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brothke writes "The recent collapse of financial companies occurred in part because their operations were run like a black box. For many years, alternative medicine has similarly operated in the shadows with its own set of black boxes. In Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, MD, break open that box, and show with devastating clarity and accuracy, that the box is for the most part empty." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine author Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst pages 352 publisher W. W. Norton rating 9 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0393066616 summary Peels away the fallacies of acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine I first encountered co-author Simon Singh at the 2005 RSA Conference. In his presentation, he included a demonstration of the human brains unique capability for pattern matching when specific patterns are expected, and used Led Zeppelins Stairway to Heaven as an example. Stairway has long been rumored to have subliminal satanic messages. When played backwards, it is impossible to decipher any message. But when the message is known in advance, one can then hear the message imploring the listener to go to Satans tool shed. Once Singh put the subliminal lyrics on the overhead, the subliminal message was now clear, not due to a subliminal message, rather via pattern matching.

While no reasonable person can believe in Stairways subliminal lyrics, far too many people do believe in equally implausible things in the realm of alternative medicine. In the book, the authors tackle four main areas: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. The books conclusion is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic are essentially worthless, while herbal medicine has limited value.

Chapter 1 starts with an overview of evidence-based medicine (EBM), of which the authors are staunch believers. EBM applies evidence gained via the scientific method and assesses the quality of the evidence relevant to the risks and benefits of the treatments. The foundation of EBM is the systematic review of evidence for particular treatments via mainly randomized controlled trials. In the chapter, the authors reiterate the concept that the plural of anecdote is not data. Acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic have plenty of first-person anecdotes, but a lack of controlled studies with real data to back up their spurious claims.

EBM shows that homeopathy and other bogus cures are of no value, yet the public is oblivious to those facts. In a piece I wrote on this topic, New York News Radio" The voice of bad science, its shows that cheap radio advertising (with its mishmash of pseudo-scientific claims) combined with a public that is ignorant of basic scientific facts, creates a perfect storm for the continuation of homeopathy and other bogus cures.

A recurring theme the book stresses is that acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and other alternative therapies are scientifically impossible, and often will violate fundamental scientific principles. A perfect example of this implausibility is with homeopathy. Contrary to what common sense and basic science, in homeopathy, a solution that is more diluted is considered stronger and as having a higher potency. The issue is that the end result is a product that is so diluted, that its contents when in solid form is pure sugar, and when in liquid form; 100% H20. When a homeopathic liquid is in its most diluted state, there is not a single molecule of the active ingredient. Therein lays the scientific implausibility of homeopathy.

Chapter 1 also asks one of the books fundamental questions: how do you determine the truth? The authors answer that it is via the scientific method. This is determined only after strict and careful analysis of a clinical study, of which the most effective is double-blind and randomized.

In chapter 3, the book jokingly notes that since homeopathic liquid remedies are so diluted that they contain only water; their only use would be for dehydration. And since homeopathy is based on the fact that the strength of a remedy is based on its dilution, one could conceivably overdose on a homeopathic remedy by forgetting to take a dose.

The chapter concludes with perhaps the strongest indictment against homeopathy; namely its content. If one looks at the content of oscillococcinum, a homeopathic alternative marketed to relieve influenza-like symptoms, the packaging states that each gram of medication contains 0.85 grams of sucrose and 0.15 grams of lactose. Sucrose and lactose are simply forms of sugar, of which oscillococcinum is nothing more than am expensive sugar pill.

In chapter 4, the authors write that while homeopathy is nothing more than a placebo, the added danger with it is that patients will often forgo real medications to take a homeopathic one. It reports of a study in Britain, which demonstrated that the most benign alternative medicine can become dangerous if the therapist who administers it advises a patient not to follow an effective conventional medical treatment. The study demonstrated that alternative medical practitioners often recommend homeopathic remedies for malaria, and ignore proven conventional medicines. Such an approach can often mean a death sentence for the person taking the homeopathic remedy.

Chapter 5 deals with herbal medicine. The chapter is somewhat different in that the previous chapters about acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic showed them to be useless, herbal medicine does have value. The book notes that herbal medicine has been embraced by science to a far greater extent than acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractics. The chapter lists over 30 herbal medicines and their levels of efficacy. An irony of herbal medicine is that some exotic ones, such as those with tiger bone or rhino horn are pushing the species to the brink of extinction, due to their level of popularity in certain parts of the world.

Chapter 5 concludes with on why smart people believe such odd things? Alternative medicine has failed to deliver the health benefits that it claims, so why are millions of patients wasting their money and risking their lives by turning towards a snake-oil industry? The authors provide numerous reasons for this, from the concepts such as natural, traditional and holistic, to attacks on the scientific method by the alternative medical community and more.

The appendix is a rapid guide to alternative therapies and lists over 30 new treatments with their benefits and potential dangers. The appendix gives single page summaries of the plethora other alternative therapies, from ear candles, colonic irrigation, reiki, to leech therapy and more. The authors write that most of these are bogus, many violate fundamental laws of sciences, and but a few have real, but limited value.

Alternative medicine operates in the shadows, blithely touting that their products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and that they are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. While these products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease; consumers nonetheless spends billions of dollars per year on unproven supplements. Consumers can be quite fickle. On one side they are furious at the SEC for their lack of oversight around Madoff Investments Securities. Yet when the FDA requires products use their disclaimer of how ineffective the item is, consumers will throw billions of dollars on ineffective products.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine is an incredibly important and eye-opening book. While Singh is a physicist and Ernst a medical doctor, the book is written in a clear and compelling style, avoids technical jargon, and sticks to the facts. In the spirit of the scientific method, the authors scrutinize alternative and complementary cures and the results show that the snake oil is still selling.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

brothke writes "The 1962 song Wipe Out, with its energetic drum solo started, was the impetus for many people to take up playing the drums. Similarly, Nmap, the legendary network scanner, likely interested many in the art of hacking, and for some, started a career for security professionals and hackers. Nmap and its creator Fyodor need no introduction to anyone on Slashdot. With that, Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning, is a most useful guide to anyone interested in fully utilizing Nmap." Read on for the rest of Ben's review. Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning author Gordon Lyon (Fyodor) pages 468 publisher Nmap Project rating 9 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0979958717 summary Valuable book about an invaluable security tool One may ask, why spend $50 on this book, when the Nmap Reference Guide provides a significant amount of the basic information needed to use the tool, especially since the reference guide is both free, and well written. The reference guide is included in the book in chapter 15, and takes up 41 pages. And for those that are cash strapped, the free reference guide is the way to go.

In addition, the web site for the book notes that about half of the content is available in the free online edition. The most useful information is in the book in chapters exclusive to the print edition, which includes Detecting and Subverting Firewalls and Intrusion Detection System, Optimizing Nmap Performance, Port Scanning Techniques and Algorithms, Host Discovery, and troubleshooting.

The main benefit of the buying the book is that it has the collected wisdom of Fyodor's, in addition to numerous real-world scenarios, and Nmap commands not documented elsewhere. At over 400 pages, the books 15 chapters provide the reader with everything they need to know about using Nmap to the fullest.

Chapter 1 starts with an overview of the history of Nmap and how it came to be. As to the question of whether port scanning is legal, the author writes that it is best to avoid the debate and its associated analogies. He advises that it's best to avoid ISP abuse reports and criminal charges, by not annoying the target network administrators in the first place. Chapter 1 provides a number of practical suggestions on just how to do that.

A complaint against Nmap it that is has often been blamed for crashing systems. Chapter 1 shows that the reality is that Nmap will rarely be the primary cause of a system crash. The truth is that many of the systems that crashed as a result of an Nmap scan were likely unstable from the outset, and Nmap either pushed them over the top or they coincidentally crashed at the same time as the Nmap scan.

An ironic incident detailed in chapter 3 is when someone from the information security department of Target Corp. complained to the author that he felt the Nmap documentation was particularly directed at his organization; given the use of the term target. He requested that the Nmap documentation be changed from targetto example. The section on target enumeration in the book shows the author did not take that request to heart.

Another example of where the book goes beyond what is in the reference guide is where the author shows the most valuable TCP ports via his probe of tens of millions of IP addresses across the internet. Not surprisingly, ports 80 23 and 443 were the top three most commonly open TCP ports. It is surprising that other ports, which should have been secured long ago, are still as vulnerable as ever.

For the serious Nmap user, the book is worth purchasing just for the indispensable information in chapter 16, which is about optimizing Nmap performance. The author writes that one of his highest priorities in the creation of Nmap has been performance. Nmap uses parallelism and numerous advanced algorithms to execute its blazingly fast scans. This chapter shows how to create Nmap commands to obtain only the information you care about and significantly sped up the scan. The chapter details numerous scan time reduction techniques, and strategies on how to deal with long scans. The chapter concludes with the output of a user who, with a customized Nmap command, was able to reduce his scan of a 676,352 IP address network from nearly a week to 46 hours.

Chapter 10 is also a fascinating chapter on the topic of detection and subverting of firewalls and IDS. The function of such tests on an internal network is to help an organization understand the dangers and risks of a real attack. Since it is not uncommon for firewalls to be accidentally misconfigured, or have rule bases that leak from far too many rules; such a test can be quite useful to any network.

Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning is the guide for anyone who wants to get more out of Nmap. It is useful whether one is a novice and only getting into basic security testing, or an advanced user looking for ways to optimize Nmap.

The book takes a real-world approach on how to use the tool and clearly documents every Nmap feature and option. It also shows how the tool should be correctly used in various settings.

What is unique about is that this is a rare book in which the creator of the program wrote it. Linus Torvalds never got around to writing a Linux reference, nor did the creators of the Check Point firewall. In Nmap Network Scanning, the reader gets the story from the creator of the code itself. This then is the ultimate Nmap reference guide.

Aside from the history and use of the program in the first chapter, the rest of the book is an extreme guide to maximizing the use of Nmap. It is written by a programmer and written for the technically astute. Anyone who wants to maximize their use of Nmap will find no better reference.

Ben Rothke manages the Bright Hub Enterprise Security channel and is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

brothke writes "In the TV show House, M.D., a premise that protagonist Dr. Greg House holds dear is that people are liars and stupid. Real life is often not far from House's observation. At the general public level, people are often misled by their lack of common sense, their deficiency in understanding statistics and basic science, and therefore fall victim to the lies of the myriad charlatans that claim to have something that fixes everything. A piece I wrote on that issue, New York News Radio — The voice of bad science, details that. While it is too broad to call the authors of Fuel efficiency of commercial aircraft: An overview of historical and future trends liars; their mediocre research created the scenario that far too many took their research as reality. Known as the Peeters report, after lead author P.M. Peeters, the authors of Plane Simple Truth refute the wide-spread belief that the fuel efficiency gains in the commercial aviation sector are erroneous, which is the principle theme of the Peeters report." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Plane Simple Truth author Geoffrey Thomas pages 208 publisher Aerospace Technical Publications rating 9 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0975234167 summary Valuable book in the important debate over greenhouse gases and aviations contribution to it The aviation industry is often an environmental pariah, with environmentalists crying foul at the industry. But it is only a pariah due to flawed data that negatively influences the public debate, and this book attempts to set the record straight. Plane Simple Truth is an articulate and extremely well-written and researched rebuttal to the Peeters report, and other flawed studies.

The Peeters report flies in the face of reality, in which gains in jet engine efficiency over the last 40 years have been astounding. Contrast those gains with the popular Cadillac Escalade and similar SUV's whose mileage per gallon is often measured in single digits, and whose efficiencies have gone in the opposite direction.

The authors wrote Plane Simple Truth as they felt that never in recent history has an industry been so maligned and the public so misled by so much falsehood and distortion. With the Peeters report and climate activists pointing the accusing finger at the aviation industry, Plane Simple Truth is their defense.

The reality is that while the Detroit automakers were making huge gas guzzling SUV's well into 2008, companies such as Lockheed had fuel efficiency on their mind back to the 1970's. In fact, fuel efficiency has been a key factor in the aviation industry since the early days. This is based on simple economics and physics in that every pound of fuel, is a pound of payload that the airline cannot carry, which costs the airline money as fuel economy is a major driver in the industry. The bottom line is that fuel economy is absolutely critical in commercial aviation. Witness the number of aviation bankruptcies in 2008 when fuel prices soured.

Like a first-rate defense attorney, the book defends the industry against its charges. In every chapter, the authors show the errors, both intentional and those errors of omission, where incorrect reporting and research have negatively affected public opinion.

While not a book about the history of jet engines; the book details the fascinating and phenomenal improvement into the efficiency of the technology. But the underlying theme of the book is that of the environmental issues.

The book details the fundamental errors in the Peters and other environmental reports that have been often taken as the unquestionable truth. Rather than analyzing the facts like the book authors have done, the media often creates sensationalist headlines with an emphasis on short sound bites, often at the cost of scientific fact. Not only do the authors refute the Peeters report, they show in detail how important aviation is to the global economy. In fact, the aviation industry is critical to every growing economy.

The books 18 chapters cover the entire spectrum of jet emissions and their incredible development in detail. Current topics such as bio fuels and their promise, new engine technology, aerodynamic gains, green airlines and more are discussed. The book makes ample use of charts and photographs to illustrate its points.

Plane Simple Truth is a fascinating book that exposes the myriad errors of the flawed environmental studies. It is also a fascinating look at the development and history of jet engines, and the amazing progress that has come about in the last few decades. Huge strides have been made that increase power by significant amounts, while simultaneously cutting emissions. In fact, there are less environmental issues to worry about in the future due to aviation, given the significant strides that are being made.

The book makes many of its valuable points via the approach of letting charts and diagrams do the talking of often dry statistical facts. Be it fuel efficiency, less emissions, or toxic gases, the book shows that misplaced myths and the smoke and mirror games that are often used by those with an agenda, have negatively affected the public's view of aviation.

We have seen that a single bad piece of research is enough to derail an entire industry and mislead the press and politicians. Plane Simple Truthis an important book that has relevance to everyone, as there is no one that is not positively affected by the aviation industry.

While the industry still has a long way to go in other areas such as passenger satisfactions, lost luggage, air traffic control delays and much more, the engine makers have continually pushed the envelope in terms of fuel efficiency and environmental concerns, and they have done this for well over half a century. This was long before the environment was a cool topic. It was also done when jet fuel was still quite cheap.

While the book's authors are intimately involved in the airline industry and clearly pro-airline, and the book's publisher is Aerospace Technical Publications; the authors let the facts speak for themselves. While greenhouse gases and their potential negative effects are part of the public and scientific debate, the ability of modern jet-engines to minimize those effects is clear. Plane Simple Truth is a valuable book in the important debate over greenhouse gases and aviation's contribution to it.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know.

You can purchase Plane Simple Truth from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.