Fairhaven, The River

Book Review: Calculated Risks, by Gerd Gigerenzer

This book is the right level for an introduction into the many problems that both professionals and the public have with innumeracy, especially regarding statistics.  Most of the examples are chosen from various aspects of medicine.  The typical physician is completely lost when dealing with even the simplest probability problem.

Examples analyzed include mammography screening, HIV testing, and various informed consent problems.  There are other examples from other disciplines, such as the routine mis-representation of DNA evidence in criminal cases and the problems that many people have with simple conditional probability in risks and associations of violent behavior.

There are examples of different equivalent ways to present these situations.  Some of these are much more effective at conveying information than others.  For example, although mathematically identical, saying "three out of ten people will be affected" is much more effective than saying "there is a 30% chance of being affected".  Far more people understand the former phrasing.

Similarly, there is analysis of how perhaps unconscious bias is revealed in the information provided in brochures used to obtain "informed" consent for procedures.  There are many ways that choice of presentation will significantly bias the readers.

This book is not a difficult read.  It requires only the ability to understand and work with simple fractions.  But it is sufficiently rigorous for professional use and understanding.

Gigerenzer has written some other books that are fluffy pablum for the general public that fears difficult mathematics like fractions, and has written some much more rigorous statistical works on these subjects.  I recommend this one as the introduction for professionals.

A good ftp proxy software

I've been using "jwftp" as an ftp proxy for about six months now, and it works very well.  I recommend it.  FTP is a very stable protocol, so "jwftp" is also stable.  It just gets a very occasional tweak to reflect changing operating system environmentts.

This is a bit of a niche interest, but as a security guru I inflict my recommendations onto myself.  Therefore, my home network lives behind some application proxies.  I've had issues getting a good ftp proxy that supports all the various ftp clients and not just the browsers.  This proxy has worked well with not just the browsers.  It's also happy with ftp, sftp, wget, and lftp.  (I personally use "lftp" as a method for intelligent mirroring of ftp sites up and down.  Wget is fine for mirroring downloads, but doesn't do intelligent mirroring uploads.  "lftp" does.)

The audit logs are reasonable to parse, and so far just confirm that the only ftp traffic is authorized traffic that I have initiated.

 

Book Review: A Brilliant Invention: Inventing the American Constitution

"A Brilliant Invention: Inventing the American Constitution" is an interesting perspective on the creation of the US Constitution.  It concentrates on the people and process of creation, rather than provide historical analysis of causes and effects.  It's a fairly brief book at 210 pages.

It starts by setting the stage of the political context.  This is not a historical analysis with explanations and reasons.  It's a statement of what was happening politically and why the constitutional convention was called.  It covers the political context of why some people favored or opposed, attended or avoided the convention.  It also covers the technological limitations of the period, e.g., the need to organize your business affairs for being out of touch for several months because there is no telephone, telegraph, or fast post.  News and post took a few weeks to travel between cities.

Next, it covers the organization and process of the convention.  This is unusual, because it is an explanation of the organizational dynamics, not a discussion of how the convention affected history.  It explains how the documents were created, how the committees are structured, how the meetings are structured, and how this is affected by the personalities involved.  I was especially amused by the name of "Committee for Postponed Items", which reminds me a lot of DICOM's Working Group 6 in terms of it's internal structure.  You don't need to be an organizational dynamics expert to read this section.  It's at a level that the novice can understand. 

Finally, it covers the conclusion and publication, without too much extrapolation into reasons for subsequent historical events.

I noticed one interesting difference between the political structure of the American Revolution and the current structure of world governments.  They had no great leader.  Today's governments are all structured around a single leader. 

The American Revolution and the creation of the constitution were driven by experienced politicians with strong legal expertise and decades of experience, but nobody was the leader.  There were always multiple leaders with their own specialties.  All of the leaders also had major weaknesses, there were powerful arguments and disagreements, and they worked out an acceptable compromise because the alternative was defeat and destruction.  The closest to a single leader was George Washington, but he resolutely stayed out of the political process.  For the rest you have names like Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, etc. 

They expected the country to be led by a similar structure in Congress, with multiple powerful politicians but no single leader.  They expected an efficient but subservient executive similar to George Washington, who expressed his opinions but carried out the policies decided by Congress.

They would probably have been very surprised by how long it took for this structure to collapse in the US.  It was not until the 20th century that the US shifted to it's current process of selecting a single leader to make all important decisions.   They were wondering whether the Constitution would survive for more than a few decades.