Radiolab!

It happened again! I met someone at a social gathering this weekend unfamiliar with Radiolab,  the amazing podcast on science and other fascinating subjects.

So here are 5 compelling Radiolab segments to introduce you to its pleasures. You can subscribe for free via Itunes or through a smartphone app like my favorite Doggcatcher.

On bliss and its real-world effects.

My previous post on tDCS, supercharging one's brain with a small amount of current.

A story from this month on attempts to communicate with dolphins, from the 60's to today.

Should we eradicate mosquitoes? It's tempting, but ...

How internet retailers get stuff too you so fast, and the human costs that entails ...

This is just a sample of 12 years' work ... if you like these, the archive is available ...

Forex trading: books

I had lunch with a friend with whom I discuss all sorts of interesting subjects, and he brought up the story of an acquaintance of his that was trading forex.

I didn't know anything about forex trading despite having traded options for the last 5+ years, so the past few days I went on a reading binge on the subject.

First, my favorite:

The author is a long time forex trader and manager who has a skeptical view of the market and its participants, with reason! To wit:

• There's no central clearing house for most trades; usually it's trader vs broker, and the broker is in position to exploit the trader in many cases
• Unlike other brokers in options or stocks who do operate with a clearing agency and thus have their client trader's interest aligned in that these firms make more money the more trading occurs. In forex, in many cases the broker can manipulate the trader into losing his or her entire account in a short time (by the use of excess leverage, sometimes up to 400 to 1, and very wide spreads)
• It's advertised as "commission free" but the brokers are paid by the bid/ask spread, so of course it's not "free" and with manipulated extra-wide spreads can be much more expensive than a small commission would be

If you're only going to read one book on forex trading, read this one.

Next is Anna Coulling:

She's apparently a well-known personality in the world of forex and I did find her book useful:

It gives a very detailed look at the entire landscape of forex, with her own warning on unscrupulous broker/dealers (but nothing like as jaundiced a view as Silvani). She does promote a "leading indicator" (fully explained in a more advanced book) of "Volume Price Analysis." that looks worthwhile .. I bought another one of hers, A Three Dimensional Approach to Forex Trading, but haven't read it yet.

One big plus for Ms. Coulling: she disparages paper trading and suggests you instead start with a tiny "micro" account and when you can show a profit trading with this then scale up. This fits my experience ... who cares about paper money?

And with the Kindle reader on my phone I couldn't resist a few other low-priced books:

 All of these were worth at least the (very low) price while I'm trying to get my head around this, but for the moment I'm sticking with options trading ... maybe when that's getting boring (a little too exciting lately!) I'll start with a micro account doing this.

Any other Forex traders out there? Comments please!

Standard math education destroys math ability?

The New York Times on Sunday published this article on the problems Americans have with math.

It turns out that American math education isn't just less than perfectly effective, it even has been shown to mess up the ability of street vendors in Brazil to do the calculations they were doing in their head successfully before being subjected to this "education."

The article focuses on a Japanese researcher who's moved to the U.S. to try and help U.S. schools implement the more successful strategies for math education in Japan and elsewhere.

We've got to do something ... the article also says that a rival to McDonald's quarter pounder that was 1/3 pound failed because most of those in a focus group though 1/4 was bigger than 1/3 and the new burger was a "rip off." 

Have direct experience with poor math education? Comments please!

C'mon, can't I leave spaces in my credit card number? It's 2014!

Probably you've had this experience ... filling out a purchase form to buy something online and entering the credit card number exactly as it appears on the card, say:

4444 5555 6666 7777

You click Submit and you get back (quickly via Javascript or less quickly with a page refresh) something like:

Why the hell should I have to remove the spaces in the form in this day and age?

To be fair, a few companies get this right, Amazon among them. Others refuse to let you put in a space some Javascript trick as you're typing. This is better than an error message, but not much. Finally, some remove spaces after you hit submit but before you finalize your purchase on another page. This is silly but tolerable.

Let me say this clearly: the display of the credit card number does not need to look exactly like the credit card number that's transmitted to the back end system.

Humans aren't good at parsing a 16-digit number; we need spaces or dashes to break up the pieces of the number.

Web geeks must just be missing the code to do this, so I will provide some examples here in hope of putting this issue to rest for all of us for the future.

Javascript:

var card = '4444 5555 6666 7777';
var cnostr = card.replace(/\s+/g, '');
alert('card b4:' + card);
alert('card after:' + cnostr);

Python:

import re
card = '4444 5555 6666 7777'
(cnostr,ign) = re.subn('[\s+]','',card)
print 'card = %s' % card
print 'cnostr = %s' % cnostr

Other languages are left as an exercise for the reader.

How about this, folks? Please send a link to this page to the purveyor of any web form that doesn't allow you to put spaces in a credit card number. We can start to get this fixed!

A virtual war over virtual hells

I just finished my favorite work of SF since Charles Stross' Singularity Sky.

Iain M. Banks was also a Scot, like Stross; Banks died in 2013. He produced 9 books in a "Culture series" about an advanced civilization, the Culture where AI-run ships and drones have achieved full sentience and are granted equal citizenship and rights.

The first four chapters are just setting up the main characters, so do give it at least until chapter 5.

The protagonist is Lededje, an "Intagliate" who was tattooed at birth right down to her DNA. This marked her as the property of Joiler Veppers, the richest and most powerful man of the Enablement, a less technically and politically (and morallly!) advanced civilization than the Culture.

I won't spoil the story by giving details on how Lededje gets away from Veppers and into dealing with the Culture. But the basis of the story runs several complex threads around a war that several civilizations have agreed to fight only in a virtual environment (like a computer game) to decide the fates of several Hells. These Hells are also running as virtual environments, and the technology exists to transfer the consciousness at death from the body of an unfortunate into one of these Hells.

The complexity of the story threads and the way Banks brought them all together with their interplay with the Culture ships (notables of these named Sense Amid Madness, Wit Among Folly and Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) is just dazzling. There's also quite a bit of discussion of the sociology and political interplay between the Culture and several other intergalactic civilizations that exist at the same time and several of which are competing in the War Over Hell.

Five stars! You may want to read one previous Culture novel to get your bearings; I'd recommend The Player of Games if you want to read one before this one.

I experienced this as an Audible audiobook, which is the way I "read" almost all fiction these days.

Change your break hours, make $15 million?

I just finished Social Physics, a book by MIT professor Alexander Pentland:

His basic idea is that progress and wealth are generated by group interaction that's balanced between existing connections and new ones, avoiding both "echo chambers" and isolation.

One example is eToro, a social connection site for day traders. Those who found the "sweet spot" between isolation and echo chamber were richly rewarded: "When traders had the right balance and diversity in their social network, their return on investment increases 30 percent over individual traders." (p. 33)

Even more amazing: the consulting practice Dr. Pentland works with suggested that a call center that was sending agents to break individually start sending groups together instead. This worked in an initial test so well that the large bank involved moved all call center break schedules to this plan and average call times dropped to the extent that it produced an extra $15 million profit for the bank.

I'm mostly working from home these days but after reading this am certainly going to make a point to get out to more user's groups and meetups of various kinds. Who knows what riches are waiting in the folds of the social fabric?

tDCS: a tiny amount of current into one's brain produces amazing performance gains!

I just heard the most recent Radiolab Short episode, which concerns tDCS with a couple of people describing their experiences with it and researchers discussing its prospects.

I won't spoil the Radiolab episode by discussing its contents in detail, but you won't be disappointed.

In addition to researchers, there are also a lot of amateurs working with tDCS, since hardware setups can be built for as little as $20. For example, this guy used a Radio Shack circuit teaching kit.

The potential for this "9-volt nirvana" seems enormous in so many areas of human endeavor it's hard to count ...

Any of my 6 or 7 regular readers tried this yet?