Enticing elucidation beneath good humored history.
Is there a secret mathematical equation to beat the stock-market smarties and outsmart the blackjack dealers? There sure is, says this erudite author. You can bet on it.
Poundstone (Carl Sagan, 1999, etc.) offers a simple formula known as the proportional Kelly criterion. Using it, you can never lose your entire bankroll, and you will have a real edge. He touts the system with scholarship and documentation. And it’s all artfully packaged with diverting tales of geniuses and gangsters. There are MIT scholars and Bell Lab theorists like Claude Shannon, Ed Thorp and the eponymous J.L. Kelly, and there are the colorful gamblers and crooks from Vegas to Wall Street like Bugsy Siegel and Ivan Boesky. There’s ambitious young Rudy Giuliani and irascible old Paul Samuelson. The math geeks, con men, arbitrageurs and professors contribute their respective talents to conjectures regarding horse-racing in Hong Kong and hedge-fund management in Princeton. We are given instruction in the arcana of information theory, card-counting, portfolio construction, fat-tail distributions and logarithmic utility. Thus, we are led, quite ingenuously, into B-school notions and economic theory with real math and actual graphs. If the academic medicine gets a bit thick, it goes down quite well with the sugar of entertaining anecdotes. It’s those stories that provide a selective picture of our civilization, a sociological survey of how risk is taken. For a good way to manage risk, Poundstone says, he’s got the horse right here. Its name is Kelly. Readers will have to decide whether to simply bet their beliefs the old-fashioned way or to sign on to the discipline of Kelly’s formula.
Enticing elucidation beneath good humored history.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-8090-4637-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.
Tired of paying hefty insurance bills and parking fines? A self-driving car may be the flying car of our near-future dreams, as this all-for-it account makes clear.
Given that Burns is a former General Motors executive with responsibility for R&D, as well as an adviser to Waymo (formerly Google’s Self-Driving Car Project), it stands to reason that he’d be a fan of the autonomous car. Some of this book is the usual by-the-numbers, back-slapping, you-are-there reporting from the front lines of the lab and test track, as when the author writes of one robotics experimenter, “Whittaker was another big guy, an inch or two taller than Urmson at about six-foot-three, with shoulders that look like they’d brush the sides of interior door openings.” The pro forma stuff notwithstanding, though, Burns and co-author Shulgan provide a series of winning arguments for why we should be wanting to see self-driving cars on the road. Despite well-publicized failings, for instance, they will lead to a substantial decrease in accidents and fatalities—and given that road fatalities are climbing after years of steady decline, that makes a good starter. Burns also notes that automobile ownership is inherently inefficient; at most, the average driver uses a car for 5 percent of a waking day, and “when we do drive these vehicles, they’re terribly inefficient,” with only about a third of the chemical energy used to drive them translating into kinetic energy. The author argues that the business of motorized transport is the most disruptable on the landscape, and while the writing is too often like traveling down a potholed road, the reasoning is sound, and the thought of not having to look for an empty parking space seems payoff aplenty for entertaining this modest proposal.
A provocative look at a rising industry that may soon change the nature of the world’s too-busy roadways.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266112-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
An illuminating if impressionistic appreciation of the Overseas Chinese, mainland ÇmigrÇs who down through the ages have become an economic force throughout Southeast Asia and beyondnotably, on North America's West Coast. Historian Seagrave (Dragon Lady, 1992, etc.) traces the emergence of these industrious expatriates back to the 11th century b.c. when the long-lived but repressive, puritanic, and anti- business Chou dynasty first drove the country's merchant class from the capital cities of the north. Forced to resettle in the less civilized regions of the Middle Kingdom's southern coast, the internal exiles began venturing offshore. In time, they established commercial beachheads that have survived civil strife, colonialism, world wars, and xenophobia in every country of the Pacific Basin save Japan and Korea. In round numbers, the 55 million Overseas Chinese (including those in Hong Kong and Taiwan) have a GNP estimated at $450 billion per annum, and their liquid assets probably top $2 trillion. In the course of his anecdotal narrative, the author makes a number of intriguing points about the prospering, nepotistic Overseas Chinese (for whom networking is a way of life). By way of example, a significant portion of their money has been (and continues to be) earned in the drug trade and other of the world's older professions. Nor do they shy away from bribery, partnerships with public officials, or other forms of corruption long outlawed in Western marketplaces. By Seagrave's convincing account, moreover, the loyalties of these secretive and disciplined DPs are essentially parochial, i.e., to ancestral villages and dialect communities rather than to the Chinese government. In the author's informed opinion, this pragmatic lack of allegiance could keep them from returning to the mainland in any great numbers regardless of what the future holds for the Communist regime still clinging to power in Beijing. A savvy observer's episodic briefing on an ethnic group that bears watching in a world economy no longer constrained by sociopolitical frontiers.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14011-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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