I am currently reading Ryszard Kapscinki's collection of essays on living in and and reporting from Africa called The Shadow of the Sun. As many of you know, I am intrigued by parochialism and in-group and out-group preferences. Kapuscinski (2001, 188-89) captures the idea perfectly in his essay 'The Black Crystals of the Night,'

Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt towards the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune. Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me - they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore ther Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.

As it was the festive season I took time off to ignore my google reader, get research done and then take a couple of days off with my wife over our anniversary (shock horror no internet access crazy!), I also went to Plett with my family before returning to Italy. As my South African sojourn ended there were flights and waits in airports (someone should write 'Doha: An Ode'). Consequently, I managed to read some books, mostly works of fiction, but there are a few non-fiction works sticking there hands up in the air awaiting a mention.

Fiction
I tooka little time to read my ever-companionable and enjoyable Galactic Milieu series by Julian May. In combination with the May's Saga of Pliocene Exile it is basically a tale of felix culpa for one of the main characters, Marc Remillard. I love this series for no obvious reason, it involves 'higher mind powers', aliens intervening in Earth Civilization in the early 21st century and odd Catholic theology, but I still love the main characters and the storyline. A human who takes a singular leap forward in evolution and basically becomes a disembodied brain sustained by his mindpowers! I can't really fathom why I appreciate this series so much, I think it appeals to the fantasist in me.

After May's series, I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited which I had been intending to read for ages. My wife has a fantastic hard cover Everyman's library version. Although somewhat strange to get into at first (I don't seem to have much sympathy for Oxfordian life), I enjoyed the second half of the book greatly. The reflections on cultural degeneration, the issue of reconciling religion and death, of what it means to be married in pre-WWII England and what lovelessness within marriage entails was both disturbing and enlivening (enlivening because I sympathise, I suppose, with the problems with reconciling areligiosity and death). I recommend this book strongly.

Following this, I read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Wow! I love it. It is a phenomenal book. It is an alternative history that considers what might have happened in the US if, instead of FD Roosevelt winning the 1940 US Election, Charles Lindbergh had run as the Republican candidate and beaten FDR. It is told mainly from the perspective of 8-year-old Philip Roth. Roth has a total command of his conceptualisation of this alternative history and writes the details of it well, focusing on the experiences of a working class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. Although potentially difficult for some because of its weighty factual nature in certain sections, the writing pulls you through, and brings you to a better understanding of the United States. This is high quality social commentary from Roth.

Next up was another work of fiction, John Updike's Terrorist. Updike follows a few characters in this book, the two main characters are a young Islamic man, Ahmad, who was abandoned by his Muslim father and lives at home with his American liberal, nurse's assistant cum artist mother. The second main character is Jack, a Jewish teacher and counselor at Ahmad's high school who becomes invested in the idea of Ahmad going to university rather than becoming a truck driver. Reading the two reviews on Amazon that gave the book one star, I can't help but think they gave the book an odd reading. The one complains that it gives a unidimensional account of Muslims, it doesn't, in fact the whole purpose of the book is to portray the kind of Islam that a devout, almost obsessive teenager constructs in order to satisfy his own preferences. It also does not portray this Islam as the Islam practised by other Muslims, in fact Updike goes to great lengths to show the different shades of Muslims once could potentially find in the world setting Ahmad in opposition to his boss Mr. Chehab. Anyway, the book does not have the grace that I have experienced reading some of Updike's earlier work, but it is definitely a worthwhile read. I'd give it four stars, not one, because he portrays the character of Ahmad well, I believe, even if he doesn't deal with the religion in as nuanced a way as some might like. If I was comparing it only to Updike's own work, rather than the work of the rest of the world, I'd give it three stars. Here is an interview with Updike about the book. Here's another (video) interview.

E.M. Forster's Maurice was next up on my shelf. Amy had been recommending this to me for ages, we had previously found a copy in that fantastic bookshop on Kloof Street (the name of which I forget), Book Lover's Paradise I think. It had sat on the shelf, unread, while I was here in Italy (Amy had read it previously for a course at uni). The book is a beautifully written, and fantastically witty, depiction of the adolescent and young adult life of Maurice, a young man from an upper class, but not noble, British family. Maurice is homosexual. Forster protrays the struggles that Maurice goes through with forcible and graceful language, portraying both Maurice's limitations to his partners, his fall, his classism (which Maurice fails to realise is as bad as homophobia) and, finally, a sexual and mental awakening to the ways in which his homosexuality will affect his life. The book is highly meaningful as one of the first pieces of genuine 21st century 'gay' literature, as Forster completed the work in 1914 but it was only published posthumously. Forster's reflections on the laws in the UK, which he wrote as part of an afterword during the 1960s, also shows how worried and anxious he was about the state of the law in the UK and how he felt that homosexuality would never be granted the status that it now has. This book is beautiful, easy to read and the timbre of Forster's writing voice is well worth listening to.

Finally, completing the fiction, I bought Terry Brooks's The Gypsy Morph in the Exclusive Books of Cape Town International Airport and finished it by the time I arrived in London (having sat in Doha for five hours twiddling my eyeballs). So yes, I had time to finish that. This book was the finale in Brooks's 'The Genesis of Shannara' trilogy. I am an old fantasy and sci-fi hack and I took pleasure in reading this book. This is good journeyman fantasy, decent battles, magic, elves, etc with a final resolution that ties together the world of a post-apocalyptic 'Earth' and that of Shannara. It was like a decent action movie: enough battles and thrilling events to keep the story moving, tied in with a worthwhile, if somewhat simple, plot. Perfect for hours in Doha waiting for my Qatar airways flight.

Non-fiction
Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is a collection of essays on bibliophiles and their behaviour, which is often profoundly strange, yet simultaneously entertaining and endearing. I am a bibliophile (hopelessly misunderstood by my parents in that respect - I love books and had to get rid of almost two bookshelves worth when I left the country to start my PhD - the horror, the horror (don't worry I didn't get rid of my Conrads), let it be known, though, that my parents allowed me to keep two bookshelves full of books in my old room). Anyway, Fadiman's book is fantastic, she ruminates on being a sesquipedalianist, she assesses the myriad ways we treat our books (I am a scribbler and write in both fiction and non-fiction books), she meditates on whether his'er would work as a substitute for his in the phrase to each his own (she concludes, emphatically, thankfully, that it would not). Fadiman's essay are witty and insightful. The book was a pleasure to read. My wife, who is possibly as bibliomaniacal (in the metaphorical rather than diagnostic sense) as I am, gave this to me as part of an anniversary gift. We truly are kindred spirits.

As promised previously, a comment on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers warrants some space. There has been a fair amount of commentary on this book (which I don't feel like linking to, sorry). Gladwell brings together a host of case studies and various research to bring together his ideas about success. He argues that success is basically composed of luck and hard work. However, you also have to be lucky enough to realise that hard work is necessary for success, so that is also part of the luck component. Underpinning both of these, though, are institutional structures (my terminology), such as the cutoff dates at school, the transaction costs of changing from one school to another (low during the 50s and 60s, high now), the mobility between areas, and the recognition given to one group rather than another (i.e. to what extent race disadvantages you because of the institutional structures reinforcing your position). The book is interesting, but I didn't get anything substantially 'new' from it except for some case studies. The studies link the argument together well, but they don't really do anything to tell us about how to change the system, or how to change people's thinking about success, except to show them the evidence against them. Historically, this has not worked: many libertarians still seem to believe in absolute freedom of choice and that institutional constraints don't exist. The book is worthwhile because it brings academic debates to hoi polloi and will hopefully strengthen the understanding that individuals are constrained by history and luck and that 'ability' doesn't always just shine on through.

Lastly, Alex Perry's Falling off the Edge is possibly one of the worst edited books of non-fiction I have read in a long time. This doesn't detract too much from his arguments about globalization, inequality and the dangers inherent in these, but seriously: repeated sentences, misspelled words, incorrect concord. Ahhh!!! I kept track until I lost the bookmark on which I was keeping track of the errors. The book is still worthwhile and I learned a hell of a lot about China, India and several other Asian countries, as well as some things that I didn't know about South Africa. I disagreed with some of Perry's more dire conclusions, such as the potential for a left-wing revolution to overthrow Asia's largest governments (China, India). Maybe I just hoped that these conclusions are wrong. I don't know enough about the countries he discusses to tell whether his arguments hold water or not. Anyway, give it a read, it's written in a reportage style (Perry being Time Magazine's African correspondent), with image plates thrown in to iron off the rougher edges. It falls into my 'racy' non-fiction category.

Next time
Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun and hopefully Roberto Bolano's 2666 once my order from Amazon arrives.

I just watched the TED talk below by Steve Levitt. In it he highlights some of his work with Sudhir Venkatesh (who regularly posts on the Freakonomics blog) about gang membership and the extent to which economic theory and the performance of crack-cocaine selling gangs coincides. Very interesting. HT: Mind Hacks.

Two points that brought it home for me, as a crack-selling foot soldier you have a greater chance of dying than someone on death row. Second, any black teenager living in the area (in their research inner city Chicago) has approximately double the probability of dying that a US soldier in Iraq has.

These statistics make me shudder when thinking what the equivalent probabilities must be for teenagers living on the Cape Flats.

The 6th Carnival of the Africans is being hosted by Angela who runs 'Skeptic Detective'. Here are my picks from the carnival.

Ivan, of a subtle shift in emphasis, tells the tale of his journey to atheism. He recounts the struggles of really understanding and relating to Christianity after seeing stark depictions of Jesus's torture and crucifixion in the Zeffirelli depiction thereof (in Jesus of Nazareth) and how this vivid experience was followed by catechism, mathematical and science education and more. Have a read, it's worthwhile.

Dr Spurt of Effortless Incitement relates some of the nuances of human tastes and how these relate to the symbolic experiences of what is being tasted (Pepsi vs. Generic cola say). Very interesting.

Mike Meadon reminds us that confusing hypnogogia for actual experiences is alive and well in personal tales of life and religion.

Two of my own posts, one on love and neuroscience and a recent one on the transitive brains of rhesus monkeys featured in the carnival.

A recent paper by Camillo Padoa-Schioppa and John Assad investigates the encoding of value in the brain for rhesus monkeys, a renewal of efforts to understand how and whether the assumption of transitivity, so crucial to the behavioral sciences, is in fact an accurate description of how individuals act when making choices. It builds on a previous paper (2006) of theirs in Nature, 'Neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex encode economic value.' The novelty in their (2008) research is that they provide evidence for value-encoding of juice consumption as menu-invariant, i.e. invariant to changes in the goods that are rank-preferred by the monkeys. I'm going to give you a brief summary and then make some points on where I'd be interested in seeing future research go.

There are three basic characteristics that they define. First, offer value responses which encode quantity or value of one or two offered juices (products). Second, chosen value responses which encode the value of the chosen juice (product) independent of the juice (product) type. Third, taste responses which are binary responses reflecting which one of two juices (products) are chosen independent of the amount of the juice (product). I have highlighted the notion of juice as product to foreground the idea of parallels between monkey juice consumption and the consumption of products by humans. Padoa-Schioppa and Assad assert that the second response, the chosen value response, is the most interesting because it is subjective and it ``represents a common unit for qualitatively different goods.'' (95) Their experimental methods are, thus, engaged with unearthing and isolating this chosen value effect. It is on this basis that we must assess their experimental methods and design.

The Experiment
The authors ran experiments with two (a male and a female) rhesus monkeys, measuring the neuronal output in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The monkeys were prepared for the experiments using normal surgical procedures in preparation for neuronal recording. Juice was delivered to the monkeys in specifically measured quanta. The instructions, as such, that the monkeys were given were consistent with previous literature on the subject, with the monkeys selecting from a set of coloured squares indicating type and quantity of juice. The monkeys had an initial fixation point, after which a `go' signal was given: the introduction of two saccade targets adjacent to the coloured squares. Once the monkey had maintained fixation on the saccade target that they chose, juice would be delivered to them. Trials were aborted if the monkey broke fixation before the `go' signal. This procedure is highly detailed and thus easily replicable with appropriate resources.

Results
The theory was that there are three potential neuronal responses: offer value, chosen value and taste responses. The argument was that the Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC) neurons have previously responded to delivery of a given juice depending on the context (Tremblay & Schultz
1999). However, that study did not assess whether these encoded responses were invariant to changes in menu. They designed an experiment in which they could isolate whether preference encoding is independent of menu choice and thus whether any (A,B,C) triple selected for an experimental session would allow for valid encoding of value in the OFC, value which would be consistent across menus. The crucial underlying distinction though is that the set of juices given fits the ranking A > B > C, with any one juice falling into a class A, B or C. This brings us to the question of how the juice rankings are derived, for which we do not have the data. Nevertheless, the final result was that 1 unit of an A class juice was equivalent to 1.3 units of a B class juice and one unit of a class B juice was approximately equivalent to 3 units of a class C juice. Finally, they showed that 1 unit of a class A juice was roughly equivalent to 4 units of a class C juice. Hence you have approximate value indifference (1 unit A = 1.3 x 3 ~= 4).

Thus the authors cover a broad base of theory related to preference transitivity and show that with distinct and well-defined preferences, values are encoded and the structure of these values reflects the mathematical conditions of value transitivity and indifference transitivity. This is very interesting and definitely warrants further research in other monkeys and for a larger sample of individuals, rather than it being some quirk of the two monkeys in the experiment.

Random Reflection
Would it not be cool, ladies and gentlemen, if instead of using disjoint sets of ranked goods they doing something that attempted to replicate what Simonson and Tversky (1992) (and most recently reinvigorated in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational) discussed in house choice - seeing two potential consumption goods and then introducing what would be called an 'irrelevant alternative' in economic theory and seeing how the type of 'irrelevant alternative' (or the degree of similarity of the irrelevant alternative to one of the actual choices) affected value encoding. To me, this would bridge the gap from what would be a traditionally 'behavioral economics' assertion (for which we require, I believe, more evidence) and that of a good neurocellular economics discussion. A question for further research I suppose.

Reference
Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, John A Assad (2007). The representation of economic value in the orbitofrontal cortex is invariant for changes of menu Nature Neuroscience, 11 (1), 95-102 DOI: 10.1038/nn2020

William Easterly, aid sceptic extraordinaire (note aid not AIDS), has started a blog: Aid Watch. I am often in disagreement with Easterly, but he does make decent points in his research about aid, about accountability and about guidelines for policy. He starts of his contribution to the blogosphere by commenting on two recent opeds by Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. Easterly criticises Zoellick for his personal pet hate: aid for aid's sake, rather than for what the aid will do. Take a look.

Jonah Lehrer has a recent piece in the WSJ in which he comments on several books on decision-making as a lead up to the release of his upcoming book How We Decide. The problem I wanted to highlight with his article was a reference to the book by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty. Lehrer comments that, "in experiment after experiment, the psychologists demonstrated that, unlike the hypothetical consumers in economics textbooks, real people don't treat losses and gains equivalently."

This is factually incorrect. They did not run experiments, they administered questionnaires. They asked people how they would react as if they were to face a lottery over gains and as if they were to face a lottery over losses. They did not actually run the experiments to test whether people would act in the ways that they described in their seminal (1979) paper, 'Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk'. To quote Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 264), "The demonstrations are based on the responses of students and university faculty to hypothetical choice problems." Again, not an experiment.

Subsequently, a number of their theories have been validated in the lab, but for a lot of their most famous results they did not run experiments, unless administering questionnaires has suddenly become experimental. Yes, in later papers they did run experiments, and, yes, for certain other research questions they ran experiments, but for the things that Lehrer comments on this did not, especially not prior to 1982. Even as late as 1992 some of Tversky's work was based only on questionnaires (by my count of the papers of his I know), similarly one of their most famous papers with Richard Thaler (1984) was based on questionnaires.

Note that for this I am not saying that questionnaires are useless, I just wanted to clarify that they are not experiments and thus that the norms for other economic experiments, i.e. actually using the monetary incentives involved, were not held to.

Anyway, the books to which he refers are all good. I have read the Ariely, some of the Thaler and some of the Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky. I just wanted to clarify that one point.