Taivo Lints Blog

Book: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence

Taivo Lints — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:46:00 +0200

A book about the history of ideas and achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence, from the beginnings to today, written by Nils. J. Nilsson and published in 2010.

The book starts with the early dreams and ideas, describes the first important AI-related gatherings in the 1950s and 1960s, and then continues moving gradually through time, describing briefly the main ideas as they came up or became prominent: pattern recognition, heuristics, semantic representations, natural language processing, computer vision, hand-eye coordination, knowledge representation and reasoning, mobile robots, board games, speech recognition, expert systems, machine learning, AI architectures, etc. It also describes the wider historical background of the field: labs, conferences, funding, controversies, most notable achievements so far, and the direction of future research.

The author has been an active AI researcher for most of his life, knows the field quite well, and has managed to pack a lot of useful information into this book. On the downside, the book is somewhat author-centric and particularly US/West-centric. Although a lot of important research was indeed done in the US and some UK labs and thus this focus is not too much of a problem in general, there was certainly a lot of relevant work done also in the rest of the World: wider Europe, Japan, Russia... These are mentioned only a few times in passing. Also, while the classical AI topics are covered quite well, the coverage of less conventional methods has rather serious shortcomings. For example swarm intelligence — one of the most active directions at the moment — is not even mentioned at all.

So I would say that the book is quite informative and very useful to get a bird's-eye view of what has been going on in AI over the time, but it is important to keep in mind that the bird is flying between mountains that somewhat restrict the view: some areas of AI are not covered, both geographically and by subject.

Official web version of the book is available here:
http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/QAI/qai-webpage.html

And more info about the book can be found at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0521122937

Homepage update

Taivo Lints — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:33:00 +0300

I have updated my webpage taivo.net — I added a downloadable stopwatch application that I recently created (TL MiniTime, tested to work on Mac OS X and Windows, and should also work on Linux), added a list of my publications, added a list of events I have attended, added links to some of my social networking sites, removed photo galleries (I now post my photos mainly to social networking sites) and made various other updates.

I also moved the site from my university server to a commercial provider GigaPros. Among other things this means that the address taivo.net now stays taivo.net in the address bar during surfing the site, instead of being just a redirect to www.dcc.ttu.ee/taivo. As of the latter address, it is still functional and currently displays the previous version of the site. I'll probably just put a sign there that tells people to go to taivo.net.

Book: The Prodigy — Electronic Punks

Taivo Lints — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:35:00 +0300

A "reissue of the very first biography of the world's biggest hard dance / rock act", "with a new introduction by Liam Howlett", published in 2010, written by Martin Roach.

The book gives a close-up and personal view of the early years of The Prodigy — about their coming into existence, about their mindsets of relentless extending of musical scope, of being punks in the sense of doing things their own ways, actively avoiding stardom, being slightly at odds with the authorities, and making music for the sake of feeling excited and making others feel excited. And about fun (and not so fun) incidents along the way.

I really resonate with The Prodigy's music and with their live shows, and I'm also interested in musicmaking myself, and I really enjoyed reading this book and understanding better the background of The Prodigy (especially the first half of the book — the second was also alright, but I got the main insights already from the first half).

So, if you like The Prodigy and would also like to understand them better, then I highly recommend this book.

Btw, the author Martin Roach also seems to be quite an interesting and slightly nonconformist guy who has become friends with The Prodigy (as well as with many other bands) and deeply cares about what he's writing about.

The book is available directly from Martin's publishing company Independent Music Press: http://www.impbooks.com/music-books/The-Prodigy---The-Official-Story/Electronic-Punks.-The-Early-Years-1988-1994/101

Book: Programming Erlang

Taivo Lints — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 22:36:00 +0300

A book by Joe Armstrong, from 2007, giving an introduction to Erlang. Erlang is a programming language and runtime system originally developed in Ericsson and now open source, and Joe Armstrong is the original author of that language.

The reason why I felt very curious about Erlang is that it seems to be a very good fit with my interests in distributed systems composed of relatively autonomous interacting components. It has language-level support for the actor model concurrency. It supports hot code swapping. And it was developed for and has been industrially successfully used for distributed fault-tolerant soft-real-time systems. Yay.

Contrary to some reviewers on Amazon, I really enjoyed reading this book — the text was fun and the code was to the point and induced a very strong urge to go and code some clever stuff :) It, admittedly, is a book for a specific and relatively small audience, both content- and stylewise, but if you're "in the demographics" (i.e., you feel similarly excited about Erlang's features, have some previous programming experience, are ok with slightly informal writing style, and are looking for a practical intro instead of a language reference) then I'd definitely recommend this book.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/193435600X and on the publisher's homepage http://pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang

And thanks a lot to James Chapman for lending me this book!

Book: On Intelligence

Taivo Lints — Thu, 12 May 2011 05:06:00 +0300

A book by Jeff Hawkins, from 2004, explaining his theory of brain and intelligence.

Jeff takes the view that intelligence is the ability to (successfully) predict. And the view that what brain does, on all levels, can basically be summed up as memorizing patterns (and sequences of patterns) and providing predictions based on those learned patterns.

More specifically, the brain is constantly extracting regularities from the incoming data streams on multiple hierarchial levels: regularities in the "low-level" sensory input, regularities in the occurrences of those low-level regularities, etc. For example, it learns (roughly speaking) certain optical patterns to form certain letters, letters to form certain words, words to form certain sentences, sentences to form certain texts, etc. At the same time there is also a constant flow of information in the opposite direction: the brain associatively recalls, at all levels, based on previous experience, what should be there and what should come next. I.e., it constantly makes predictions. And if something does not match the predictions, an "alarm" is raised that should lead to an (automatic) reconsideration of the situation and possibly to learning something new. For example, if the brain assumes that the text that the person started to read is some particular famous speech it knows, it predicts what sentences, words and letters come next. If these predictions fail, it may need to reconsider the initial assumption that the text is that particular speech. Or if the prediction fails only on a single word, the attention of the person is drawn to that word (which might turn out to be a typo or maybe the word was incorrectly remembered by the person or just misread in the first go at the moment).

And such continuous pattern extraction and prediction is what goes on in almost all parts of brain and on all levels, and underlies everything from the lowest sensory input and motor output to the highest levels of abstract thinking. Jeff emphasizes that "Prediction is so pervasive that what we "perceive" — that is, how the world appears to us — does not come solely from our senses. What we perceive is a combination of what we sense and of our brains' memory-derived predictions.", because what the brain predicts actually affects what and how we sense and notice. Also, while when applied to incoming sensory data the top-down flow has the role of predicting and drawing attention to violations of prediction, the brain can also route the same top-down flow to motor output, in which case it will be executed, if possible: "when your own behavior is involved, your predictions not only precede sensation, they determine sensation". In the given example of text processing, the particular speech as such gets unfolded into sentences, and sentences into words, and words into letters, and letters into hand movements for handwriting or hand movements for typewriting or movements of the vocal apparatus for speaking etc.

As of intelligence in general, Jeff claims that "Intelligence is measured by the predictive ability of a hierarchical memory, not by humanlike behavior." and that there is no reason to be afraid of intelligent machines, because "They will not have personal ambition. They will not desire wealth, social recognition, or sensual gratification. They will not have appetites, addictions, or mood disorders. Intelligent machines will not have anything resembling human emotion unless we painstakingly design them to."

I find the central point of the book very interesting and quite likely to have a strong relevance to how the brain really works (not necessarily in details, as Jeff himself points out, but at least in some of the general principles). However, I am not so sure about the reliability of those parts that touch upon artificial intelligence more generally, outside his memory-prediction framework. I cannot really disprove anything, but I occasionally got the feeling that some things are not fully correct. For example the aforementioned belief that intelligent machines will be just emotionless pattern detectors and predictors unless we painstakingly embed the emotions — some alternative opinions say that such emotions and drives are actually crucial for developing interesting higher level AI (then again, maybe it's partly about the difference of goals — whether we should create emotionless pattern detectors-predictors or systems that behave interestingly). Also, I get the impression that when talking about AI Jeff seems to equate it only with the early classical logic-based AI, and when talking of "robots" he seems to think of inflexible systems without much any feedback... (which isn't exactly the case in general).

Also, even though Jeff emphasizes that he is not interested in building humans, but in understanding intelligence and building intelligent machines, he categorically claims that "We have to extract intelligence from within the brain. No other road will get us there.". I agree that brain is the best example for us to build on, but by no means should we be so categorical and exclude other roads to high-level machine intelligence. Jeff points out early in the book that it was his strong intuition that made him rather sure that the Artificial Intelligence approach will fail to create programs that do what humans can do and will also fail to teach us what is intelligence in general. While I have actually had the very same intuition for a long time as well, and am thus very supportive to nonclassical approaches to AI, I nevertheless exercise caution about getting channeled into the other extreme, and I find it slightly alarming that Jeff seems (in my humble opinion) to fall into the very trap that he, ironically, cautions against just 20 pages later: "However, looking across the history of science, we see our intuition is often the biggest obstacle to discovering the truth".

But these small complaints of mine are mainly about the peripheral / general thoughts in the book, not about the core point which I find very interesting. So, overall I'd still say that the book "On Intelligence" is definitely worth reading for anybody interested in the workings of the brain and (but not necessarily) in how to create thinking machines.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805078533

Moment: Kiwi

Taivo Lints — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 22:44:00 +0300

Kitchen. Slowly and thoughtfully I roll a kiwifruit in my hand, feeling the softly rough texture, and carefully start peeling it. "Chile" says the sticker. I've never been to Chile... yet this furry little guy grew up there, happily, obliviously... And then an opportunity arose -- to break free, to see the World, to travel across the ocean towards the rising sun, to hear the plangent church bells of the old Europe... I paid for that trip. And now I'm gonna eat it.

[a little reflection to stimulate thinking about personal and global issues :]

Book: Coders at Work

Taivo Lints — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:13:00 +0300

A book by Peter Seibel, from 2009, consisting of interviews with various accomplished programmers:

Jamie Zawinski -- Lisp hacker, early Netscape developer.
Brad Fitzpatrick -- creator of LiveJournal, memcached, Perlbal.
Douglas Crockford -- creator of JSON, involved in the development of the JavaScript language.
Brendan Eich -- creator of JavaScript, current CTO of Mozilla Corporation.
Joshua Bloch -- has led the design and development of several major features of Java.
Joe Armstrong -- creator of Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP).
Simon Peyton Jones -- a major contributor to the Haskell programming language, and lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
Peter Norvig -- a computer scientist with wide-ranging interests, currently the Director of Research at Google.
Guy Steele -- has been involved in defining Common Lisp, Fortran, C, ECMAScript, Scheme, Java.
Dan Ingalls -- the main initial implementer of Smalltalk, inventor of BitBLT.
L. Peter Deutsch -- creator of Ghostscript, the author of some notable implementations of Smalltalk and Lisp.
Ken Thompson -- the main developer of Unix, creator of the B programming language, Belle chess computer, and UTF-8 Unicode encoding.
Fran Allen -- pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, the first female IBM Fellow and the first female recipient of the Turing Award.
Bernie Cosell -- one of the main software developers for ARPANET routers, Lisp hacker, creator of DOCTOR (a version of ELIZA).
Donald Knuth -- the author of "The Art of Computer Programming", creator of TeX and METAFONT, inventor of literate programming.

The interviews are pleasantly lengthy and detailed, and include discussions on how the person got started with programming, their work on various projects, how their views on programming have changed over time, their approach to designing software, how they do debugging, their views on formal proofs of program correctness, how they approach reading code written by somebody else, their feelings about commenting and documenting the code, how to recognize a good programmer, the teamwork aspects of software projects, whether they consider themselves a scientist, an engineer, an artist, a craftsman, or something else, the question whether nowadays' programmers should bother learning what goes on at the low machine level, whether programming is a young person's game or can be done well by older people as well, and much more.

The scope of the discussions is satisfyingly broad, ranging from contemplations about big high-level issues down to the detailed stories and technical explanations without any fear of scaring off some potential readers / buyers of the book. Instead of trying to write a book acceptable to everybody (which, on the flip side, might not be outstandingly exciting to anybody in particular), the author has chosen a specific target audience and caters to it remarkably well.

So, "Coders at Work" is a collection of interviews with great programmers, done by a good programmer, and intended to be read by programmers. And if you ARE a programmer, there is a very high probability that you will love this book.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1430219483

Book: An Introduction to Theories of Learning

Taivo Lints — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 13:50:00 +0300

A book, the 7th edition (2005) of which I read, by B. R. Hergenhahn and Matthew H. Olson, about the main theories of learning, in a college textbook format.

The book starts by giving a general overview of the concept of learning and the use of scientific method. Then the early approaches are briefly described, starting from Plato and Aristotle and going through the various philosophers (Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, etc.) up to the early schools of psychology (voluntarism, structuralism, functionalism, early behaviorism). And after that the more detailed overviews of the major theories of learning are presented, which takes up the most of the book:

Predominantly functionalistic theories: Thorndike, Skinner, Hull.
Predominantly associationistic theories: Pavlov, Guthrie, Estes.
Predominantly cognitive theories: Gestalt theory, Piaget, Tolman, Bandura.
Predominantly neurophysiological theory: Hebb.
An evolutionary theory: Bolles and evolutionary psychology.

The final chapter of the book rather briefly discusses the current trends and some open questions.

I feel like I got quite a good general overview of the main ideas about the learning process: their historical development, key researchers and key points. The overall flow of the book followed the development of the theories in time, which provided the benefit of understanding why the things that currently seem obvious were not so obvious earlier -- when reading the older theories they seem to fully make sense and match experimental data, but then in the next section / chapter new (later) experiments and ideas are described that partially disprove some of the previous ones and form a new seemingly great theory... until another chapter brings yet another change. This also sustains the desire to keep reading to find out new and new things. On the other hand, the book isn't exactly leisure literature and at some points I really felt like taking a break or pushing myself a bit to keep going.

All in all, it was a very useful book for me: both for my research and for the general understanding of the world.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131147226/

Book: Focus

Taivo Lints — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:09:00 +0300

A book by Jurgen Wolff, from 2008, about how to fight procrastination and how to better focus on your most important activities and goals.

The feeling of not living up to your potential and letting the precious time slip by, day by day, year by year, can be extremely frustrating. The opposite -- fulfilling your potential and spending your time on activities that you love and / or that result in great achievements -- makes you feel happy and empowered. The good thing is that being able to focus on the activities that are important and positive for you is a skill and habit like any other -- you can learn it and become better by conscious practice. Thus, spending some of your time on improving your ability to work efficiently (as well as on other so-called "self-help" topics like improving your attitudes and social skills) is just as reasonable as spending some of your time on learning a foreign language, a musical instrument or some scientific theory.

Now, there already exist thousands and thousands of blogs and books about productivity and time management, offering a large number of tips and techniques, so why bother reading yet another one? Because Wolff's "Focus" has a somewhat nontraditional perspective and offers advice that at least I hadn't read anywhere else before. Wolff's view is that the majority of traditional time management methods are best suited for the analytical, well-organized, "left-brain" persons, whereas the more intuition-based, variety-loving "right-brain" people would benefit more from a slightly different approach that he then tries to provide.

Some of the advice Wolff gives is quite well-known (which, of course, does not diminish its importance), such as identifying your behavioral patterns, eliminating-delegating less important activities, setting big goals and dividing them into small subgoals, using visual reminders, focusing on positive things, creating the flow, and many more.

As of the less traditional suggestions, here's an example: be very careful about setting deadlines (especially if some parts of achieving the goal depend on external partially unpredictable factors), because failures to get things done by deadline are demotivating, and deadlines also tend to lead to the exponential increase of workload (and to a decrease in the willingness to look for alternative, more efficient routes, due to being in a hurry) just before the final date. A better approach might be to commit to moving steadily towards the goal in small steps (revising the strategies on the go as necessary) and achieving the goal whenever the steady progress has resulted in the desired state.

Other interesting advice includes the use of hero pattern (switching from "I have a problem / goal" mindset to "I am on a quest"); letting go of the belief that one person has one personality, and instead having a well-developed set of (possibly inconsistent) alter egos and for each situation picking the most suitable of them; taking the dividing of a big task into small steps to the extreme, e.g., making the first starting steps so absurdly tiny that they will not trigger postponing the task, for example if the goal is to start going to the gym regularly, then the first step might be literally stepping out of your front door with the gym bag, with the full permission to then stop and step back in (the trick is that the likelihood of continuing towards the gym instead of stepping back in is actually remarkably high); and much more.

Additionally, there are useful chapters on managing people and meetings, using language more efficiently (mostly NLP-inspired suggestions), dealing with the daily information overload, and so forth.

So, although "Focus" surely is not a magic book of spells that makes you highly efficient and happy overnight, it nevertheless gives very useful advice that is either complementary or alternative to the more traditional methods. If you are willing to make an effort to improve yourself, then this book most certainly can help you move faster towards your goals.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0273715445

Book: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Taivo Lints — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:26:00 +0300

A book from 2004 (first version 2003), where Al Franken, a US comedian and liberal, exposes some lies and dubious acts of Republicans and American right-wing media (Fox News and the like). Quite a hilarious book. Though, assuming that Al writes mostly truth, which he claims he does, it is also a rather saddening treatise -- I was kind of hoping that the politics and media in US are not THAT dirty.

So, if you'd like to read a highly satirical and amusing book about real American politics and media, then take a look at "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". But, of course, keep in mind that it isn't exactly a balanced analysis.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0452285216/
and Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_and_the_Lying_Liars_Who_Tell_Them

And thanks to Chätrin who gave me this book as a birthday present!

Book: Introducing NLP

Taivo Lints — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:21:00 +0300

A book by Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour, originally from 1990, about the main methods of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).

NLP is a practically oriented collection of methods for better understanding of oneself and others, for influencing people, and, possibly, for rapid changing of own or others' behavioral and psychophysiological patterns. The book covers filtering, rapport, pacing and leading, representational systems, submodalities, accessing cues, elicitation, calibration, anchoring, feedback, learning loops, levels of learning, beliefs, various linguistic patterns, reframing, timelines, conflict and congruence (incl. in business settings), psychotherapy, phobia cure, modeling, accelerated learning, and more.

"Introducing NLP" is a dense book packed with information, drawing, obviously, mainly on the original works of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, but also adding some bits from others, too. Some people have said it's a bit dry and boring, but I personally liked it this way -- even though the proper working through the book took me quite some time, I felt a lot more knowledgeable afterwards, whereas the typical more easygoing books (such as the book I reviewed recently: "Crucial Conversations") sometimes tend to annoy me a bit with their excessive dilution and repetition.

Whereas the book is quite a good in-depth introduction to NLP, I would recommend to complement it with watching Richard Bandler's 10 hour video set "An Introduction to Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning", recorded at his seminar in Edinburgh. These entertaining videos drive the main points home a lot more efficiently and vividly than the book, but the latter, on the other hand, is a lot more detailed and practical.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1855383446/

Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "NLP. Sissejuhatus neurolingvistilisse programmeerimisse": http://www.tnp.ee/raamat?id=701

Book: Resilience Engineering

Taivo Lints — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:58:00 +0200

A book edited by Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods and Nancy Leveson (and containing chapters by these and many other authors), from 2006, about an improved approach to safety management.

"Resilience Engineering" is a well-integrated collection of quite thorough explorations and analyses of safety management in complex systems, both on the theoretical level as well as in the form of case studies. Even though the title might give an initial impression of the book being focused on technical systems, it is actually quite universally applicable and looks at techno-social systems as wholes, mainly in the form of technologically oriented organizations.

The core idea of "Resilience Engineering" is to move the field of safety management from the kind of design-time analysis that has been expected to produce "demonstrably safe" systems that should be safe within predescribed working conditions but in reality still experience failures due to the unpredictability and complexity of the real world, to the construction of adaptively resilient systems that are actively monitoring and adjusting for dangerous deviations.

Also, the book calls for better accident models that do not view failures as simply breakdowns or deviations of the components from the design specifications, but also as events that may easily arise as occasional unexpected consequences of interactions between otherwise acceptably working parts: "Rather than looking for causes we should look for concurrences, and rather than seeing concurrences as exceptions we should see them as normal and therefore also as inevitable. This may at times lead to the conclusion that even though an accident happened nothing really went wrong, in the sense that nothing happened that was out of the ordinary. Instead it is the concurrence of a number of events, just on the border of the ordinary, that constitutes an explanation of the accident or event."

Additionally, the book notes that even if the theoretical basis for understanding and preventing the majority of failures would be well-developed and widely available (which it isn't), there is still a major practical concern to tackle: safety management incurs an additional cost for the system, and in real life the pressing need for higher efficiency keeps (justifiably) trying to minimize all costs. Therefore, "from a risk management perspective, the key question is how to keep concern for risk alive when things look safe". And this can be particularly difficult due to the effectively working safety measures seeming unnecessary to a superficial observer for the very reason that those measures successfully prevent the failures and leave an impression of a safe environment. Or, as the book puts it: "superficially a safety manager’s job is to handle irony: the core of a good safety culture is a self-defeating prophecy, and a whistle blower’s ultimate achievement is to be wrong". The solution is to create a well-developed and strong safety culture that avoids the erosion of critical safety measures in the endless push for efficiency.

I definitely found the book educative and enjoyable, and would recommend it to anybody who has a deeper interest in safety management and in the adaptivity issues of (complex) systems.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0754649040/

Partial homepage content update

Taivo Lints — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:43:00 +0200

I made some content changes on my webpage http://taivo.net. The main changes were: making the site English only (was both English and Estonian before), totally rewriting the "Who am I" section, adding a section "Scientific Interests", and removing sections "PhD Topic" and "Works III".

My plan has been to do a more thorough update of the site, but it hasn't been my top priority so far and has thus been on hold. But now I felt that I should quickly update at least some of it, so that's what I did -- a quick partial update of the most important content that will hopefully be followed in the near future by updating the rest of the site, too.

Book: Crucial Conversations

Taivo Lints — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:26:00 +0200

A book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, from 2002, about how to keep up constructive dialogue in difficult situations.

A short and somewhat fragmentary summary:

Crucial conversations are those where the stakes are high, opinions are different, and emotions run strong. Such conflict situations trigger our natural fight-or-flight response (releasing adrenaline, increasing blood supply of the muscles and thus decreasing blood supply of the brain) which makes it difficult to keep calm and to keep up the level of mental activity that is necessary in complex communication situations. To keep the dialogue constructive in spite of this interference, we should learn and practice a set of supportive skills.

Focus on what you really want, honestly, for yourself, for others, and for the relations. Think about how you should behave to best reach these goals. Now, is your current behavior consistent with your true goals, or maybe your motives have quietly shifted into defending yourself or trying to win at any cost? If you have managed to keep, or to bring back, your focus on your real goals, then is this also clearly understandable to the communication partners, or maybe your behavior tells a different story? Learn to notice when the conversation turns crucial. Learn to monitor the behavior of yourself and others, and, most importantly, the level of safety in each participant. When somebody feels unsafe, they will either start fighting for themselves or close up, which both stop the constructive dialogue. To maintain the safety, make sure that you all have some common (possibly higher level) goal in mind and that you honestly work toward that goal, and also keep up mutual respect, no matter how different the opinions and personalities. If the other participants do not engage in constructive dialogue, do NOT blame them -- it is your responsibility to try to create an atmosphere where they will become more and more open and constructive.

Separate facts from interpretations. Find out and discuss explicitly how the participants interpret their observations about the issue under discussion. Be ready to change your interpretations in the light of the new information and ideas you get from others. Find alternative solutions that everybody agrees on, even to those problems that initially seem to have only two mutually exclusive ones. Honestly apologize for your mistakes, but do not apologize for your honest standpoints. Fully explain why you have the opinions and standpoints that you have, but never try to force them upon others -- forcing tends to automatically create counterreactions, even if your ideas are indeed the best (but never assume that they are before finding out the others' viewpoints as well). Beware: if your belief in your ideas is very strong, you might not even notice that others get the feeling that you are forcing those ideas upon them -- pay close attention to your tone of voice, posture, talkativeness, aggressiveness. Calm down and give others enough time to explain their views, too.

If there is a decision to be made, make sure that everybody understands the process through which it will be made, and that decisionmaking is a separate process from the dialogue (which is the process of finding out and discussing the information and viewpoints that the participants have).

In the book these ideas are, obviously, presented in a more systematic and detailed way, and there are more of them than listed here.

The only thing that slightly bothered me about this book was the feeling that it could have easily been condensed down to half of its size -- some of the ideas were getting a bit repetitive and diluted. On the one hand, repetition with variations is surely helpful for better understanding, but on the other a concise presentation might maybe make it easier to imprint the information into the memory.

But overall I found this book very educative and would recommend it to almost everybody, because we all have crucial conversations on a daily basis -- with our families and friends, with our coworkers, bosses, clients, opponents, and so on.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071401946

Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "Otsustavad kõnelused": http://www.raamatuklubi.aripaev.ee/Book.aspx?ID=7d0ffb84-00ed-47eb-b392-a5fb4be3a42a

Book: Transcend

Taivo Lints — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:38:00 +0200

A book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, from 2009, about keeping a good health and extending your expected lifetime.

Modern healthcare is becoming more and more infused and boosted by the information technology, or, in some sense, it IS becoming an information technology itself by moving from the phase of trial-and-error to the phase of data- and simulation-based design of interventions. Ray and Terry believe that this will lead the healthcare to follow the same kind of exponential growth as various areas of IT have enjoyed, which in turn will lead to radically more efficient health maintenance and healing methods already within a few next decades (new efficient drugs, RNA interference, gene addition, pluripotent stem cell based therapies, later also medical nanobots). Their idea is that during the next few decades you could look at your life as being either behind or in front of a moving frontier of extreme longevity -- if you keep yourself in good enough health until the next level of healthcare arrives in around 10-15 years, then your health and expected lifetime will be boosted enough by the new methods of that level to reach the yet another level of healthcare arriving in the 2030-ies, where it will be boosted again, and so on. This book is intended to help you cross the "Bridge One".

Regardless of whether Ray's and Terry's predictions turn out to be correct or not, the book "Transcend" is packed with useful information about living a healthier life. The suggestions are so numerous and detailed that it is difficult to summarize them here, but, broadly speaking, the main topics are:

Assessing your state frequently and thoroughly enough -- self-assessments, medical examinations, lab tests -- and using this information to adjust your lifestyle, eating, etc.
Keeping the stress under control.
Paying attention to what and how much you eat.
Taking appropriate supplements.
Exercising regularly: aerobical, strength, and stretching.
Minimizing toxin contact / intake.

All these are explained with plenty of details and guidelines, based on the very latest scientific knowledge they had at hand. The latter means, however, that not all the suggestions are based on long-term human experiments, and they do acknowledge themselves that some viewpoints might change in time and that some of their suggestions, especially with regard to supplements, are considerably different from the common FDA approved ones. But they do promise to keep interested readers up to date with latest developments and research results via an electronic newsletter (that anybody can subscribe to at http://www.kurzweilai.net/).

A possible conflict of interests can be found in the fact that Ray and Terry also have a supplement-selling business where you can buy the supplements they suggest in the book, but knowing a bit about Ray's background I would rather assume that their idea was not to make a lot of money by suggesting the supplements, but he just wanted to have a reliable source of those at hand, both for himself and for the people they are advising (I haven't bought anything from there so far, though, in case you're wondering).

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in maintaining a good health AND who does not freak out when seeing occasional complex-sounding words and phrases like gamma-tocopherol, prostaglandin-E3 or single photon emission computed tomography, AND who has enough education and critical mind to understand that not all suggestions can be taken as the ultimate truth, but just as interpretations of the current state of scientific knowledge.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605299561
and at Ray's and Terry's site: http://www.rayandterry.com/TRANSCEND/

Book: Creative Recording 1, Effects and Processing (2nd edition)

Taivo Lints — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:36:00 +0200

A book by Paul White, from 2003. Gives a good introductory practically oriented overview of:

the mixing console,
patching and patchbays,
equalizers,
enhancers,
compressors,
limiters,
gates and noise reduction,
panning and positioning,
digital delay effects,
reverberation,
multi-effects,
MIDI (very briefly),
software plug-in basics,
production effects,
and surround sound concepts.

Note that the emphasis is on effects and processing, so topics like microphones are NOT covered in that particular book (which is only part 1 of a series).

The target audience of the book is beginners and intermediates, but the reader is treated with full respect and at no point did I get a feeling of the content being dumbed down too much (obviously, the book doesn't cover every possible aspect of the topics, but this is fully understandable). It might even be that those readers who have no technical background might find the content not be the best match with their baseline and taste, but, correspondingly, the more enjoyable it is to the technically inclined audience. I definitely found the book to be very educative for me.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1860744567

Book: Go It Alone!

Taivo Lints — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:36:00 +0300

A book by Bruce Judson, from 2004, freely available on the web ( http://www.brucejudson.com ), that talks about how to start small companies that are not necessarily small in revenues.

When talking and thinking about start-ups (especially in high-tech) it is quite common to assume that large venture capital investments into the company and fast increase in the number of employees are very positive indicators of company's success. However, this book describes an inverted alternative:

The business is started with a minimal investment, and the founder or founders retain full ownership and control of the enterprise.
The business is run entirely by a small number of people, generally from one to six.
The founder does not set out to create a small business. He or she is working from the premise that the business has unlimited revenue potential.

The third point is what distinguishes this approach the most from the common abundant solo entrepreneurs and tiny companies -- in modern world a company that is small by employee count can nevertheless be large by market share (in its specific niche) and cash flow. The main method of achieving it is extreme outsourcing (not to be confused with offshoring) where the majority of company's business activities are conducted externally. This allows the entrepreneur to concentrate on those key areas s/he can do best (and enjoys most) while all the rest is handled cost efficiently by various service providers, preferably using customizable off-the-shelf solutions instead of special orders.

Over time I have skimmed quite a few writings about creating (tech) start-ups (for example, I keep an eye on Paul Graham's essays http://paulgraham.com/articles.html that, at least from the perspective of a computer programmer, are quite a fun reading), but so far it is the "Go It Alone!" that seems to have had the strongest effect on lowering my psychological threshold of starting a company.

The book is available at http://www.brucejudson.com .

Book: Ennast leida, ennast hoida

Taivo Lints — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:47:00 +0200

A book in Estonian, from 2008, which is mostly a translated collection of four English books by Jackson J. Adam: The Secrets of Abundant Health (1995), The Secrets of Abundant Wealth (1996), The Secrets of Abundant Love (1996), and The Secrets of Abundant Happiness (1998).

The book provides a collection of sound advice which can hardly be called "secrets" anymore nowadays thanks to the proliferation of personal development and self-help literature and audio, but given how low is the number of people actually following such advice it doesn't hurt to have yet another book on it. What makes "Ennast leida, ennast hoida" different from a typical self-help book is its way of presentation -- the advice is packed into fictional but quite realistic-sounding narratives -- which makes it an easy read and also helps with the impact factor (think of fairy tales as a good example of memorable educational narratives). The pattern used in each section is the following: a young man is in distress, an old Chinese guy shows up, talks a bit and gives the young man a list of ten names with phone numbers, and goes away. The young man then visits those people, each of whom describes how they met with the Chinese guy years ago and what was the main advice they got out of the encounters with the old man and with the ten other people that were on the list they got from the Chinese guy.

There are a few dubious explanations on how and why some of the "secrets" work (some of those even explicitly corrected by the Estonian translator), but the main points are good and valuable. The "secrets" of health listed are the power of thinking and imagination, breathing, healthy eating, laughing, resting, posture, living environment, faith, and love; the "secrets" of love are the power of thought, respect, giving, friendship, touching, freedom, communication, faithfulness, desire, and trust; the "secrets" of happiness are mentality and attitudes, bodily factors (physical exercise, anchoring, posture, food, etc.), embracing every moment, the power of imagination and positive affirmation, goals, humor, forgiveness, giving, relationships, and faith; the "secrets" of wealth are the power of unconscious beliefs, strong desires, clarity of wishes and goals, detailed plans, domain-specific knowledge, willpower and persistence, control of expenditures, honesty, faith, and charity.

All in all, it is a good collection of useful advice. While it would be a very good idea to get the deeper knowledge about each point from other sources, this book serves as a handy reference list for occasional quick memory refresh.

More info about "Ennast leida, ennast hoida":
http://www.rahvaraamat.ee/?id=62&no=R110192

and the originals by Adam J. Jackson:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061044245/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536909/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722539436/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0722536895/

(umm, some of the third-party prices at Amazon are, to put it mildly, CRAZY, though)

Book: Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taivo Lints — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:39:00 +0300

A book originally from 2007, about the importance of events that have very low probability of occurrence but very large impact if they do occur, and how to live so as to avoid being too seriously hit by the negative versions of such events (at least in the domains where it is possible), and how to benefit from the positive ones.

The discussed topics also include:

the widespread misuse of Gaussian distributions in areas where they do not apply;
confirmation bias (people tend to pick only the facts that support their theories);
scalability of professions (to serve more clients, the shoemaker needs to spend more time making shoes, but a writer writes a book once and prints / sells copies without additional effort when demand increases, but then again the writer has much larger risk of the product being not wanted by anybody);
empirical skepticism (systematic doubt plus preferring experiential knowledge to theorizing);
asymmetry of confirmations (i.e., one confirmatory example should not increase your confidence in the general correctness of a theory very much, but one counterexample does decrease the confidence in the correctness of a theory a lot);
falsifiability (instead of looking for confirmations, try to find cases that would prove your theory wrong);
narrative fallacy (our tendency to create stories that connect and explain events, even if those events might not be causally connected in reality);
how happiness depends on the frequency and size of positive or negative events, and how this dependence can reduce our eagerness to live so as to take advantage of rare but very large positive events;
the problem of silent evidence (we mostly hear only from / of those people / objects that have succeeded / survived, and draw incorrect conclusions due to this bias in our data set);
the problem that (mathematical) statistics is researched and taught mostly based on game problems that have strictly defined rules and known bounded outcome sets, but real problems do not have such constraints and require different approaches;
the expert problem (while in some disciplines there exist true experts, in others there are only people whose position as "expert" is not justified due to their lack of abilities to really explain or predict things);
how understanding fractals and power laws can help to reduce unpleasant surprises by rare powerful events, but still does not give us precise predictive instruments;
and much more.

So, in general, "Black Swan" is a great book filled with important, interesting and useful ideas. However, there were two problems that somewhat decreased my satisfaction with it. Firstly, the tone of writing tends to be occasionally quite arrogant. For me the frequent outright bashing and ridiculing is a warning sign of a person who has not reached the level of mental maturity of balance and goodwill (note that by immaturity I do NOT mean playfulness which I value a lot, but being inconsiderate and egoistic; also, I know that such type of ridiculing is widely popular and entertaining for many people, and we even have a special word for it in Estonian - ärapanemine - that I do not know how to translate, but still I consider such behavior unpleasant). Secondly, while most of the main ideas in the book I easily and eagerly agree with, some of the examples were in my opinion either not applicable in given context or even contrary to the main ideas, and sometimes so much so that I felt it necessary to double and triple check my thinking ("the author cannot possibly make such mistakes?!"), but to no avail. Apart from the possibility of me misunderstanding something, I had a hypothesis that the arrogant tone and occasional inconsistencies are intentional, so as to really engage readers' minds and make them think, but unfortunately it is more likely that they are not.

All in all, I quite highly recommend this book, but only to people who think and analyze what they read instead of just "downloading" everything to their unquestioning brains.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400063515/

P.S. Thanks to Jan Dyre who gave this book to me!

P.P.S. If anybody organizes a discussion about this book (or, more generally, about the ideas it contains), I would be very happy to participate!

Books: Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained

Taivo Lints — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:05:00 +0300

Science fiction books by Peter F. Hamilton, originally from 2004 and 2005. Or, actually, it is one story (occasionally referred to as The Commonwealth Saga) split up into two physical books just to keep things manageable, because the total page count for the paperback edition is around 2400.

As the Publishers Weekly has put it, the book is an "intelligent space opera". If you're looking for science fiction novels that have considerable philosophical depth and explore the essence of the Universe beyond imaginable to an ordinary people, then you might find the Commonwealth Saga not particularly attractive. What it does offer, instead, is an enthralling story of a time period in 24th century when the future existence of human (and some other) societies is put in jeopardy. There is no single main character but many persons whose stories get intertwined at some point or another. In addition, the area of space involved is huge: the Intersolar Commonwealth consists of hundreds of planets interlinked with wormholes. Nevertheless, Hamilton somehow succeeds in creating quite a coherent reading experience, and the grandiosity of the world and the plot is smartly conveyed through personal stories of people whose personalities and ways of thinking are easily understandable to a 21st century reader.

For me, these books were so captivating that it was hard to stop reading and put them down in the evening. I even intentionally delayed starting with the second book because I wanted to get some other things done as well and it would have been very difficult to allocate enough time for other tasks when immersed in such a "space opera" (by the way, in case you're wondering, I do NOT watch soap operas from TV; the "intellingent" in front of "space opera" is exactly ment to draw attention to the fact that it is not a soap opera in space).

So, in conclusion, I highly recommend these books.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345479211/ and http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345461673/ .