Taivo Lints Blog

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/

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/

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 .

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!

A book by Len Walsh, originally from 1969, for people interested in starting to learn to read Japanese. It is a nice little book that almost in a story-like fashion explains and builds up around 300 of the most common kanji characters. For example, it starts with the pictograph for sun, and shows how it evolved into the kanji character for sun. Then "tree" is treated in a similar fashion, "roots" (or "origin") is derived from "tree", and then the characters of sun and roots are put together to form a compound "origin-of-the-sun", which is the name of Japan in Japanese, pronounced NIPPON or NIHON.

For sure, you should not expect to be able to read Japanese texts after finishing this book, as it covers only 300 kanji out of the thousands, and hardly any kana at all. But what it covers, it covers in a very pleasant and captivating way. For me, the book was a real pleasure to read, and I would recommend it to everybody who is interested in starting to understand written Japanese, and in why the characters look they way they do.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0804804966