Michael Lewis has another enlightening book written with great skill such that the readers would be interested enough to keep reading about this esoteric working of the stock exchange.

Key Points:
– The Stock market is rigged. This 60-minutes segment has a good coverage.
– This book is about a journey of how Brad Katsuyama and others discovered how their trades are being front-run and manipulated and found the HFT gets ahead of people’s trades (front-running).
– Milli-seconds and micro-seconds make a huge difference: Microwave towers and fiber optics cable were used to speed up trades ahead of others.
– Spread Network builds and leases the network to the HFT for millions.
– Thor – started by Brad to synchronize the trades at all exchanges so the order arrive at all exchanges at the same time to avoid HFT.
– Flash crash can be attributed to HFT. More flash crashes will happen.
– Dark pool: dark allies to feed the customers’ trades to the HFT sharks.
– Irony: Goldman Sachs uses IEX.
– Heroes of the story: Brad Katsuyama from RBC and his new IEX. Other characters including Ronan Ryan. Michael Lewis makes them come alive and interesting.

My takeaways:
– Wall street folks are greedy driven by profit and bonus. It’s biggest casino where the rich guys play the “house.”
– Angry how they use their talents to legally con people.
Role of technology and speed play either side of the roles – faster computers, please.
– IEX works by slowing down the HFT by 350us and speed up the SIP.
– Serge Aleynikov’s “stealing” the code and getting years of jail sentence.
– Why Russian programmers are fit for HFT, because they have lived in a country where working around the system is a way of life for generations.
– Programmers should go to Wall Street to maximize their pay.
– I don’t think I’ll be able to trust the Wall Street again. Too many incentives to rig the system for their own benefit.
– eBook reads like a fiction, and flows well. Makes you care about the characters and good use of metaphors and close-up description of 9/11 event.

This book is about the extreme parenting style of Amy Chua in raising her daughter to musical stardom.

– Extreme parenting: the dilemma of “Chinese parenting” (parents’ choices) vs. “Western parenting” (children’s choices) in a western world.
– Some of her practices are extreme: daily music practices during vacation, lead by examples (giving practice instructions, doing the homework of finding the right teacher).
– Never give up on your kids; you know better than your kids and the kids may hate you now but appreciate you better in the future.
– Western culture favors more socialization and fun over technical drills and pushing oneself for success.
– Building a strong foundation for the kids and let go. Discipline builds confidence, which breeds success and so on.
– If you know in your heart your kids are diamonds in the rough, wouldn’t you want to polish it? It’s NOT so easy to let go for Chinese parents.
– Funny. Not as hard charging and abusive as the media portrayed it. It’s much harder to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. If it’s not out of love, you wouldn’t do it. The intentions are always good and out of the heart. But I wouldn’t surprised that there’s something to be gained in glowing over and being proud of your children’s achievement.
– I’m curious how her two daughters, Sophia and Lulu, will turn out. They seem to be thriving. Curious if they will do the same to their own children: 2nd and 3rd generation children get soft.
– Admire Amy Chua’s honesty of self-parody and her drive to instill the discipline in her kids, which Western parenting lacks. Not sure about how much of that can stymie or contribute to the creativity of the children, which the society values more.
– Katrin’s (Amy’s younger sister) undergoing bone marrow transplant (many dosages of chemotherapy) and surviving the Leukemia may have changed her perspective about raising her own daughter for happiness.
– Comparing two dogs to her two daughters, dogs just need a little love and attention and don’t require pushing due to limited potential. But children, that’s a different story.
– Personally, I don’t have a Tiger Mom and my parents were not tiger parents. I’m self driven but how would I turn out if I had a Tiger mom? I guess I’ll never know.

Really enjoyed the book. If you’re interested in how the Chinese parents raise the kids, this book might offer a glimpse of it but use it as a reference as not all Chinese parents are like that. At least not mine.

Here are some good youtube videos on this book:
Amy Chua: Tale of a Tiger Mother (1/12/12)
Today Show
Child of Tiger Mom Speaks Out
Emily Luk: A Tiger Daughter Weighs In

I didn’t know Robin Robert before the book since I don’t watch TV, especially the morning TV like Good Morning America. Who has time to watch TV in the morning while rushing to go to work? But it may be just me.

The book describes Robin’s going through her bone marrow transplant after acquiring the MDS (Myelodysplastic syndromes), possibly caused by the heavy chemo therapy from her breast cancer a few years before. The book went through great details of the process: finding the donor (her sister), pre-treatment to kill of all the damaged blood cells, the gradually inject the new stem cells from the donated bone marrow to propagate the healthy cells. After the heavy duty treatment (> 100 days), she finally came through in one piece.

My takeaways:
1. Learned a few things about the job the anchor person in the early morning show. Waking up 3:45am in the morning and did lots of things before any one is awake, especially the crews working overnight to prepare for the show.
2. “There should be no limit to gratitude,” her mama sets an example for treating people with utmost kindness.
3. Strong family tie between Robbin and her family, especially her mother and her sisters. This sets a person up like Robbin for success.
4. Robin seems to have fun at Good Morning America. She’s surrounded by nice and genuine co-workers.
5. Bone marrow transplant story: the pre-treatment to kill off all the old cells and transplant the stem cells to rebuild it like an infant.
6. The book’s capturing the voice of the caretakers – her partner, Amber is quite a treat for the reader to learn from their perspective.
7. Coming back from edge of death, twice, and in public eyes can really change a person’s perspective in life. Being thankful is the least one can do.
8. Great voice in the audiobook. Not like reading a book but telling a story, an emotional story.

This is an inspirational book for anyone who’s going through a serious illness or taking care of one. I recommend the book.

What a journey for Elizabeth Warren, from being a blue-collar worker’s daughter in Oklahoma, to a school teacher, to becoming a Harvard Law Professor and then to becoming a US Senate from Massachusetts.

I listened to the audiobook and utterly enjoy the story-telling of her own story. It’s fascinating to see a woman achieved such a success having been encouraged by her own mother to be just a housewife. Born to a financially-strapped family with a healthy-failing breadwinner father, she saw first hand what it’s like to go from the middle-class to the poor. Elizabeth was driven to succeed despite getting married at 19 years old and managed to get her law degrees while raising two young children. I’m not surprised that her first marriage failed as she turned out be a woman Jim Warren expected her to be. But she did marry her true love, another professor named Bruce Mann because of his “great legs.”

Professors don’t always have the cushy job starting off. There were lots of moving between her and Bruce. There were lots of accommodating and testing of their love for each other, especially with her 2 young children and her parents plus Aunt Bee sticking around to take care of the kids.

Teaching a law class without text takes lots of guts, especially something like bankruptcy law that were just revised after the Great Depression at that time. But that planted the seed for her continued effort to fight for the middle class and the lower echelon of the society. She started out wanting to know who those people went broke but later found how ordinary those people are.

Elizabeth dug deeper into why the number of people filing bankruptcy are climbing so fast. Besides divorces, serious illnesses, unemployment, She found that most people fell into the traps set up by the banking industry: balloon payments, high mortgage rate, ratcheted up interest rate, and etc.

Making a difference could mean taking on more thankless jobs like what she started with the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, then COP (Congress Oversight Panel to oversee the bailout of 2008), and finally running for the senate race. It’s a long-odd fight and Elizabeth has what it takes – a simple focus to help turning the odd more in favor of the little guys, the underprivileged, and the future generation.

The American politics have been known to be heavily influenced by lobbyists, especially the Wall Street firms and banks. Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to run for a political seat and who’s going to pay for that? None other than the big companies – not the little guys. “The System Is Rigged!” (See her speech here in Democrats National Convention.)

As a Republican, I cannot be helped to move to the center by Elizabeth Warren’s drive, passion and her arguments to turn the tide. Her data just confirmed my belief that the odd is stacked against the poor, who are trapped by the rich ( or laws enacted by lawmakers funded by the rich) to “slave” for the rich. It’s probably not healthy in the long run. It’s what triggered the revolution in the past. People revolt if they can’t take it any more.

Politics are inherently dirty but the partisanship was incredibly silly, like dividing the COP budget along the party line. To be an insiders, she was discouraged from criticizing other insiders or the insiders don’t listen to them. That’s a good advise in any kind of politics. Elizabeth gave birth to the CFPB and yet she’s not allowed to take official leadership role because her nomination won’t pass Congress due to her intimate involvement. Well, she turned around, ran for the senator and won! Irony in politics.

Her fight for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to be included in the reform bill after the financial crisis got the banking industry to spend over $1M/day to fight it, according to her. I like her story in convincing Barney Frank to include the protection bureau in the bill – her Grandma knew two good things about FDR during the Great Depression: he made it safe to put money in the bank and “other good things.” Create something that people can understand and they’ll stand behind it. Good advise.

There are lots of tedious description of her running for the senate toward the last quarter of the book.

Overall, it’s an inspirational book. I highly recommend it.

The third metric in addition to power and money touted by the author involved well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving.

Well-being: Meditation, Being a gazelle (be peacefully enjoying the moment), don’t overconnect (the snake in the digital garden of Eden), secure your own mask first (take care of ourselves first), don’t deprive yourself of sleep (a performance-enhancement drug), do lots of walking/hiking. adopt pets.

Wisdom: Daily gratitude exercise (writing down a list of things to be thankful for) makes sense to relieve stress and pave a better outlook in life. Use your inner voice, hunches, and intuitions. They can be helped with good sleep and meditations. Our smartphone is not adding smartness to our lives – iParadox. Our “hurry sickness” or “time famine” could dampen our creativity. Protect our children time affluence. Join the “slow movement.” Letting ideas simmer on the back burner could yield insights, and sometimes breakthroughs. “The future will belong to the people who can innovate – and innovation comes from knowing when to slow down. A good tip of accomplishing you really want to do – drop the rest from the list. The author recommended evicting the “obnoxious roommate (negative thoughts).” Our habits are our auto-pilots; forming good habits would reduce our need for willpower that gets depleted under stress. Use of stoicism and find meaning in life suffering and facing difficulties could benefit us. Take a minute when you wake up to breath deeply, be grateful and set your intention for the day.

Wonder:
Take time to wonder at the world around us. Slow down and let wonder do its job, at its own pace. Be open to the serendipity of coincidence. Momento Mori – remember death or our mortality. Allowing the reality of death into our everyday reality can keep us from veering off course. The author talked about her mother’s death and how she lived her life in wonder until the last day.

Giving:
No self-development book is complete withing talking about giving back. No exception here. Make plan to volunteer in a weekend. There are more stories about her mother’s giving and helping others. Go-getter are good; go-givers are better. Giving promotes positive health boost and grow brain. Start small with giving and make it a habit.

The appendix is full of apps and tips. Also the Audiobook narrated by an foreign accented woman (may be from Greece). Lots of good quotes throughout the book.

It’s a decent book if you’re really lost and mired in pursuit of power and money. Otherwise, it makes a good gift for someone like that.

Reading this book is like reading a science fiction with real science explained by a real scientist. As a engineer, I particularly like Dr. Kaku’s technical ability to separate out the science from the fiction, especially on some of the popular scifi movies like iRobots, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Matrix, Total Recall, The Planet of the Apes, and etc. From the book, I can derive that the author must be a movie buffs. Many topics are covered in the book. You can check out a very summary speech video by Dr. Kaku in the videos list below:
Dr. Michio Kaku’s Speech at Microsoft
Dr. Michio Kaku’s Youtube Channel

Let me outline some of my takeaways from the book here:
1. Our brains are a truly amazing machine, capable of emotion, long-term and short-term memory, reasoning and simulating the future. It consists of more than 100 Billions neurons.

2. The brain is like a large corporation: 1) Most information is subconscious (CEO is not aware). 2) “Emotions” are rapid decisions made independently at a lower level. 3) There is a constant clamoring for the CEO’s attention. 4) Final decisions are made by the CEO in the command center (prefrontal cortex). 5) Information flows are hierarchical.

3. The author defined “Consciousness” as the process of creating a model of the world using multiple feedback loops in various parameters (e.g. in temperature, space, time and relation to others), in order to accomplish a goal (e.g. mates, food, shelter). Three levels of consciousness: Level 1: reptiles-like feedback loop, Level 2: create a model of their place in space and relative to others (social animals with emotions). Level 3: Capable of simulating the future (like humans). Humor is a sign of Level 3 consciousness because of a surprise from our own simulating. Self-awareness is creating a model of the world and simulating the future in which you appear (limited by the “mirror test”).

4. Telepathy: Reading of the mind is possible through an MRI machine (which can be as small as a cell phone) and matching of the brain pattern against a “dictionary.”

5. Telekinesis (mind controlling matter): This is already possible using EEG and MRI to control external mechanical machines. The author talked about extending the control through the “brain-net”, total immersion in entertainment and exoskeletons, use of avatars and surrogates.

6. It’s now possible to record/download memory from the mice brain and then replay/upload to the mice. It’ll take a few decades to do that for humans, when people can shop for the knowledge they want and upload it. There are benefits to erase certain memory to cure post-traumatic disorder (PTSD). Once a person’s memory can be downloaded and uploaded, what’s preventing a person to live forever by leaving a legacy of memory and upload it to someone or some future avatar/surrogates? Provocative!

7. Photographic memory is due to the brain’s inability to forget, like a savant. Forgetting is an active process, requiring intervention by dopamine.

8. What separates us humans from chimpanzees are just 1.5% of genes. The critical ones are the HARI (folds our brain for more surface area), and ASPM (speech, language) genes. RIM-941 gene was discovered to be unique in homo sapiens only. Potentially, scientists could tweak the ASPM genes and allow humans to evolve to be more intelligent and turn chimpanzees into humans.

9. Due to thermal dynamics and energy conservation reasons, our human brain seems to be maxed out in term of intelligence level.

10. Dreams can potentially be projected into the contact lens of a sleeping person and enact a dream. Also dreams can be captured via MRI scans.

11. Many mental diseases like OCD are due to the various parts of the brain getting stuck in the infinite feedback loop. Sometimes an extra neutrotransmitter like serotonin can be given to reduce the symptom. They’re largely caused by the disruption of the delicate checks and balances between competing feedback loops that simulate the future (usually because one region of the brain is overactive or underactive). DBS (Deep Brain Stimulation) has been used with some success.

12. On AI (Artificial Intelligence), today’s robots are at Level 1 (difficulty navigating in the real world) like a worm or slow insect. Robots need to have emotions, linked to consciousness, especially empathy valued by the owner and fear as a defense mechanism. The most difficult one is humor.

13. About reverse-engineering the brain, the author suggested 3 methods: 1) simulate the brain electronically with a computer, 2) map out the neutral pathways of living brains, 3) decipher the genes that control the brain development. By doing so, we may be to 1) find the origins of certain mental diseases, 2) pinpoint precisely which cluster of neurons are misfiring, 3) help AI, 4) determine how the long-term memories are stored, 5) allows immortality.

14. Predicted by Dr. Ray Kurzweil that by 2029, a $1000 PC will be a thousand times more powerful than the human brain, which can then be reverse-engineered. By 2055, $1000 PC will equal the processing power of all the humans on the planet. 2045 is the year of “singularity” when the machines will surpassed humans in intelligence. That’s a pretty brave prediction. I hope Intel to live up to that and I can live to see it happen.

15. Traveling in space may require us to transfer our consciousness via a light beam to an avatar/surrogate without our physical body as it’s limited by the harshness of space travel.

16. Our mind has been evolved to be the most intelligent wetware 1200 light year from the earth. We should be grateful how lucky we are to be living on this planet. Thanks to this 3-lbs flesh on our shoulders; it’s a real master piece.