspectives on “Deep Blue,” IBM’s chess-playing super-computer that defeated champion Gary Kasparov, and our evolving attitudes toward “intelligent machines” in general.

Standage’s style is lively and engaging. I try to balance (somewhat) “for fun” books and “good for me” books, and this one truly succeeds on both levels. Highly recommended.

needs more demons? Not a bit of it. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, in particular, has plenty.

surprise benefits of pseudo-vegetarianism

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink in fits and starts over the past two months — it’s on the library’s short-term loan list, so I request it, read as much as I can before it’s due, return it, and repeat. I don’t think it’s a bad way to read such an information-dense book; it provides opportunities to digest and reflect on Gladwell’s theses.

I don’t think he delivers on the implicit promise that has made his books bestsellers among business readers. The Tipping Point provides tools for understanding why some messages — like teen anti-smoking campaigns — don’t “stick.” But it doesn’t provide tools for making messages stick. I think that’s because societies’ response to stimuli is fundamentally chaotic. Ensuring any particular meme spreads is impossible. Even Steven Spielberg directed an unequivocal flop once.*

Blink suffers from a similar problem: it identifies situations in which rapid intuitive assessments — “thin-slicing,” in Gladwall’s parlance — are invaluable, and other situations in which they’re extremely harmful. It doesn’t provide foolproof guidelines for distinguishing “good” thin-slicing from “bad.” Again, I don’t think it’s a soluble problem.

I’m not an expert on cognition; I’m a lay person with probably just enough information to be dangerous. But I think a major component of what makes for human intelligence is that our brains are abstract pattern-recognition machines. The engine that recognizes individual human faces is the same engine that sees animal shapes in clouds and inkblots. I think it’s always going to be subject to errors, particularly in high-stakes situations that require snap judgments: “He’s drawing a gun!” versus “He’s pulling out his wallet.”

Even if I don’t think Gladwell’s books quite live up to their hype, they’re informative, provocative, fascinating, and lucidly written.

For instance, his account of Sheena Iyengar’s research on consumer choice provided insight into something that’s intrigued me for the past decade. Iyengar found that customers given an opportunity to taste 6 jams in a store were far more likely to make a purchase than customers who had a chance to taste 24 different jams.

I’m a pseudo-vegetarian. This generally makes dining out straightforward: most of the menu is automatically excluded from consideration. I usually pick from the small set of available options rapidly and without much conscious deliberation. When I dine at a vegetarian or seafood specialty restaurant, I have a larger field to winnow. My selection process is radically different (and much slower). I typically try to find the entrée that maximizes features I like: the one with the ginger, tofu, and straw mushrooms. Sometimes I experience a kind of stress that’s unusual for me: no dish has the poblano pepper sauce, guacamole, and melted jack cheese; I can only get different combinations of two of those ingredients. Then I feel vaguely dissatisfied with a meal that I would unhesitatingly and happily choose if I had fewer options.

Iyengar’s research suggests that this behavior isn’t just me-being-weird. Gladwell’s synthesis provides a framework for understanding it: I “thin-slice” among a few choices, but not among a dozen.

*Of course, Gladwell has certainly “tipped” his own books, so maybe, just maybe, he knows something about hidden marketing levers that he’s not sharing.

the warren harding error error

In Blink, Gladwell devotes a chapter to exploring what he calls the “Warren Harding error.” He contends that the primary reason for Harding’s political success was that the man looked presidential.

Gladwell doesn’t apply this line of reasoning to politicians of the current era (although later he does quote Paul Ekman — who, with Wallace Friesen, assembled the “Facial Action Coding System — claiming that in 1992 he saw Clinton’s tendency for marital indiscretions literally written on his face.)

Whatever I thought of his policies or the abilities he brought to the job, I think I have to concede that Ronald Reagan looked presidential (at least some of the time). He was certainly always too much the gunslinger for my taste. But he could be dignified without entirely losing the humanizing mischievous twinkle in his eyes. If he’d been an actor cast in the role of the president, I think I could have bought it.

The real mystery is the election — twice, yet — of George Walker Bush. The presidential debates of 2004 crystallized this for me. John Kerry with his imposing height and resonant voice, looked and sounded presidential. His opponent looked like a used-car salesman by comparison: shifty-eyed, almost sneering, his voice often distinctly petulant if not actually whining.

And yet he won. Where are you now, oh Warren Harding error? Come back. We need you.

In other news, I took a few of the Implicit Association Tests Gladwell describes in the same chapter (it’s essentially the “be careful about judging books by their covers” segment of the book). Gladwell (and Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek, who developed the tool) claim that the test design is effective even when you know you’re being tested (unlike many sociological tests).

I’m not convinced. I took a test designed to identify an “implicit association” (e.g., an ingrained unconscious bias, more or less) for males/sciences and females/liberal arts. I was prompted by the survey I took beforehand to think fleetingly of famous scientists like Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, and famous creative types like Julio Cortàazar and Pablo Picasso. My biggest problem was that every time I was shown the words “history” and “philosophy” I had to consciously think “soft science? or liberal art?” But taking the test to the best of my ability still produced outlying data.

Then I took a test to identify implicit associations between ethnic groups and positive and negative concepts. When I was told I was supposed to associate images of caucasian men with negative concepts and images of black men with positive concepts, I muttered “black, good; white, evil” under my breath. No sweat.

deli slices of security

I was initially critical of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for not delivering on its implied promises, but I’ve revised my opinion of it substantially. It’s had a real impact on the way I think about certain types of situations. I still don’t think it provides a foolproof method for applying its principles, but it does offer tools for identifying problematic patterns in processes. As one example, it provides a framework for examining my misgivings about approaches to security in the post-September 2001 United States.

The administration argues that the lack of major terrorist incidents within the US demonstrates the effectiveness of the Homeland Security and Transportation Safety initiatives. This argument is obviously specious. The lack of a major incident in the first half of 2001 scarcely proved that the US was well-protected from a terrorist attack in the second half of the year. And the penetration of the new system by the “shoe bomber” and razor-blade-toting blog readers (for example) makes a strong case that the new system is not necessarily more effective at threat identification than the old system.

Back when the major concerns of airport security were preventing the influx of drugs and illegal (but peaceable) aliens, I was involved with a competitive bid to develop training for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As part of the effort, members of our team accompanied INS personnel on airport security details and took some of the courses given to the agents. (For the record: all of the material I was exposed to was unclassified.) It was obvious that the most effective agents relied heavily on the sort of intuitive assessments Gladwell describes in Blink. In particular, they were very good at identifying people who had something to hide. Other people have written about the hazards of inexperienced personnel and over-reliance on trickable technology. But I wonder: does a process that makes all passengers nervous and uncomfortable make it fundamentally easier for people with malicious intent to slip through?

As part of my ongoing research on improving MBTA usability, I’ve been listening to the chatter between MBTA dispatchers, bus drivers, train operators, station managers, and other staff. Shortly before Christmas, toward the end of evening rush hour, I heard an exchange that that went like this:

We have an incident of an unattended package that has been sighted on the east platform of [station name].

About half a minute later, I heard the following reply:

A passenger forgot her package. She’s on her way back to the platform to retrieve it now. Please just let her get her bag.

In Gladwell’s parlance, I felt that I had ample opportunity to “thin slice” the conversation. The first speaker was officious, with a pseudo-military quality that verged on pompous. He used the passive voice and awkward, redundant, and jargon-y terminology.

The second speaker was clearly fed up with the first speaker. I had the distinct impression it wasn’t the first such conversation. The tone of voice — and the word “please” — suggested that the speaker thought it was unlikely that the woman would be allowed to get her bag back without additional hassle.

The second speaker had a good opportunity to make a realistic assessment of how likely the passenger was to pose a terrorist threat. The second speaker implied face-to-face contact with the passenger — who was probably cramming in last-minute shopping on the way home from work, and carrying one package too many. The first speaker was making decisions on the basis of a blurry picture on a monitor and (I suspect) a procedural manual revised in the wake of September 2001.

I’ve spent much of my career working on training products for state and federal agencies, and I think it’s likely that the new rule book specifies that any unattended package must got through the full threat evaluation procedure, no matter what the station manager recommends. After all, there’s always a chance that the station manager has somehow been coerced into making a false statement.

The problem is, this approach just doesn’t work. Being on high-alert forever is the same as not being on alert at all — people aren’t wired to maintain peak vigilance indefinitely. Procedures that are excessively cumbersome will eventually be disregarded. And while I understand that discounting the judgment of those closest to a potential threat situation may protect the MBTA from liability, I’m far from convinced that it’s the best way to actually increase the overall safety of the system.

Needs More Demons? No. I’m not even going to make a corny joke about devils in details.

Mostly, though, Roving Mars is a book about project management. Squyres often speaks, somewhat disconcertingly, about “doing science” as if science is merely a product of having assets correctly positioned, in the same way that a movie’s revenue is the product of having copies of the film in theatres. He admits that, from his perspective, one of the critical goals of the Spirit and Opportunity missions was to justify more Mars missions, in the same way a succesful product generates more demand in the marketplace.

Much of the ground Squyres covers will be familiar to anyone who’s manged a difficult project (perhaps especially a software development effort). He covers intial brainstorming; marketing and proposal development; forming strategic alliances with competitors; the struggle for budgetary, schedule, and manpower resources; risk mitigation strategies; motivational techniques; benefits and drawbacks of delegation and outsourcing; troubleshooting and quality assurance; and aproaches to consensus-building and fostering effective decision-making. It’s a fast and engaging read. Several chapters are written in the form of Squyres’ journal entries, which gives it a “you are there,” sort of immediacy. For a book about project management, it’s often surprisingly suspenseful and moving, and Squyres’ “boldly go where no one has gone before”-style enthusiasm is palpable.

Throughout he makes a solid case for his own talents as a manager (despite his penchant for tantrums). And throughout he reinforces my growing sense that there is something fundamentally and systemically wrong with the current best-practice management of complex engineering development efforts.

The Mars rover project is repeatedly stymied by mistakes that simply shouldn’t be made: instruments designed to work sideways but not upright, confusion between English and metric units, pieces that are fabricated to the wrong size. It’s perhaps especially disheartening to compare these errors to the highly-publicized mistakes NASA has made in recent history, from grinding the Hubble’s mirror to the wrong spec to the material science failures that cost the lives of space shuttle astronauts.

Also disturbing — but eerily familiar to me — was the degree to which the developers of the Mars rover software were unable to predict its behavior. I was shocked by how frequently the rover team was faced by problems I’ve faced with notoriously buggy commercial software. Computer that crashes as soon as it boots up? Been there, fixed that. Corrupted flash memory? Ate my second cellphone alive.

I’m convinced that the issue isn’t stupidity or incompetence on the part of the team, not just because these folks have high-falutin’ degrees in their fields, but also because every smart team I’ve had a chance to observe or directly work with — including some folks who made me feel positively dim — has made similarly obvious mistakes on sufficiently complex projects. On the biggest projects I’ve been associated with, it was sometimes painfully obvious that no single person understood the whole requirements document. I once saw a data entity diagram that covered a large conference room wall from floor to ceiling. I saw team members literally start sobbing when it became evident that fundamental assumptions underlying that diagram — which represented over a year of work and several million dollars — had never been valid.

I’ve begun to think of it as a big picture/little picture problem. When teams are stovepiped, each group can do its “little-picture” work and check and resolve its internal errors. On small, well-characterized projects, group leaders can grasp the “big picture” at a level of detail that permits identification and resolution of problems that cross group lines. But on projects that are bigger and more uncertain, it becomes impossible for anyone to grasp the gestalt of the project at a sufficient level of detail. Things start to slip through the cracks.

Since Malcolm Gladwell’s books — particularly The Tipping Point — have had more influence on my thinking than any others in a decade or so, I’m inclined to wonder if large engineering projects are being constrained by the fundamental limits of human cognition. I’m even tempted to wonder if Gladwell’s “magic number” 150 might crop up somewhere in a calculation of maximum manageable size.

I don’t think the problem is insoluble, but I think it calls for new techniques for asserting correctness. There are mathematical methods for “proving” the correctness of software. They’re seldom applied in the real world, partly because they’re cumbersome and expensive, but also, I think, because they rely on not changing requirements during development. I argue that since no one ever understands the requirements for complex projects, it’s almost inevitable that the requirements will change when one or more deficencies are identified midstream. My anecdotal experience suggests strongly that many serious engineering errors arise from failure to understand the consequences of a requirements change during the development cycle.

The engineering development process of the future should attack this problem from three angles:

• The requirements definition phase must systemically address the inability of humans to fully characterize the behavior of extremely complex systems.
• Throughout the development cycle it must embody consistency checks that prevent errors of the English/metric variety
• Throughout the development cycle it must explicitly maintain the constraints on its own behavior, so that flaws resulting from requirements changes are immediately evident.
  (Software often has implicit constraints, e.g., it only works if only one document is open. Currently, information about these constraints may only exist in the mind of a single developer.)

Two other takeaways from Roving Mars:

• Good golly, rocket scientists drink more than I would have guessed.
• Wow, a lot of Mars probes have just flat out disappeared. Some enterprising sci-fi writer ought to be able to get at least a short story out of the conceit that the Martians shoot down any probe that gets too close to their cities, and play games keeping just out of camera range of the ones they allow to land.

Needs More Demons? No, Squyres’ project is plenty bedevilled.