While the Internet plays an important role in spreading ideas and encouraging political thought, it also constitutes a significant fraction of our global economy. It is commerce, not content, that drives the quest for better Internet security. Brett Pantalone Pittsboro, N.C.
TRUE GRIT In “The Neuroscience of True Grit,” Gary Stix points out that the U.S. Army’s adaptation of Martin E. P. Seligman’s Penn Resiliency Program to assess and improve the “emotional and spiritual” well-being of soldiers is being launched to the tune of $125 million, although its efficacy has not been properly tested. What Stix fails to mention is the impact of this mandatory program on the estimated 25 percent of soldiers who report no religious preference. Soldiers who respond in the negative on such measures as “I am a spiritual person,” or “I often find comfort in my religious or spiritual beliefs,” or “in difficult times, I pray or meditate,” or “I attend religious services [how often?]” receive low spiritual-fitness ratings and are referred to a training program that extols prayer and encourages them to seek religious counseling.
This policy simply assumes that we can infer that the nonreligious lack emotional resources and are less able to cope with stress from the fact that religious people often find solace and strength in their beliefs. Of course, the more important point is that the program amounts to proselytizing by the U.S. government and thus looks like a violation of the First Amendment rights of nonreligious soldiers—to say nothing of being insulting and alienating. Evan Fales Iowa City
INSIDE JOBS In “Financial Flimflam” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer asks and answers only the least interesting of questions about economic predictions. Yes, the largest “actively managed” funds underperform passive ones, largely because of higher fees. Ho hum. Then again, dismissing the entire hedge fund industry because T. Boone Pickens was wrong about wind power is as ridiculous as concluding the opposite because Warren Buffet has routinely outperformed the market. Shermer is well aware of the logical fallacies involved because he quite literally wrote the book on them [The Mind of the Market, Holt, 2009].
Far more interesting would be to examine whether or not the claims of successful active managers stand up to scrutiny. For example, many claim that quicker access to and better use of information constitutes an edge. Law-enforcement authorities the world over seem to agree, given their reactions to the use of insider information.
Can an edge be developed legally? Some claim that small size or trading in areas underserved by risk capital can constitute an edge. Is this possible? Some claim that behavioral information is embedded in historical price charts. The list goes on, and some money managers who claim to have an edge would argue that it can persist only in an environment in which most market participants refuse to believe that there is such an advantage and so would thank Shermer for his article. The point is that some money managers consistently outperform the market over many years. Are they simply the beneficiaries of luck? Jon Blumenfeld Westport, Conn.
CROPS OF THE FUTURE Julian P. Sachs and Conor L. Myhrvold acknowledge in “A Shifting Band of Rain” that as the global rain band shifts its position northward, “some places are likely to benefit, but many others, we fear, will face dry times.” Then, as with many predictive models of coming climate change, they focus on the detrimental effects of the continuation of such change to human societies and thus seem to advocate a plan A of trying to slow or reverse it. Perhaps it is time to start thinking about plan B: dealing with the results of climate change proactively.
For example, by recognizing that the currently wet areas of the earth will eventually miss a good portion of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) rains they now receive, causing their wet climate crops such as coffee and bananas to no longer thrive, plan B would use this predictive model to encourage countries that will ultimately be within the ITCZ to finance more planting of such crops. Allen Dart Tucson, Ariz.
I AM A FORD, I AM A CHEVY David Pogue is wrong when he writes in “Gadget Politics” [TechnoFiles] that fierce techno loyalty is a recent phenomenon. When I grew up in a small town in Iowa in the 1950s, there were two great lines of social division: Protestant versus Catholic and Chevy versus Ford. (Plymouth people were too weird to seriously consider.) Bob Swanson Pocatello, Idaho
COLD ATOMS In “Demons, Entropy and the Quest for Absolute Zero,” Mark G. Raizen describes experiments in which a one-way laser gate reduces the volume of a gas, and thus lowers its entropy, without increasing its temperature. Raizen points out that the decrease in entropy can be explained by information considerations. Such an explanation is not necessary, however. The construction of the lasers, the power they consume, and the rest of the experimental apparatus all account for a great increase in entropy. I thought that this increase in entropy must be taken into account, and it clearly offsets the drop in entropy he produced. Information flow is not needed to explain the entropy drop. Michael Bookbinder New Canaan, Conn.
RAIZEN REPLIES: I restricted the system of interest to a collection of atoms in a box interacting with a laser beam. We are interested only in the change of entropy caused by that interaction. This is commonly done in thermodynamics, and one does not need to take into account all the entropy that went into the production of the laser beam.
