Agent Books

This is a powerful and moving book, beautifully written with emotion and grace. The author transports the reader to the heat and humidity and culture of south Viet Nam from first sentence to last. A must read for anyone who has ever been to Viet Nam, who has ever thought of going to Viet Nam or who has ever even heard of Viet Nam.

This book is available for free download at www.pdrecovery.org, a non-profit organization that supports research on Parkinson's disease.
The website also has other information and publications available for free download.

This extraordinary book, which I obtained through the Folio Society, is compiled from the personal daily journals of a British diplomat and emissary who was in Russia from 1905 through 1918. He was personally acquainted with many of the principal participants in the Bolshevik Revolution, including Trotsky, whom he visitied almost daily in the early stages of that event, and even Lenin. His eye-witness accounts of many of the events surrounding the entire history of this cataclismic tranformation of Russia from a Tsarist Empire into a Soviet one is like no other. It is in the first person throughout, and is one of the most gripping narratives of its type I have ever read.

If you have any interest whatsoever in this period of history, you must read this book!

This is a good read!
Well written & gives you an interesting perspective as too how the firm operated when it first began.

Kudos too Paul Kramer,

Why is this selling for $99-$500 when you can get it off his website for $14.95? It's still in print. Jeez!

John Martin Fischer has filled a career with writings on free will, libertarian agency, and compatibilism. Much of that work has been summed up in his The Metaphysics of Free Will, which I've been working through this past week.

Unlike much dry analytic prose, Fischer is a treat to consume. He is a smooth, lucid writer; it's never difficult to discern where he came from or where he's going. More importantly, his content is rock-solid. Fischer approaches the question of agency from an interesting and original angle: we suppose ourselves to be persons and to be morally responsible. On its face, however, the existence of either an omniscient God or a determined future pose a challenge to this intuition of moral responsibility, control, and hence, personhood. This is the context of Fischer's defense of compatibilism. If either God exists or the future is determined, personhood might be in trouble. Answering this two-pronged skeptical challenge is his central project. In doing so, he touches on many important issues of modality, epistemology, and metaphysics proper.

There are several lasting contributions this book gives to the free-will debate:

1. A clear statement of the "Transfer Principle," an underlying rule of inference behind many incompatibilist arguments. Fischer evaluates its plausibility and role; he defends it, in fact, against many compatibilist attacks.

2. Articulation of Dialectic Stalemates - Fischer is not just a good writer - he's a fair one too. While the free-will debate is often heated, beligerent and impassioned from all sides (eg: van Inwagen, Dennett), Fischer is not given to this sort of puffery. Fischer is willing to admit it when he doesn't have a knock-down, drag-out argument for compatibilism; he is restrained in his critique of incompatibilist arguments. Nonetheless, the book makes one thing clear: It's not an easy task to argue for incompatibilism. At best, such arguments are inconclusive, at worst, they merely beg the question. By clarifying where these Dialectic Stalemates reside, Fischer has laid out an agenda of sorts for philosophers of the future - some territory simply isn't productive to write about.

3. Personally, I found Fischer's treatment of Frankfurt-type examples incredibly helpful. He lays out potential Frankfurt-type examples, and various libertarian responses. His analysis of the Flicker of Freedom response strategy was especially penetrating. Fischer gives a really nice argument why this response, though sound in some ways, is not ultimately persuasive.

4. A brief account of "guidance control," that sort of control Fischer distinguishes from "regulative control"; The account is brief, though. I suspect Fischer elaborates on how guidance control might be a sufficient condition of responsibility in later writings.

One would be hard pressed to find a better book-length defense of incompatibilism than van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will. Fischer's book, along with Dennett's Elbow Room may very well become the compatibilist counterpart - a classic text that anyone interested in the issue simply must read.

I love this book! It has a nice full glossary and section summaries. It has chapter review questions but doesn't give the answers. It has though questions (critical thinking) that it DOES give the answer to. (Weird?) This book is very well written, very English (the language, not the nationality). My professor goes along with the book so that always makes you get more out of it.
The topics sometimes seem kinda random, and the same small concepts are repeated several times in different chapters and never (so far) going into details. The website for the book has nice online diagnostic quizzes. It's definitely a book that if your instructor says buy it, you should read it, because you will get something out of it. There's lots of interesting pictures which make it fun to read too.

... go to the bar tonight?

Inspired by Brian Arthur's El Farol Bar Game, the minority Game provided the path for the entry of many statistical physicists into econophysics. Game theory, since the 1980's, has become a large part of economic theory, but is largely restricted to studies of Nash equilibria, which (by Nash's own design) is a neo-classical idea. Economic systems are instead complex, not amenable to any imaginable equilibrium analysis. As Per Bak said, equilibrium is a dead system, like a glass of water at rest. Challet, Marsili, and Zhang are three leading researchers in economics, and are the experts on the Minority Game.

This book begins with a very nice introduction to the main ideas and then includes a compilation of the main papers in the field by the Fribourg Group, who are leaders in the new and growing field of econophysics, and other main players. Physicists will enjoy seeing the tools of statistical mechanics in action in an economic setting, and economists will be encouraged to think outside their equilibrium straightjacket by studying the book. But the full range of topics is covered, Nash equilibria as well as cooperation. the compilation also includes some very nice contributions to finance theory and market efficiency.

This well-written book is a thrilling read, whether on an airplane or at home in the lab. Anyone who would like to elevate their understanding of mixed surfactants should pick up a copy of this book.

Dr. Sapaty describes some very far out and very powerful technologies that are coming on line for organizational management of dynamic distributed systems. The Internet will no longer be just for sending emails and basic e-commerce in the very near future. I see WAVE as a general solver to a multitude of distributed systems. WAVE is a new methodology and technology enabling the solution of any reasonable, and some that may not be currently reasonable, problem in distributed computer networks, with code mobility being a key principle. The technology allows for the problem description on a semantic level, shifting traditional coordination, synchronization, and data or agent exchange to automatic implementation, making application programming very compact and simple.

This WAVE paradigm looks very powerful: One issue with it is that it is so radically new and improved from what is currently being done, that it will take a while for people to actually believe it is real! I do, and now I want - no, need - to help convince others...The fact that you are reading this review indicates that you have interest in this field. As such, I recommend that you purchase this book, as well as his new book that discusses advances in the spatial programming of distributed dynamic worlds (which is due to be released soon) and judge for yourself. You will not be disappointed.

Larry M. Deschaine, PE / Systems Optimization Design Engineer / Fortune 500 Company / MIT '84