Literary roundup

My avider readers may have noticed, amid the sporadic coverage of this year, that my book reviews have been trending to the negative. Of the two books I've reviewed this year, both have fallen short of my expectations, at least in any positive sense. My public, I make no doubt, will be worried for me. There's only so long one's soul can survive on the sort of diet I've discussed in the previous two literary posts.

But allow me to reassure you, dear reader, that my literary experiences have not all been negative. I have in fact read some fine works this year. Some of them, indeed, several hundred times.

There's a Wocket in my Pocket is far from Dr Seuss's greatest work. It lacks the compelling characterisation of The Cat in the Hat, the poignant pathos of Yertle the Turtle or the timeless sagacity of Oh, the Places You'll Go. But on the other hand, its vivid depiction of a world packed with sentient creatures in every cranny echoes the powerful meanings of Shinto or Gaian animism, and that can only be a good thing. In other words: if you think there's a jertain in your curtain, you'll treat it with more respect.

More importantly, the pages are made of stiff card, which means it can survive day-to-day handling by a 16-month-old child. That, indeed, is the common theme of this list.

Ten Little Babies, Gyo Fujikawa's sinister thriller based on the Agatha Christie novel, tells of the varying fates of - as the title suggests - ten babies. The illustrations make quite clear, however, that the nine little babies who went to bed late are not included in the ten who originally sat down to dine. So in fact there are 55 little babies in this book, only ten of which are accounted for. A disturbing thought.

Guess How Much I Love You is the only book on this list that belongs to me, having been a gift from Susan some years ago, and ownership not having formally transferred to Atilla. I must remember to include it in my will. In reading to 'Tilly, I have been forced to recognise that although stretching out one's arms or reaching up high are fine graphical demonstrations of "this much" - flipping oneself upside down and stretching one's feet up a convenient tree trunk is, frankly, hard.

Duck's Stuck, a muddy fable of farmyard life, doesn't aspire to either the poetic or artistic heights of a Seuss. But it does have a quiet little charm of its own, which I can best explain by pointing to the fact that Cow's lines are predominantly words that you can actually moo. "Cow chewed. Feathers flew. 'Try now', mooed Cow." I defy you to read that aloud without changing your voice. This, together with the great "Aaaa-chooo", have kept this book firmly at the top of Tilly's favourites list for more than three months.

How to Catch a Star is a little more advanced, with its themes of holistic astronomy, sophisticated engineering and animal training. 'Tilly is less convinced by it, generally seeing it as a last resort to fend off the moment when he finally has to accept that it's bedtime.

Honourable mention should go to That's Not My Polar Bear, now pretty much retired, but an invaluable guide to distinguishing wildlife. Thanks to this book, 'Tilly has known since before his first birthday that if he is confused between two polar bears, he can identify one from another by carefully squeezing their noses, tickling their tummies and rubbing their tongues. Valuable tips, I'm sure we can all agree.

The Lost Drivel

For some years, my father made a habit of using me as a tame book reviewer. For a Christmas present he'd give me a book that he'd heard some buzz about, but wasn't convinced enough to invest his own time in. Then, based on my verdict, he'd decide whether or not to add it to his own reading list.

The process introduced me to some splendid books. I first encountered Philip Pullman and Iain Pears that way. But it was, as you'd expect, hit and miss: there were some serious turkeys in the Christmas mix.

So it was that one year, on my way to New Zealand for my then-annual New Year visit, I found myself saddled with an exceptionally bad 500-page hardback potboiler. I forget what it was - it had ghosts, I remember - but I didn't feel like carrying it home, so I 'regifted' it to my now-brother-in-law, whom we'll call Ben.

This Christmas, Ben got his revenge.

Dan Brown's most recent opus, The Lost Symbol, is a book so bad that I feel the need to recalibrate the bottom end of my scale. This undigested ramble around subjects that the author either doesn't begin to understand or, worse, simply chooses to misrepresent, runs to some 700 pages in paperback. (It could have been done in 300, tops, and it would still have been atrocious but less repetitive. Presumably Brown's publisher specified a wordcount.) Warning just in case you're planning to read this tosh for yourself: from this point on, I will be spoiling like milk in the sun.

Summary: a mysterious villain believes that 'ancient wisdom' guarded by the Freemasons would enable him to become a god, and sets out to force our hero to uncover the Masons' deepest secret.

Spoiler: it's a bible. Yes, that's right - the unspeakable secret that billionaire Freemasons are prepared to lay down their own, their families', and each others' lives to protect - is the most readily-available book in the Western world. If only our villain had thought to check in his hotel drawer, we could all have been spared this whole tedious taradiddle.

And if you think that's silly, just wait until you find out why the CIA is involved.

Along the way, we get introduced to the wonderful world of 'noetic science'. 'Noetics' - loosely speaking, Greek for 'bullshit' - is a label invented in the 1970s to make new-age mysticism sound scientific. In Brown's hands, it becomes a top-secret research institute that has conclusively proved the existence of multiple gods, the power of prayer, the weight of the soul and the length of a piece of string, through rigorous scientific experimental processes that are too dull to be explained even in this interminable pile of filler.

(Some of Brown's fans claim that the details are omitted because they're too technical. But based on the available evidence, it seems more likely that Brown simply neither knows nor cares what a 'scientific experiment' is.)

Science, then, is treated with a level of contempt seldom found outside a Bible Belt school board. It would be nice to report that Brown's other strand, mysticism, fares better. But here again, the author clearly despises his subject as much as his audience.

The hero spends much time lambasting others for taking metaphors literally. Yet Brown himself is agonisingly literal-minded. The idea of 'ancient wisdom' here becomes 'the Ancient Mysteries' - some sort of cosmic cheat sheet, well known to The Ancients, that can transform him who understands it into a god. (After all, when was the last time you left home without dropping a quick libation to Pythagoras?) And when Jesus says 'The works that I do shall [ye] do also; and greater works than these shall [ye] do', in Brown's world this means that we can all cure cancer by wishing hard enough. The mundane fact that proper science (as opposed to 'noetics') now routinely heals the sick, makes the lame to walk and the blind to see on a scale undreamt-of in Jesus' day - doesn't seem to have dawned on him.

I remember, as a teenager, talking ideas like these through with my schoolfriends and fellow students. And I don't believe my circle of friends was particularly elevated. In Dan Brown's world, these sophomoric meanderings become profound wisdom to be uncovered, to much gasping, by the most intellectual elite of the Ivy League.

Maybe Brown was stoned while he wrote. That would explain the prose style, but it's not much of an excuse.

Editing the Herald

Since James is, apparently, still on holiday (bloody academics), it falls to me to get angry about today's New Zealand Herald.

"Half of Kiwis doubt global warming: poll" says the headline. Curious, I click to the article. "A Herald survey", it reports.

Oh, excellent. So the Herald has commissioned its very own poll? That means it'll be telling us all the data, not just cherrypicking a few findings that happen to catch the reporter's eye. It'll tell us how many people were surveyed, when and how, what questions they were asked, and how their answers varied with their demographics...

Well, not so much as it happens.

Almost one in five of 2296 respondents said the concept was a giant con, and a further 28 per cent said global warming had not been conclusively proved.

"Almost" one in five? You wouldn't care to be any more precise about that figure? Did they use the words "giant con", or was that suggested to them as Option 1? As for "conclusively proved" - what does that even mean?

An online survey of the Herald Readers' Panel was conducted by the Nielsen Company between December 10 and December 17, as world leaders prepared to meet at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen.

Thirty-eight per cent said global warming was a serious problem that needed action now, 13 per cent said it was the world's biggest challenge, and 2 per cent did not know.

Again, your words or theirs? I'm going to guess yours, but would it hurt you to publish the damn' questions?

Nineteen per cent - including almost 30 per cent of men aged 45 or older - thought it was a giant con and a waste of money.

A giant con and a waste of money. Two separate options, one portmanteau one, or just the reporter's own interpolation? I guess we'll never know.

And that, believe it or not, is all the data we're given about this poll - the one commissioned by this newspaper, for which it has presumably paid good money. No list of questions (let alone answers), nothing about the design of the form, the sample selection process or the demographics of the sample. Without which this research quite literally isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

This is a newspaper, right? Its entire raison d'etre is to report stuff. And this particular stuff is its own exclusive property. If the Herald doesn't tell us this stuff, no-one else even has the right to it.

No wonder Kiwis are uninformed about science, when their leading national daily newspaper can't even be bothered to publish its own original research...

Blood money

There's one of those sad stories on Slashdot, today, illustrating the real purpose of the Iraq war...

It points to a New York Times story about how the Iraqi army is using, basically, divining rods to detect explosives at checkpoints. There's a predictable slew of comments attacking unscientific methods in general and dowsing in particular, uncited studies supposedly debunking unverifiable anecdotes, all of it illustrating the boundless arrogance of random people on the Internet. But what really strikes me is the price of these divining rods.

Apparently, the Iraqis buy them for anything between US$16,500 to US$60,000.

That's a lot of money for a stick.

And they bought them - 1500 of them, so far - from a British company. That is to say, from one of the occupying powers.

I don't know how much Britain has spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Billions, I presume. So it's nice that they've got $50 million or so back like this. Except, of course, that the money came from the taxpayers, but the return is going into the pockets of private investors. In other words, it's yet another redistribution of cash from (everyone) to a very select group of people.

It'd be vastly more efficient, to say nothing of costing many fewer lives, simply to let them dip their hands in the till directly. Looked at in that light, the "MPs' expenses" business looks positively enlightened.

Personally, if someone offers me a dowsing-based bomb-detection system, I'm perfectly willing to listen. If they put on a good demo, I'll even set up some tests of my own. But I also have this belief, which I can't quite shake, in the concept of a "fair price" - something that is at least vaguely related to the cost of production. Don't tell me that price was set in a free market.

The science of karma

A fascinating new study from Germany finds that revenge doesn't pay.

In a sane world, this would be no surprise. Energy spent on making someone else's life crap, is energy that's not working for oneself, or one's loved ones. In economic terms, it's simply a waste of resources. From Othello to Captain Ahab to the Count of Monte Cristo, our culture is full of illustrations of how revenge is a dish best not eaten at all.

The fact that this isn't considered blindingly obvious is probably because there are so many batshit-insane people around nowadays. In particular, believers in that beguiling branch of maths known as "game theory" - a category that, nowadays, includes almost everyone concerned with social sciences. Game theory, as popularly interpreted, implies that if someone does something bad to you, you should retaliate proportionately against them.

As far as it goes, the theory is fair enough. But it doesn't go nearly as far as many people think it does. Game theory, like every mathematical theory I've ever heard of, is based on a vast pile of mostly-unspoken assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. For instance, there's the assumption that all players are following the same rules, which are not liable to change. Then there's the assumption that the number of players is constant - nobody will enter or leave the game mid-way. Or that all players have the same motivation. In most economic and social contexts, these assumptions are patently absurd. But they're so seldom stated that it's easy to forget they're there.

Now, thanks to Prof Dr Armin Falk of Bonn University and his co-authors, we have concrete evidence that "negative reciprocity" is truly counter-productive. In particular, the study finds, vengeful people are much more likely to find themselves unemployed.

What does work, on the other hand, is "positive reciprocity". Turns out that, regardless of the level of motivation, returning good behaviour leads to a much more profitable relationship than punishing bad behaviour.

What I like about this study is that it doesn't care about means or mechanisms. It doesn't try to prove, or even imply, that reward is a better motivator than punishment, or that relationships based on threat of punishment are unhealthy. It doesn't even try to argue with game theory. Maybe these things are true, maybe they aren't; that's not the point here. The point is that there is a measurable difference in outcomes.

Trolls and thugs

Let's hear it for The Register, which for the second time this week is feeding me material on how evil the Internet is. And this time, it's proper Research.

The latest piece, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, shows a significant positive correlation between teenagers who make heavy use of the Internet, and those who show violent and aggressive behaviour in real life.

Now, anyone who's been online for more than half an hour must surely have noticed that there's a high proportion of jerks, and I've seen a great many explanations of this advanced over the years. Maybe it's harder to avoid such people online; maybe the anonymity of the 'net makes people more confident and less considerate; maybe it's because we're not accustomed to mixing with so many teenagers; maybe it's a small proportion of users making a large volume of noise; maybe it's simply the shared culture of a "place" with a population historically weighted towards adolescent males.

But this research suggests - although all of those things may still be true - it's not just a perception. There really is a higher concentration of yobs out here in cyberspace.

Media coverage of the finding is fairly clearly divided into two camps. In the blue corner, we have those such as FOX News, who have no reservations about citing the study as evidence that the Internet is turning our teens into sociopathic thugs. In the red corner, the likes of El Reg argue that causality could work the other way - it's possible that thuggish kids are simply more drawn to spend excessive amounts of time online. (To do it justice, FOX does acknowledge that possibility - but it's buried half-way down the story, while the opposite explanation is in the headline.)

Intuitively, to me, the second explanation looks likelier. Show a bully a medium in which they can inflict fear and offence with minimal risk, and my bet is they'll gravitate to it like the British government to a database. It'll fascinate them, seeing how much they can do, what they can get away with, until some idiot leaves it on a train...

The original paper preserves a studied neutrality on this point. But it does suggest that "preventive programs for aggressive behaviors should pay attention to Internet addiction among adolescents." Which just goes to show, it is possible to convert science into policy recommendations without, necessarily, getting into a shouting match about it.