Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Dec 22 2018

Book review: What’s your type? by Merve Emre

whats_your_type.What’s your type? by Merve Emre is described well by it’s subtitle “The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing”. It is the story of Katherine Cook Myers (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980) who developed the test based on the foundations her mother laid.

The Myers-Brigg Test presents users with a set of forced choice questions which it then converts into 16 personality types based on four axes: introversion/extraversion (E/I), thinking/feeling (T/F), sensing/intuition (S/N) and judging/perceiving (J/P). Your type is denoted by the four letters one from each axis.

I’m fairly sure I’ve taken a Myers-Briggs test in the past and I’ve completely forgotten the outcome, I’ve taken a related test more recently. For which I came out an “architect” – INTJ. I am proud of my label!

The story starts with Katherine Myers. It is fair to say that she was an unusual mother, writing a column on child-rearing “Diary of an obedience-curiosity mother” which was published for many years in the American Magazine. These were the notes of her highly structured programme of child-rearing, as applied to her daughter. They appear to have picked up a theme of the time, in using knowledge for self-improvement. There was a similar movement in Victorian Britain.

This episode leaves you with the impression of a fiercely intelligent woman channelling all her energy into the only outlet the society of her time gave her: the raising of her daughter. She had two other children who died young. Isabel’s marriage and departure was clearly a wrench for both mother and daughter.

Katherine then “found Jung”, the psychologist Carl Jung – more specifically Jung’s psychological types. This fitted with her desire to classify people, and find a place for each in society. Her mission then became to render Jung’s types into something more useable. She corresponded with Jung, and met him once. There was clearly a degree of hero worship and obsession in her interactions with him.

Katherine’s approach to type was very much an individualised “expert” one, Isabel’s contribution was democratisation – making a questionnaire and answer scheme such that customers could apply the tests themselves. Like her mother, Isabel was clearly very capable – winning a prize for her novel “Murder Yet To Come” in 1929. A second novel, “Give Me Death” sounds profoundly racist, it features a Southern family whose members commit suicide on discovering that their line contains “negro blood”. This reflects racist/eugenicist overtones in some of Katherine’s writings.

During the Second World War Isabel’s test was used at the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS) as part of a battery of tests applied to evaluate the suitability of people as spies. During the war, Katherine, amongst others tried to “diagnose” Adolf Hitler with a view to predicting the possible outcomes for the war. Unsurprisingly there predictions were not particularly useful.

After the war Myers-Briggs became involved in the Berkeley Institute of Personality and Assessment Research. This followed on from the OSS work and saw relatively small numbers of candidates taken on weekend “house-parties” for assessments. The candidates were a wide range of the great and the good, but scarcely any women.

Later the Myers-Brigg test moved to the East coast, to the Princeton Educational Testing Service (ETS) which designed and administered the SAT. For a number of years they tried to give the Myers-Briggs test a solid scientific foundation but were ultimately not satisfied with it. The original Jungian psychological types were somewhat subjective, and the Myers-Briggs test had a habit of providing different types on retesting.

The Myers-Briggs test was ultimately to find a home in the Centre for the Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) which Isabel founded with Mary McCaulley, a psychologist from the University of Florida. Uptake of the Myers-Briggs Test grew enormously in the years after Isabel’s death in 1980.

The new thing that the Myers-Briggs Test introduced was a degree of dispassion in its outcomes. None of the types are described as “bad”, or really can be construed as such. The tenor of the test is positive. It is about finding ones place in society and the world of work. This may run counter to individualistic ideals but it struck a chord with many organisations and individuals. It is an astrology for our times, it gives us a team to join, and guidance on how to live our lives.

In some ways the strongest impression I got from the book was of the Myers-Briggs testing regime as a modern day cult, this is only addressed directly by the author in the Introduction and Conclusions regarding her travails with the CAPT, the current guardians of the Test.

Nov 17 2018

Book review: Inferior by Angela Saini

inferiorMy next review is of Inferior:How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini. The theme of this book is encapsulated in the subtitle. The chapters of the book cover eight broad topics around how science has treated women. Typically they outline something of the background of the established view, and then go on to discuss some more recent revisions.

It all starts with Darwin and a letter from an American suffragette, who receives a somewhat dusty response from him regarding what he sees as the proper,evolved and, undoubtedly lower status, state of women. But Darwinism does give women an opportunity: no longer is their position ordained by God but it is now subject to environment and the laws of nature so a new space for interpretation and equal rights opens up.

The next chapter covers health and longevity, it fits to a degree with the final chapter on the menopause. Women typically live a bit longer than men though are slightly more prone to illness, particularly autoimmune diseases. For various reasons women have tended to be un-represented in medical trials, this is being addressed now. Looking back, the treatment of the menopause as a medical problem to be resolved rather than a normal part of life, is problematic. I think it may have happened to a lesser extent with men with declining libidos in later years being addressed with Viagra. The difference being that Viagra is a short term “solution” whereas HRT has tended to be a long term intervention with unknown side-effects. For many aspects of this book we can look to other animal species to see how they are similar or different to humans, with the menopause pickings are sparse. Pretty much the only example is the orca, where mothers appear to nurture their male offspring throughout there lives.

Much of the recent scientific view on human sexuality are derived from some experiments on fruit flies done in the late 1940s. They showed that males were more promiscuous than females, and the conclusion drawn from this was that males benefitted from spreading their seed more widely whilst females only needed to be fertilised once. This was reinforced by experiments, which can only be described as unethical, involving sending out students to proposition members of the opposite sex. It turns out that men were more likely than women to go sleep with a stranger. But clearly women are considering more than just reproduction in such scenarios – they face a real threat of violence.

Across the world zookeepers are puzzled as to why some of their male bonobos get beaten up by females. All manner of exceptional explanations are provided for this. But fundamentally it is because bonobos have a matriarchal society in which males lacking the protection of females (in particular their mother) are vulnerable to bands of marauding females. This is the reverse of the situation in other primate specifies such as chimpanzees and orang-utans where isolated females are targeted by males.

There is an air of desperation to the efforts to demonstrate that women are different in all manner of biological ways, rather than accept that actually it is the way that society treats women that leads to their disadvantage. Or even consider it, for that matter. Intelligence, or scientific achievement, is covered in a couple of chapters, one of which is entitled “The missing five ounces of the female brain”. Fundamentally the problem here is trying to pull apart abilities such as spatial reasoning on an axis (gender) that fundamentally isn’t that important. It turns out across a wide range of human abilities it’s only the ability to throw and the ability to jump vertically where men exceed women by more than a standard deviation. Human abilities can be variable and typically the differences between genders are much smaller than the differences within one gender.

To exclude women from scientific societies, universities and degree courses until the mid-twentieth century and blame their lag of progress in scientific circles as down to some deficiency in their abilities certainly takes some chutzpah. And the fact that we’re doing this in the early years of the 21st century is an embarrassment. Like many women of her time, my mum left her scientific work when she was pregnant with me, and in at least one case was not even given an application form for an administrative post because she was a mother.

Anthropology makes an appearance with a conference entitled “Man the Hunter” from the 1970s. Here man (the male) is seen as the key player going out on the hunt to provide for the tribe. In fact, “gathering” turns out to be more important because hunting is an unpredictable business and only rarely results in the hunter bringing home the dead antelope.

Inferior is written in a style which I found reminiscent of Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes. We are given the context and something of the character of the scientists who Saini interviews. This is in contrast to a lot of scientific writing, even in popular books, which tends to erase the people. I think it is particularly important for a book like this because much of the book is about the character of people. It is striking that almost without fail those arguing for a biological necessity to the the position that women find themselves in are male and those arguing for a new viewpoint based on societal contingency are women.

The change in mindset this brought to me is how obvious the importance of the gender of the researcher is in determining what is studied but also the outcome.

Nov 02 2018

Book review: Milk of Paradise by Lucy Inglis

My next review is of milk_of_paradiseMilk of Paradise by Lucy Inglis. I’ve been following Lucy Inglis on twitter since before she was writing books, so you can’t treat this as an unbiased report.

Milk of Paradise is the story of opium. It is divided into three parts, covering opium itself, morphine and heroin. Morphine and heroin are derivatives of opium so this collective biography makes sense.

The first part takes us back to prehistoric times and the origins of the poppy from which opium is extracted. The opium poppies grown today are domesticated, there is no wild opium poppy. The ancestral flower comes from Turkey where cultivation started in about 10,000BC. Traces of poppy mixed with henbane, another imported plant used to counteract the side-effects of opium, have been found in Britain dating back to 4000BC, where it could have only appeared through long distance trade. It always surprises me how far goods were traded across the prehistoric world.

The chapter moves on through opium in Roman and Greek times where descriptions are somewhat vague, to the Arab physicians of the 12th and 13th century who were clearly using it for anaesthesia for quite complex surgery. Similar preparations were used in medieval Britain, such as dwale – a mixture of hemlock, opium and henbane in wine. These appear to have gone out of usage.

The next section covers the the global trade in opium, particularly into the Far East. This picks up on some of the themes of The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan. Opium had been introduced to China by Arab traders in the 10th century. As ocean going ships come into widespread use in the 15th century trade increased with tea, coffee and spices coming to Europe in the early years of the 17th century. By the 18th century half the Batavian (modern day Jakarta) spice trade was actually in opium.

The second part of the book, notionally on morphine a derivative of opium, covers the medical uses of opium preparations and addiction. Growing wealth in the 18th century in Britain led to people with sufficient money to abuse alcohol – the Gin Craze. This was paralleled with increasing signs of addictive behaviour in the use of opium. It was a problem in China too which the Chinese authorities tried to address in the face of military action by the British to maintain their trade in opium. Something of a theme in the book is the shameful behaviour of the British over selling opium to China, much of the 20th century has been spent on battling the “illegal” drugs industry. The 19th century was just as bad but the illegal drugs industry was replaced by the “legal” British trade of opium to China, something China tried to stop repeatedly.

The final part of the book covers the 20th century, prohibition and the rise of organised crime and gangs in the supply of drugs. Prohibition of narcotics is a relatively recent innovation in the West, it arose during the early years of the 20th century driven by the US who convened the 1912 International Opium Convention from which international prohibition legislation is derived. One gets the feeling the addiction starts to be seen as a problem when it effects women. Opium and its derivatives had long been used in medicine but the second half of the 19th century saw the growth of the pharmaceutical company who saw benefits in new formulations of existing drugs, the invention of new drugs and the promotion in treating all manner of ailments.

The rise of morphine and heroin was facilitated by the introduction of the hypodermic needle which provided rapid action, and convenience. The downside of this was the increased risk of infection, and addiction.

Also in the 20th century we see how war drives medical innovation, such as ambulances to recover casualties in the First World War, new surgical techniques, new anaesthetic methodologies, new antibiotics and new facilities for delivering medical care as close to the “front line” as possible (like the MASH units of the Korean War. Prohibition and the involvement of Germany as the opposition led to supply problems in the First World War.

In the period between the wars Germany expended considerable effort in innovating new drugs, one gets the impression that both the Allied and Axis forces were fuelled by amphetamines and other stimulants. In fact, more generally, one gets the impression that a large chunk of humanity has got through life in a drug-induced haze from time immemorial.

The book finishes with chapters on Afghanistan and “heroin chic”, the use of narcotics in popular and artistic culture.

I found Milk of Paradise very readable, the division into parts is not strong, much of the second part continues to talk about opium whilst notionally the chapter is about morphine. It is opinionated to a degree, which is no bad thing.

Oct 14 2018

Book review: The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

the_silk_roadThe Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. A panic buy for holiday which I have only just gotten around to reading, it was recommended by a colleague after we’d talked a little about the East India Companies and the development of trade.

Frankopan’s twist is to consider the history of the world focussing on the Silk Road routes which run from Europe though to China. The centre of this route is the Middle East rather than Western Europe where histories more traditionally focus. In the early years trade didn’t run continuously from Western Europe to China, it met somewhere near the centre with merchants trading between their home countries and the centre, somewhere close to Baghdad.

The book is arranged chronologically in chapters with the geographic focus allowed to drift as the events dictate. Each chapter describes a set of related events, and feels free-standing. The emphasis is very much on the flow of trade, people and invasion. It feels like we rarely sit in one place and allow events to unfold there.

Somewhat to my surprise the book covers pretty much all of human history from the time of Alexander the Great to the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The coverage is very big picture, it isn’t too interested in individuals, battles or places but the broad sweep.

The story starts with the rise of the Roman Empire, followed by the influx of Christian thinking in the later Roman period, then comes Islam, rising up from the south. Next come the Vikings, and the fur trade from northern Europe into Baghdad driven by the wealth in the region. The Vikings were to become the Russians (from Rus for red). The Vikings were keen slave owners which led to a trade in slaves (Slavs is derived from slave). The Italian greeting Ciao is a contraction of “I am your slave”. At its peak the Roman empire was taking 250,000-400,000 slaves per year and the Middle East took more than that.

Trade with the Middle East meant that Arabic coinage was found throughout Europe in the latter part of the first millenium. King Offa (fairly local to me in Chester with Offas’s Dyke just down the road) made coinage with (bad) Arabic on its reverse.

The Christian empire began a revival in the 10th century, leading to the Crusades. Italian city states (Venice, Genoa) were vying for supremacy in the region at the time. Their trade deals are reminiscent of those struck by the East India Company much later.

They were stopped by the rise of the Mongol Empire, which only narrowly failed to invade Western Europe. The Mongols, despite their reputation, were highly organised and implemented low taxation on goods passing through their Black Sea ports. The long distance sea routes were important because they enabled goods to travel untaxed but for their origin and destination, rather than at each country on the way. There then followed the black death, which killed upwards of 75% of the population in some cities. It led to rises in the wages of the surviving workforce.

At this point, in the late 15th century Western Europe finally came to the fore, with the Portuguese and Spanish conquest of the New World and Vasco de Gamas sea route to India bringing in huge wealth in the form of gold and silver (and decimating the American people with violence and disease in the process). By the 17th century the focus in Europe had shifted to the northern countries like the Netherlands and Britain and their trading activities in the Middle East and India.

Moving into the 19th century, Britain started to see Russia as a threat to its Indian Empire. The First World War comes as the Ottoman Empire falls and Britain finds itself siding with Russia against the Germans, somewhat surprisingly given the historic good relationship with Germany. Oil starts to become important, Britain gains oil concessions in Persia in the run up to the First World War. The increased usability and efficiency it brings to the navy is seen as critical to holding the Empire together. After the First World War the French and British divide up the Middle East in the (secret) Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Part of the expansion of the Roman Empire was access to the grain reserves of Egypt, echoed in the 20th century by the (failed) German invasion of Russia. The German aim was to take the grain belt of southern Russia to provide desperately needed food for the fatherland. Chillingly they realised this meant the death of millions, and they were determined it would be Russian millions. As it turned out they ended up killing the Jews in the Holocaust, prefigured by their long persecution of them.

The remainder of the book covers the post-World War Two period and revolves around oil, the decline of British power, the rise of Russia, the US, and the Arab states – finally benefiting from their oil wealth in the 1970s. This comes into my living memory so I tend not to consider it history. It is salutary to be reminded how the events we see unfolding today have very deep roots in history.

I found The Silk Roads fairly readable although a bit of a slog until I realised that the main text finished about two thirds of the way through the book to make room for the extensive notes. I would have welcomed a big pull-out map to locate the many cities mentioned, and a timeline.

Sep 30 2018

Book review: Behavioural Marketing by Dave Walters

behavioural_marketingHere I branch out into completely new territory with Behavioural Marketing by Dave Walters. I wanted to learn more about other areas of endeavour outside of data science, and I sit between the marketing services department and the internal marketing department at work. So here I am.

It turns out that actually I haven’t travelled so far, data is at the core of behavioural marketing. It is clear from how Walters writes, in 2015, that this concept has not penetrated to the heart of marketing which traditionally has been a more “creative” industry where crafting that perfect message has been the core of the job, rather than ensuring the perfect message is sent to the right potential customer.

Behavioural marketing is marketing that is responsive to the behaviour of the customer, so for example marketers might set up a set of emails that are triggered when you visit a website or put things in your shopping basket but then navigate away before buying (the so-called “abandoned cart”). The first such email might simply be a reminder that you had left items unbought, the second might ask if you have any questions and the third might be an offer of reduced price.

The book is divided into three parts which broadly cover an introduction to behavioural marketing, implementing behavioural marketing in an organisation and advanced topics (how to become immensely rich and successful as a behavioural marketer and what the very best behavioural marketing brands are doing).

During the preamble to these parts the “behavioural marketing manifesto” is provided, quite deliberately, in 50 tweet sized chunks for you to disseminate:

“Almost every sale begins with marketing. Get it right, then scale”

“Care more about what your audiences do than what they say”

These two quotes capture the core message of the book, the job is to measure what your prospects are doing (automatically) and then send them customised messages. The idea here is that process is largely hands off.

Behavioural marketing is based around customer journeys, Walters sees the big three here as acquisition, path to first purchase and path to repeat purchase. Much of the analysis of these journeys revolves around the behaviour of a customer on your website. So web analytics is important, when a potential customer first arrives on your site you will know little about them but you can tag them with an anonymous cookie so when you do find out who they are their behaviour prior to that point can be analysed.

Alongside marketing triggered by behaviour (visiting a webpage, abandoning a shopping cart) there is content triggered by segmentation. Segments of users may be something like “repeat purchasers”, “deep considered”, “raving fans” and “disinterested recipients”. They can be identified by scoring their behaviour, this scoring is achieved by attributing points to different actions and then thresholding based on point scores, or alternatively using actions to determine segments. I.e. someone making 10 purchases a year may be considered a repeat purchaser. Someone making 10 purchases a year, immediately after a product is launched and talking about it on social media may be considered a “raving fan”.

Another division is by channel, it is fair to say the key channel in all of this is email in terms of ability to act. Walters lists the channels as email, direct mail, sales (outbound telephone calling), call centre (inbound calling), social media, and mobile applications. Mobile applications are relevant here because they can do custom notifications and support messaging which is opted-in at time of installation. Walters sees the arrival of GPS on mobile devices as game changing, now marketing can be very location aware, with the importance of wearables growing in the future.

I quite liked the random facts scattered through the book, call centre calls average cost is $7.50, expect 20% attrition on a mailing list per annum, you need to do 30 hours per month per channel on social media to make it worth while, expect to see one marketer for every five to eight sales people in a mature organisation.

Unlike the scientific, technology and historical books I read this book has fairly direct instructions on how to execute your new behavioural marketing strategy in a real business. The closest in approach is Data science for business by Provost and Fawcett.

This book is pretty readable, although I found the style a bit grating in places. I felt it gave me a good overview of behavioural marketing. I know what it is now, and I’m pretty clear of what my key activities would be in making it work in an organisation. It probably means I’m going to pester my marketing colleagues now.