A New Season for the San Francisco Symphony

Strictly speaking, the Patron's Gala is the first concert of the season for the San Francisco Symphony. However, I prefer to treat the first subscription concert as the beginning of the season, since this is the first occasion that people attend pretty much strictly for the music (rather than the champagne)! Thus, while the Patron's event was launched with Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" (a bit of an oxymoron, considering the price of admission), we more ordinary subscribers got our fanfare from Mozart in the triadic opening of his C major K. 338 symphony with its grand orchestration that included trumpets and timpani. This provided an interesting reflection back on the summer (which probably had not been intentional). Recall that this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival scheduled two works that the Symphony had performed in the course of its preceding season (the K. 317 "Coronation" mass and the K. 482 E-flat major piano concerto). In this context it is also nice to recall that the first of the two Midsummer Mozart concerts concluded with that K. 338 symphony, situating the festival, in a peculiar sort of way, "between past and future," as Hannah Arendt might say.

However, while George Cleve had programmed this symphony to conclude a program that was as fascinating as it was extensive, Michael Tilson Thomas programmed it as a "curtain-raiser" for Gustav Mahler's Lied von der Erde. According to Peter Grunberg, who delivered the pre-concert talk, MTT saw this as a "Vertigo-connection," with the tormented Scottie as Mahler, whose soul is eased when Midge plays some Mozart for him, which happens to be (what else?) the second movement of K. 338. That makes for a great story, but I prefer to think in terms of Mahler's reputation as a conductor. In this case the story has to deal with friends persuading Brahms to join them in their box when Mahler was conducting Don Giovanni. Brahms agreed to come only if they would let him doze on the "fainting couch;" but, as the story goes, as soon as Mahler conducted the opening notes of the opera's overture, Brahms was up from the couch and riveted to the rest of the performance! K. 338 is much earlier than Don Giovanni, and I am not sure how (if at all) Mahler approached the non-operatic Mozart. Nevertheless, it throws an interesting light on the coupling of Mozart and Mahler and reminds us that sometimes biography tells better stories than fiction!

When I wrote about the Midsummer Mozart performance of K. 338, I observed that, with its orchestral resources, it was the grandest sound of the evening. Needless to say, the resources required for the Mahler dwarfed those of the Mozart; and, in spite of the trumpets and timpani, there was a shimmering transparency to Cleve's performance that was absent in Davies Symphony Hall. However, it is unclear that such a sound could have been heard in any but the few front rows of Davies; so what we had was a performance both appropriate to the space and preparatory for all the stops that would then be pulled out after the intermission.

I am never sure whether or not I approve of prefatory remarks that prepare one for disappointment, but in this case it was probably just as well that MTT took the time to tell us that Thomas Hampson, the baritone soloists for Das Lied von der Erde, was dealing with an incipient cold. Personally, I sometimes worry that Hampson is given to over-acting, even in a concert setting; so it may have been just as well that he had to deliver a more subdued performance, even if that performance lapsed into a head tone or two. He certainly paced himself well through the final "Abschied" movement, which takes about as much time as all of the five movements that precede it. For that matter MTT's sense of the architecture of that movement played out in such a way that one just lost track of how much time was elapsing. The ear followed from episode to episode without worrying that any of them were lingering on excessively.

The tenor solo was sung by Stuart Skelton, who approached his performance with a bit more dramatization. However, since he had to deal with two songs that depict drunkenness, one really would not really want the dramatic element to be short-changed. Besides, he also brought just the right physical presence to "Von der Jugend," which he sang between the two "drunk songs" and is one of those Chinese poems that simply focuses on capturing a single pristine moment.

Das Lied von der Erde is another one of those works that can never be captured effectively by current recording techniques. Too much is happening in the orchestra, and almost all of it serves the relationship with the voices and what they are singing. The orchestration is both rich, in the abundance of different sound qualities that are invoked, and spare in giving each of those sound qualities its proper measure and no more. The chinoiserie is kept discreetly minimal, with only a few nods to pentatonic melody lines. However, the sound of the mandolin in the final bars of "Der Abschied" evoked the color of its Chinese cousin without those few pitches having to refer to any particularly "Chinese" melody.

From a personal point of view, this performance also looked back to an earlier time, since Das Lied von der Erde was one of the first performances by MTT and the San Francisco Symphony that I heard when I moved from Singapore (with its own coincidentally Chinese connotations) to the Bay Area. I have begun to make a habit of hearing MTT's "second time around" performances, which he has now done for several (if not most) of the symphonies. I like him because he never repeats himself. There are always new ways to hear Mahler, and he always manages to find them. Sooner or later, I suspect I shall discover the same in the ways in which he conducts Mozart!

Second Thoughts about Tannhäuser

I once heard a great story about John Maynard Keynes. He supposedly gave a lecture, after which some pedantic type came up and challenged him for being inconsistent with several assertions from his published literature. (Today we would say that he was being accused of flip-flopping.) Keynes responded, "When I receive evidence that is inconsistent with a position I have taken, I change my position; what do you do with inconsistent evidence?" By virtue of recent correspondence with a friend who shares the Opera box where my wife and I sit for a "mini-series" (while we attend the entire subscription series), I have stumbled across some evidence that is not very consistent with the reading I was proposing for the Tannhäuser text.

The reading in question concerns the opposition of Venusberg-as-life against the Wartburg-as-death (triggered by the dead animals, which are pretty much the first thing we see when Tannhäuser returns to the Wartburg from Venusberg). Our box-mate observed that she "was distracted by Venus' farmer tan;" and this got me to thinking about the necessity of both light and water for life and how they were handled in this interpretation of the scenario. Let me consider each a bit in turn.

Let's start with light. As I pointed out, there is this tree that runs through all three acts of the opera, almost like, as one of my friends used to put it, the skewer through the shish kebab. In Venusberg "the tree is rich with green foliage;" but how did it get that way? There is very little sense that Venusberg is a place of light or darkness. It is a place of orgies where we have enough light to see what is happening, but is it a place of day and night? In the scenario as it has been set, light only begins to matter when Elizabeth opens up all of the windows to the Minstrel's Hall. Venus can summon a ring of fire; but light and dark do not appear to signify, perhaps because time does not need to be divided into intervals if life is eternal.

A green tree also needs water, but that does not appear to be in Venusberg either. We only see water with the arrival of the staggering pilgrims, one of whom heads straight for a little stream at the edge of the stage. This could be taken as a minor detail; but, where questions of life and death are concerned, the classical elements are a bit more than minor details!

Thus, it may be that Venusberg really is not all about life. It is just about sex and probably sex without procreation. Thus, it is just as sterile as Elizabeth's piety! Now this is not entirely inconsistent with my original conception: If Venusberg is a place of eternal life for those who dwell there, than procreative sex is not necessary. (Take that, James Thurber!) Nevertheless, in the face of all that effort to unify the three acts of the opera with that tree, it feels as if a whole bunch of other contextual details have fallen by the wayside. In other words, to fall back on my previous attempts to view performances through the lenses of the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, we have some serious problems of logic in this production, not the logic of Aristotle, of course, but just some basis for a rationale behind what we see and hear. I guess my exercise in sense-making for this production still has some work left to do!

Too Much Chutzpah to Choose

This was one of those weeks when the chutzpah candidates just kept coming. Perhaps the full moon had something to do with it. As absurdity followed absurdity, I kept telling myself to wait; but I suppose I cannot wait any longer.

To some extent I find that I had to deal with this week through a process of elimination. Burma was a scene of the raw power of brute force, so chutzpah never really entered into their equation. Presidential politics is just poor theatre, where we still have to put up with summer-stock performances. As to the President himself, he is just getting too predictable to be accused of chutzpah. On the other hand I felt that this story, which Al Jazeera English pulled off of their wire services, deserved a bit more attention:

Pakistani journalists are marking a "black day" to condemn police beatings during opposition protests against Pervez Musharraf's pursuit of another five-year term in office as president.

Musharraf won a legal victory on Saturday when the election commission declared him a qualified candidate for the election on October 6.

Lawyers and opposition activists staging protests outside of the commission building in the capital clashed with police, who wielded batons and fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Police then turned on journalists covering the melee, beating several of them.

Now I would guess that some readers now want to ask, "Isn't this just another instance of that 'raw power of brute force' you saw in Burma?" Well, yes, it could be; but what if it were more than that? Pakistan has been trying very hard to flirt with the respectability of responsible governance, so why would Musharraf want to jeopardize his act? Could it be that the word went out that, if the eyes of the world are not fixed so ardently on Burma, it might be possible to let one or two thugs off-leash long enough to let Pakistani's know where the power lies. American politicians know this trick well, often making moves they would prefer be hidden at times when the media are looking elsewhere; and there is every reason to believe that Musharraf both knows and uses that kind of playbook. That is where the chutzpah lies: not in the brutality itself but in deliberately scheduling it at a time when most media sources are "otherwise engaged." Fortunately, Al Jazeera was not "otherwise engaged;" and, as a result of their vigilance, the Chutzpah of the Week award can be assigned to Pervez Musharraf!

We Don't ALWAYS Live by Metaphors!

It is probably still hard to find anyone in cognitive science these days who does not worship at the temple that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson built with their Metaphors We Live By book, even if most of the important points in this book had been made at least a decade before its publication by Continental literary theorists, such as Roland Barthes and Paul Ricœur. It was therefore refreshing to read what philosopher Colin McGinn had to say about Steven Pinker's latest burnt offering at this temple in the course of his review of Pinker's new book The Stuff of Thought, which appeared in the September 27 issue of The New York Review. McGinn is no slouch when it comes to Continental thinking, which makes his take on metaphor interesting reading:

Our language is transparently shot through with metaphors of one kind or another. But it is far from clear that everything we do with concepts and language can be accounted for in this way; consider how we think and talk about consciousness and the mind, or our moral thinking. The concept of pain, say, is not explicable as a metaphorical variation on some sort of physical concept.

While I appreciate McGinn's effort to deflate blanket generalizations, I am not sure I agree with specific examples. Indeed, because the concept of pain is so subtle, metaphor is often the best, if not the only way, to describe it, particularly when it is necessary to form an effective bridge between our own mundane vocabulary and the far more specialized terminology of the physician we have consulted about the pain. When we get to "consciousness and the mind," our knowledge of what we may call the objective reality is still so impoverished that, as is the case with pain, just about anything we have to say involves invoking one metaphor or another.

No, my beef with the Lakoff-Johnson acolytes and priests is that we engage more than metaphor when we express ourselves through tropes. This is why I feel they committed a great sin of omission in disregarding those Continental literary theorists, because Continental writing tends to example all of the tropes (or, as we were probably taught to call them in school, figures of speech). Indeed, one major spiritual godfather of such Continental thinking, Roman Jakobson, even developed the hypothesis that the decision to invoke metaphor or metonymy may serve as an indicator of a particular cognitive function. (Actually, Jakobson began with the problem of trying to account for cognitive dysfunctions; but this is a case where you can learn from looking through either end of the telescope, if one allows that metaphor!)

Out general ignorance of the breadth of figurative language was brought home to me last night in an amusing way. My wife and I were watching the DVR recording I had made of Akellah and the Bee. One of the words that trips her up was "synecdoche." What tripped me up was the discovery that I had never heard the word pronounced, so I only got it once I heard it defined. I then realized that, for all of the times I had read this word in both books and papers, this was the first time I had ever heard it uttered, even though it is used so frequently in our ordinary speech. Could it be that many of the problems we have in dealing with "real reality" stem from the fact that we are now too vocabulary-impoverished to describe that reality?

The Priorities of our "Reading" Public

Given my general preference for reading books that have withstood some test of time, I have never been a great fan of the New York Times best-sellers list. The Fiction column rarely interests me, and most of the Non-Fiction entries are fluff. Nevertheless, Reuters reporter Steve Gorman decided there was a story in the latest version of the Non-Fiction list; and he may have a point, since, if nothing else, the top three entries may tell us more about our national priorities than many of the more methodical polling systems. Let's take those three entries "from the top," as the say:

1. The top slot is currently held by Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence. My guess is that most of the people buying this book never listened to any of Greenspan's Congressional testimonies, nor do they know very much about either the why or the how of the Federal Reserve, let alone Greenspan's policies in running it. Nevertheless, the word quickly got out that this would be a "tell-all" book that had a lot to say about our current President; and that seemed to be enough to make Greenspan as much a center attention as he was when the fate of our monetary supply was in his hands.
2. Coming in behind Greenspan is O. J. Simpson with If I Did It. I suppose you could call this a "subjunctive tell-all book." It had one of the longer build-ups in public relations history, primarily because there was a whole to-do over whether or not the book should actually be released to the public. That was enough to get the general public to lap it up once it went on sale.
3. Behind O. J. we find Bill Clinton's Giving book. As non-fiction books go, this is definitely the most informative of the bunch. It is even bold enough to recommend an altruistic life-style that can be realized without seriously disrupting one's budget or time. It definitely provides more opportunities for serious reflection that O. J. does and is probably easier to negotiate than Greenspan's text. Could it be that the lower priority has something to do with what the title says about the subject matter?

Of course the Times list says nothing about what people are actually reading. These are books to be set out on the coffee table to identify their owner as a thinking individual who has time for serious reading matter, which is to say that these all serve the purpose of cheap set dressing. In that respect I suspect many will use the overt display of Clinton's book as an excuse for not having the time to heed any of its lessons. Clinton should have known better. He could just as easily have produced a reality television program that could have been kick-started with the examples cited in his manuscript! What if people watching that program started thinking about what they could do to appear on subsequent episodes? That would be a concept!

Antisocial Technology

Perhaps the best way to explain the opposition between the United Nations and the United States with respect to the current environmental crisis is in terms of attitude toward technology and growth. This, at any rate, is how I read the attempt by David Jackson, of USA Today, to summarize the current state of affairs:

"There are two different visions about how you make progress," said David Doniger, policy director for the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Doniger said Bush's encouragement of voluntary efforts simply won't work. A global treaty with "real limits," he added, would actually force businesses to pursue the kinds of cleaner energy-producing technologies that the president talks about. "If you just call for pledges, you don't get any real changes," he said.

Over the years, Bush and his aides have said that hard-and-fast restrictions would cripple economic growth. In 2006, Bush told an audience that the Kyoto treaty would have been "a lousy deal for America," leading to "massive layoffs and economic destruction."

The United Nations approach to a global treaty basically requires trans-national commitment to a new regime of regulation; and that concept of regulation just does not sit will with our President (or, probably, with most of his supporters). Thus the United States would rather frame the issue in terms of economic growth, presenting the "Clear Skies & Global Change Initiatives" to encourage the development of new technologies that will "solve" environmental problems like global warming. We probably should not be coming down too hard on the President for taking such a position, since ours is a culture that has been seeking a technology fix for every problem for quite some time (at least all the way back to Benjamin Franklin).

However, where this once may been one of our more admirable national traits, it may now be turning into a global hazard; and, for those of us who have been following the DigitalLife conference in New York this week, that hazard may well impact more than the environment. It may involved tampering with the very social fabric through which we engage with each other, often with little regard for what the consequences may be. Let me focus on one example reported by Associated Press Business Writer Mark Jewell:

A new device by iRobot Corp. resembles the company's disc-shaped Roomba vacuum cleaner but has a webcam bulging from the top.

It's designed to enable parents on a business trip to feel they're almost at home. For example, a parent could remotely send the wheeled robot into a bedroom, where the children could open a book in front of the robot's camera. The parent could then read the story aloud and watch and hear the kids' reactions. The family could also converse.

The robot can be controlled from within the home or remotely, using a Web connection to a home wireless network. The user can operate the robot with either a joystick or a computer installed with iRobot-supplied software.

Color digital video streams only one way, meaning a traveling parent could see the kids but not vice versa. Up to 10 parties can have PIN-number access to the gadget, allowing distant relatives or friends to keep in touch, as well as immediate family.

This item was part of a longer article entitled "Robots take on social tasks;" and it should remind us that any pursuit of new technologies cannot ignore the history of what we have tried (not always successfully) to learn about the nature of those social tasks. In this case a good place to begin would be by reviewing the history of Harry Harlow, which, fortunately, Lauren Slater did for the Boston Globe, about three-and-a-half years ago. He is best known for running a series of experiments with monkeys that could teach us about the nature of parenting. Here is Slater's summary of the experiment for which Harlow is best known:

Rhesus macaque monkeys share roughly 94 percent of their genetic heritage with humans. But Harlow felt no kinship with his test subjects. "The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish," he said. "I don't have any love for them. I never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you love monkeys?"

Harlow's experiment required wire cutters, cardboard cones, hot coils, steel nails, and soft cloth. He used the wire cutters to fashion a wire mother, its torso patterned with small squares, a single inflexible breast "on the ventral front." Affixed to this breast, a steel nipple pierced with a tiny hole through which the monkey milk could flow.

Then Harlow fashioned a soft surrogate, a cardboard cone bunted in a terry cloth towel. He wrote, "The result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available 24 hours a day . . .. It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by monkey fathers."

First Harlow took a group of newborn rhesus macaque babies and put them in a cage with the two surrogate mothers: the wire mother full of food, the cloth mother with an empty breast and a sweet smile. After the initial trauma, something amazing started to happen. Within days, the baby macaques transferred their affections from the real mother, who was no longer available, to the cloth surrogate.

The cloth mother, however, had no milk, so when the youngsters were hungry, they would dart over to the chicken-wire mother and then run back to the safety of the soft towel. Harlow graphed the mean amount of time the monkeys spent nursing versus cuddling. The disparity in favor of cuddling, he wrote, was "so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing . . . is that of insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother."

Harlow was establishing that love grows from touch, not taste, which is why, when the mother's milk dries up, the child continues to love her. The child then takes this love, the memory of it, and recasts it outward, so that every interaction is a replay and a revision of this early touch. "Certainly," writes Harlow, "man cannot live by milk alone."

For a long time psychology classes tended to treat the above summary as a closed story on an experiment, results, and lessons learned. However, the narrative of the real world does not close off quite so nicely. It turns out that the monkeys that participated in Harlow's experiments experienced side effects that did not appear until after they had grown:

When he [Harlow] took the grown-up cloth-mothered monkeys out to play and mate, they were violently antisocial. Some began to display autistic-like behavior. A New York Times reporter came out to Madison to do a follow-up and Harlow led him to his lab, where a troop of rocking, head-banging macaques sat in cages, chewing off their fingers. "I admit it," said Harlow. "I have made a mistake."

Harlow's admission was good news, but he did not necessarily see any mistakes in his underlying methodology. Rather, he saw the mistake as an opportunity to formulate and explore new hypotheses, no more concerned about long-range side effects than he was with his first round of experiments.

This brings us back to the present. The "long view" of Harlow's biography should serve as a cautionary tale to the sorts of visions now being promoted by iRobot, if not the entire vision of DigitalLife, let alone a world-view that sees environmental crisis as a little more than an opportunity to investigate hypotheses and promote the technologies that emerge from experimental results. In the case of the iRobot, we may find ourselves cultivating a new population grounded in norms of autistic behavior; where the environment is concerned, we are faced with the prospect of repeating history with consequences that will be anything but farcical, whatever Marx' assessment of the human condition may have been.

Censorship Censured

"This just in," as they like to say on news broadcasts. A little more than twelve hours after Amy Tiemann's News Blog post about Verizon's refusal to carry text messages from NARAL, Reuters released a report that Verizon has reversed its position:

Verizon Wireless will allow an abortion rights group to set up a text message alert system for its subscribers, after initially refusing the request based on what the company called an outdated policy against unwanted messages, a spokesman said on Thursday.

The second-largest U.S. mobile phone carrier had denied a request from NARAL Pro-Choice America to set up text message alerts for subscribers who sign up for notices with a number known as a short code.

The decision was based on what the company described as a "dusty internal policy" aiming to protect subscribers from unwanted messages.

Verizon Wireless said the policy was created before it had designed spam filters and other measures against anonymous hate messages or adult materials.

"The decision not to allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident," Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said in a statement.

Verizon should also be lauded for the straightforward language they used to acknowledge the error they made. Apparently, they can hear us now!

The New Censorship

Amy Tiemann put a post on the CNET News Blog under the headline "Verizon refuses to carry activist text messages." She began with a disclaimer:

This news may hit CNET tomorrow as a New York Times cross-post, but I haven't seen anything about it yet so I wanted to be sure it was reported here.

More than twelve hours have now passed is the post was placed, and I have yet to see anything on CNET News.com. As a matter of fact, the only one of my sources for national news that seems to have felt this to be worth reporting this morning was Democracy Now! (I no longer trust the signal-to-noise ratio at the Times for anything more serious than its arts reviews.) Here is the full text of the story as Amy Goodman read it over the air:

The telecom giant Verizon is being accused of censorship for barring an abortion rights group from its network for a text-messaging program. Naral Pro-Choice America allows wireless users to receive updates by sending a text message to a five-digit number. But Verizon has blocked the number to its users, calling the program “controversial or unsavory.” Naral president Nancy Keenan said: “No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them.”

Ms. Tiemann was quick to home in on the implications of this story:

I am no expert on Net Neutrality, but the idea that a telecom carrier will refuse to carry messages based on content is incredibly scary. Could they decide to broadcast messages sent by the Democratic party, but not Republicans? Christian messages but not Jewish? Everybody has a point of view that could be viewed as "controversial or unsavory" to someone else. I thought that controversy and open dialogue were integral parts of our democratic process. Idealism dies hard even in this day and age.

Needless to say, an item like this is as interesting for the comments it raises as for its content. This morning reader "cbratelli" was there with the usual free-market reaction:

Other carriers allowed NARAL to sign up. You are in the nice position of being able to make a unilateral decision in favor of your values. You can switch carriers today. You don't have to start a PAC, run a campaign, try to get your candidates elected, petition voters, etc. and then ultimately lose and be forced to pay for something you disagree with--which is all too common with political solutions to problems.

By switching, you not only immediately get your way, but you also produce a small but potentially cumulative pressure on Verizon to change to more conform to your values.

Competitive market choices provide a far more democratic solution--with far fewer losers--than any political campaign could hope for.

As is often the case when the free market is evangelized above all forms of governmental control, this position offers more confusion than enlightenment. It is one thing to choose the newspaper you read on the basis of its editorial stance on sensitive political issues; but the thought that choosing a telecom carrier the same way is, as Ms. Tiemann put it, "incredibly scary." Does this mean that I shall have to have one wireless plan consistent with my position on abortion rights, another based on my position on religion, and possibly yet another based on my racial background? Verizon has taken the first step down a very slippery slope; and "competitive market choices" will only plummet us further down that slope, rather than providing a new "improved" facility for the democratic expression of political positions.

Consequences in China

Perhaps the Chinese finally are beginning to recognize that consequences matter. While I have not been particularly optimistic about the progress that China has been making in dealing with the problems of hazardous foods and manufactured goods, they at least have come around to recognizing that their public face cannot hide behind veils of denial. It may be possible that the Olympic Committee played a role in this recognition with their threat of cancelling certain events if the air quality was not improved. This brings us to today's dispatch from Beijing by Jamil Anderlini reporting for the Financial Times. It turns out that the Chinese are finally coming around to recognize that the Three Gorges Dam, one of the greatest efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, may, itself, be an environmental disaster:

China’s Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact.

The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world’s largest dam are coming true.

Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

In all fairness Mr. Anderlini then suggests that there may be a political side to this admission of the problem:

The unusual criticism of such a symbolic project could be politically motivated in the lead-up to the 17th Communist Party Congress, a five-yearly event in which senior officials jockey for power before the top ranks of the party are decided.

In his published remarks, Mr Wang quoted Premier Wen telling China’s cabinet recently that “the environmental cost is the most pressing of the serious problems facing the Three Gorges project.”

The dam was the brainchild of Mao Zedong but construction began under the government of former President Jiang Zemin, who still exercises residual influence in the current government even three years after he relinquished his last official post.

Former Premier Li Peng, the man widely believed to be responsible for sending in troops to quell the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement, is the official most closely associated with the Three Gorges project.

In other words, whether or not, as is the case with addiction, recognition is the first step to rehabilitation, it can also be the first step to cleaning up a political house. This would be unfortunate, because it would then distract attention from the environmental impact of the dam, which is a serious problem requiring serious attention. Furthermore, since the dam itself was supposed to address the problem of air pollution, this means that the threat of the Olympic Committee still hangs over China's head, with the possibility of resolution more remote than had previously been anticipated.

Now I suppose there are plenty of idealists who would argue that the impact of this problem has now escalated to a global level and should be addressed by (at least) the industrialized nations, acting in concert under the leadership of the United Nations. However, given that the President of the United States chose to ignore a discussion on the environment that took place at the beginning of this week, we would probably be more likely to bet against the idealists. Furthermore, it would probably be unfair to lay all of the blame on our President. Ours is a country of self-determination; and we want to keep it that way. To a great extent China is trying to deal with its problems in that same spirit of self-determination. At least they have now come to a point where they can admit that this approach is not working, but it remains to be seen how they will seek out to design and implement more effective solutions.

The Monsters in the White House Closet

It would seem as if everyone wants to get in print with an opinion of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's performances (I cannot thing of a better word) both prior to (on 60 Minutes) and in the course of his visit to the United States in order to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. So I have tried to invoke a bit of restraint on this particular matter. This is due, in part, to my spending a fair amount of time with transcript texts and realizing that very little has changed since I wrote about Ahmadinejad's approach to discourse back in February. However, now that Tim Dickinson appears to be applying the same level of transcript study to his latest post on the Rolling Stone National Affairs Daily blog, this seems like a good opportunity to compare notes. Here are Dickinson's key observations:

And I was struck by how foreign — alien — Ahmadinejad’s speech was. Starting with his opening, end-timer’s prayer for the return of the 12th imam and running through to his absurd proclamation that “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.” (We do not have it, he ought to have said, because we hang all of our homosexuals.)

It’s worth reading the whole transcript. If only to hear directly from a man who has been diminished to caricature in the collective imagination. He’s clearly dangerous in his Holocaust denial and his designs on wiping out Israel, but he’s also clearly not deranged. He’s clever and dedicated to his worldview. And it’s a mind worth wrapping your head around for a few minutes as you take in U.S. Iranian relations from the Persian perspective.

I agree that Ahmadinejad is "dedicated to his worldview;" but that worldview is so "alien" to the United States that the conceptual distance undermines any hope of fruitful communication. (My first inclination was to invoke the adjective "meaningful;" but I think that would indicate a bias toward our own worldview of rationality.) I would also suggest that the degree of Ahmadinejad’s dedication to his worldview is at the same level of Bush’s to his worldview. At the end of the day, they both see a world whose clean boundaries between good and evil are defined by the wisdom of the heart; and the world, as a whole, is all the worse for each of these men assigning the other to his simplistic “evil” category (not that it would be any better if they were in agreement).

The only thing that depresses me more than this impasse is the way in which the media have decided to make a circus out of it. Meanwhile, Democracy Now spent an hour with Evo Morales this morning; and this was a much better model of what I called a fruitful conversation. Delicate questions were asked with delicacy and were not evaded. Serious questions about relations between Bolivia and the United States were raised and were addressed with calm deliberation. Frankly, I am more concerned about the extent to which our engines of propaganda will be applied to demonize Morales than I am with Ahmadinejad’s “alien” nature.

This is News?

In the wake of the Associated Press circulating a flawed analysis of the first of the Osama bin Laden video messages released this month, Matt Spetalnick of Reuters has now decided to report on a standard practice as if it were news:

How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?

When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how -- with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.

However much fun we may wish to make of that "gaffe-prone" behavior and the follow-up efforts at damage control by Dana Perino, this time Ms. Perino's account was right on the money:

Anyone giving a major speech or delivering a broadcast, like on the morning and nightly network news, has phonetics for cues just for the possibility they're needed.

I should know. Some of my happiest student hours at MIT were spent working at the campus radio station (whose call letters were the omen-laden WTBS). While most of my time went into broadcasting classical music, all of us would have to read the news from time to time; and we would generally just pull it off of our UPI wire feed. Since, more often than not, this was a last minute scramble, those phonetic pronunciation cues were a real asset.

Of course they never solved all of our problems. We had one guy who could always be counted upon to provide us with a worst-case scenario. For me his classic moment was when he was reading a story about race relations and Malcolm X and called the protagonist "Malcolm the Tenth!" After that, there were a few jokes about sending a note to UPI recommending that they insert "Malcolm Ex" as a phonetic cue!

A Writer Writes about Writing in Cyberspace

I found it interesting that The New York Review decided to run a review of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. I found it more interesting that the reviewing task was assigned to Janet Malcolm, who not only knows more than a thing or two about the general practice of writing but also maintains a historical perspective that includes the now-obsolete genre of the letter-writing manual. Indeed, true to the tradition of one of my own teachers that the first sentence can make or break the rest of the text, Malcolm uses that historical perspective as her point of departure:

To say that Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is more a users' manual than a book is not to belittle it.

This then becomes the theme of her review, culminating in the following summary paragraph:

So this is the crux of the matter: Email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as is tone deafness. The problem of tone is, of course, the problem of all writing. There is no "universal default tone." When people wrote letters they had the same blank screen to fill. And there were the same boneheads among them, who alienated correspondents with their ghastly oblivious prose. One has only to look at the letter-writing manuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to see that most of the problems Shipley and Schwalbe deal with are not unique to email but common to the whole epistolary genre. They are writing problems. Some of us do find the time in the day to write a carefully worded, exclamation-point-free email when the occasion demands. Mostly, though, all of us who use email avail ourselves of its permission to write fast and sloppy. Shipley and Schwalbe's serene acceptance of the unwriterliness of email, of its function as an instrument of speedy, heedless communication, is correct, and their guide is helpful precisely because it doesn't pretend that the instrument is anything but what it is.

This conclusion is then followed by a coda of two observations. The first seems to regard email as a transient phenomenon:

As email's novelty wears off and its limitations become clearer, we will revert to the telephone when something complex, intimate, or low-minded needs to be communicated.

As one of the earliest adopters of email, I find it very hard to think of it as a novelty; but I do recognize that there has been a long trek, which began in the research laboratory, slowly migrated to the workplace, and eventually found its was into people's homes. Even today, someone who is working with me on a writing project (of all things!) has not yet learned to use email (meaning that I cannot send my drafts for review as attachments); but that person's schedule really does not allow time for email, which reminded me that Malcolm never really addressed the hypothesis that the "fast and sloppy" style is a product of that time-consuming Inbox that greets us, not only in the morning but at just about any time we take to check it. This then raises the more critical issue in Malcolm's observation, which is that life no longer seems to afford us the time we need to deal with the complex or, for that matter, the intimate; and that alleged novelty of email is not going to "wear off" precisely because it allows us to weasel out of complexity and intimacy with quick-and-dirty verbal gestures. As I have previously argued, we have sacrificed a commitment to serious communication in favor of "hollow conversations;" and, at the risk of stretching the metaphor, email has provided the altar, the knife, and the victim required to enable the sacrifice.

This provides a useful segue to Malcolm's second coda observation:

Interestingly, the models Shipley and Schwalbe choose to illustrate their section "How to Write a Perfect Email" were written by twelve-year-olds. The really young, evidently, don't need the help the rest of us do; like Blakean innocents, they are untouched by email's evil. Their harmless chatter ("OMG! I was playing yesterday, when this really CUTE boy rode up on his bike") is reminiscent of the notes we used to pass in class, which are, come to think of it, the precursors of email: hastily written, instantly delivered and replied to, and, if intercepted by the wrong person, mortifying.

In making this observation, Malcolm may have missed out on the one way in which email's "novelty" might "wear off," because such "harmless chatter" seems to be migrating away from the formalities of email to the more casual environments of social software (where one has a bit more control over how many eyes see the notes that get passed). For all the debate over whether or not Facebook belongs in the enterprise, I still tend to agree with John Seely Brown that, if we want a glimpse of the workplace of the future, we should look at the kids of the present. Perhaps MySpace is the laboratory where we are most likely to learn about the future of communication at both work and leisure. It can certainly provide us with an abundance of texts; but, situated as we are in an older generation, how skilled can we ever be at interpreting those texts? At the very least I suspect that Malcolm's dismissal of such content as "harmless chatter" is premature!

Another Facebook Reality Check

I have a friend (whom I would prefer not to identify) who once asked me (I'm still not quite sure why) if Second Life was where middle-aged men went to get laid. Given the ongoing interest in whether or not Facebook (or something like it) should be considered part of an enterprise software suite, this question, however sarcastic it may sound, should not be ignored; and it appears, at least according to a recent post on The Blotter, that the New York Office of the Attorney General is of a similar opinion:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his office is launching a full investigation into the social networking site Facebook and its safeguards against sexual predators.

"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," Cuomo said of the investigation.

In recent weeks, AG investigators posing as underage Facebook users were "repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators" and granted unrestricted access to "a wide range of pornographic images and videos," including such groups as "*For girls that love to share naked pics*" and "Porn Star Trials," according to Cuomo's letter to Facebook.

The review also found that Facebook failed to respond or was slow to respond to complaints filed by investigators posing as the parents of the solicited underage users.

This investigation may end up killing two birds (that are not particularly close to each other) with one stone. From the enterprise software point of view, it reopens the question of whether or not time on Facebook is "wasted," while, at the same time, it also addresses the hypothesis that I claim HBO is investigating in Tell Me You Love Me, which is that sex is all we talk about and that we do so in extremely impoverished ways. The one way in which these "birds" may be closer than we think is in how they reveal our communication practices, whether for business or pleasure, and the danger they expose that all of those conversations are depressingly hollow!

The Tannhäuser Score

Given my slightly disparaging attitude towards Wagner's words, it would be more than a little unfair to write about Tannhäuser and ignore the music. On the other hand so much has been written about Wagner's music that it is hard to imagine adding anything new to the current store of knowledge. On the other hand I can take a more egoistic stance and write about something I heard pretty much for the first time in yesterday's San Francisco Opera performance, and it has to do with this history of the score. As we can learn from a variety of sources (including the Chronicle), it received its first performance in Dresden on October 19, 1845 but was then revised for its first performance in Paris on March 13, 1861. Two things are important about this, both of which were observed by Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman. The more familiar is that, because Parisians insisted on ballet with their opera, Wagner extended the opening Venusberg music by about ten minutes to allow for such a ballet. The second is the Paris date, which means that the new music was written about Tristan und Isolde, which many would regard as a watershed in Wagner's intellectual development.

The implication of this second point is that the four-note chromatic ascents that penetrate the ballet music at its most passionate are most likely deliberate evocations of the same chromaticism in Tristan, particularly in light of the shared carnal context. (Wagner would reflect back on Tristan with a bit more sobriety in Hans Sachs' encounter with Eva in the first scene of the final act of Meistersinger; but here, of course, the Tristan legend is invoked in the text.) What is more interesting, however, is that this is not the only suggestion of cross-reference in the Tannhäuser score. There is at least one brief motif supporting Elizabeth that would later transfer over to Elsa in the second act procession of Lohengrin; and many of the explicitly Christian references presage the fundamental motifs of Parsifal. Thus, if we are to consider this in terms of that duality of Venusberg and the Wartburg, Venusberg "celebrates" the passions of Tristan and Isolde, while Wartburg is part of a "Christian thread" that would subsequently present itself through first Lohengrin and then Parsifal.

As to the first point, I agree with Kosman in two ways. First of all, the new ballet music is pretty damned awesome, all the more so for being informed by Wagner's "linguistic discoveries" in Tristan. Secondly, Ron Howell's choreography for this music did it no justice at all. (I might even suggest that Kosman's negative reaction to the subsequent staging is a result of being put off by that choreography.) Things were probably not any better in 1861 Paris, but the history of ballet has had some very significant ups and downs since then. Furthermore, over that period of time, any music by Wagner has never progressed beyond footnote status; and, in terms of the "Holy Trinity" of modern ballet, neither the "Father" (Michel Fokine), nor the "Son" (George Balanchine), nor even the "Holy Ghost" (Frederick Ashton) ever had anything to do with Wagner. The Venusberg music, along with the overture, was used by Leonide Massine for his ballet "Bacchanale" in 1939; but, in spite of some of the really delightful things that Massine both choreographed and performed ("Gaîté Parisienne" being the most memorable for me), the man had a bad habit of biting off more than he could chew (Beethoven's seventh symphony with its creation of the world in Greek tunics, for crying out loud). So I shall risk being accused of arrogance, and assert that ballet and Wagner just do not mix. They certainly did not mix in Howell's no-such-thing-as-too-much-excess conception. Having recently seen the documentary Absolute Wilson, I found myself longing for the intensity of Robert Wilson's sense of prolonged stasis. The music does so much frantic jumping around that any further depiction of erotic emotion would probably be better conveyed through a frozen tableau!

The Tannhäuser Text

There are many ways in which one can complain about the new production of Tannhäuser at the San Francisco Opera. In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman appeared to want to corner the market on all of them:

Unfortunately, these musical riches had to contend with an unsightly and almost aggressively foolish new production by director Graham Vick and designer Paul Brown, one that seemed determined at nearly every step to undercut the opera's admittedly treacherous dramatic flow.

Kosman has taken this approach to Wagner productions in the past, usually leading up to some punch line to the effect that one is better off closing one's eyes and enjoying the music. Certainly, the music was splendid. Donald Runnicles brought his usual keen understanding of pace to the Wagnerian scale; and orchestra, chorus, and soloists all followed that pace to deliver a performance worthy of recording for posterity. However, in taking the staging to task, Kosman seemed to have overlooked the fact that Wagner had as much of a hand in the libretto for Tannhäuser as he had for the music. Granting that his literary skills never approached the level of his musical talent, we still have to recognize that, by taking responsibility for the words, Wagner was acknowledging that the music could not say everything; and, even when the text offers some pretty specific language about staging, we should recognize that the words provide room for interpretation just as the music does. Therefore, I would suggest that digging into the text provides a good way to come up with evidence that the Chronicle may have given Vick a bad rap.

Before doing that, however, I should put a few of my own cards on the table. I basically learned my Tannhäuser from a Metropolitan Opera production that had experimented with casting a single soprano in the roles of both Venus and Elizabeth. This was at a time long before I had gotten into teasing out subtleties through text interpretation, so I was neither offended nor won over by this particular approach. However, since the very question of identity recurs in so many of Wagner's operas, I had to credit the Met for taking a challenging approach to this question.

The other piece of context that I brought with me to yesterday's performance of Tannhäuser was my past studies of Zen. More specifically, this dual relationship of Venus and Elizabeth reminded me of the Zen parable of the monk who dreamed he was a butterfly; upon awakening, the monk asked himself, "Am I am man who dreamt that I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?" This seems like the best way to introduce Tannhäuser's first words:

Zu viel! Zu viel!
Oh, daß ich nun erwachte!

Too much! Too much!
Oh, that I now might awake!

[translation from Solti recording]

The world of Venusberg is a dream-world of the Wartburg; but the Wartburg is also a dream-world to Venusberg. With his preference for Schopenhauer over Hegel, Wagner did not seem to have much concern for dialectical synthesis; so this dual relationship of dream-worlds pretty much precludes the possibility of there being any middle way. Just as one can only see either a duck or a rabbit in that classical optical illusion, but never both at the same time, one can never reside in both Venusberg and the Wartburg; and where one chooses to reside is a question of that will that shapes the world.

This now brings us to the question of how Vick and Brown decided to conceive of their production of Tannhäuser; and I came away with a clear sense that, at the end of the day, it was all about this duality and choice. The duality is best revealed through the unit set, which has the walls and ceiling of an enclosed (but still very large) space but a "floor" which is the earth itself in which a tree is rooted. This tree is an important element, since it reflects the two perspectives of the two worlds.

To understand this reflection, it is necessary to turn again to the text. On the Wartburg the very mention of Venus is basically heretical, since it reflects an anti-Christian belief. In Venusberg, however, Tannhäuser never mentions the Warburg specifically, let along its Christian foundation; nor does he ever say anything about Elizabeth. He talks about freedom, which is basically freedom of choice. However, it is when he tries to explain to Venus why he wants this freedom of choice that things get interesting:

Mein Sehnen drängt zum Kampfe,
nicht such ich Wonn Lust!
Ach, mögest du es fassen, Göttin!
Hin zum Tode, den ich suche,
zum Tode drängt es mich!

My longing urges me to combat;
I do not seek pleasure and rapture!
Oh, if you could understand it, goddess!
Hence, to the death I seek!
I am drawn to death!

The choice that Tannhäuser wants to make is that of death (through combat) over the eternal "pleasure and rapture" of the sexual indulgences of Venusberg. He would reject eternal bliss in favor of mortality. The choice between Venusberg and the Wartburg is a choice between life and death.

We are immediately aware of this after the "passage" (for which the tree assumes the symbolic role of portal) between the two world in Act I. We know we have left Venusberg because the music has changed. What we hear are the horns of a hunting party. What we see are the results of the hunt. On that same ground where, half an hour previously, Tannhäuser had been singing his praises of Venus, dead animals are now piled in a heap. The image is as striking and provocative as the images of the ritualized Venusberg orgy, and we are all confronted with the choice in its starkest terms.

This theme continues in the "passage" from Act I to Act II. In Act I the tree is rich with green foliage. In Act II all the branches are still there, but the leaves are gone along with any other evidence of fertility. Indeed, all that remains is an opportunity for a striking visual cue. When Elizabeth intercedes on Tannhäuser's behalf after he has dared to invoke Venus and her world of carnal love, the play of light casts a shadow of the tree as an image of the Cross. I doubt that this was an accident, particularly since all of the women at the song contest assumed the identical appearance of the Virgin Mary. Elizabeth, then, through her act of intercession becomes the ultimate embodiment of the Virgin.

In Act III very few branches remain on the tree. All the time of the journey of pilgrimage has elapsed, and the tree has only decayed. The Wartburg is still the realm of decay and death. Even Elizabeth succumbs to death in order to intercede for Tannhäuser a second time, this time before the Heavenly Throne, to override the judgment of the Pope himself (right at the time in the narrative when Tannhäuser is ready to cash in his Wartburg chips and find the way back to Venusberg). Ironically, Elizabeth's intercession also bring life to the Wartburg. Leaves return to the tree; and, with a symbolism that is bizarrely literal, the earth yields a "crop" of children. This final gesture drove Kosman crazy, since he chose to read the symbolism as "a gang of half-clad children crawling out of holes in the ground like God's own Gopher Scouts."

Still, this gesture leaves us hanging on a nagging metaphysical question. During the song contest, Tannhäuser rejects Wolfram's song of love scornfully:

O Wolfram, der du also sangest,
du has die Liebe arg enstellt!
Wenn du in solchem Schmachten bangest,
versiegte wahrlich wohl die Welt.

Oh Wolfram, you who have sung thus,
have woefully misrepresented love!
If you languish so fearfully,
the world would come to an end, forsooth!

The reason "the world would come to an end," of course, is that the love that Wolfram extols is so pure that is does not allow for sexual intercourse; and no sex means no children. Thus, when, at the end of Act III, life comes to the Wartburg, it is not through that "middle way" that places religious purity beside carnal knowledge but by a divine intervention that offers up a new generation of "Wartburgians!"

Needless to say, I am happy to accept anyone who wishes to challenge this as an empty intellectual exercise. However, I feel it important to point out that, for me at least, this was a production that really benefited from the projection of the English text. This is one of those cases when the text says so much more than the synopsis and then provides the platform upon which one can make sense of how the production was conceived and implemented; and, at the end of the day, is it not that act of sense-making that makes a live performance so enjoyable?

Teaching (and Learning) Skeptical Inquiry

I realize that much of my passion for skeptical inquiry can be traced back to my personal teaching experience. When I was teaching computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, thoughts about what would constitute a curriculum of a declared major in this area were just beginning to converge; and the idea that there might be "engineering methods" applied to the development of software (known, at that time, as "software engineering") was not yet out of its infancy. In the history of ideas, infancy is the period of lots of fast-and-loose philosophizing in the absence of a support base of data points against which hypotheses can be tested. When this takes place in conjunction with the launching of a new academic curriculum, it is also a period when lots of books get written, which serve as repositories for all of that philosophizing. In other words it is a dangerous time to try to learn, since there is now solid intellectual foundation for what one ought to be learning!

When I had to teach the introductory course for our Department's Master's program, we had an abundance of part-time students; so the course was taught in the evening. Any student who was matriculating part-time came from the "real world" of information technology; and such students were pretty confident that they knew more than their professors did. I figured the best way to deal with this was to leverage it, rather than to try to play power games; and software engineering was the best subject to benefit from such leverage.

So each week I would begin a class with a brief exposition of some insight from the published literature, usually one that appeared to me enough that I could prepare a strong advocacy for the material. I would then open the floor to discussion, making it clear that every student was encouraged to seek out the consistent contrary position. It was what made the learning experience interesting for them. This discussions were lively, and it gave them a sense of the value of personal experiences. It was also an interesting (and highly satisfying) experience for me. Since this was in the Engineering College, I did not bother to tell them that this was called “dialectical inquiry” or that it had been around since Socrates!

My attitude towards the software engineering literature then is not that all different from my attitude to all those evangelical IT books that clamor for our attention without having very much to say. I realize now that what I abhor most about such publications, past and present, is how fast-and-loose they play with blanket generalizations. I am cynical that so many of them fly around today in as much abundance as they flew around thirty years ago, but my teaching experience taught me that such onslaughts of questionable write are best challenged with skepticism rather than cynicism. As I recently observed about the "cultural clash" between the "Cult of the Amateur" and the "Cult of the Expert," we should view it as an “obligation of reason” to view the assertions from both camps in the same skeptical light! This only leaves us all with the problem of what needs to be done about all of those folks out there who seem to have committed themselves to dispense with any such obligations!

The Price of Amateurism?

It may seem a bit far-fetched to try to diagnose the current banking crisis in terms of Andrew Keen's "cult of the amateur;" but this is a "rehearsal" space. Hypotheses need to be rehearsed before they are ready to be defended through more scrupulous techniques of argumentation. Nevertheless, since so much of what I have written is about the consequences of living in "the world the Internet has made;" I feel a certain need to consider whether or not a crisis that we are all likely to end up paying for is one of those consequences.

Consider the attempt to analyze the situation in the latest issue of The Economist:

This debacle holds lessons for the way Britain regulates its banks. As Mr [Mervyn] King [Governor of the Bank of England] pointed out, defending his performance in front of a House of Commons committee on September 20th, the law prevents the Bank either from staging a covert rescue operation or from engineering a swift takeover; and flaws in the protection of depositors mean that, once an overt rescue operation is under way, depositors will flee. Mr King defended the separation of powers between the Treasury, the Bank and the FSA, but he was wrong to. It has exacerbated the system's flaws: nobody was in charge of the operation.

I have to wonder whether this paragraph has Charles Dickens spinning in his grave or dancing in heaven. Is it not just the latest incarnation of the “nobody’s fault” syndrome that dominated the logic behind the circumstances of Little Dorrit? The only difference seems to be that, thanks to globalization, the syndrome now presents itself through transnational dynamics.

Still, this raises a question of causality. Are we just talking about what happens when the principles of globalization encounter an economic "perfect storm;" or is it relevant to bring the Internet into the scene of this particular narrative? Let me try to make my case through a recent catastrophe that had nothing to do with economics. Back when Kathy Sierra was receiving her death threats, I interpreted the circumstances as an argument that we had to get beyond the “amateur” thinking about governance in cyberspace that was flooding the blogosphere. What happened was that my effort to try to start a conversation about governance provoked a counter-reaction to focus on the problem of "getting identity right." In retrospect, I now see this as revealing a need for a more important conversation that never took place: One of the key factors that determines identity is responsibility; and (surprise!) this is also one of the key factors that needs to be addressed in any system of governance, whether we are talking about countries or banks (or, for that matter, setting the agenda for the YearlyKos Convention). Now in confused of calcutta, which had championed the need to focus on identity, we find a reaction to the Economist analysis that basically bemoans the “state where it is no longer possible to lead or ‘govern’” because it is beset by “whole armies of intermediaries.”

This is an irony that cuts to the core of our current condition: Conversations about governance are easily dismissed as irrelevant when death threats are looming; but, if we are all in danger of losing our money, that is another matter! Nevertheless, the Dickensian logic that I invoked as my point of departure focuses less on how many intermediaries there may be in a social system and more on the extent to which that system is defined by who is responsible for what; and this is where we begin to venture onto the turf of that world the Internet has made. This is a world in which responsibility is assigned to the abstractions of businesses processes, rather than to the individuals who actually implement those processes. The individuals are, thus, amateurs. Theirs is not the amateurism of citizen journalism, which is one of Keen's favorite targets; and but is amateurism nevertheless. Furthermore, it is an amateurism that has insinuated the workplaces of both public and private sectors; and, thanks to the Internet, the consequences of that amateurism are now propagated through those aforementioned transnational dynamics, the same dynamics that Keen examined in analyzing the role of the Internet as an information source. In other words the scope of amateurism is actually far broader than Keen had anticipated!

Is this, then, the ultimate argument that, at least in times of crisis, crowds are more likely to be mad than wise, simply because their "regular social practices" do not encourage, let alone cultivate, wisdom? This would be an extreme position, particularly in light of James Coleman's more disciplined efforts to analyze the "micro-to-macro problem." Nevertheless, Coleman's answer to the question of whether crowds are mad or wise is basically, "It depends;" and I think that one conclusion we can draw is that one of the factors on which the answer to that question depends is that matter of "regular social practices." If these are practices that ignore such social values as responsibility and reflection, then my hypothesis is that madness is the more likely outcome!

Duoh!

My interest in learning more about "wet brain" behavior led me this morning to SPIEGEL ONLINE, which ran an extended feature by Gerald Traufetter (translated into English by Christopher Sultan) on recent research into the phenomenon of error-related negativity (ERN). Traufetter described the phenomenon as follows:

It refers to a characteristic wave of voltage beneath the skullcap, which can be measured whenever the brain detects that an error has been made. Especially surprising is the fact the ERN signal already begins to flicker even before a person is aware of his error.

Traufetter then elaborates on the significance of the concept:

In the early 1990s, Michael Falkenstein, a neurophysiologist from the western German city of Dortmund, observed for the first time how voltage declines by at least 10 millivolts in a specific group of nerve cells, and that this occurs only 100 milliseconds after a person has made an error -- about the time it takes for your cursor to respond to a click of the mouse.

Falkenstein's discovery marked the beginning of a period of systematic study of the brain's fine-tuned error detector. It paved the way for fascinating new theories on questions such as why compulsive disorders occur or why some people hesitate while others make confident decisions. It also shines a new light on the development of addiction.

Suddenly it becomes clear why a person can often avoid making a certain mistake based purely on gut feeling. "The experiences of the error system provide precisely that subconscious knowledge on which intuition is based," explains [project manager Markus] Ullsperger.

Needless to say, for all the thoroughness of Traufetter's exposition, it should be read under the assumption that today's scientists, beholden to funding organizations as they are, tend to take a small-boy-with-a-hammer view of every discovery. Thus, much needs to be done before ERN can be taken as evidence that the brain has an "error system," let alone that this "system" will provide us with new insights into the nature of addiction and/or intuition. Nevertheless, it is certainly an interesting result, particularly in light of recent findings concerned with the memory of emotionally charged events (given how emotionally invested we tend to be in the mistakes we make).

Since I am far from an expert in this discipline, I can do little more than view it through a philosophical lens. That lens is heavily informed by Augustine, whom I cited in my previous blog for his insight into the nature of the concepts of past, present, and future:

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come.

The anxieties that arise from those memories of emotionally charged events are very much "a present of things past." ERN may provide us with physiological evidence of that "present of things to come." If so, it will not be the first brick in this particular wall. That previous blog entry cited results from Washington University, which indicated that the "present of things to come," is localized in the left lateral premotor cortex, the left precuneus and the right posterior cerebellum. Presumably ERN researchers will begin to investigate connections between these voltage drops and activity in the regions identified by the Washington University team, in which case it will be rather nice to see such an eminent medieval philosopher getting his due in such a contemporary scientific issue!

The Story may have been Bogus, but the Buns are still Bad!

Warren McCulloch used to be fond of saying, particularly in the heat of a passionate argument, "Don't bite my finger, look where I'm pointing." This may be a motto worth remembering as we discover that the contaminated Chinese bun story may still be with us. The finger-biting, in this case, surrounded the revelation that a news report about steamed buns sold by street vendors in China that were actually made from cardboard was actually bogus. However, a Reuters dispatch from Beijing this morning revealed that the finger was pointing at a serious problem that has still not been satisfactorily resolved:

An outbreak of food poisoning has put 260 kindergarten children in hospital in China, the offending meal most likely a breakfast of buns and porridge, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Most had recovered from Wednesday's poisoning at the kindergarten in Wuwei in the remote northwestern province of Gansu, but 16 were still seriously ill.

Food poisoning is a frequent problem at Chinese schools, especially in rural areas, where lax official supervision encourages canteen contractors to cut costs at the expense of proper hygiene and food safety.

What is most disconcerting about this report is how unsurprising it is. As readers we are well beyond waiting for the other shoe to drop, or perhaps the metaphor might be better captured by the shoes of a centipede! Last week I suggested that Chinese strategic planning had to bite the bullet and navigate a course between "the Scylla of capitalism and the Charybdis of self-serving ideology;" but current conditions seem to indicate that they are more likely to run afoul of both hazards at the same time!

An Anti-Chutzpah (but Audacious) Republican

Anyone who did the math in yesterday's Chutzpah of the Week award post should know by now that there were, in fact, six Republican senators who support Jim Webb's time-off measure. The BBC article I cited actually quoted one of the, Chuck Hagel. That quote deserves consideration:

We cannot continue to look at war and the people who fight and die in wars as abstractions, as pawns, as objects.

This is a very noble piece of rhetoric, and I wish it had swayed four more Republicans to get the vote count up to the required level of 60. Nevertheless, it also opens up a philosophical can of worms; and we would do better to take a long hard look at the contents rather than quickly shut it up again.

Regular readers know that I share Senator Hagel's disgust for the practice of what I have called "objectifying the subject," whether it is in the interest of commerce or the rationalization of some hopelessly misconceived government policy. However, such readers also know that I get very nervous with the casual use of words that we have never bothered to understand very well. Because of my continuing interest in "social software," one of the words that really bothers me is "community," particularly when it is invoked as a shibboleth by some blathering technology evangelist. However, exactly a week ago I was confronted with the prospect that we were being just as abusive of the noun "humanity" and that this particular abuse seemed to be worming its way into the general global Zeitgeist. Now Senator Hagel did not explicitly use the word "humanity;" but the concept behind that word is the underlying subject matter of the quoted sentence. From this point of view, Senator Hagel has made an assertion about war that is either very ignorant or very revolutionary. I really have no idea which he intended it to be, let alone which I would like it to be; so let me try to pursue the issue.

The verb "continue" implies the extension of something. In this case I take that "something" to be what Giddens would call the "regular social practices" of military operations. What we must first recognize about those practices is that they are trained, which is (as should be obvious) the objective of "Basic Training." The regularity of those practices is important, because it endows them with a property of predictability without which the entire procedural concept of a chain of command would not be able to function. Having been spared my own experience of Basic Training, my understanding of it comes only from conversations with friends and colleagues. Back in my student days I had a friend who enlisted in the Coast Guard. When I saw him after he had completed his Basic Training, he told me, with some amusement, that he was not allowed to keep a copy of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" essay; but he then added that, in retrospect, this was entirely consistent with the objective of Basic Training. He recognized that Basic Training was, to a rather high degree, objectifying him, basically for the sake of the quality of his performance once training had been completed. It would appear that, on the basis of the above quotation, Senator Hagel does not want this practice to continue.

If that is really true, then his assertion about war should be taken as very revolutionary; and I think that is the way I would like to read it. Military historians can probably come up with better examples than I can, but I suspect that the overarching narrative of military history has a lot to do with one side understanding the regular social practices of its opposition, identifying the vulnerabilities in those practices, and exploiting them. We have even turned a literary construct from Greek mythology into a metaphor for this process: Achilles' heel. Now we are faced with strident ideologues who want to play fast and loose with the concept of war, itself, enjoining us all to support America's "War on Terror." Such rhetoric is never toned down by suggestions that the speakers are playing dangerously with words and concepts they do not understand; if anything such challenges only escalate the stridency.

Senator Hagel has now taken a different approach. He has been bold enough to suggest that the regular social practices of our Department of Defense (not to mention the Department of State and possibly the entire National Security Council) may be the source of vulnerabilities that have been (and could readily continue to be) exploited by new strategies of terrorism, such as those practiced by al-Qaeda. This is an act of audacity far beyond any of the denotations or connotations that Barack Obama has dared to suggest. Indeed, it would probably be dismissed as impossible (and probably insane) by just about anyone in our "ruling class," possibly while invoking another famous metaphor, which is the problem of getting a battleship to change course. Perhaps Hagel has decided to retire because he really does not want to fight this battle. I would understand this decision and sympathize with it. On the other hand I hope that this remark will inspire at least one reputable journalist to challenge every aspirant to the White House with the assertion that Hagel made: Are we looking at war in a way that can only make us vulnerable to the primary threats of attack that we now face?

Bringing the Chutzpah Back Home

After spending two weeks in China, the Chutzpah of the Week award seems to be ready to return to the United States; and we have the Senate Republicans to thank for restoring our national "pride." As reported on the BBC NEWS Web site, at stake was a measure proposed by Democratic Senator Jim Webb (hopefully still remembered for his eloquent response to this year's State of the Union Address) that would give our troops time off between their tours in Iraq. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, Webb felt that such a measure was necessary to keep our troops in effective shape. Defense Secretary Robert Gates did not see it that way, though, calling the measure (according to the BBC report) "a backdoor attempt to pull troops off the battlefield." (Gates' own military record was in the Strategic Air Command.) Between toeing the party line and demonstrating that they have the raw power to block the Democrats (60 votes were needed to pass this measure, rather than a simple majority), the Senate Republicans were able to muster 44 opposing votes (presumably this crew included the 43 who voted against restoring habeas corpus); and one more effort to keep our boys in proper fighting shape bit the dust. This was such a blatant exercise of putting party loyalty before loyalty to our armed forced that all 44 of those Republicans definitely deserve this week's chutzpah award! Thanks for bringing it back home, guys!

Confused about the Crater

The BBC did not help matters very much this morning by introducing their story on the "mystery crater" in Peru with an excerpt from the notorious adaptation of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles into a you-are-there radio drama. However, this rather sensationalist approach confirmed the observation of one of their guests, which is that people, as a rule, tend to prefer catastrophic explanations, no matter how outlandish (such as an alien invasion), to the more ordinary (particularly if the explanation is even a bit more complicated). Indeed, the great value of this particular guest's contribution was the time he took to propose alternatives to the meteorite hypothesis. This is the one that most of the wire sources have adopted without considering alternatives, although, in compiling their own story from those sources, Al Jazeera at least had the good sense to describe the crater as "apparently made by a meteorite." However, the reason the BBC interview put so much time into alternative hypotheses is because of their guest's strong conviction that the chemical composition of a meteorite cannot intoxicate the atmosphere at the site of its landing.

One of the more viable alternatives has found its way onto the BBC NEWS Web site:

"Increasingly we think that people witnessed a fireball, which are not uncommon, went off to investigate and found a lake of sedimentary deposit, which may be full of smelly, methane rich organic matter," said Dr Caroline Smith, a meteorite expert at the London-based Natural History Museum.

"This has been mistaken for a crater."

Unfortunately, you would have had to heard the radio interview to apprehend the proper definition of fireball. The geography of Peru around this area is highly volcanic. Every now and then, rather than erupting, one of the volcanoes will just sort of "spit out" some of its molten contents. The result is called a fireball; and, as Dr. Smith observed, their trajectories are frequently observed. There was also a report on BBC World Service Television of bones having been found at the "crater" site (without saying whether the bones were human or of some other animal). The point is that, between the fireball and the site, they may have been a variety of sources of methane, which would then account for the toxic air quality.

This brings us to the "Q&A" page that BBC NEWS has now prepared, which explores this hypothesis and then pursues another interesting direction that was not covered on the radio interview:

What does a meteorite emit?

Meteorites do not in themselves let off any dangerous fumes. They can however expose rotting organic matter, and the air can be filled with methane, hydrogen sulphite and carbon dioxide.

But there is some debate as to whether this is a meteorite - or indeed an object from space - in the first place.

Some scientists are suggesting that people may have witnessed a fireball, set off to investigate, and found a lake of sedimentary deposit that was already there. The biological process here could mean that the kind of fumes listed above are also emitted.

Can these really make people feel so ill?

Intense smells, even those that are not particularly toxic, can make people feel poorly, while high levels of carbon dioxide mean people at the site may not be getting enough oxygen.

At a purely physiological level, walking some way with some trepidation as to what one might find could well have an impact on the body and produce feelings of nausea and dizziness, sensations which may be compounded by the fact that other people say they are suffering from the same complaint.

So could mass hysteria play a role?

Symptoms could well be caused in part by what is known as a Mass Sociogenic Illness (MSI).

There are countless examples of this through history and up to the present day.

Amid fears of a gas leak late last year for instance, dozens of British pupils were taken to hospital with nausea and other symptoms. However no gas or environmental cause was found, and doctors could establish nothing wrong with the children. It was ascribed to mass hysteria.

Meanwhile, the Belgian Coke scare of 1999 - when many said they fell sick after drinking contaminated cans - was also said to be an example of MSI when laboratory analysis showed levels of contamination were not high enough to cause any of the illnesses reported.

This brings us back to the Welles broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which induced MSI with a vengeance. Even when the outlandish is not involved, the catastrophic still tends to trump the more innocuous. Perhaps there is a side of all of us that draws upon the media to provide us with a steady supply of victims, expecting the same novelty from acts of victimization that we expect from each new season of television programs. When we grow bored with too many stories of victims of exploitation (now that the mass media are finally waking up to this being the underlying story behind the subprime mortgage crisis), our self-indulgent appetites crave victims of "natural causes;" and the reporting of news has become a business of satisfying those cravings that is not particularly different from the junk food business.

Anthologizing Recordings

A recent confused of calcutta post about "little orphan albums" has unleashed a bit too much naive and sentimental claptrap about how music is practiced; but it has also brought to light some interesting comments about "compilations," which have led me to think about my own interest in collecting anthologies. Of course the very word "album" is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as a "blank book for the insertion of collected items," meaning that every album is basically a compilation. Back when the duration of a recording was limited to the side of a 78 RPM shellac disc, an album tended to be a collection of songs, either popular or more serious (such as opera solos). As recording technicians became more skillful, they could work with material of longer duration; so an "album" of, for example, Beethoven's third would consist of, say, a dozen of these discs in a "book" that looked a bit like an album for photographs whose pages were envelopes for the discs themselves. So it is that we now have so many valuable audio documents of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. My parents had albums like these, and they had a lot to do with the formation of my first impressions of music.

These days the duration of the recording process is no longer an issue; and, as a result, the connotation of "compilation" as evolved in some interesting ways. One of the confused of calcutta comments cites an interesting example from the vinyl era:

There is an ‘orphan’ album I would like to find in digital form - about 30 years ago Guitar Player magazine brought together a collection of guitarists such as Lee Ritenour, BB King, Barney Kessell/Herb Ellis, Larry Coryell, Albert Collins and a few others and recorded a double vinyl album - not strictly speaking a supergroup, as they didn’t all play together … but a fine collection of music all the same.

Given my own interest in the nature of performance, I would not mind having a copy of this collection, as it provides an excellent opportunity to appreciate the breadth of variety in the ways that each of these artists approached the same instrument. In a sense what Guitar Player was doing was compiling a synchronic "snapshot" of the state of the art of guitar-playing, illustrating, in audio form, the sorts of issues that would come up in the articles was publishing.

However, as I recently wrote about another compilation project in the classical domain (The Sibelius Edition), my particular interest in anthologies runs more to the diachronic approach to listening. Thus, while I very much enjoy my Music & Arts CD collection of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven symphonies over the period from 1942 through 1994 (which is to say in the midst of the Second World War), I equally enjoy having the EMI Classics collection of the post-War recordings made between 1950 and 1954; and I particularly appreciate the recordings of the third symphony, since both of these were made with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Thus, while I continue to hold to the belief that there will always be intricacies in the practice of music that can never be captured by recording techniques, I also believe that such practices are very much "organic" processes that develop, grow, and evolve over the course of time. Recordings that provide us the opportunity to track such processes as they emerge in the works of an individual composer (such as Sibelius), performer (Arthur Rubinstein recorded the four Chopin scherzos for RCA three times, in 1932, 1949, and 1959), or ensemble (such as the Vienna Philharmonic, under not only Furtwängler but also so many other conductors).

Furthermore, while I have framed my argument with examples from classical music, I am just as passionate about listening to jazz diachronically. As I have already mentioned, Lennie Tristano did not leave us with very many recordings; but they are one of the few handles we can grasp in trying to understand his approaches to performance, composition, and particularly improvisation. Indeed, the Tristano anthology compiled by the British company, Proper Records, has managed to assemble, where possible, multiple takes from single recording sessions, allowing the listener to follow the path of improvisation as it leads in several different directions. Then, of course, if you really want to get serious about a diachronic approach to improvisation, you can listen to the Mosaic compilation of the recordings that Dean Benedetti made of Charlie Parker. Between March 1, 1947 and July 11, 1948, Benedetti "chased the Bird" to his club engagements with recording equipment, just for the sake of capturing his solos.

Whatever my enthusiasm for diachronic listening may be, I am the first to admit that it is no easy matter. I am not even sure I can yet introspect will enough to write about my own approach to doing it (or, for that matter, how well I feel I can do it). What I do know is that I could not do it at all without the benefit of drawing upon all those recorded documents that are now available through different players in the music business. Some of those players do a better job, and I am never shy about voicing my preferences and peeves. Nevertheless, having the documents at all is important to me; and, whatever Jean Baudrillard may have had to say about the "infantile" nature of collecting objects, these particular objects have become invaluable to me!

Banishing Blackwater

Is Iraq ready to take responsibility for its own governance and provide their citizens with sufficient security to enable returning to everyday matters of work and family? These are the questions that occupy both politicians and pundits whenever the issue of troop withdrawal is raised. Today the Iraqi interior ministry took what may prove to be a significant step in asserting that responsibility and declaring a self-determination that is independent of the interests of some of the non-Iraqi forces that have ostensibly been acting on the country's behalf. Here is the lead of the story, as it was reported on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Iraq has cancelled the licence of the private security firm, Blackwater USA, after it was involved in a gunfight in which at least eight civilians died.

The Iraqi interior ministry said the contractor, based in North Carolina, was now banned from operating in Iraq.

The Blackwater workers, who were contracted by the US state department, apparently opened fire after coming under attack in Baghdad on Sunday.

Blackwater has attracted considerable attention in the world of investigative journalism for both the breadth and depth (in this case "elevation" may be a better word) of the work it is currently doing under contract in Iraq. Much of that attention has been directed that the fact that the State Department is one of Blackwater's "prime" customers. Since the security of overseas State Department facilities has usually been handled by the military, this has raised any number of questions regarding both the need and the desirability of outsourcing such a critical aspect of government operations. As the lead paragraphs suggest, it was the State Department contract that led to the incident resulting in the gunfight. Here are the details as provided by the BBC:

The convoy carrying officials from the US state department came under attack at about 1230 local time on Sunday as it passed through Nisoor Square in the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Mansour.

The Blackwater security guards "opened fire randomly at citizens" after mortars landed near their vehicles, killing eight people and wounding 13 others, interior ministry officials said.

Most of the dead and wounded were bystanders, the officials added. One of those killed was a policeman.

A spokeswoman for the US embassy in Baghdad later confirmed there had been an incident in which state department security personnel reacted to a car bomb "in the proximity", and that they had been shot at.

"We are taking it very seriously indeed," she told the BBC, adding that discussions were still taking place about Blackwater's status now that they had been ordered to leave.

When asked if Blackwater was complying with the order, the spokeswoman said she could not comment because the investigation into the incident was still in progress.

The BBC's Hugh Sykes in Baghdad says it is generally assumed that Iraqi courts have no authority over foreign private security contractors.

However, the US embassy spokeswoman said the question of their immunity from prosecution was "one of the many issues" raised by the incident.

Blackwater has not yet commented on the incident.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi side of the story does not seem to recognize any sort of immunity surrounding this incident:

he interior ministry's director of operations, Maj Gen Abdul Karim Khalaf, said authorities would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force.

"We have opened a criminal investigation against the group who committed the crime," he told the AFP [Agence France-Presse] news agency.

All Blackwater personnel have been told to leave Iraq immediately, with the exception of the men involved in the incident on Sunday.

They will have to remain in the country and stand trial, the ministry said.

This is, of course, the beginning of a story, rather than its conclusion. There is sure to be a fair amount of jawboning (and probably horse-trading) before those Blackwater personnel pack up and leave "immediately." Nevertheless, this is a major assertion of internal responsibility on the part of the Iraqi government, the sort of responsibility that we teach our children goes hand-in-hand with the democratic process. If Iraq is now committed to moving in the direction that we have said we wanted them to go, we had better be careful about any actions that might impede their progress!

Doing Justice to the Composer

Having written about how much there was to hear in the music that Camille Saint-Saëns composed for Samson and Delilah, I am now happy to report that the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton of Patrick Summers, did not disappoint. Summers knew exactly how to manage all those intricacies of counterpoint and orchestra texture that tend to get lost in the spectacular excesses of sex and violence up on stage. Even that misnamed "Bacchanale" was far more passionate in the pit (where it seemed as if every member of the orchestra was sweating bullets), than it was in the somewhat lame choreography, which never seemed to climax in the blood sacrifice that the set had been designed to portray. However, Summers deserves points for subtlety, too. This was most evident in his work with the opening chorus. Whether or not Saint-Saëns took his cue for the long build-up of Handel's "Zadok the Priest," Samson and Delilah is introduced by a sequence of waves of slow-and-steady crescendo, each one climaxing with a bit more energy than its predecessor.

Actually, since this opera was apparently originally conceived as an oratorio, we should probably assume that Saint-Saëns was not only aware of Mendelssohn's Elijah but also took it as a point of reference. Needless to say, Elijah does not give in the sorts of spectacle that were expected in opera; so perhaps one way of comparing the two would be to say that Samson and Delilah offers up in Technicolor what Mendelssohn had previously mastered in black-and-white. This would give Saint-Saëns the necessary acknowledgement for his orchestral technique. This should not be taken as a grudging acknowledgement. One can learn a lot about not only composition but also that skill in good listening that Stravinsky so valued (as long as one recognizes that the orchestral score is critical to the success of any opera).

As to the action on stage, if the choreography was weak, then the chemistry among the major characters was there in full force. This was most evident in the second act, in which Delilah has to play off first against the High Priest of Dagon and then against Samson. This demands a fair amount of character development on her part, without, in the second case, turning her into a remake of Carmen manipulating Don Jose. Olga Borodina handled both relationships solidly, allowing us to enjoy the game of sexual politics being played with utter mastery. Meanwhile, both Juha Uusitalo, as the Priest, and Clifton Forbis, as Samson, took command of their own power games, each having a triumph in his own way. All that was really lost in the dramatic interpretation was the basic Judaic concept of teshuvah, the idea that God attaches more value the turning away from one's own transgressions than to constant obedience. However, one cannot fault Forbis for missing out on a key element of Judaism that librettist Ferdinand Lemair had chosen to ignore; and, if we really want to get technical about it, the concept has its origins in Midrash and Talmud, rather than the Old Testament! This, however, is a matter of a pilpul and, by all rights, should not detract from the enjoyment of spectacle!

A Plague on Both Their Houses

Matthew Garrahan has filed a useful report for the Financial Times on the "sharp increase in the number of safety-related toy recalls by Mattel and other toy manufacturers." The point that Mr. Garrahan wishes to make is that this is not simply a problem of Chinese manufacturing processes. Rather, if one just looks at the numbers, the problem has more to do with flawed design, rather than manufacturing problems:

More than 1m toys were recalled because of concerns about lead paint. However, Mattel has also recalled some 18m toys containing small magnets that could prove harmful if swallowed.

He then reinforces his point by citing an academic study:

Professor Paul Beamish, from the Richard Ivey School of Business, and Hari Bapuji, at the University of Manitoba, analysed 550 toy recalls made in the US since 1988 and found that more than 75 per cent were due to problems that could be attributed to design flaws. Only about 10 per cent related to manufacturing defects.

It goes without saying that, at least when you go "by the book," every stage of a production cycle has its own review process. Manufacturing is generally reviewed by the statistical techniques of quality control, and it is not hard to get up to speed on the problems of statistical sampling and the interpretation of the sample data. The only real questions that should be addressed by Mattel are where the review takes place (at the site of manufacturing is preferable for a variety of reasons) and by whom. Design review, on the other hand, is far less systematic. When I worked for Fuji Xerox at the time when everyone was deep-ending on "knowledge sharing," they were experimenting with an interesting approach to design review in which everyone in the production cycle had the opportunity to contribute, going all the way to service technicians who had to worry about how easy it would be to diagnose problems and replace parts.

Since I no longer work for Fuji Xerox, I do not know whether or not their experiment led to a more general adoption of such an extensive review process. However, a comment from Professor Beamish leads me to believe that Mattel would dismiss such an approach as being too time-consuming:

There are a lot of companies going to market very quickly with toys. It’s highly competitive and sometimes when there is too much emphasis on speed and low cost, things can get sacrificed, whether that’s product safety or product quality.

Once upon a time we were taught that competition was good for the consumer, performing the dual functions of driving quality up and driving prices down. Professor Beamish's observation seems to indicate that, at least in the toy business, this lesson is now a myth (if it was ever true in any business in the first place). Following the trend of objectifying the subject, the customer is nothing more than the source of some data points, fed into some impersonal process driven by an optimization algorithm. This is how it was when Ford was manufacturing its Pinto whose gas tank positioning made for a high risk of explosion on impact. That was forty years ago. These days we have more data points; but the processes of review and decision seem to be just as short-sighted, if not more so.

Why McDonald's?

The latest McDonald's to open in Berlin is attracting more attention than usual. John Ward, in his SPIEGEL ONLINE report, explains why:

This is the first McDonald's in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, and expectations were high that the denizens of the famously left-wing district would act to resist the incursion of the Golden Arches. There was a time here when protesters would throw excrement-filled care packages and plastic bags of paint into fine-dining establishments in the neighborhood, until someone decided to outdo the others by lobbing a hand grenade into one expensive restaurant in the early 1990s.

But that wasn't the scene Friday -- far from it. There were reportedly a few protesters in attendance in the morning, but by noon they were gone.

One possible explanation might be that economic resistance would have more impact than physical protest. However, one paragraph from Mr. Ward's report makes one wonder if the Kreuzberg community will deal with McDonald's by shunning it:

Nadine R., a 23-year-old student running to get to class, admitted between slurps of her beverage that she was happy to have a fast-food place across from her school. "I usually like to eat something healthier," she said. "But you get so little time in your break. It's just so much easier to come here," she added, as a friend dragged her away.

This is the same story we hear in the United States: convenience trumps health, whatever the longer-term consequences may be. Given the pressures of life, whether as a student or as a worker, one can at least understand, if not sympathize with, Nadine's decision. So it is likely to be that McDonald's will become a fact of life in yet another community that knows, in its heart, that it would be better off without it.

A "Perfect Storm" of Hazards from China?

The day before China's Health Minister made the embarrassing statement that being conscientious about the safety of foods and manufactured products could, itself, be a "sickness," Victoria Ho issued a report on CNET News.com about a survey of malware conducted by the antivirus company Sophos. Here is the basic substance of her report:

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China--including Hong Kong--hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August. The U.S. ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of sites that contain malicious code.

The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August.

The company warned that simply staying clear of sites hosted in the top three countries of China, the U.S. and Russia is not an effective method of avoiding malware.

"Hackers are hijacking Web sites around the world to make them point to malware on sites based in China, the U.S. and Russia," Carole Theriault, Sophos senior security consultant, said in a statement.

Sophos also warned about a sharp rise in spam pointing people to these infected sites. Malicious senders, in an attempt to bypass attachment virus scanners, are using messages that direct people to Web sites with malicious code. Computers get infected when people click on the links in the e-mail message.

"Most malware writers...are using spam and the Web to infect users," Theriault said. "Criminals are hard at work trying to slip past filters at the corporate gateway."

Today we have a Reuters report, filed from Beijing, which indicates that these physical and virtual dangers may be combining into a sort of "virtual storm" of hazards within the scene provided by the annual Moon Festival, celebrated by the consumption of the special sweet moon-cake pastries. In the physical world there are the findings of the food safety bureau in Guangdong to the effect that, in the words of the Reuters story, "only 85 percent of 80 batches of mooncake filling tested met quality standards." In this context the conclusion of the report inspired as little confidence as the recent official statement from the Health Minister. Here is more of today's Reuters text:

Despite finding excessive traces of intestinal bacteria, preservatives and high acidity levels, the authority said consumers could "rest assured" -- 98.1 percent of the finished product on supermarket shelves met standards.

However, almost as an addition of insult to injury, the "contamination" of the Festival itself has also taken over the virtual world:

China has warned Internet users to be wary of downloading virus-infected mooncake greeting cards ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival after a wave of Internet worms hit hard-drives last year.

Is this just one of those coincidences that usually account for actual perfect-storm situations; or is it the latest set of symptoms of a more systemic malady? Having tried to situate this story in a context-setting "scene," that scene should also account for today's China Daily report (whose results are available through Al Jazeera English) of the widening income gap in China. In this report the gap being examined is between rural and urban Chinese. However, it is likely that the gap is further enhanced by those rural Chinese who are so financially strapped that the succumb to the lure of urban prosperity, only to find that they have traded one state of poverty for another (which may be even greater). As we begin the aggregate all of these symptoms and acknowledge the magnitude of the collection (not to mention its unpleasant consequences), that recent rant against capitalism from Osama bin Laden should induce a chilling resonance.

However, this should not be taken as a call for either rant or revolution. After all, the last attempt to revolt against capitalism now as a sort of tired been-there-done-that feel to it, probably because all that came out of it was a replacement of the Ruling Classes of capitalists with the Ruling Classes of opportunistic ideologues. Rather, we should recognize that we are in a situation that demands what I have called "crisis-driven strategic planning." This means that we need not only to invoke what I have cited as the Neustadt-May fundamental questions of crisis management but also but also to think critically about the very nature of rationality that we apply to addressing those questions. This is no easy matter; and I have previously invoked Andy Grove's observation that it requires a lot of "intellectual ergs" (observing also that such a commitment requires a matching commitment of personal will). To return to the nautical metaphor, we are like Odysseus, in that we cannot avoid a course that leads us to both the Scylla of capitalism and the Charybdis of self-serving ideology; so we have no choice but to negotiate a path that avoids both hazards. To opt out of the choice is to elect to succumb to at least one of the hazards (if not both of them).

The Latest Round of Technocentric Ignorance

It had to happen sooner or later. According to Associated Press Technology Writer Matt Slagle, David Hanson and his company, Hanson Robotics, have a project that, for all intents and purposes, aims to turn the Pinocchio fairy tale into a reality. In the laboratory Pinocchio's name is actually Zeno, which also happens to be the name of Hanson's eighteen-month-old son; so Hanson is not exactly the same as the childless Geppetto. I am less interested in just how far Hanson can go with this project than I am with his position on what is called the "uncanny valley" debate over how realistic robots should appear. Here is how Slagle describes the situation:

The theory posits that humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans, but that robots made to look very realistic end up seeming grotesque instead of comforting.

"Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy," Hanson said. "Well, robots can seem real and be loved too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics."

In my book this is yet another example of an engineering whiz-kid who should have been paying more attention to his core requirements in the humanities. Since it only takes one example to refute a "nobody" assertion, let me offer up Sam Shepard as a counterexample. Before he became a familiar face in Hollywood movies, Shepard used to write some really creepy plays. One of the creepiest, Buried Child, even won a Pulitzer Prize. All the action takes place in the living room of an old farmhouse and is basically concerned with the family living there. The one major character who is not a member of the family is Shelly, whom we do not see until Act Two. When she enters the living room, one of the first things she says is, "It's like a Norman Rockwell cover or something;" and she's right! Shepard understood that creepiness always resides beneath, but very close to, the surface of things; and Buried Child is very much an exercise in peeling back the surface of a typical Norman Rockwell canvas to reveal the creepy. He thus gave expression to all of us who, for various reasons of cultural background, never identified with those Saturday Evening Post covers and comforted us with the prospect that it was just as well that we did not identify with them! Having just written about how little we seem to understand about the concept of "humanity," I find it ironic that I should encounter such an explicit example in the current practice of robotics!

Spaghetti Does Not Grow on Trees!

I was only in high school when Jack Paar used his evening television program to show to the United States the great spaghetti-tree-harvest documentary that the BBC had produced for an April 1 broadcast. I remember Paar saying that the hoax had been so subtly successful that several days elapsed before British viewers started calling in saying things like, "I know this is going to sound absurd, but did you show a documentary about harvesting spaghetti trees?" This seems to be the best way to introduce the following legitimate story from the BBC NEWS Web site:

Consumers' associations in Italy have asked people to refrain from buying or eating pasta for the day, in protest against recent price increases.

The groups are requesting the government intervene to reduce pasta prices.

An increase in the price of wheat in recent months has forced pasta manufacturers to pass on the cost.

It turns out that, in this age of globalization, the price of wheat is no longer a national matter. Much (I wish the BBC had given a percentage) of the wheat that goes into making Italian pasta is now imported! This is probably a supply-and-demand problem: The world demand for Italian pasta is so great that it cannot be satisfied by Italian wheat production; and, presumably, what makes the pasta truly Italian is the production process, rather than the ingredients. Of course, if, as Freeman Dyson has asserted, this really is the "century of biology," then perhaps Italian scientists should figure out how to genetically engineer those spaghetti trees that the BBC had imagined all those decades ago! Then we can translate our wine arguments over to the question of whether spaghetti harvested from trees in Australia is as "authentic" as those from Italian trees!

The Voice of the Swiss People's Party

This seems to be a day in which the past is haunting the present. Having just searched my archives to get the skinny on Taro Aso, Secretary General of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, I now find myself doing the same on the subject of discrimination in Switzerland. This was prompted by a story by Imogen Foulkes for the BBC on a report from the Swiss Federal Commission of Racial Discrimination that found the current system for acquiring naturalized citizenship in Switzerland "discriminatory and in many respect racist." This triggered a memory of a campaign that had been initiated by the Swiss People's Party to ban the building of minarets in Switzerland. The Al Jazeera story that reported this campaign did not give the percentage of parliamentary seats held by this Party; but Ms. Foulkes claims they are "currently leading in the opinion polls;" so it would appear that the news from last May was a bit of a harbinger.

When I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, I had an American student who had spent a fair amount of her time in Switzerland. It was from her that I learned that the Swiss take a highly decentralized approach to governance, to a point where the almost insignificant status of the Federal government is a matter of national pride. This decentralization is strongly evident in Ms. Foulkes' account of what it takes to acquire Swiss citizenship:

Switzerland has Europe's toughest naturalisation laws. Foreigners must live for 12 years in a Swiss community before they can apply, and being born in Switzerland brings no right to citizenship.

Under the current system, foreigners apply through their local town or village.

They appear before a citizenship committee and answer questions about their desire to be Swiss. After that, they must often be approved by the entire voting community, in a secret ballot, or a show of hands.

It is this process that is now being criticized by the Federal Commission of Racial Discrimination. Ms. Foulkes cites an example from their report:

It cites the case of a disabled man originally from Kosovo. Although fulfilling all the legal criteria, his application for citizenship was rejected by his community on the grounds that his disability made him a burden on taxpayers, and that he was Muslim.

Needless to say, the Swiss People's Party is staunchly defending this status quo and rejecting any proposals of reform to the process.

This should makes us all reflect on the extent to which we tend to romanticize that ideal vision of "town meetings," usually while expostulating all sorts of verbal claptrap that demonstrates little more than an thoroughly impoverished comprehension of the underlying concept of "community." On the surface the Swiss system has an interesting enough perspective: One can only become a "member" of the country if one becomes a "member" of one of the country's communities. However, joining a community is not, as a rule, a matter of going through the steps of some objective process. Rather, it involves achieving some level of agreement between the individual applicant and the existing members of the community. The community makes the decision, and the applicant carriers the primary responsibility for achieving that agreement.

However, this is where we have to start getting careful about just what a community is. The position I have previously endorsed is that community is the expression of "self" across a group. This, of course, is the old rabbinical trick of answering one question ("What is community?") with another question ("What is self?"); but, even if we hold any detailed account of that second question in abeyance, we must still recognize that one cannot had a sense of "self" without a sense of "other." Thus, when a community is deciding on whether or not a "new applicant" should be a member, they are basically ruling on the "otherness" of that applicant. If that "otherness" is recognized by the community as a whole as being too "alien," then membership is denied; and, by the very criteria that constitute the nature of community, this is probably as it should be.

Nevertheless, all this academic scare-quoting of everyday nouns like "community," "self," and "other" does not refute the assertion that this approach to determining community membership is, by its very nature, discriminatory. If you cannot have self without other, you cannot have community without exclusion; and exclusion is just a synonym for discrimination. So, having raked this Swiss model over the coals of social theory, let us return to questions of practice.

Consider the case of the disabled Kosovar. Here is a man who is a refugee in the spirit, if not the strict literal sense, of that noun. He had the good fortune to get out of a powder-keg, even if not entirely intact. Mr. Foulkes' account did not give the circumstances that brought him to this particular community in Switzerland. However, the Federal report cited that the community decided that "his disability made him a burden on taxpayers" and that his religion was deemed too alien by a presumably Christian population. The second criterion is as old as history itself. We continue to live with it in the United States, even in the current context of the recent news about the leader of a fundamentalist commune in Utah and Arizona that still practices polygamy. The former criterion is the more practical one, and it reminds us that the responsibilities of government are not always as simple as we would like them to be. If every community ultimately has to take responsibility for its own health care budget (which could well be the case in some of those romanticized visions of "town meetings"), then the decision of this Swiss community is no different from the sort of decision than an American insurance company might make.

When I worked in Singapore, my health insurance did not cover any problems ensuing from a heart murmur that had been detected decades previously by an echocardiogram. After a full physical examination, my primary care physician sent me off to have another echocardiogram. The cardiologist detected no heart murmur. He explained that the technique of interpreting the results had improved significantly since my first echocardiogram. I got him to write a letter to the insurance people, who then dutifully removed at exceptional clause from my policy.

Am I arguing that this is all a question of money? Perhaps, but, if so, it is more a question of who pays the money. If health insurance is national, then this should not be a decision criterion at the community level. My guess, however, is that the health care question was only a rationalization; and the real criterion was the religious one. This really bothers me, because this Kosovar is not different from all those Jews who desperately tried to get beyond the reach of the genocidal policy of the Nazis; and he serves as a reminder that no one is really there to assume protective responsibility for people in such a state of desperation. Thus, it is not a question of whether or not we know what we are talking about whenever we use the noun "community" but of whether we are just as ignorant (if not more so) whenever we invoke the noun "humanity."

Ancient Culture, Short Memory

Now that Shinzo Abe has resigned as Prime Minister of Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has to choose a new leader; and, because this party still controls the lower house of the Diet (but not the upper house), the party leader will de facto become the new Prime Minister. Under the headline of Abe being admitted to hospital to be "treated for a stomach complaint probably caused by extreme exhaustion and stress," the BBC has begun to survey the field of possible successors. The only declared candidate thus far is Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga; but the odds-on favorite seems to be the Party Secretary General, Taro Aso. This name may be familiar to those who closely follow the Chutzpah of the Week award. Mr. Aso beat out President Bush for an award last March for some remarks he made to the media that were nothing short of spectacular. Let me repeat the Reuters excerpt I quoted when Mr. Aso received his award:

Blond, blue-eyed Westerners probably can't be as successful at Middle East diplomacy as Japanese with their "yellow faces", Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso was quoted by media as saying on Wednesday.

"Japan is doing what Americans can't do," the Nikkei business daily quoted the gaffe-prone Aso as saying in a speech.

"Japanese are trusted. If (you have) blue eyes and blond hair, it's probably no good," he said.

"Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces."

For those tracking the calendar, yes, Mr. Aso was, indeed, Mr. Abe's Foreign Minister; and this turned out to be one of the many episodes that made the Abe administration seem like a comedy of errors.

The new leader of the LDP will not be chosen until September 23; so, for now at least, the China Institute of City Competitiveness still has a firm hold on this week's award. One has to wonder, however, just how short memories are within the LDP leadership or how short they take the memories of the Japanese people to be. Perhaps the LDP is counting on that youth culture that no longer understands the significance of August 6, 1945; but that is still a solemn day in Hiroshima. Still, there is a lot of time for deliberation between now and September 23; so there is still hope that the LDP will manage not to follow one blunder with an even bigger blunder.

An Expert Opinion is Still an Opinion

It would probably be understatement to assert that JP Rangaswami does not think very much of Andrew Keen. Just for fun I decided to do a Google Reader search on "execrable" in his confused of calcutta blog and got only one hit among his posts and follow-up comments. The adjective was applied to Keen's writings, probably with regard to the his attack on the "Cult of the Amateur." This has led to JP mount a mini-campaign against Keen based on the following premise:

I’m a lot more worried about The Cult of The Expert than I am about The Cult Of The Amateur.

Truth be told, I, for one, get very suspicious whenever the noun "cult" is invoked; and JP would hardly be the first to try to knock down the pedestal on which we tend to place our experts. Bertrand Russell probably did it best when he said, "Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken." I actually got that quote from a paper by Ian Mitroff with the somewhat unwieldy title, "A Communication Model of Dialectical Inquiring Systems—A Strategy for Strategic Planning." However, any weakness in the title is made up for in the concluding remarks, which present the assertion that we should make a habit of challenging experts rather than trusting them. This then leads to the punch line (delivered in italics for emphasis): "no one can challenge an expert …like another expert …who is on the opposite side of the fence."

Alessandra Stanley, who first came to my attention with her perceptive analysis of the media ballyhoo behind Don Imus' act of political incorrectness, applied her analytic skills to yesterday's session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her TV Watch column for this morning's New York Times. My guess is that she has never read anything by Mitroff (but would not be a stranger to Russell). However, she seems to have homed in on the fact that this session was all about challenging experts and assessing the expertise of the challengers. Furthermore, by viewing this event through William Paley's "bloodshot eye," Ms. Stanley could see that this was yet another instance of media manipulation, rather than anything as abstract as dialectical inquiry:

There is no “I” in senator, but it was inevitable that “I” would be the most pronounced pronoun of the day: panels that included Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama, Christopher J. Dodd and Hillary Clinton, as well as a Republican candidate, John McCain, were bound to play to the camera. Democrats seeking to challenge the administration’s claims of progress wanted to signal that they had their own boots on the ground.

But viewers can take umbrage when civilians lecture men in uniform about the hazards and hardships of war. Most senators were experienced enough not to cross the line.

As a result, from Ms. Stanley's point of view, the expert best equipped to challenge the expert General David Petraeus was Senator Chuck Hagel, whom she introduced to the reader through the two Purple Hearts he had received in Vietnam. She quoted Hagel directly:

I’ve always found that you want an honest evaluation, and not through charts, not through the White House evaluations. You ask a sergeant or a corporal what they think. I’ll be on them every time, as I know you will. General, I know you will.

Like the subjects interviewed in Alive Day Memories, Hagel knows that this is not a matter of finding a simple answer to a complex question. However, he also knows that expert opinion must always be challenged; and he knows how to do this with not only his own expertise but also his ability to seek out experts where "conventional wisdom" tends not to look.

Unfortunately, Hagel probably also knows, as Ms. Stanley observed, that yesterday's Committee meeting had more to do with political theater than with the fate of the real "boots on the ground" (not to mention the rest of us back on the home front). If Hagel has chosen not to run for reelection because he has had enough of political theater, then he has my sympathies. As in just about any theater, the "productions" have run the entire gamut from the profound to the inane; but it seems as if, during the current decade, the "show" has been little more than American Idol. However, rather than bemoaning Hagel's departure from the scene, Ms. Stanley closed her own "review" with another "actor," who, while not yet fully prepared to challenge expertise at least has the perception to reflect on his own experiences:

Only one senator didn’t seem to understand the underlying point of the exercise yesterday. Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee who was elected in 2006, admitted as much in his opening statement. “I know I’m new here,” he said, addressing Mr. Biden. “And I’m at a semilow point in the way we do things.”

Mr. Corker tried to defend the Iraqi government and its failure to achieve any degree of reconciliation. But he violated the code of Congressional omerta.

He explained that Iraqi officials work under difficult conditions. “Unlike us,” he said, “where we ride from nice homes to the Senate and work out in nice gyms.”

Beauty is in the Politics of the Beholder

China seems to be making a habit of trying to get an early jump on the Chutzpah of the Week awards. This week attention shifts from the Health Minister's take on the safety of food and products to the China Institute of City Competitiveness, a non-profit organization tasked with naming the most beautiful city in the country. The Institute has assigned this honor to Beijing, described by the Reuters report of this decision as "Dirty, polluted, congested and razed of many old buildings." Reuters chose its words well, since it cited a China Daily report on the Institute as a source of the criteria for "beauty:"

Institute chairman Gui Qiangfang said the assessment took into consideration Beijing's design, infrastructure, architecture, culture and natural beauty.

"Factors including the preservation of historical monuments, forest coverage, air quality, the transportation network, city life, public space and GDP were also considered," the newspaper said, with no hint of irony.

Presumably, the promotion of the city hosting next year's Olympics is more important than irony, even when the topic involves air that you can "cut with a knife" (in the words of one presentation I heard on doing business in China). So, if there is no irony, it must be chutzpah!

Thinking about "This World:" Transcendence or Negligence?

On the surface it appears somewhat ironic that silence should figure so significantly on this day of memory in the United States while, at the same time, Osama bin Laden should use the occasion as an opportunity to release a 47-minute video eulogizing Walid al-Shehri, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, the first jet to crash into the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. In order to find perspective for that day when "everything changed," I found myself digging into al-Shehri's own words (thanks to translated passages provided by Al Jazeera English), where I found the following:

As for our own fortune, it is not in this world. And we are not competing with you for this world, because it does not equal in Allah's eyes the wing of a mosquito.

Yes, this is a typical example of that transcendent thinking without which martyrdom would not be possible; but is it not, also, a statement of negligence, if not denial, of "this world?" That being the case, do we not also find such negligence in an American policy that refused to honor the proposals of the Kyoto Agreement (one of the key points in the rhetoric of bin Laden's own recent video) or ratify the authority of the International Criminal Court? Were not both of these acts an assertion of the self-interests of the powerful over a few faltering steps, taken on a global scale, to deal with the pressing problems of "this world?" Is not the very foundation of faith-based policy one of a transcendence, which, when viewed by those of us who do not share the faith, just as easily interpreted as negligence? Walt Kelly was famous for saying, "We have met the enemy, and they is us." Have we the courage to acknowledge the parallels between our attacks on such abstract concepts as climate control and international justice and the more concrete attacks of 9/11/2001? If we have that courage, can we summon the will to bring about a course-change away from this continuing negligence of "this world?"

9/11/2001 was not the day when "everything changed." Things were already changing on Election Day of 2000, when those governed by faith alone began to chip away at those processes of our government that had been set in place by our Constitution. We were already witnessing the change in mind-set in the summer of 2001; but the only reactions to those changes were minor demonstrations that did not equal "the wing of a mosquito." Then nineteen terrorists applied their negligence of "this world" to implement a demonstration on a scale that exceeded "the wing of a mosquito" by an unthinkable magnitude. After 9/11/2001 we could no longer ignore a change that was already in the works. Unfortunately, we could be dissuaded from reflecting on it; and our government and media achieved that dissuasion with businesslike alacrity. Six years later it seems as if all capacity for reflection has been sapped from us. Yet faith-based terrorism derives its very strength from a similar suppression of reflective thinking, masquerading a brutal negligence of "this world" as transcendence. Both sides are stuck in the same muck. Only by extricating ourselves can we have the substantive grounds to prevail over the negligence that lies at the heart of terrorist convictions.

Let's Talk about Sex

Having put in a good word for the new HBO documentary Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, I feel I should also offer some reflections on their new series, Tell Me You Love Me. On the surface this is described as a "drama about three couples and the therapist they share;" but, as is almost always the case, it is "about" many things on many different levels. Let me start with the most obvious and then work into the more subtle.

Just about all of the buzz that preceded the premiere of this series had to do with promoting it as "the new sex show" (without, of course, using such blatant language). Given the beating that HBO seems to have taken (at least according to The New York Times), over John From Cincinnati (not to mention the Times referring to The Sopranos as "HBO's greatest performer"), it is hard to view Tell Me You Love Me as anything other than an effort by HBO to "get back on top" (with apologies for a metaphor consistent with the subject matter). That being the case, those who select HBO for their Sunday night viewing in search of frank-and-open explicit sex scenes will not be disappointed. However, if that is all they want, then there are probably cheaper ways to invest their entertainment dollars.

So let us, instead, consider a few other surface features less obvious than the sex scenes. Let us start with the almost total absence of the use of names by the characters in this drama. They all have names, of course, all of which are explicitly spelled out on the home page for this series; but I am not sure I heard anyone addressed by either a first or last name in the course of the first episode. This is related to at least one other surface feature, which is the considerable time devoted to conversations that take place over cell phones. In the world of Caller ID, you no longer have to identify yourself when the person you are calling says "Hello." Indeed, because that person knows who you are, he or she rarely says "Hello" any more, because the call is treated as the continuation of an ongoing conversation. Thus, to a great extent, this is a drama that demonstrates to us what the epistolary novel has evolved into in the 21st century. This takes us into deeper levels.

Before delving there, however, consider another surface feature. The first conversation we observe the therapist having is which her husband (probably) about the fact that the book she is writing is in its final stages. From my point of view, this sets a somewhat clinical tone for the whole drama. Now we can probably assume to believe that the three couples are all new cases. (As a matter of fact, we see only one couple in a session and another session that involves only the wife. The third couple is not yet married and have yet to enter the therapist's office.) This makes for an interesting frame. We can probably assume that the way in which the therapist does her job is informed by the content of this yet-to-be-completed book; but we have no reason to believe that, as the drama unfolds, she will be doing her job particularly effectively. (Look at the journey that Dr. Melfi ended up taking over the extended narrative of The Sopranos.) It may turn out that these new patients do not fit the patterns of the therapist's past practices very well. They may not even fit at all; and she may end up chucking the entire manuscript (if not the confidence to write a book at all), as a result of her experiences with these new patients.

This is where I want to dig deeper. I am less interested in whether this series has been inspired by the epistolary novel than I am on whether the debt it owes is to those nineteenth century masters who were so good at documenting the "human comedy," such as Balzac (who provided me with the quoted phrase) or Trollope. This is a series that may end up telling us more about what we have become in the world we are now situated than just about our sex lives. If this is the case, then the first episode is looking at us all through a rather jaundiced eye. Not only are the conversations hollow, but they seem to be about little other than sex. Even the act of reading a bedtime story has a detached (and, for one brief moment, distorted) abstraction to it. If we think about this in terms of that old get-a-life cliché, these are characters who are really not that far from the zombies I feared we would become if our capacity for communication just died.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this. Perhaps I am just enjoying seeing the work of someone who has managed to use narrative to say what I keep struggling to say though exposition. Whatever the case may be, I believe that the first episode of Tell Me You Love Me has set us up for a good old-fashioned cautionary tale. I only fear that those who most need the message to be cautious about how one lives in this world are the ones most likely to ignore it.

The Awful Truth

Last night was the first broadcast of Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, the new HBO documentary produced by James Gandolfini. The timing could not have been better. I suppose the original intention of HBO was to broadcast this on the Sunday night before 9/11. However, by all rights it should have been required viewing for all those directly (or, for that matter, indirectly) involved with General Petraeus’ delivery of his report in the Capitol today. It also coincided with an Associated Press story, now available through Truthdig, which introduced it as follows:

More and more troops are coming home from Iraq with brain damage, the result of repeated exposure to explosions, and doctors are having a difficult time keeping up. For many, the damage causes problems experts have never seen before and aren’t sure how to treat.

Reading a wire dispatch, however, is one thing; but seeing is believing. Two of the ten case studies examined in the HBO documentary involved known physiological brain damage; and one can only wonder about the others, even if treatment thus far has involved other parts of the body. A DVD is already available; but it is clear that HBO is not in this one for the money, since they have also provided a link to a page for watching the entire film on-line. What is most important, however, is that ten members of our military who barely escaped death have been given a voice; and HBO has allowed that voice to be amplified to the strength it deserves. The only question that now remains is: Who in the Congress (not to mention the White House) will take the trouble to listen to these voices seriously?

A Spoonful of Eye Candy Make the Counterpoint go Down

As I prepare to see the San Francisco Opera production of Samson and Delilah next Sunday, it is hard to forget that this opera embodies what is probably the most well-worn cliché of the music literature, at least over the course of the twentieth century when it was worked to death by just about every comedian on stage or screen (including the animated ones in the latter case). This moment is all the more ridiculous, since the "official" title of this particular musical episode is "Bacchanale," in spite of the fact that Bacchus-worship was not a practice of the Philistines. (Indeed, the libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire makes it clear that this scene is celebrating Dagon, which is one of the details from the Book of Judges that is kept intact.) However, once we get beyond the hackneyed, this opera reminds us that spectacle was not an invention of Cecil B. DeMille, or even D. W. Griffith, and that "grand" was quite a meaningful adjective in the phrase "grand opera!"

We are also reminded that music was just as much a business in late nineteenth-century France (or, for this particular opera, Germany) as it was about three-quarters of a century later when Lennie Tristano was bemoaning the sorry state of jazz in the Forties of the twentieth century. However, if we get beyond the eye candy on the stage and even the "star turns" of the leading characters, this opera provides us with many opportunities to see that Camille Saint-Saëns was just as a serious about his music as Tristano was about his. We get to hear Saint-Saëns display his command of both counterpoint and choral writing with a refinement that we miss if we limit our attention to the "Bacchanale" or other his spectacles, such as the second piano concerto or the "Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso." Then, if we listen "behind" the mezzo-soprano's delivery of Delilah's seduction aria ("Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix"), we hear some wonderfully delicate management of orchestral texture and chromatic lines that, in other hands, would have been written off by my own composition teachers as "slimy."

This leaves us with an impression of a Saint-Saëns who was able to achieve a dialectical synthesis of the ideals of his art form with the pragmatics of the business that provided him opportunities to compose. He could produce music that, as Roger Sessions would put it about a century later, he could listen to (and present to his students) "without blushing." If the general audience cared only about seeing a sexy Delilah, lapping up orgiastic choreography, and finishing it all off with the collapse of the Philistine temple, that was their affair. Today's audiences tend to have the same interests; and, if that benefits the budget of an opera company, we are all the better for it. The rest of us can seize the opportunity to listen to the music that probably gave Saint-Saëns, himself, the greatest satisfaction; and we, too, benefit.

More Data about the bin Laden Video

Al Jazeera English has now provided us with data points that can refine yesterday's analysis of the flawed Associated Press account of the latest video from Osama bin Laden. Their own version of the story cites "Al Jazeera and agencies," which is the way they claim to use their wire services (without, unfortunately, naming them) and then supplement those accounts with their own sources. This report also includes a link to a Web page of excerpts from an English translation of the transcript of the tape. In the context of my own analysis, this page offers good news and bad news. The bad news is that it consists only of excerpts, none of which have to do with the promotion of Islam (which seems to have attracted the most attention in the Western press). The good news, however, is that Al Jazeera is given as the source of the translation, meaning that it is probably the work of the same translators responsible for all the other English versions of Al Jazeera reports; and, when one compares the Al Jazeera version with the one that ABC News was using, they match up rather well. This thus adds to the level of confidence we can assign to the validity of the full text made available to ABC News. Furthermore, the Al Jazeera news story does include a reference to the recommendation to "embrace Islam" (also quoted in the Al Jazeera text); but the Al Jazeera version supports my own reading that this is part of the concluding remarks, rather than the "solution" that the Associated Press account made it out to be. (The Al Jazeera account does cite the "solutions;" but only the first is given as a quotation from the transcript. Al Jazeera seems to have recognized better than Associated Press that the "second solution" was wrapped in the cloak of an extended rant, whose target had to do more with capitalism than with religious belief.) Unfortunately, the "conversion meme" has done a prodigious job of "infecting" Western journalism to the extent that even BBC News, usually one of my preferred sources, has turned this into a story about conversion to Islam. The conclusion thus seems to be that, while there are an abundance of resources that bring clarity to this situation, we continue, as I argued yesterday, to prefer the muddled confusion into which we allowed ourselves to be immersed by both our government and its media support when 9/11 provided the incentive to cultivate that culture of fear around a new concept of Homeland Security that now dominates our day-to-day lives.

Owning up to the Mess

Last July I cited a passage of text by the novelist Andrew O'Hagan because it had so skillfully captured a critical character attribute in a few words. I few weeks later I had the opportunity to see the video recording of O'Hagan interviewing both Günter Grass and Norman Mailer at what could fairly be called a "superstar event" at the New York Public Library. This was visibly not a pleasant experience for O'Hagan. Grass pretty much mopped the floor with his efforts to ask penetrating questions about the recent revelation of his SS service during the Second World War; and Mailer just played the grand old man to the hilt as an opportunity to ramble away in monologue, thwarting O'Hagan's every attempt to salvage a conversation out of the engagement.

Now O'Hagan has a piece in the Telegraph that is supposed to be a celebration of literary festivals but degenerates into an attempt to recover face from his embarrassment in New York. As is often the case where embarrassment is involved, what O'Hagan has written does not align very well with what got captured on video, at least as it was broadcast on Book TV. (Unless I am mistaken, O'Hagan has created a few characters in his novels who have a similar problem with what they write.) He does own up to a rather blatant ineptitude at his first encounter with Grass ("The hero of your youth murdered my grandfather"); but dismisses it as a gesture that "failed both as humour and as wind-up." (What did he think it would succeed at.) As he continues the account, he seems to assume that, because Grass did nor react to this remark he was therefore oblivious to it, rather than worrying that Grass might just be waiting for a time to get even (such as a time in front of a large audience). Thus, Mailer, as an expert in boxing, could pick up of Grass exposing weakness on O'Hagan and then proceed to exploit that weakness during his own time in the spotlight.

Aren't novelists supposed to be aware of such devices?

No Time for Simplistic Interpretation

The good news about the Associated Press report of that latest video of Osama bin Laden it that it has a named author, Lee Keath, as well as a Cairo byline. That means that, were Associated Press to empower us to do so (which they do not, which is the biggest piece of bad news), we could question Keath about how much of that article is a matter of interpretation and how much of that interpretation is warranted. That includes the wording of the headline (which, as I know from personal experience, the author does not always write). This particularly critical, not just because Yahoo! News gives it the largest font but also, more importantly, because many newspapers appropriate the wording of the headline along with the content of the story itself.

For those who have not seen it, the headline is perfect for fueling that culture of fear that has been cultivated in our country in the name of "Homeland Security." The text is as blunt as it is threatening:

Bin Laden urges Americans to convert

As is often the case, we need to proceed several inches below the fold (so to speak) before we have any exposure to the author's source material:

Bin Laden makes no overt threats and does not directly call for attacks, according to the transcript, which was first posted by ABC News on its Web site.

Instead, he addresses Americans, lecturing them on the failures of their leaders to stop the war in Iraq despite growing public opposition in the U.S.

"There are two solutions to stopping it. One is from our side, and it is to escalate the fighting and killing against you. This is our duty, and our brothers are carrying it out," bin Laden said.

"The second solution is from your side. I invite you to embrace Islam," he said.

One result of that, bin Laden said, would be an end to the Iraq war. He said "warmongering owners of the major corporations" would rush to appease voters who showed they are looking for an alternative, "and this alternative is Islam."

The first thing that this tells us is that Keath is relying on a translated transcript, taking it for granted that, if ABC News posted it, it must be valid. Well, at the very least, that Web site tells us a bit more about the source:

ABC News' Jonathan Karl, Pierre Thomas, Luis Martinez and Theresa Cook Report: ABC News has obtained a transcript of the latest taped message from the United States' most wanted terrorist, and a senior U.S. intelligence official has confirmed to ABC News that "initial technical analysis suggests the voice on the tape is indeed Osama Bin Laden."

According to the transcript, which can be viewed by clicking here, bin Laden opens with "praise to Allah" and his "law of retaliation" -- "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and the killer is killed."

This is where things begin to get interesting. The hyperlink is, indeed, a valid one; but two points need to be made about it.

1. It is strictly an image whose resolution was too low for me to process with my Acrobat OCR tool.
2. The first page is "Page 2." Presumably any information about who provided the translation was on Page 1. So we seem to have more information about the validity of the video than we have about the accuracy of the translation!

In spite of these difficulties, there is still a major problem with Keath's account, particularly where that "second solution" is involved. This much is true: The sentence "The second solution is from your side." can be found in the transcript with little difficulty. Unfortunately, it is not followed by a sentence that has anything to do with "embracing" Islam or any more explicit reference to religious conversion. It is followed, instead, by a rather different form of provocation:

It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the people and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporation.

This is followed by a paragraph of polemic, directed primarily against the Bush administration that adds little to polemics we have read from any number of other sources, emphasizing points such as the refusal to observe the Kyoto accord. The following paragraph then elaborates that Blair, Sarkozy, and Brown deserve the accusations of the preceding paragraph as much as Bush does; and this brings us to the first hint of any religious interest on bin Laden's part: "as you liberated yourself before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system." The polemic, now focused on capitalism, goes on for two more paragraphs before proposing an alternative path:

So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls of His slaves and the methodology that best suits them.

We then get ten paragraphs that extol the methodology and lead up to the punch line:

Don't be turned away from Islam by the terrible situation of the Muslims today, for our rulers in general abandoned Islam many decades ago, but our forefathers were the leaders and pioneers of the world for many centuries, when they held firmly to Islam.

Note that the sentence "I invite you to embrace Islam." never appears in this text; it only appears on the final page of the transcript and the beginning of the concluding remarks. However, even at this point there is no explicit suggestion of the concept of conversion, meaning that it is not particularly clear what the text means by "embrace." Nevertheless, the fact that the earlier text makes a point of the extent to which the Jews of Spain fared far better under Muslim rule than they did under the persecution of the Inquisition leads one to assume that this is an embrace of "loving acceptance," rather than a rejection of personal articles of faith.

So does this critical sentence actually have a source; and, if so, where is it? Well, the text I quoted that included the hyperlink to the transcript appeared on the Political Radar blog maintained by ABC News. If you do a text search on that Web page, you discover that the only "hits" on "convert" and its variants appear in the (quite extensive) User Comments section. If this means that Keath was treating those comments with the same authority he was willing to accord to the ABC News sources, then, at the very least, he needs a course in remedial journalism! Beyond that, some investigative journalist may decide that this is an opportunity to determine whether Keath is playing a role at the Associated Press along the same lines as the role that we learned Judith Miller was playing at The New York Times!

Hopefully, it goes without saying that this analysis does not, in any way, support the points that the transcript has bin Laden making. When this man goes on a rant, he gets things muddled, just like any other ranter. The confused confluence of democracy and capitalism is the one example most evident the excerpts I provided. Also, while my own cultural frame attaches great significance to the tolerance that Islam-ruled Spain showed to the Jews, there is nothing in this transcript that led me to believe that bin Laden would "embrace" (to use the word of the hour) a similar spirit of tolerance. Nevertheless, we now live in a culture in which anything that claims to be news may actually be manipulative propaganda. So, when it turns out that an Associated Press release is grounded in serious misinterpretation (not to mention that the release appeared so close to the presentation of the Petraeus report), then, in the interest of keeping readers properly informed, that misinterpretation should be brought into the light.

The Hollow Conversation

Putting aside my penchant for trying to take on the Cluetrain Manifesto with either polemic or brash tomfoolery, let me now try to address the issue by framing it in a historical context. The basis for the frame is the concept of "conversation;" and, while I have already tried to frame conversation without the broader concept of the "interaction ritual," in this case I would like to take a more business-oriented approach and frame it in terms of "organizational communication." In order to do this, however, I must first recognize that those "terms" of organizational communication have evolved considerable over the roughly fifty years that both the practical world of business and the academic world of the professional literature have recognized it as a valid and significant topic. Therefore, I would like to offer a quick historical sketch of how the semantics of the phrase "organizational communication" has changed, based on the subjects of publications in that professional literature. These are the "phases of evolution" I would like to propose:

1. Propaganda: This had both an external side (public relations) and an internal one (if anyone remembers the "home organ").
2. Effective electronic mail usage: This initially concentrated on internal communication but gradually branched out to the external, starting with suppliers and distributors and eventually extending to customers (always getting the short end of the stick).
3. Decision support through groupware: These tended to be studies of how Lotus was being used and how much impact (positive or negative) that usage had.
4. Communication network theory: This had to do with how social networks formed, developed, and dissolved, with particularly attention to the role played by technologies, whether electronic mail or more sophisticated groupware. These studies were to first to take a more integrated view of the internal and the external. However, they were mostly descriptive (meaning that managers are still not sure what to do with the results).

This brings us to the present day, when Marx and Engels have been vindicated for their observation that the conduct of business is, above all else, a matter of "internal and external intercourse." (No, this is not from The Communist Manifesto; it is from The German Ideology!) On the surface that Marx-Engels phrase would appear to be just Cluetrain-speak. However, aside from my contention that the Cluetrain folks have only the most superficial conception of what a "conversation" really is, what is most important is that the "intercourse" itself is about more than just markets. What is missing from the picture, whether it is painted by the Cluetrain theses or by the evangelists for social software, is that, while technology keeps throwing out more and more ways to enable all that intercourse, the people empowered by the technology are still very much at sea when it comes to the content of the intercourse.

One of the popular protest mottos during the Vietnam War was, "What if they gave a war, and nobody came?" Today we seem to be addressing an analogous question, "What if we all gathered in conversation, and nobody had anything to say?" We all know this kind of situation. We have encountered it at countless parties. Our usual reaction is, to return to Goffman's terminology, to let ritual trump interaction and babble away on a sort of "automatic pilot." In many ways this would be the worst-case scenario behind that old Xerox marketing injunction to "keep the conversation going" (at the same time, giving the raspberry to Richard Rorty who coined the phrase in the context that "keeping the conversation going" was fundamental to the practice of philosophy).

There is an old joke about behaviorism that goes back to the days of Skinner. One behaviorist says to his colleague, "Boy, I am really impressed with operant conditioning. I have now trained my five-year-old to do anything I want!" He then pauses a bit and says, "So what do I want him to do?" So it is with the current state of that "internal and external intercourse." We have more "power of conversation" than we have ever had before. What we lack is the power to figure out what to talk about; so our conversations, if we hold them at all, turn out to be as hollow as that "automatic pilot babble" that takes place at so many social gatherings!

Confronting the Chutzpah

I have no idea whether or not there is a satisfactory translation of chutzpah into Chinese (after all, there really isn't one for English); but a Reuters report seems to indicate that the highest-level government officials are now backing away from Health Minister Chen Zhu's recent Chutzpah Award winning statement on safety:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on Thursday his country took food safety "very seriously", echoing comments by President Hu Jintao in Sydney.

Whether or not there is any substance behind his rhetoric remains to be seen. Nevertheless, I suspect that I was far from the only one to point out just how ridiculous Dr. Chen had made himself; and sometimes seeing a problem in the most ridiculous light turns out to be the first step towards taking it more seriously.

On Pavarotti

Of all the items piling up that one can now read in memory of Luciano Pavarotti, the one that matters the most to me is the tribute that Bono wrote that appears on the BBC NEWS site. I am under no illusions that anything I ever write about the performance of music will ever be read by more than a handful of people. Like it or not, music is a business that is sustained by consumers, whether the product is "live" or "captured" through one medium or another. As a corollary, it follows that the primary interest of the consumer is the overt celebration of what has been consumed. Thus, even in his last years on a stage as esteemed as that of the Metropolitan Opera, hearing Pavarotti sing was more a matter of contending with hysterical masses just waiting for the right moment to shout "Bravo!," whether or not he actually happened to be "on his game" that particular evening. Pavarotti had made that transition from talented tenor to superstar; and when "The Three Tenors" became a major stock-in-trade, he took the next step to becoming an institution.

At this stage in his life, he could easily have rested on his laurels, teaching some elite cadre of pupils and making the occasional guest appearance. However, Bono (who knows well about such matters) recognized that Pavarotti chose another path:

His life and talent was large but his sense of service to the weak and vulnerable was larger.

As a result, through that shared commitment to a sense of service, the two of them became partners in many humanitarian efforts. This is not the time to try to compare Pavarotti at his best (or worst) to that vast demographic of tenors, past and present, made available to us because music is such a business. Rather, it is the time to remember that Pavarotti had a strong sense of who he was that he could apply beyond the usual arenas for performance. Bono has helped us to remember that side of the man who knew how to turn his larger-than-life image to greater needs and ends; and it is what Bono has remembered about him that I, too, take the most comfort in remembering.

Facebook in the News and the Comics

Wikipedia cites Carl Jung as introducing the term "synchronicity" to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." There is probably no causal connection between Gary Trudeau setting his Doonesbury sites on Facebook and today's Facebook report by Eric Auchard for Reuters. As expected, Trudeau is applying his acid-dipped pen to exploring the consequences of having (and growing) a Facebook presence. Meanwhile, it turns out that Facebook management is concerned with exactly the same issue:

Facebook, the social-network site that has enjoyed explosive growth in new members over the past three months, said it plans to let users tell the rest of the world how to find them on the site.

Starting later on Wednesday, Facebook will begin notifying members they have a choice over whether to keep their listings private or to allow Facebook to make their name and profile picture available when outsiders search the site.

In terms of nuts and bolts, what does this actually mean? According to Auchard, it means the following:

But after notifying users over the next 30 days of its plans to open up basic profile listings of its members, Facebook plans to begin allowing sites like Google, Yahoo or others to "crawl," or index, its public member profiles.

This should cheer up Alex Doonesbury, whose primary concern seems to be that she is "stuck at 2,000 friends;" but it should also bear some monitoring in the real world. At a strictly technical level crawling Facebook data should be no different from crawling blogs, so it will be interesting to see if news reports of consequences are any different.

Irony Returns!

Since I seem to be in a mood for reviewing past posts, I also realized that this blog has not had a healthy shot of irony since last June. Fortunately, I am happy to report that Reuters has a story hot off the business wire that should serve as a remedy:

Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will release its fiscal first-quarter results on Nov. 5, later than usual for that period, due to complications in installing a new computer accounting system, its chief financial officer said on Wednesday.

CFO Michael Lehman said at Sun's financial analyst meeting in New York that the company wants to make sure the complex system is working properly before it releases results for the quarter.

Reading this evoked one of the classic adages from my student days: "To err is human; to really screw things up, it takes a computer!" I sold my Sun shares quite a long time ago, so I have no personal stake in this story. However, I hope that at least some of the shareholders are wondering whether or not the launch of the new accounting system was scheduled with the quarterly deadline in mind. If it was, then those "complications" must be pretty massive (and, if it was not, then, by all rights, CFO Lehman has, in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "some 'splainin' to do"). Whatever the case may be, there is nothing like a hardware company beset with software problems to let us know that irony is alive and well (and apparently living quite comfortably in Boston these days)!

Chutzpah over Safety

Once again a strong chutzpah candidate has surfaced in the middle of the week. This is the first time a candidate has appeared around the unfolding sequence of stories about the safety of foods and products from China; and, according my records, the last award China received was actually shared with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States (the constitution of the "team" being part of the chutzpah). However, today's Reuters report by Ben Blanchard on the latest "official" reaction to this safety scandal has just the right level of outrageousness to merit an award:

Hyping China's food and product safety problem is a sickness in itself, the country's new health minister said on Wednesday, a day after Mattel announced a third global recall of Chinese-made toys.

That's right, eternal vigilance may be the price of freedom; but where food and product safety is concerned, it may be bad for your health! In order to reinforce the authority of this health minister, the Chinese news sources have been quick to describe him as "a Paris-trained scientist who unusually is not a member of the ruling Communist Party," which, I assume, is supposed to affirm his professional objectivity. However, if we look at his words (even allowing for subtle errors of translation), we get a different picture:

"I must remind some friends that we are certainly extremely sensitive towards this problem, but over-sensitivity caused by only seeing part of the picture, in medical terms, is called an allergy," Health Minister Chen Zhu said.

Presumably Dr. Chen was not trained as an allergist. (I certainly would not want him as my allergist; and, if that is his specialty, I just hope I never have any allergy problems while I am in Paris!)

This all has to be seen as China's latest move against the high level of media attention that this safety problem has been receiving. At one point the government seemed to have found the moral high ground when it turned out that one particular media source was a fault for circulating a bogus story. However, that "triumph" is now more than a months old; and too many other things have happened since then. Indeed, holding that moral high ground is, itself, a matter of "eternal vigilance." Undermining that sense of vigilance is not going to benefit anyone in this scandal; but the real chutzpah in this case is the resort to alleged "scientific authority" to achieve the undermining!

Where the Buck Stopped

The BBC report of the verdict in the case of the 1972 Swiss mid-air collision in clear skies makes for interesting reading. This accident resulted in 71 fatalities, most of whom were Russian children on holiday. The air traffic controller responsible for the plane in which the children were flying was later stabbed and killed by the father of two of those children. The trial involved eight defendants: four managers and four controllers. The bottom line is that the managers were found guilty and the controllers were acquitted. For my money this constitutes a clear understanding of the nature of negligence and where it lies and deserves to become a case study in the areas of managerial decision making and decision support technology. The prosecution case was that the collision was due to a "culture of negligence," rather than any failure on the part of a specific controller. Indeed, "negligence" may be too polite a term for a management policy that created virtually impossible conditions for the controllers:

The trial revealed that minutes before the crash a single air traffic controller was in charge of 15 planes: He made 118 radio contacts with them, and he was guiding a plane into land.

The only question that remains now is whether or not the punishment associated with the verdict did, indeed, "fit the crime:"

Three of the four managers convicted were given suspended prison terms and the fourth was ordered to pay a fine.

A culture of negligence often goes hand-in-hand with a "culture of what-you-can-get-away-with;" so we must ask whether or not these measures are going to be punitive enough to deter similar incidents in future mission-critical situations.

Diz Digs Igor

I find it a real joy when I find two books that give me pleasure end up converging on a common theme. So it seems to be with David Schneider's books about the San Francisco Symphony, which rewarded me with that wonderful quote about good listening from Igor Stravinsky, and Ira Gitler's, Jazz Masters of the Forties. It turns out that Dizzy Gillespie felt just as strongly about good listening as Stravinsky did. He just had a different way of expressing himself. Here is Gillespie in his own words, extracted by Gitler from an interview conducted by Gene Lees:

I find nowadays that musicians are not as inquisitive as they used to be. You’ve got to be inquisitive. You’ve got to know why. If you respect a guy’s playing and he does something and you don’t know why, you say, ‘Why did you do it?’ What he does is easy to find, you can listen to the record. Why is what is important.

To invoke Stravinsky's approach, getting at the "what" is a matter of hearing; but it takes listening to get to the "why!" Adding my own spin to this observation, answering that "why" question, in turn, can involve appealing to matters of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, often in subtly interrelated combinations. Finally, by bringing Stravinsky and Gillespie into the same camp, it should be clear that good listening is equally relevant to composed and improvised music (although in different ways)!

From Wasting Time to Paying for It

The latest discussion at confused of calcutta (just in time for Labor Day on this side of the pond) involves JP Rangaswami taking issue with a recent Financial Times article:

In today’s print edition of the Financial Times, David Bolchover averred that The self-employed are too busy to go surfing; commenting on the TUC criticism of blocking access to social networking sites, he meanders through the graveyard of worker apathy and ends with the assertion that “you will not find the self-employed immersed on Facebook for hours. The perception of working is irrelevant to them. They are paid for being productive, not for turning up”.

I think he’s managed to miss the point, spectacularly, while coming very close to it.

I found that discussion particularly interesting, because it requires revisiting a topic that both JP and I have explored, which is the question of what constitutes “wasted” time when one is "on the job." JP's approach to this issue is to stress the need for an "outcomes-base view" of what one does "on the job," in which case it really does not matter whether or not one is self-employed. I acknowledge his point; but, as any of my regular readers should know by now, when you start talking about “outcomes,” you are basically anchoring the discussion in the world of nouns, which, as we both well know, is not the world of verbs. Where this is most important is in the service sector, where maintaining an ongoing engagement is as important as any of the “outcomes” of that engagement (if not more so). To some extent “turning up” (when the time is right, i.e. when needed) is the primary obligation of the service provider!

Thus, there is a deeper problem that arises from this whole shift from a production economy to a service economy. It is not so much a question of wasting time. It may not even be a question of “productivity,” if “production” is not the primary goal of the work. Rather, it is the need for a new model of compensation that is commensurate with both how services are rendered and with what service providers do during their “down time” in order to be better at rendering those services. Are the corporate bean-counters ready to get their heads around that question?

Charlie Parker's Listening Skills

My interest in reading about music as a practice has led me from Eunmi Shim's book about Lennie Tristano to the more "classic" book by Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the Forties (which was, of course, one of Shim's sources). This book begins, as, by all rights it should, with a chapter entitled "Charlie Parker and the Alto and Baritone Saxophonists." One of the things that Tristano and Parker had in common was an extraordinarily acute skill at listening to performances and internalizing those listening experiences into performance practice. Thus, both of them were tapping into what Stravinsky would later get at in his remarks about good listening. It was therefore no surprise for me to discover that Parker though a lot of Stravinsky.

Leonard Feather use to arrange "blindfold tests," where the subject had to identify performers on the basis of sound alone. When Parker took the test, Feather included classical music. Gitler documented the results as follows:

Feather also played some classical music for Parker. Bird readily identified Stravinsky and said: "That’s music at its best. I like all of Stravinsky—and Prokofiev, Hindemith, Ravel, Debussy and of course Wagner and Bach." Several years later he named Bartok as his favorite. In the forties, at the Roost, he would play the opening phrases of Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik as a call to let his sidemen know that it was time for the next set. In the fifties, according to Bill Coss, "He never listened to jazz in his home. For that matter, he seldom listened to jazz anywhere unless he happened to be on a job. His main interest was in classical music, mostly the moderns."

I suspect that, had Stravinsky been aware of these remarks and practices, he would have approved!

The Lastest "Hot" Facebook Discussion

As I continue to keep out my feelers for hard data about Facebook is actually being used, I feel it necessary to call attention to Alaa Shahine's dispatch for Reuters this morning. The lead paragraph says it all:

More than 2,000 Egyptians have joined a discussion group on Facebook, the popular Internet social networking Web site, to ponder one overwhelming question: "What will you do when (President) Hosni Mubarak dies?"

Once again I think it is worth asking whether or not 2000 constitutes a statistically relevant sample; but, for this particular topic, I think the fact that the discussion group exists at all is worthy of note. To provide some historical context, this is again the sort of topic that was likely to show up on a Usenet discussion group; and, when the discussion involved a government that tended to be "sensitive" about such discussion, most (if not all) of the discussants turned out to be submitting their contributions from outside the borders of the country in question. Having said all that, though, I still hold that this is a data point worth considering!

The Coming Mahler Wars?

Having written about the performances that the San Francisco Symphony would be giving with Michael Tilson Thomas as part of the Proms series in London, I feel it is only fair to report that Matthew Rye of the Telegraph has now reviewed these two concerts. The review was highly positive, declaring that both concerts "demonstrated a musical partnership at the height of its powers." The highest praise went to the second concert, at which MTT conducted the Mahler seventh. This was not included in the "Bon Voyage" concert (since that would have left little, if any, room for anything else); but its performance last June was definitely one of the high points of this past season.

Without being smug, however, I cannot say I was surprised by this critical reception. MTT is still "Permanent Guest Conductor" of the London Symphony Orchestra. I do not know how the rest of the critics feel about him, but his LSO reviews in the Telegraph seem to have run the gamut consistently from sympathetic to enthusiastic! So I suspect that his fan base is as strong in London as it is here, particularly where Mahler is concerned.

Nevertheless, we may be entering a period of "Mahler turf wars;" and London could well be a principal battlefield. This would certainly be a logical location for such a confrontation, due, at the very least, to Georg Solti's efforts with the LSO prior to his Chicago appointment and Giuseppe Sinopoli's recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra. Valery Gergiev is now principal conductor of the LSO, and he will be leading them into Mahler territory in the coming season. Furthermore, he will be doing it with a vengeance, since he will be conducting the complete cycle of symphonies (representing the tenth only by the adagio movement, however, which is all that MTT, not to mention Solti and Sinopoli, has ever performed). Furthermore, according to the LSO press release, he will be "pairing the symphonies with music by Schoenberg, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and Nikolay Karetnikov and Boris Tischchenko, two Russians with roots going back to Mahler." (The Schoenberg is his first chamber symphony, coupled with the Mahler seventh. This draws an interesting line in the sand, since MTT has always conducted this as the only piece on the program; and I do not know if he has ever conducted the Schoenberg. On the other hand there is an interesting historical connection, since the series of concerts given by Schoenberg's "society for private performances" included a four-hand piano transcription of this particular Mahler symphony.) All this, of course, is taking place in the context of Simon Rattle's "claim" on Mahler (which he has now transported from Birmingham to Berlin). Meanwhile, to throw another log on this fire, Mariss Jansons will be conducting the Concertgebouw in the Mahler fifth when they come to Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco this January (and, of course, the Concertgebouw claim on Mahler goes back at least as far as Mengelberg). (In the spirit of that LSO press release, he will be pairing the symphony with Strauss' "Don Juan.") I have already purchased my Concertgebouw tickets, since I have no intention of missing this performance! Personally, I am hoping that all of this competition will raise the bar on the quality of Mahler performances (not that I have anything against the level of the bar that MTT has set)!

The Obsolete Rhetoric of "Human Potential"

I think I have finally hit on why JP Rangaswami is so infatuated with social software. What appeals to him more than anything else is the "leveling of the playing field" in cyberspace, which basically means that everyone is equally enfranchised. This would explain his most recent expression of a "mission statement:"

I want to find out more about the people who see these tools as opportunities to develop and enhance their potential, as opportunities to deliver to that increased level of potential. And I want to find ways of helping people do this.

Now there are a variety of ways in which I have tried to confront this world-view. The most theoretical probably came up when I tried to develop the principles behind the concepts of interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains. In that discussion I emphasized the axiom that the bonds that enable the formation of social networks are, by their very nature, stratified, which means that the playing field is never going to be level, nor should it be if networks are to form and function effectively.

However, beyond theoretical principles, there is also a matter of what might be called the rhetoric of idealism. The above quotation is an invocation of all that rhetoric about "human potential," which keeps trying to install itself as a meme in both social and management theory. I am sure that there are a lot of people out there who are sincere in embracing such rhetoric; and, in the grand scheme of things, it may even be desirable to do so. On the other hand, to distort a famous remark by John Maynard Keynes, in the grand scheme of things, we're all dead. Idealism has its place, but not as an opiate (now I seem to be distorting Marx) that deadens our awareness of the here-and-now. In that here-and-now the major problem that faces any business, regardless of scale, is the volatility of the context in which all operations (internal and external) are embedded. As a result every CEO has basically the same goal: survival in the face of volatility. This is why, for example, making decisions in the face of overwhelming volumes of data is so intimidating, since you have to implement your decision before it has gone obsolete.

Thus, to turn the rhetoric of human potential on its head (one of my preferred approaches to argumentation), we may invoke the metaphor of physics and observe that enterprise management today is all kinetic and no potential. The boss who is quick to “think on his feet” always trumps the reflective analyst, even when the latter comes up with more effective results. I do not particularly like these conditions; but we are not going to make them go away by (invoking the spirit of Marx once again) enfranchising the masses. I really wish I did have more constructive ideas for turning things around; but, from where I sit, I am hard pressed even to find sources of either commercial or political authority that might be able to lead the world of business out of this wilderness!

The Implication of Lennie Tristano's Wisdom

Two weeks after writing about what I called "the wisdom of Lennie Tristano," I realize that I had not followed his argument through to its logical conclusion. However, now that confused of calcutta has called my attention to "an article in First Monday headlined Rearchitecting the Music Business: Mitigating music piracy by cutting out the record companies," I realize that I really ought to do this. JP Rangaswami was kind enough to reproduce the end of the summary, which is laden with the usual terminological claptrap the IT evangelists invoke when they lack a grasp of the underlying principles:

A key assumption in this presentation is that the costs associated with the current model of oligopolistic intermediation — as well as the artist lock–in that is its consequence — is at the root of the crisis in music distribution.

However, once we strip away all the gingerbread, we realize that the real problem in today's music business is pretty much the same one that Tristano discussed: a conflict between practicing musicians and commercial interests of such violent opposition that there is little hope of dialectical synthesis. That logical conclusion from Tristano's argument was actually best stated by Tristano himself and was an oft-repeated piece of advice that he would give to his students, particularly the best ones: “If you are serious about making music, get a day job!” This was, indeed, what Tristano, himself, did. He put out a shingle to give lessons in jazz, particularly improvisation; and, by all accounts, he made a relatively decent living that way. This freed him from worrying about whether he could get performing gigs when most agents and club managers found his work too "far out;" nor did he have to worry about making records that would sell successfully. (In the latter case he made relatively few records, most of which are pretty damned awesome!)

From this point of view, any concern for "rearchitecting the music business" can never be more than a red herring (yes, I realize that is the wrong magazine) from the musicians' point of view. The wisdom of Lennie Tristano is that good musicians should not have to worry about making money from what they do, just finding the time for that "day job" that will give them the financial support to "do their musical thing." The best thing musicians can do today is to ignore all aspects of the music business (probably including the consumers)! My guess is that, if they take this "modest proposal" seriously, they will feel better for it; and, if they then decide to distribute their stuff through the Internet on their own terms, the rest of us will probably feel better, too!