The Rehearsal Studio

Davos Needs Descartes!

2012-01-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

Today’s report from Davos by Tim Weber, Business Editor for the BBC News Web site, can be boiled down to a single sentence summary:

Everyone attending the World Economic Forum is worrying about youth unemployment.

My guess is that most of us 99% folks in the real world will respond to this with the immortal line from Rocky Horror:

No shit, Sherlock!

Even those whose knowledge of history is pathetically myopic probably realize that unemployment may well have been a more significant motivating factor behind the Arab Spring than the more idealistic quest for democracy.

So, having been blessed with a flash of insight into the obvious, what are the folks in Davos doing about it? Given the length of Weber’s article, it is clear that a lot of people are doing a lot of talking. Then there is this photograph that gives some indication of what else they are doing:

I used to attend meetings where diagrams like this emerged. They are supposed to be a product of free-for-all brainstorming, drawn by a “facilitator,” who tries to summarize the results of the meeting in a diagram that is as informative as it is attractive. It is clear from this photograph that Weber’s camera could not fit the whole diagram. This is a bad sign. If you cannot go away from a meeting with an image that “fits the mind’s eye,” you are likely to lose your grip on the whole affair. Unfortunately, the reason this particular diagram is so crowded is that it is filled with platitudes, all the usual content-free phrases that you learn in business school to “keep the conversation going” without sounding like a dummy. If the 1% are trying to convince the 99% that they are actually trying to do something about the most serious problem on the table, then Weber’s report seems to indicate that they have managed to invest a day in nothing better than shooting themselves in the foot.

It’s time for a modest proposal to break this logjam. The problem with brainstorming at Davos is that everyone there has pretty much the same mindset. Put another way, there is some fundamental set of propositions (which could probably fit on one of those whiteboards) that are simply accepted as axiomatic by all conferees. What is needed, then, is a strong injection of Cartesian doubt. For René Descartes reasoning began with the capacity to doubt everything and accepting as truth only that which withstands the challenge of doubt. Thus, if one can create a whiteboard of “Davos axioms,” one should also be able to run each one of them through a wringer of doubt, driven by the likelihood that no individual axiom is necessarily shared by everyone in the room. If those axioms can be brought down like a house of cards, then there would be at least a fighting chance that the Davos conferees could shift their attention to finding solutions, rather than drawing a big pretty picture of the problem.

Redirecting the Attacks on Apple

2012-01-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

This morning Larry Dignan used a post to the Between the Lines blog on ZDNet to give “equal time” to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in the face of the beating that Apple has been taking from two extended reports in The New York Times by Charles Duhigg, the first co-authored with Keith Bradsher and the second with David Barboza. The good news is that Dignan definitely got it right in shifting the focus from Apple to the broader issue of the impact of globalization on supply chain management. He probably even got his punch line right:

The bottom line here is we enable a supply chain that has a lot of warts. We want to examine those warts, but not really. This flap about worker safety isn’t about Apple, the tech industry or any other vertical. It’s about us.

However, there is still a need to establish a context for this broader view; and, for me, the best way to set that context is by recalling two movies that, by all rights, should have had greater impact. The one most relevant to the case Dignan made is Robert Greenwald’s 2005 documentary The High Cost of Low Price, which is basically a systematic study of the consequences that have evolved from the “Wal-Mart economy” that has consumed our culture’s attitude towards just about any commodity. However, if we also wish to focus on the consequences of brutal working conditions (for which Dignan offers an inadequate gloss on viewing supply chain abuses “through the Western lens”), then we need to turn to Richard Linklater’s 2006 docudrama Fast Food Nation and the book by Eric Schlosser on which it was based.

There is a subtext in Duhigg’s reports based on the old joke that everybody likes to eat sausage, but nobody wants to know how sausage is made. Upton Sinclair investigated that “inconvenient truth” in The Jungle, which Schlosser acknowledged as a major source for his own writing. The thing is that, while Schlosser made the case that things have not changed very much for sausages, there has been a change in that the sausage is now a metaphor for the iPad.

Dignan asserts that “the buy American movement never quite worked.” He has good warrants for this claim; but, after yesterday’s stake in the ground at Davos, I would suggest that his vision is dangerously narrow. We now view the global supply chain as a potential risk to “homeland security,” from which we conclude that we need a strategy to protect it (which would mean protecting all of those abusive work practices that make the whole machine tick). However, if we were really serious about homeland security, we would be strategizing to restore a level of self-sufficiency that started to go down the tubes when we first got bitten by the bug carrying the infection of profits-through-global-outsourcing. (I would love to single out Tom Friedman as the infecting agent, and he may well have been the first bug to deliver an effective bite. However, we have to be fair and realize that he was just the messenger of a message whose consequences he could not fathom.)

Ultimately, this is a matter of dueling propaganda campaigns. The party line of the consciousness industry is the one that Dignan accepts as an axiom: We are addicted to consumerism and demand to satisfy our addiction through low prices. The fact that Apple has become a “drug kingpin” for this metaphor is purely incidental. One way to reject this propaganda is through an alternative campaign that promotes self-sufficiency. This may be what Barack Obama originally had in mind by making “Yes, we can” a campaign slogan; but in all likelihood he had sold out to the consciousness industry even before he had won the election. We, as a culture, need to believe that we can restore self-sufficiency without retreating into isolationism. The 1% do not want us to believe this, but we need to see whether or not the 99% will embrace such a vision and decide to move towards it.

The US Priority at Davos: The Global Supply Chain

2012-01-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

A BBC News dispatch from Davos that arrived last night (our time) gives some indication of where our country’s priorities lie with respect to the agenda of the World Economic Forum. Here is the one-sentence summary of the story:

The US has unveiled a strategy at the Davos World Economic Forum to protect the global supply chain in the event of a terror attack or natural disaster.

Apparently this is a policy that has been approved by President Barack Obama and was the basis for the speech given to the Forum by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. As the BBC observed, there are definitely virtues to this policy:

The supply chain includes provision of food, medicines, fuel or any goods that underpin the American way of life.

The strategy would plan for worst case scenarios, enabling the government and industries to respond quickly to disasters that could disrupt access to vital commodities.

Unfortunately, the virtues of freely-flowing food and medicine may turn out to be a Potemkin village cloaking issues that are less likely to impact the majority of American citizens (if not the whole 99%).

Once we get past the blue-sky side of the story, we read the following:

Ms Napolitano cited a 2010 incident in which al-Qaeda operatives in the Arab Peninsula plotted to send explosive devices into the US via cargo planes that were thought to be carrying printer toner cartridges.

"That really brought to the forefront of my own recognition that we need to have a sense of urgency about the importance of the global supply chain,'' Ms Napolitano said as she addressed a crowd at the World Economic Forum.

However, the free flow of toner cartridges is just the tip of the iceberg. The real iceberg can be found lurking in what has become an often-cited analysis piece by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, which appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times under the headline “How U.S. Lost Out On iPhone Work.” Since Obama is being credited with this new supply chain protection strategy, it is appropriate to recall the opening paragraphs of this Times article:

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The rest of the article explains the logic behind Jobs’ depressing observation; and, at the core of the lengthy (not to mention disconcerting to the point of harrowing) argument lies the critical role of the global supply chain. The bottom line is that just about all American manufacturing is dependent on global supply chains, basically because one would not be able to impress shareholders with dazzling profit margins without them. Put in the bluntest possible language, America has become a country in which just about any production of goods (and often services) has no substantive use for the American worker.

Obama is certainly right that the protection of global supply chains is currently of significant interest to “homeland security.” However, excessive dependence on such supply chains should also be treated as a matter of homeland security. It amounts to having a business culture in the throes of an addiction whose withdrawal could well be disastrous. If our President were really interested in domestic security, he should be thinking about weaning that business culture away from the debilitating effects of globalization and rebuilding that culture of self-sufficiency that served us so well during the twentieth century. Such self-sufficiency would require putting more Americans back to work. This, of course, is what the Occupy movements have been crying for; and Napolitano’s Davos speech makes it clear that the 1% are doing a good job of hanging tough in ignoring such matters.

The Revolt of Ortega

2012-01-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

One of my professors was very big on José Ortega y Gasset. This probably had a lot to do with Ortega’s interest in phenomenology (and with my acquisition of the Norton collection of essays Phenomenology and Art). However, the one time I knew him to invoke a specific Ortega text, it had nothing to do with phenomenology. Rather, the passage came from the chapter entitled “The Barbarism of ‘Specialisation’” from The Revolt of the Masses. Here is the passage:

Experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilisation, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.

Ortega wrote The Revolt of the Masses in 1930, so he was probably thinking of how the study of physics at atomic and subatomic levels had shifted from highly sophisticated laboratories filled with expensive equipment to the desks of mathematicians, whose models were successfully predicting results that would then be confirmed through experimental observation. He was certainly not in a position to predict the impact of computer technology on the practice of science, although I suspect that, had someone explained the concept of crowdsourcing to him, he would have gotten it immediately.

I cite this potential connection between Ortega and crowdsourcing because crowdsourcing seems to have enjoyed a recent triumph in dealing with the complex problems of protein folding. Biochemist David Baker created a video game called Foldit through which users could play with different ways to fold protein structures and get scored on how viable their results were. The results were reported today by Martin LaMonica in the Cutting Edge section of CNET News:

Baker's group this week published a paper (click for PDF) in Nature Biotechnology that found that humans' puzzle-solving skills are actually better than computers in designing complex proteins. "Human creativity can extend beyond the macroscopic challenges encountered in everyday life to molecular-scale design problems," the paper concludes.

Note that no prior knowledge of biology or any other science is necessary for playing Foldit. At a surface level, this is not too far from the old scenario of a million monkeys at a million typewriters putting out the complete works of William Shakespeare. As Bob Newhart point out, what made this a joke was that the Gedankenexperiment did not account for who would monitor the monkeys. Foldit has basically built the monitoring process into the game, apparently allowing for more human creativity than would be achieved through brute-force enumeration of all possibilities on a supercomputer.

Is this the celebration of mediocrity that Ortega envisioned? I am not sure I would call the exploitation of a large population of puzzle solvers a triumph of mediocrity. Baker had to invoke a fair amount of “hard science” to design the game in such a way that it could be used as a valuable experimental tool; but, if you want to embrace Ortega’s pessimism, you probably could say that all of those puzzle solvers are nothing but cogs in the vast machinery of that tool. Personally, however, I am more concerned by the following quote from Baker:

You could imagine where you come home in the evening and you can either stay up all night playing Halo or be designing an HIV vaccine with people around the world. Which would you be happier saying you did when you went to work in the morning?

The implication seems to be that one can harness the masses into the service of scientific research as an alternative to playing Halo because you can associate Foldit with making the world a better place. Nevertheless, there is also a question of attitude. People play Halo because the gratification is in winning the game (or, at least, playing it better than your friends). If the gratification from playing Foldit involved “designing an HIV vaccine,” wouldn’t you feel you deserved some compensation for your efforts? What do you think, Dr. Baker?

Tim Weber Calls Out Davos Hypocrisy

2012-01-24T10:21:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Tim Weber’s preview piece on the BBC News Web site for the convening of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I cannot fault the wording of his headline:

Davos 2012: Has capitalism got a future?

This at least acknowledges that the whole framework in which economic issues are discussed may require serious rethinking. Weber then suggests that such rethinking may be given serious attention this year:

The eurozone, the financial sector, poverty, inequality, corporate responsibility and the rise of China: They all feature heavily in both the sessions organised by the forum, which is always eager to lob in a few inconvenient questions, and the topics of many of the events organised by banks, industry groups and corporate giants.

However, he then pulls his punch line, which I read as his take on how successful the gathering is likely to be:

It is gloomy business, albeit discussed while scoffing haute cuisine breakfasts, lunches and dinners in Davos' five-star hotels.

This is basically a variation on Colin Quinn’s joke about Davos: Economic theory may be about mathematical models that analyze quantitative metrics, such as growth; but such models say nothing about either the nature of quality-of-life or how that factor varies around the world. It is a reminder that the most hypocritical thing Bill Clinton ever said had nothing to do with sexual indiscretions; it was:

I feel your pain.

Bill Clinton will never feel the pain of a Haitian who, years after the hurricane disaster, still does not have a decent place to reside, let alone a viable way to earn a living.

The Occupy movement has been right to identify the enormous gulf between the 1% with wealth and everyone else. However, there is a corollary gap that may be more important, which is that the 99% still do not have a voice in identifying issues in need of innovative policy thinking, let alone offering suggestions as to what those innovations should be. In other words economic policy is a product of an echo chamber even more insidious than that of Washington political reporting. All the parties involved in the conversation know exactly what will be said before it is uttered. No productive thinking can come of this, and the only result will be that the gap separating the 99% will get even wider.

Until Klaus Schwab has the courage to go into the backyards of economic distress, his World Economic Forum will be a waste of time that only benefits those posh Davos hotels.

Counterproductive American Express

2012-01-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

I have grown used to the fact that American Express provides me with a summary of all of my charges at the end of the year. I am pleased to see that I can now download that summary as a PDF; and this is definitely a good thing, because the “interactive” version on their Web site is one of those products of counterproductive design thinking. Presumably, the clients who make the heaviest use of this summary are those, like myself, who need to gather and classify all the necessary numbers for filling out their tax forms. Unfortunately, no one on the design team seems to have bothered to take the trouble to figure out what would be a useful set of categories consistent with those relevant to Form 1040.

Probably the greatest aggravation comes in pulling together those expenses that would qualify for medical deduction. You would think that “medical” would be a major category; but this is not the case. So far I have found three separate categories, each of which contribute to my medical expenses. “Pharmacies” is a subcategory of “Merchandise & Supplies” (which you cannot see on the online summary sheet, because the space for subcategories runs out when it collides with the “Total” line, meaning that the last subcategory you see is “Clothing Stores”). “Health Care Services,” on the other hand, is listed under “Business Services” (which is consistent with our “industrial” view of health care). Finally, Medicare payments show up in “Government Services,” which is a subcategory of “Other.” The bottom line is that I have to do my own filtering from the summary to get the numbers I need. The good news is that at least I can use the search tool on the PDF version and see each of my results in its appropriate context.

That “Other” category is also a source of amusement. My biggest single American Express charge every year is the renewal of the San Francisco Opera subscription for my wife and myself. I was thus amused to see that my grand total of “Entertainment” expenses was $0.00. It turns out that the Opera charge was classified under “Other” in the “Charities” subcategory. I’m not quite sure how the Opera would feel about this classification. One thing is certain: Anyone who thinks that they can just copy numbers from this form into their tax returns will probably be opening themselves up for an invitation to an audit! Do we take this as a sign of what American Express thinks about their clients these days?

The Strategy of a Failed Candidate?

2012-01-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

While my opinions of both CNN and TIME are best kept heavily muted, I continue to have a high opinion of Fareed Zakaria; and I am impressed that TIME has allowed him to pursue projects leading to articles that plumb far deeper than the usual superficiality we now associate with American news media. Thus, when his extended interview with President Barack Obama appeared in the Swampland department of the TIME.com Web site, I felt it was worth more than a casual glance at the screen. I printed it to allow for more reflective reading, and I was far from disappointed after giving the piece a serious level of attention.

Whether or not it was Zakaria’s intention, the interview helped me to refine my own disappointment with Obama. While there were several new insights, it struck me that most of the take-away points were reiterating a message that Obama has delivered many times. This is the message enumerating the significant achievements that have taken place under his Administration, which seems to imply that the strategy for his campaign will be based on broadcasting those achievements early and often until the voters finally go to the polls.

In other words Obama plans to succeed by getting as many voters as possible to “look at the record.” Personally, I think this is a perfectly valid approach to argumentation. I invoked it myself back in the days when it seemed as if Sarah Palin would be the rising star of the American political scene. In doing so, however, I noted the irony that this particular turn of phrase can be traced back to Al Smith, whom I described as “a failed Democratic Presidential candidate.” Thus, I am both surprised and concerned that Zakaria’s own sense of history did not allow him to pick up on the historical echoes behind Obama’s argumentation and use those echoes as ground for questioning the President’s electoral strategy.

Probably the most important political event since that interview appeared was yesterday’s primary in South Carolina. Because the primary results thus far have been so mixed, it is hard to tell how significant this latest source of data will turn out to be. Nevertheless, it provides a context for Obama’s strategy that probably deserves more than passing consideration.

When considered as an academic, Newt Gingrich appears as a man with a solid command of history on a global scale. However, Newt-the-academic is not running for office; and Newt-the-politician knows full well that he is campaigning to a culture that almost prides itself in its disregard of history. For Newt-the-politician, history is, at best, a trigger for what he seems to do best, which is making up stories based more on how compelling the narrative is, rather than whether or not the details are consistent with reality. (Ingrid Rowland would probably suggest that he has the makings of the perfect Roman politician.) South Carolina seems to have presented us with a sector of the electorate that is swayed by such stories more than anything else, particularly when the storyteller can apply his craft to attacking the media. (His tirade at the final debate had all the earmarks of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” strategy; but how many people in the audience know what that strategy is?)

The lesson from South Carolina to Obama may thus be that, however admirable “the record” may be, he had better have a “Plan B” when the polls begin to suggest that a tally of significant achievements does not constitute grounds for reelection.

Stockhausen Challenged by Description

2012-01-21T18:59:00.000-08:00

I have been reading the University of California Press anthology of articles from Source, which I plan to review on my Examiner.com national site. In the first issue I found a transcription of a conversation in which one of the participants was Karlheinz Stockhausen. I was particularly struck by one of his observations:

Every day, working in the electronic studio, the worst problem I have is to describe what I have done. All you can use are words and numbers. Incidentally, a studio in Stockholm is almost ready where every action is automatically recorded. You just fool around, and at the end you get a so-called reportage. Recently I worked four days in our studio. At the end, I had to spend another four or five days analyzing what I had done in order to write it down. It is an awful thing for me. But without what I describe there will be no culture whatsoever in the new dimension. If I make a thing, I’m not only interested in the result; I’m interested in the initial culture. Let’s say we have no score, but we do have a tape. The tape alone doesn’t help enough for study. We can listen, yes; we can get a kind of idea; it may stimulate other things one can do. But one is really not able to go further in that direction. There wouldn’t be any scientific or philosophical or musical progress in our culture if one couldn’t learn from one’s forefathers.

I suppose there is no reason to assume that Stockhausen would have been aware of what was happening in literary theory at the time he made this remark. I wonder if he would have been comforted or disturbed by the proposition that description was the most difficult of the major text types, to a point where an entire monograph was eventually written to explain why it was so difficult.

More important, however, is why Stockhausen was obsessing over the difficulty of description. It concerned what he later called the “medium of transport,” which entailed the principle that one could not “learn from one’s forefathers” without some kind of physical medium. This strikes me as yet another example of artifact-centered noun-based thinking, overlooking the fact that making music is a verb-based practice. Thus, while Stockhausen may have had the “secret stash” of jazz records that may have inspired him, he may not have had much of a clue as to how the practice of jazz is passed from musician to musician through verb-based practice, rather than through noun-based artifacts. This makes for an excellent example of how all of us, no matter what we do or how well we do it, have particular blinders that limit our worldview; and those blinders are so effective that we do not even know they exist!

Another Toxic Aspect of Innovation

2012-01-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

If any serious healing of both the economy and its corollary unemployment crisis is to come from the manufacturing sector, then it is probably time for another cautionary observation that Barack Obama’s mantra about solving problems through innovation is nothing less than the latest brew of Jonestown Kool-Aid. One would have thought that the aftermath of the Solyndra crash would have been evidence enough. However, recent news brings a perspective on purported successes in Asia that may support an ugly syllogism:

Innovation creates markets for new toys
Growing markets make for more manufacturing jobs
To support the increasing demand, manufacturing turns to wage slavery

I like to think of this as the “Foxconn syllogism.” For better or worse, Foxconn seems to have avoided implications that it has created a new generation of slave labor. However, as Hanna Stewart Smith reported today in her Unboxing Asia column for ZDNet, Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai in Taiwan, seems to be cultivating a vocabulary that is even uglier:

“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” said Terry Gou, chairman of Taiwan’s Hon Hai, the parent company of Foxconn.

This was his statement at the end of year party, and considering recent events in Foxconn; Gou picked a regrettable choice of words.

Unfortunately, what could just be poor wording is made much worse by the fact that he also suggested he wanted to learn management techniques from Chin Shin-Chien, director of Tapei [sic] Zoo.

To make matters worse, he invited Chin to speak and asked his general managers to listen to his advice, as well as inviting him to take part in his company’s annual review.

Gou and his general managers apparently listened carefully as Chin provided advice as to how to manage different types of animals, and asked Chin to put himself in the position of Hon Hai’s chairman. It seems, unfortunately, there’s a bit more than just jest to this analogy.

These remarks should resonate with those of us in the United States familiar with the pro-slavery rhetoric that flourished in the years leading up to the Civil War, if not with our own subsequent confrontation with wage slavery that eventually led to the rise of labor unions.

I am not suggesting a Luddite revival committed to the destruction of all machines in factories. However, the underlying Luddite argument was that innovation was making life better for a select few while making it much worse for the general labor force. The real toxicity of innovation comes not from the inventiveness of the imaginative mind but from the translation of that inventiveness into benefits for an elite community of investors, taking a public-be-damned attitude to everyone else, even when “everyone else” is a major population sector depending on manufacturing to provide a living wage, whether in Asia on in European countries like Greece. Meanwhile, that elite community is about to gather, once again, in Davos and play with their numbers and mathematical theories; and they are likely to continue their games in serene oblivion, since it is unlikely that any of the “Occupy” movements have the scratch to set up camp in Davos!

"Reinventing the Textbook" (for whom?)

2012-01-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

Andrew Nusca’s report for ZDNet on Apple’s education-based press conference, held this past Tuesday, had a bold headline:

Apple: We want to reinvent the textbook

I suppose a more honest headline would be “We want to crack the education market,” because this amounted to a pitch for a hardware-software solution worthy of any of the kingpin consulting organizations. As might be guessed, the press conference was run by the marketing department; and those of us who have tried to take education seriously at some time or another would do well to ask just how well any marketing department is connected to the nature of education. After all, marketing is not about education. It is about indoctrination (or “brainwashing” among more cynical observers); so, no matter how good intentions may be, there is good reason to question whether or not “marketing judgment” either knows or cares about the needs of either students or teachers. In order to take a closer look at what is really going on here, I suggest we divide the analysis into two of the basics of education: reading and writing.

There is no doubt that Apple has had a significant impact on the nature of reading behavior. I now know people who have used the iPad as a reading device for any number of purposes, some of which are both work-related and serious. Nevertheless, I have had a twinge of suspicion for about a year, going back to when the marketing folks decided to mount a billboard blitz with the image of an iPad comfortably settled into a lap at the near end of a pair of outstretched legs. The message seemed to be that reading from an iPad would be more comfortable than reading from a book, newspaper, or magazine; and, as a corollary, it would be way cooler.

Now, while I probably would like to be comfortable when reading escapist fiction or People magazine, I am not sure that comfort is the critical factor where education is involved. Now, while I continue to hold to the position that reading has nothing to do with “productivity” and “efficiency” (concepts that imply that reading a text is a waste of time when one can just do a Google search), I also believe that there is a “work” factor to education that should not be subverted by candy-coating the experience with “play” or the barbarism “edutainment.” Thus, while I might question that a project on which I was a researcher was called “Productive Reading,” I feel that the project still had value through its efforts to enhance the possibilities for engagement between reader and text. Education comes about through such engagement, and one has no motive to engage when one is too comfortably relaxed.

To Apple’s credit, they seem to “get” this concept of engagement. The iPad is definitely an engaging device. It can support reading by taking a rich-media approach to the text (allowing, for example, an author to make a point about a piece of music by including audio clips), enabling not only annotation but the sharing of annotations, and offering convenience features for things like checking the definition of a word without leaving the “reading space.” To be fair, however, this is all stuff that was around long before the iPad. The real question is how much of that stuff has been accounted for in the iPad package; and, even if it is there, will it actually be used in educational settings?

This is not a question of the nature of reading. Rather, it is a question of whether or not the texts being read will actually support such reading practices. In other words it is a question of writing.

Anyone who has read a textbook of substance appreciates the value of an index. Anyone who has had to write such a textbook knows that preparing such an index is a laborious process. The index is not just a simplistic linking of words to pages. At its best it is a structured text in its own right, using techniques like indentation to account not only for words but also for relationships among those words. Now, if preparing an index demands so much of a good author, what will be the demands to prepare the text in a way that it will support all of those “engagement experiences” that Apple trumpets?

In Nusca’s report, here is how Apple addresses this question:

As for content creators, a new, free iBooks Author app allows you to create interactive e-books. The application has a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface and default templates (math, science) so it’s easy to get existing content into the cloud. It also has a one-click glossary function.

More technically savvy publishers can use Javascript to create their own widgets and HTML 5 for layout, and thus, experience.

The point is that the textbook of the future will require an author of the future. The writing skills driven by filling blank pages with words (even when mediated by good word processing software) will no longer be sufficient; and there is likely to be an extended period of trial-and-error as the more adventurous authors have their first experiences sorting out techniques that work from those that don’t. My guess, however, is that, during this period, very few of those authors will be thinking about the power of JavaScript. More likely, they will be worrying about the fact that they now have to juggle far more resources than had previously been the case and that integrating all of those resources to make just the right rich-media student text is likely to feel more like movie production than writing a book.

Will all this be good for the currently disappointing state of education in our country? I continue to hold that the greatest asset for education is a foundation of rich interpersonal experiences. If the student does not have a strong base of personal engagement with teachers, friends, and family over what happens in the classroom, no amount of cool technology is going to enhance the learning experience. Indeed, there may even be the risk that a strong “cool factor” may impede those interpersonal experiences, just because the machine is more engaging than any mere human can be.

Put another way, “reinventing the textbook” may introduce changes to the learning experience; but they are likely to be surface-level changes. What matters more is what happens at the “deep structure” of the experience. That “deep structure” does not figure in Apple’s business model; so we should not expect that they will do anything about it. In other words the problem of education will remain with us, the mere mortals who use technology. I cannot feel particularly confident that new technology will do much for how we learn, any more than it has been significantly beneficial in some of the more critical aspects of how we communicate in any setting.

Is History Really a "Tonic of Tragedy?"

2012-01-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Simon Schama’s attack on Downton Abbey. This apparently first appeared in The New Statesman and then migrated to Newsweek, from which it was picked up by The Daily Beast, which is where I read it. Schama has a way with words that can only be compared to Jack the Ripper’s way with a knife. It is at least far more entertaining since the only bloodshed is figurative, rather than literal:

… Downton serves up a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery. It’s a servile soap opera that an American public desperate for something, anything, to take its mind off the perplexities of the present seems only too happy to down in great, grateful gulps.

Since there was a tureen of disgusting material that figured in last Sunday’s episode, this particular turn of phrase could not have been more apposite. Still, the bottom line is that Downton Abbey is a successfully calculated maneuver to wrest audience share on Sunday night away from HBO by trying to revive the glory days of Upstairs, Downstairs; and it has been so successful that it has made the attempt at a sequel to Upstairs, Downstairs seem feeble by comparison.

However, while Schama may be entertaining, I am not sure about how informative he is. His current credentials are as Professor of both History and Art History at Columbia University; and one would think, at least where the reputation of Columbia is concerned, that he would do better than concentrate on strutting himself about with all the entertainment trappings of a Kenneth Clark-like “television don.” I was particularly put off by his decision to end his attack with what is posed as an apology but is actually just as caustic as the rest of his text:

Sorry, but history’s meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane. Done right, it delivers the tonic of tragedy, not the bromide of romance. But then that wouldn’t get the high ratings, would it?

Is that “tonic of tragedy” there are any reason other than clever alliteration? I agree that history should not be a “bromide of romance;” but trying to frame history in terms of tragedy (Aristotelian, Marxian, or otherwise) is equally misconceived. I prefer Hayden White’s position that history is best approached as literature, assessed for its quality of writing as well as its consistency with documented evidence. It is from that point of view that, on Examiner.com, I waxed so enthusiastically over the history writing of Leta Miller and, by way of contrast, vented such a harsh opinion of Harvey Sachs. As far as Downton Abbey is concerned, I am willing to take it as the same kind of escapism that I enjoyed in Joss Wheedon’s Dollhouse; and I can do that without feeling even the slightest tinge of guilt!

Television Trumps Cinema Again at the Golden Globes

2012-01-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

Once again curiosity got the better of me when it came to reviewing the results of the Golden Globes. However, while last year my curiosity was directed at Melissa Leo, this year there really was not anything in the movies category that drew my attention. It is as if the movie industry now shares with Broadway that “vast wasteland” epithet that Newton Minnow once used to condemn the quality of television in the Fifties. (This leads me to wonder whether Minnow was aware of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s theory of a “consciousness industry.” Given what things were like in the Fifties, if he was, he probably did his best to conceal the influence.) Now it is television, particularly the pay cable channels, that is willing to take on gutsy substance without worrying about having the narrative get interrupted by commercials or having scripts that will scare away sponsors. Thus, while many view the Globes as a barometer for the Oscar results, I could care less how those contenders finally get rank-ordered. I prefer to be drawn into serious extended narrative; and that just is not Hollywood’s bill-of-fare.

My only problem with the Globes is that I have yet to figure out their criteria for classification. I have already written about the arbitrariness of how the Emmy Awards have muddled the distinction between drama and comedy (classifying United States of Tara as comedy, almost as if in denial of the more serious subtext of the narrative). The Globes muddy the waters further by adding “miniseries or movie” as a category along with “drama” and “musical or comedy.” As a result Homeland ended up classified as drama, while Game of Thrones ended up in the “miniseries or movie” category. The good news is that this allowed both Kelsey Grammer to be acknowledged for getting to exercise some solid acting chops in Boss (drama), while Idris Elba could be similarly recognized for Luther (miniseries). It also meant that Game of Thrones (miniseries) did not have to compete with Homeland (drama), even if that means that it was then bested by Downton Abbey. (It also leads me to wonder if this “game of categories” had been designed to make sure that the judges would not have to choose between Downton Abbey, which is as best a mild, although highly polished, diversion, and Homeland, which left any serious viewer wondering just what has been achieved in “Homeland Security” since 9/11.)

I know better than to kid myself. I realize that David Simon was able to hone his craft in television while working on Homicide for NBC. However, I suspect that the constraints imposed by NBC made him seek out a less restrictive environment, which he found in HBO (perhaps by virtue of Charles Dutton, who already had plenty of reputation, making his directing debut with a miniseries for HBO based on The Corner, a book that Simon had co-authored). Both NBC and HBO make programming decisions that are ultimately “ruled by numbers.” However, it seems as if HBO and Showtime are more willing to take a “portfolio management” approach to their numbers that makes them less beholden to that consciousness industry and the need to ground everything in a subtext of consumerism and its addictive nature. In the movie industry, on the other hand, the exceptions to the rule come from those odd independent efforts that may make the occasional splash or two but will never make a wave big enough to shift the status quo.

Debussy and Messiaen

2012-01-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

Now that, as a result of my writing for Examiner.com, I have joined the ranks of music critics (even if I continue to believe that “examining” is not the same as criticism), I find that I have become more cautious in what I say about what my colleagues (who call themselves critics) are writing. I figure it is better to take what I have read from others and use it to reinforce a point, rather than pick a fight. However, an interesting difference of opinion arose this week over the San Francisco Symphony semi-staged production of Claude Debussy’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian that deserves a bit of perspective, without turning the opposing thoughts into grounds for a contentious argument.

I am referring specifically to the review that Joshua Kosman wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle after the opening night performance (which is also the one I attended on my Examiner.com “beat”). It did not take me long in my reading of Kosman’s text to recognize that he was being more lukewarm than I had been, even though it was clear that he was giving Debussy his due at just about every possible turn. I suppose what struck me was that he was not giving due acknowledgement to the context of Debussy’s music, which was a five-hour latter-day mystery play with five acts worth of text by Gabriele D’Annunzio and choreography by Michel Fokine for the role of Sebastian being danced by the highly flamboyant Ida Rubinstein. As I wrote in my own piece, “it would be sadly accurate to describe Debussy’s music for this affair as ‘incidental.’”

Nevertheless, the music was the heart of the San Francisco Symphony performance; and Kosman kept his focus fixed on Debussy’s score. However, here is the conclusion he drew:

Yet Debussy never quite gives in to the work's underlying premise; he always seems as embarrassed as we are by the fervid expostulations of d'Annunzio's text, and by the shiny colors of the story. So he buries everything under a layer of propriety, culminating in Sebastian's ascent to a heaven that sounds like some kind of drab gentleman's club.

Again and again through Thursday's performance I kept thinking of Olivier Messiaen, whose brand of unabashed religious frenzy is the only thing that could have made this project whole. When Messiaen depicts heaven, or the saints, or the unearthly bliss of suffering, his belief is so profound and unbridled that it carries you along. Debussy, here, is always hedging his bets.

My own impression is that, if you want to approach this in terms of an ecstatic take on Christian faith, then I am not sure it is fair to use Messiaen as grounds for comparison, simply because Debussy had to work with D’Annunzio’s aesthetic, which, in all likelihood, was far more detached and abstract than Messiaen’s far more sincere professions of faith. Put another way D’Annunzio’s priorities in conceiving his mystery play were grounded in his particular (some would probably say idiosyncratic) approach to aesthetics. On the other hand what Kosman calls Messiaen’s “unabashed religious frenzy” was a product of sincere faith of the highest order, far beyond the scope of intellectualization or anything dreamt of in D’Annunzio’s philosophy.

From this point of view, I would not say that Debussy was “hedging his bets.” Rather, he was, as I like to say, playing the cards that had be dealt to him. Since I get the impression that his own religious convictions were never as strong as Messiaen’s, I feel he deserves to be judged on his own mindset and the practices that emerged from it. In that context it is not surprising that Kosman heard “echoes” of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in Debussy’s score. Here was a case of one composer with a relatively detached relationship to a religious narrative drawing upon another, who was probably just as detached.

Parties to the Farce?

2012-01-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

The London Telegraph, which is, for the record, a Conservative-leaning newspaper, ran a rather interesting take on The Iron Lady this morning. It was a piece by Arts Correspondent Roya Nikkhah in which she documented the opinions of several of the Conservative politicians who had played key roles as part of Thatcher’s Administration. As might be guessed, the reaction ran the gamut from aggressively negative (“extremely distasteful” were the words of Michael (now Lord) Heseltine) to a decline to comment at all, as was the case with Thatcher’s successor (now Sir) John Major.

Clearly, no one directly associated with the Thatcher Administration wanted to see themselves depicted as actors in a farce (which, as I suggested yesterday, was one way to view the film), let alone portrayed by an actor best known for his arch sense of mockery (such as Richard E. Grant playing Heseltine). Only Sir John Nott came right out to say that he was not looking forward to seeing himself portrayed. Most of the venom, however, seems to have been directed at framing the narrative from the perspective of the dementia of Thatcher’s final years. Admittedly, this is strong stuff; but it also carries a strong sense of irony that Thatcher should come to the same end as her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, albeit with less immediate family support.

In his retelling of the story of Oedipus for the libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” oratorio, Jean Cocteau referred to Oedipus falling from a great height after having been ensnared by a trap that was set before he was even born. I do not think that either Reagan or Thatcher was brought down by some “trap of destiny;” but they both ascended to a height from which a fall was inevitable. Furthermore, enough oxen were gored in the course of that ascent that it should be no surprise that many felt little sympathy (and perhaps even some relief) when the fall occurred.

Nevertheless, those few left who take the trouble to read history know that history, as a discipline, is rarely kind to those about whom it tells its stories. If one has ascended to a position from which one becomes an agent in those stories, then it is inevitable that at least some of those stories will be unsympathetic, if not downright cruel. The best one can hope for is to die before the historians set to work; and, in this case, it is hard to imagine that anyone would have financed the production of a film like The Iron Lady while Thatcher was still alive.

The Dramatic Category of a Margaret Thatcher Biography

2012-01-13T14:37:00.000-08:00

There is a telling sentence near the beginning of Martin Filler’s NYRblog post about Meryl Streep’s performance of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that is likely to frame the attitude of those of us who still enjoy the study of history. After having put forth the proposition that Streep’s best roles have always been comic ones, Filler says the following about her latest effort:

But when I watched this strange tour de force of Important Acting, I was uncertain whether I was witnessing a tragedy or a farce.

This left me wondering if Filler was familiar with either Slavoj Žižek’s book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce or the Karl Marx text about how history repeats itself that inspired the title.

Those of us bold enough to voice openly a preference for social democracy would know how to consider that last quarter-century of British politics in these terms. Thatcher was so rabidly opposed to social democracy that it is hard to perceive her as anything other that the key villain in a major tragedy of what one might archly call “the developed world.” The problem is that every one of her successors, regardless of party affiliation, seems to have managed to turn this tragedy into farce. This makes for a grim contrast with American politics, in which, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, we have had to endure one farce after another until we found ourselves staring tragedy square in the face under the Administration of George W. Bush.

It may be that fiction has provided a better platform for examining the Thatcher phenomenon. From that point of view, John Mortimer wrote the book. It was called Paradise Postponed; and ultimately it is about the evolution of a Prime Minister (who happened to be male in Mortimer’s account) who became a scourge of social democratic values will all the gusto of William Shakespeare’s account of King Richard III. In such a framework one could appreciate the virtues of an actor particularly skilled in comic talents.

Getting out of the Shadow of History

2012-01-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

Recently, while reading Milan Kundera’s extended essay, The Curtain (in Linda Asher’s translation from the French), I came across the following remark:

The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. Flaubert’s poetics does not devalue Balzac’s, any more than the discovery of the North Pole renders obsolete the discovery of America.

It occurred to me that this observation applies to more than literature. It provides a useful framework for thinking about innovation in our culture, which seems obsessed with prioritizing it above all other values. It also provides a lens through which to examine the processes by which a composer or performer of music can find his/her own “voice” without necessarily engaging in games of abstruse abstraction.

Perhaps these thoughts were influenced by my listening to Igor Stravinsky’s 1924 piano sonata while reading the above text. Some thought that Stravinsky’s neoclassicism amounted to assigning some dignity to his ridicule of those classics of the past. Stravinsky was once even coarser about the matter, suggesting that rape may carry the “benefit” of bringing a new life into the world and that, within this metaphor, his music for Pulcinella amounted to a “rape” of Pergolesi. (Did he ever find out, before his death, that most of the music he had appropriated was actually counterfeit Pergolesi?)

Personally, I find Stravinsky’s metaphor to be in bad taste. However, I also appreciate that there are those who resort to abusive rhetoric as a way to get attention. I think that, even though he was writing about literature, Kundera was both more polite and more accurate in capturing what Stravinsky’s neoclassicism brought to musical discourse.

Using Kundera’s language one might say that Pergolesi’s vision was constrained by what we would now call a worldview. (The same could be said of those composers paid by his publisher to write more “Pergolesi music” after the composer himself had died.) Furthermore, just as the worldview constrains what one sees, it also constrains what one can express. Stravinsky’s worldview in 1924 was clearly radically different from Pergolesi’s, and those differences influenced his approach to expression. One might say the same about Ludwig van Beethoven when he serves up a minuet movement instead of his more characteristic preference for a scherzo. He is “seeing things,” so to speak, in this now-obsolete dance that those who danced it could not possibly have seen.

The issue is not whether or not any of us can say “something new” and then label it as our own “intellectual property.” The issue is whether we are capable of saying anything (in whatever text modality is suitable) that others can accept as worth saying. It is easy to overlook this little point, which is why most of those who evangelize innovation almost always do so. Perhaps that is also why we have a world overflowing in innovations that still feels depressingly impoverished.

Life Imitates Art (ironically)

2012-01-10T09:10:00.000-08:00

Of the many amusements I encountered while reading Gabriel García Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch, the funniest was the bit about how the protagonist (who is a rotting corpse for the duration of the novel) had opened a retirement community for deposed dictators. I was reminded of this particular comic twist while reading Al Jazeera English this morning. They ran a story, apparently taken from their wire services, which featured a statement by Israeli Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, delivered to a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and defense:

On the day the Assad regime falls, it is expected to harm the Alawite clan. We are preparing to receive Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights.

Bashar al-Assad and his family are, as may be guessed, members of this clan.

Al Jazeera’s efforts to get any comments on this statement had come to nought when this report was filed. Thus, for now at least, we have no way of knowing whether Gantz was making a policy statement on behalf of the Israeli Defense Forces or whether he was speaking as an individual with the authority to follow through on his proposal. (Gantz is currently Chief of Staff for the Army.) This is not quite a “retirement community” scenario. More likely it reflects a better-the-devil-you-know approach to foreign policy. Nevertheless, the “family resemblance” to Márquez vision is striking, not to mention ironic!

Confusing Amazon

2012-01-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com has turned out to be a rather valuable resource when I am doing my writing for Examiner.com. When I am reviewing a recording, it is one of the easiest places for me to find its release date; and, since an image of the album cover is often one of the best candidates to fit the constraints allowed to me for any image I provide, the Amazon page usually gives me the best candidate to download and then crop as needed. As a result I spend a lot of time on Amazon.com, almost none of which involves buying anything.

Today I shall probably be doing a piece on the first CD in Jonathan Biss’ project to record the complete piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. By way of “homework,” I decided to read Beethoven’s Shadow, which was released as a Kindle Single last month (in conjunction with Beethoven’s birthday). I do not have a Kindle; but Biss’ publicist provided me with a PDF review copy, which provided me with my most extended exercise in reading from the screen to date. (Printing the file was password-protected, not that I would have wanted to print that many pages.)

After completing this exercise I decided to see what else had been released as a Kindle Single. The Kindle Singles home page turned out to be a useful place to get an idea of both what was available and what was popular. When I read to the bottom of this page, I discovered that there was still a recommendations window, captioned:

Continue Shopping: Customers Who Bought Items in your Recent History Also Bought

This has never been anything other than a source of amusement; but, now that I am trying to use the site as a reference resource (supplementing my regular use of Grove Online, not to mention Wikipedia), I realized that I am probably throwing an even bigger monkey wrench into their recommendation algorithm than I had done when I was buying off-the-wall titles (both books and recordings).

Today’s top recommendation offered a curious blend of irony and nostalgia. It was John Cage’s Silence. The irony is that, in many respects, my experiences in reading this book (and, as a result of reading Leta Miller’s accounts of the early years of an avant-garde movement that involved Cage, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison, among many others, continuing to read it) did a lot to shape much of that off-the-wall browsing I have done on Amazon.com. In other words this is a classical example of how recommendation algorithms cannot tell the difference between co-occurrence and causality. The nostalgia has a somewhat ironic tinge as well, since I purchased my copy of Silence long before Amazon.com even existed!

More Unnecessary Hurdles to Leap from Apple

2012-01-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

I ran into my first really aggravating glitch with Safari yesterday. When I view my monthly bank statement online, my bank tries to open it as PDF in a separate window. Because Firefox did not have the necessary plug-in from Adobe, it just prompted me to ask if I wanted to save the file; and I did. Apparently Adobe has yet to provide a plug-in that works under Lion, perhaps as a result of the various ways in which administrative decisions have poisoned the relationship between these two companies. In an effort to demonstrate that Apple can get along without Adobe, Safari has been provided with a “native” PDF plug-in. This allows you to see the file. However, when you are looking at it, you cannot save it (because that menu item is greyed out); and Print only shows you the visible area of the window!

I found all of this really frustrating. Even more frustrating, however, was that the Safari help facility had absolutely nothing to say about saving the whole PDF as a PDF. Indeed, given the responsiveness of the help tool, I was beginning to wonder if Safari even knew what PDF was! I probably wasted an hour before it occurred to me that I should follow my Windows instincts and right-click on that piece of the PDF I could see in the browser window. Sure enough, that brought up a menu including the Save as PDF… operation!

I take all this as further evidence of what Ted Landau called “Lion’s ‘My Way or the Highway Approach.’” I feel that Apple seems to have made up its own mind about how its customers should use its hardware and software. This then gives them the right to try to shoehorn our own practices to fit their model of what they thing we should be doing, even if we have perfectly good reasons for doing them the way we want to do them. Landau called this “iOS-ification,” implying that Apple wanted to get its Mac users to start thinking like iPad users, not realizing that there are plenty of things we do on a Mac that would be silly to do on an iPad. Many of those habits stem from enterprise practices; so perhaps Apple has a mission of weaning the whole world away from such habits, regardless of whether or not they make sense in certain settings. Whatever the reason, Landau probably hit the nail on the head in characterizing Apple as a company that would prefer to dictate to its users, rather than listen to them, which means that it probably will not be long until the dispassionate observer will no longer be able to detect any differences between Apple and Microsoft!

Has THE BOSTON GLOBE Given Jon Huntsman the Kiss of Death?

2012-01-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

The news was big enough to flash all over the CNN screen at the pizza place that my wife and I chose to visit for an early supper last night: The Boston Globe decided to provide an endorsement to Jon Huntsman for the coming Republican primary in New Hampshire. Praising Huntsman for offering “vision and opportunity,” the Globe endorsement was significant enough to merit a story on the BBC News Web site. (The main reason was probably because so few people were aware that Huntsman was still in the race; he did not even campaign in Iowa.) In that respect it is interesting to see what the BBC chose to excerpt from the endorsement:

The priorities he would set for the country, from leading the world in renewable energy to retooling education and immigration policies to help American high-tech industries, are far-sighted.

He has stood up far more forcefully than Romney against those in his party who reject evolution and the science behind global warming.

This was a real shot across the bow of the ship under whose flag Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are sailing, that ship that has abandoned any rational discourse about the nature of government and the well-being of the electorate in favor of hell-and-brimstone apocalyptic language.

I can remember when New Hampshire was the ultimate boogeyman of conservatism, back when the Manchester Union Leader could reduce even the most outspoken liberal candidate to tears. New Hampshire, as a state, has changed a lot since then. Hell, it has successfully legalized gay marriage at a time when the California effort to do so is still mired in the courts. The New Hampshire college students whom Santorum addressed yesterday decided to call him out on his opposition to gay marriage and booed him when he left the room.

What this all means, however, is that New Hampshire is more interested in talking about governance than in listening to fundamentalist sermons. As a result even the conservative voters may well take the Globe endorsement seriously. Unfortunately, New Hampshire is no more representative of national thinking than Massachusetts is. The Globe endorsement may win a small battle for Huntsman; but my guess is that, for just about any other electoral decision, they have given him the kiss of death.

How is the Economy Healing?

2012-01-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

The BBC News Web site just put up a report whose lead sentence is optimistic, at least on the surface:

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its services index rose to 52.6 last month from 52 in November. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.

Needless to say, this (along with an increase of 325,000 new jobs in December according to the ADP National Employment Report) has been picked up by many, particularly in the financial sector, who are desperate for good news. Here is the quote given by Wayne Kaufman, Chief Market Analyst at John Thomas Financial:

This is another data point that shows our economy is healing.

It fits in well with improvements we've seen in consumer sentiment, and obviously that's because there are more people getting paychecks, which is making everyone happier.

We should bear in mind, however, that this is an interpretation of the financial sector, by the financial sector, and for the financial sector. How does it signify (if at all) for the rest of us?

As the BBC report puts it, the service sector “covers industries ranging from utilities and retailing, to healthcare and finance.” In other words it has considerable breadth; so, at the very least, any optimism should be withheld pending a more specific industry-by-industry account, which would give us some idea of what new jobs are going to whom. (It is also grimly amusing to note that the photograph attached to this story on the BBC Web page shows an automobile assembly line, which has no direct connection to the service sector.) At the very least one would assume some kind of bump in retail having more to do with the holiday season than with any overall trends in the economy.

Beyond that, however, is the question of the work itself. We should not dismiss Kaufman’s assertion that “there are more people getting paychecks;” but it begs two questions:

What are they doing to earn them?
How much are they actually earning?

For the majority of the unemployed, any paycheck is better than none at all. However, it is probably the case that, more than any other sector of the economy, service work has become less skilled by virtue of “advances” (yes, those are scare quotes) in technology (as in the case that, much of what is now called “knowledge work” requires little, if any, knowledge). Furthermore, again because of the impact of support technology, such work is no longer regarded as warranting a full-time salary. Rather, compensation is provided on the basis of “piece work,” following the economic model of a sweatshop in the garment industry.

As a result both of the above questions give rise to hypothesis that need to be seriously considered:

A strong majority of the new jobs tallied by ADP involve people working at skill levels significantly below those for which they have been trained and/or educated.
A strong majority of those jobs offer little, if any, security of extended employment and provide compensation that, while better than nothing, may not match the skills of the worker. In other words this is compensation based on (to use the vocabulary from Karl Marx’ “Critique of the Gotha Program”) neither abilities nor needs. As I have previously suggested, this is a world of work that is not particularly representative of what might be called a “real economy.”

Thus Kaufman may be celebrating a recent rise in gilded cages for the future workers of this country (if not the world). Consequently, any claim that this amounts of a “healing” of economic conditions is, at best, questionable for those in the 99%. Furthermore, the conditions resulting from such “healing” bear so little resemblance to any traditional model of a “real economy” that they are suspect at best of socially pernicious at worst.

Apocalypse 2012?

2012-01-04T19:15:00.000-08:00

It was informative to read Mark Lilla’s piece in the latest New York Review, “Republicans for Revolution,” just before the Iowa caucus-based primary. Lilla demonstrates that current Republican trends are far from the traditions of conservatism, a nomenclature (if not concept) that he finds emerging in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is a concept in which the inertia of social traditions trumps any issues concerned with the rights (such as the unalienable ones) of individuals. As a political philosophy it draws upon those who seek comfort in the status quo, rather than trying to rouse new sectors of the electorate into the ranks.

Yet this latter course of action is precisely what the Iowa candidates have been falling over each other in efforts to do so. Rick Perry was probably most blatant about it: All that really matters is capturing enough attention to get people to vote for you, sort of like the marketing principle that, if you run enough really flashy ads for a Honda, enough people will go out and buy one to make it worth your time and money. Thus, we had Mitt Romney trying to play adversarial politics by old-school rules while surrounded by a bunch of radicals, all homing in on apocalyptic language as some kind of formula for gathering attention and the votes that would follow.

This morning’s lesson seems to have been that, in the Iowa sample space, only eight votes separated political tradition from a radicalism that we are more likely to associate with fundamentalism in just about any religion we would care to name. “Political science,” as we like to call it, may be taken as a sort of anthropological study of those who make a career out of politics. However, what if, by virtue of the explosion in bandwidth that now supports communication, one no longer need follow the traditional codes of political practices? What if even shouting “Fire!” in a crowded space is now accepted as legitimate conduct among those seeking to hold public office? What if, to draw upon Lilla’s punch line, those who seek office have not the foggiest idea what they will actually do should they assume that position and all but revel in their cluelessness?

It is clear from current practices in Congress that the practice of politics is failing the American electorate. However, the playing field of candidates has become swamped with those who would chuck the whole system and then leave it to “the resourcefulness of the individual” to sort out the resulting mess. What kind of a society have we become, if we are now seriously considering electing such deliberately destructive elements to our highest offices?

Who Are These Guys?

2012-01-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Since I began the year with a post declaring my bailing on Firefox, I took some interest in yesterday’s post by Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols to his ZDNet Networking blog. It was Vaughan-Nichols who first put the bug in my ear with his data points on browser popularity collected by Net Applications and StatCounter. According to yesterday’s report, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) is “continuing to fall like a stone” in the ratings, while, while Chrome 16 is “the world’s most popular single browser version.”

Before I made my own decision to go over to Safari, I had considered trying Chrome. The problem was that I had never actually seen the browser running on any platform, whether it involved a computer belonging to someone I knew or one on display in a showroom. So I fired off an electronic message to one of my former Silicon Valley research colleagues. She, in turn, cited another one of my former colleagues, known for being adventurous in trying out new software, saying that even he had not tried Chrome.

This left me to ponder the immortal words of Butch Cassidy: Who are these guys using Chrome and driving up their popularity numbers? Then it hit me: Chrome is probably the required browser for all Google employees, just as Microsoft requires their employees to use IE. Thus, we may have reached a tipping point at which the number of people who have to use Chrome are beginning to outnumber those who have to use IE; and this effect may then be spinning out to those free to make up their own minds. There is also a latency effect: Someone who used to work for Google (or Microsoft) may have gotten sufficiently accustomed to the respective “home browser” that, left to his/her own devices, that browser remains preferred, just out of habit. This is not to criticize the surveying techniques of either Net Applications or StatCounter but just to suggest that popularity depends on subtle factors of influence that have nothing to do with the product itself, and controlling for such factors may be so difficult as to be virtually impossible.

Free Market Health Care

2012-01-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

According to an Associate Press story filed by Joseph Pisani this past Saturday, Groupon (along with other daily deals sites) is moving into health care. In other words coupon-based marketing is now flourishing, at least on the Web, in areas such as dental examinations, cleaning, and X-rays, as well as eye examinations and even Lasik eye surgery. I am sure that many of this new breed of coupon-clippers see this as a way of sticking it to the insurance industry, the primary agent responsible for detaching health care from any vestige of resembling a public service and transmogrifying it into an industry to be managed by the same practices applied to manufacturing cars in Detroit (the epitome of a simile that serves as a good example and a bad example at the same time).

Now we see that it is not just the practice of health care that has been influenced by such industrialization. In the world the Internet has made, any product or service can be allowed to flourish under a free market economy. This “daily deals” approach firmly ensconces health care as a suite of offerings on the free market. Of course the golden rule of the free market is caveat emptor; and, as they say these days, there’s an app for that. The buyer who knows enough to be wary can, as Pisani’s article is quick to point out, always consult Yelp.

Farewell, Firefox

2012-01-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

I never made an explicit New Year’s resolution to bail on Firefox in 2012. I just realized that, while most of the other software I have been using has been catching up with all the monkey wrenches thrown at them by Lion, Firefox was the one piece of software that was really failing to play an adequate recovery game. I liked the fact that it was the only browser that allowed me to save a Web page in a useful text form, but the Safari Page Source option for such saving is a viable alternative, even if the format is HTML. (Text search seems to work just as well on my newly-created HTML files as it did on the old raw text ones, and the file size overhead does not seem to be too onerous.) I am now half a day into the transition, and the speed bumps I have encountered have been minimal. With any luck the folks at Apple will take better care of maintaining Safari than they have done with OS X!

Giving More Credit than is Due

2011-12-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

Simon van Zuylen-Wood has a nice piece on the Web site for The New Republic about Newt Gingrich’s “Earning by Learning” plan for education reform. This is the one that involves giving kids cash incentives for such things as reading books over the summer. Zuylen-Wood offers up a reasonable summary of hard research data, from which one can conclude that such incentives work some of the time on some of the subjects. Indeed, the data seem to indicate just when it does work and for whom. This allows him to conclude with the punch line:

Newt might have been on to something.

This seems to imply that someone who comes up with a sweeping generalization, disproven in its full generality, “might be on to something” for the special cases that confirm the usefulness of the recommendation. That kind of approval is dangerous. All we need is more shoot-from-the-hip generalizations that will do more harm than good if not scrupulously examined. When was the last time anyone knew Newt to do anything scrupulously?

The Panda with FLAYSHEDIG Tastes

2011-12-30T08:09:00.000-08:00

Desperate times call for desperate measures. As just about anyone who follows stories about these creatures knows, pandas are supposed to subsist entirely on a diet of bamboo. Indeed, Stephen Jay Gould’s famous essay about the panda’s “thumb” is all about the evolution of the front paw to make it easier for the panda to get at the edible portion of a bamboo stalk.

However, panda followers also know that there has been a problem with a decline in bamboo stocks (associated with an increase in land development). As a result, there is a story on today’s BBC News Web site about how the panda may be adapting to this change in its environment. A camera set up in China’s Sichuan Province has captured a panda gnawing on the bones of a dead gnu, apparently relishing it as much as any stalk of bamboo. (The Web page for this report includes the video.) This is all very well and good for the interests in survival, but what will the rabbis say if the panda then develops a taste for gnu milk?

Rediscovering SILENCE

2011-12-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

I think I did not purchase my copy of Silence until after I met John Cage (and hunted mushrooms with him) during the summer of 1968. I probably bought my copy shortly after my return to MIT in the fall. It was the M. I. T. Press paperback edition (which now seems to be dismissed as a sacrilegious object by Cage purists). I was not quite sure what I would learn from it. I suppose one of the first things I discovered was the text version of many of the stories in Merce Cunningham’s “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run;” but I also used the book as a “score” from which I gave several of my own performances of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.”

However, as a result of my “reading from the screen” experience with Leta Miller’s paper about the relationship between Henry Cowell and John Cage between 1933 and 1941, I realize that it may be time for me to revisit some of the essays intended for more theoretical consumption. In particular there are the texts for the three Composition as Process lectures that Cage gave at Darmstadt in 1958. Cage’s focus on processes rather than structures may have planted the original seeds of my own interest in distinguishing verb-based and noun-based thinking. By the time I had purchased Silence I knew that Cage clearly preferred process to structure, but another seed came from one of those mushroom hunts. Cage mused on what it would be like to treat nouns as if they were verbs, posing as a representative question, “What would ‘to tree’ mean?”

Cage was never particularly deep in his approach to philosophy. He tended to glean from the surface of Zen parables and the sermons of Meister Eckhardt. My guess is that he never appreciated the extent to which time-consciousness was far more sophisticated than our capacity for interpreting visual stimuli as objects. Indeed, I am not sure that he would have had the patience for Friedrich Hayek’s speculative book about how mind imposes order on the sensory signals it receives. I might even suggest that Cage’s use of chance processes was intended to undermine existing capacities to impose such order by providing signals that challenged classification by those means “wired into” the cerebral cortex. Still, the only way I may be able resolve such a hypothesis is to go back to Cage’s writings, this time with a better understanding of his work as a composer and my own mind’s working when trying to listen to what he composed.

Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men?

2011-12-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

This morning BBC News reported an alternative take on the spirit of Christmas:

Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian clerics over a turf war in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

Around a hundred priests fought with brooms as they cleaned the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas.

Yes, that’s right: They were fighting over who got to clear which sections of the church (and, for those who get off on such things, the Web page at the above hyperlink includes video). If ever there were a need for the what-would-Jesus-do question, this would have to be it!

I am glad I remembered to include that parenthetical “more or less” when writing yesterday about accommodation among practitioners of different faiths in the Holy Land!

The Right Word in the Right Language

2011-12-27T14:49:00.000-08:00

This may just be politics as usual in Israel, but it is interesting to see just how the leading opposition party there is using today’s mass protest against “gender segregation” (as one report put it) by the ultra-Orthodox extremists of Beit Shemesh for political capital. An article about the protest filed late this morning on the BBC News Web site quoted opposition leader Tzipi Livni describing the ultra-Orthodox of Beit Shemesh as “the extremist elements that are rearing their heads and are trying to impose their world view on us.” Presumably, Livni made her remarks in Hebrew; but my guess is that she deliberately chose the same noun form that has been applied to violent acts by extreme fundamentalists of other faiths (that need not be enumerated).

I am also struck by the use of words sharing the stem for segregation. I believe I heard a television report (which I have to confess I have been unable to trace), which claimed that there are Orthodox communities that force women to ride in the back of the bus. I would guess I heard this on the BBC, because I would find it hard to imagine an American report of such activities that would refrain from a reference to Rosa Parks. In other words Israel may be facing a civil rights movement that it had not dreamed would arise in a country of Jews.

I would also like to consider a remark that showed up in the same Al Jazeera English report that included the phrase “gender segregation.” The source is Professor Emeritus Menachem Friedman of Bar Ilan University. This is what he has to say about the current tension between ultra-Orthodox communities and the predominantly secular majority of Israeli citizens:

It is clear that Israeli society is faced with a challenge that I am not sure it can handle. A challenge that is no less and no more than an existential challenge,

I agree that “existential” is the right adjective, but I wonder if Friedman had bothered to explain why this is the case. As I see it, Israel may be forced to decide whether it is a “Jewish state” or a “state that guarantees freedom from persecution to all Jews.” That is the critical existential distinction; and it may be that how it is resolved will determine whether the current dispute between Israelis and Palestinians is best resolved with a one-state or two-state solution. Clearly, the Palestinians would have every reason to reject a one-state solution if that one-state were a “Jewish state.” Just as clearly, no Jew living in Israel would want to sacrifice the motive for settling there in the first place. However, a single state that would guarantee freedom of religion to all Jews might satisfy enough of the currently secularized population to make for a viable resolution of the problem. If the walls of Old Jerusalem can accommodate practitioners of any number of different faiths (more or less), why can’t that accommodation be escalated to the scale of a single country governed by a representative democracy?

Reading from the Screen

2011-12-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

I am still pretty ambivalent about whether or not any of those portable reading devices are actually worth the investment. As a result I have decided to give myself a reading experiment based on my “untethered” MacBook Pro. I realize that this is larger than most readers; but, given that I already do a fair amount of Web reading in this mode, I figure I am creating a situation that gives the technology a slight advantage. Because I rarely read anything on paper without a pencil in my hand, I also decided to base the exercise on my Acrobat Pro, since I am pretty comfortable with the annotation tools it provides.

I should also point out that this not the first time I have done this sort of experiment. About five years ago I tried it with one of the early portable models that could be used in both tablet and keyboard mode. At the time the tablet resolution was way too crude to support my pencil habits. On the other hand I have been annotating PDF files in Acrobat for some time; so, again, I was giving technology an advantage of familiarity.

The real question I wished to confront was the one of length. I read most of my news on the screen these days. So I wanted to see if many of the habits I already had would scale up to longer documents. My experiment five years ago was with a full-length book; and I gave up after the first few chapters. This time I selected an article from the Journal of the American Musicological Society for which I had a really high interest level, since the topic concerned the relationship between Henry Cowell and John Cage between 1933 and 1941. (As a point of reference, this is the time period during which Cage heard Nicholas Slonimsky conduct Edgard Varèse’s “Ionisation” at the Hollywood Bowl.) Normally, I print reprints and read them with a very active pencil. However, this particular article was 66 pages long; so I had a pretty strong incentive to take a “paperless” approach.

I downloaded the PDF of this article on the afternoon of December 12. Almost exactly two weeks have elapsed, and my first observation is that I am progressing slower than usual. Had I been reading from hard copy, I would have been able to fold the paper into one of my copious jacket pockets and take it with me on many of my ventures from home. I do not do that with the MacBook Pro, and I am not yet sure how inclined I would be to carry around one of the new reading devices.

Nevertheless, I am progressing. I am about sixteen pages into the paper; but I had little time for reading it in the midst of last week’s pre-holiday activities. So I am not unhappy with my rate of progress. For the record, I have been using the Acrobat commenting tools; but, so far, that has only involved underlining two passages (one of which confirmed the story about Cage at the Hollywood Bowl). As to the physical reading experience, I find the MacBook Pro equally comfortable when sitting in a chair or lying on the couch. The new two-finger scroll control (which I initially disliked) works very nicely since I cannot fit a full Journal page on the screen. I probably would have preferred being able to look at the screen in portrait mode, but the keyboard would then have been awkward to manage.

I am waiting to see if I find any need for marginal annotations in this reading experience. I know that I shall not be able to actually “write” in the margins; but I have used the Acrobat tool for adding notes in the past. That creates notes with content that can be found with the search tool, and that may prove to be a real advantage. In other words I am not sure I would want to have any kind of “virtual pencil” with one of the new portable readers; and I suspect that, when I need to create such notes, I would prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one.

At this mid-point in the exercise, I have yet to be convinced that any of the new technologies will support my kind of reading; and I also am willing to admit that “my kind of reading” may be going obsolete even faster than I anticipated!

NBA Perspectives

2011-12-25T17:06:00.000-08:00

My wife has been having a great time reading Harvey Araton’s When the Garden Was Eden, very much a love letter to the New York Knicks of the 1970s. I was therefore amused to see that Henry Abbott chose to review this book for tomorrow’s New York Times in conjunction with covering Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James. Raab is from Cleveland, so it is easy to anticipate the nature of this book, although Abbott feels that he may have taken polemic to extremes. Reading this review on the day of the belated opening of the NBA season, it is hard to avoid thinking about these two books offering takes on what is right with “basketball then” (although Araton’s book is not all about the positive) and what is wrong with “basketball now.” I fear that, if nothing else, Raab’s bile will sell more books than Araton’s more disciplined account to do justice to history; but sports fans who used to revel in statistics, past and present, now seem to share our culture’s general scorn for history.

Steve Jobs without the Hagiography

2011-12-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

I was wondering whether or not The New York Review of Books would select Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs for consideration and, if so, whom would be assigned the task. The answer can be found in the latest issue (January 12), in which Sue Halpern is the designated reviewer. Anyone who takes the trouble to search for Halpern’s name on this site knows that I have a high opinion of her. When she writes about the objective world of science and technology, she always seems to equip herself with enough background to make it clear that she is speaking from an informed position, rather than just relaying the canned assertions of others. She then has a knack for projecting her “objective content” into both subjective and social worlds, meaning that she is better equipped to discuss implications and consequences than the usual crowd of evangelists, not to mention many of the more emotional nay-sayers.

By now most people know the basic backstory behind Isaacson’s biography. Basically, he was hand-picked by Jobs to write the “authorized” account. Given the single-minded focus Jobs could apply to just about anything he did, one wonders how this selection process occurred. Did Jobs draw up a “short list,” which, after considerable deliberation, was finally whittled down to a single individual? My own guess is that this is not likely, particularly since one of the prevailing themes of the book concerns his preference for gut-level decision-making. That being the case, there is a good chance that Jobs’ gut was informed by browsing the biography section of a physical bookstore, where he would discover that there was this author with reputable credentials, who had already written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. One can almost hear Jobs’ gut shouting out, “That’s the guy for me!”

(I suppose it is possible that this scenario could play out through Amazon recommendations; but I am not sure it would have as much appeal to the gut, so to speak.)

Yes, I know that sounds irreverent; but then I have never been particularly interested in writing biography. I figure that an obituary for some individual who has received comparatively little attention is about as far as I can go, even when the subject is someone who had been involved with a considerable chunk of my personal life. So I do not have to worry as much about showing the same respect for my subject matter as any good biographer would. Thus, Halpern is dispassionate enough to recognize hagiography when she reads it. To her credit, however, she has come up with a balanced account that gives all of the virtues their due without disregarding many of the vices that tend to get ignored in “authorized” accounts (or, in Isaacon’s case, relatively quarantined). In other words any reader who would like a well-written overview of Jobs’ accomplishments would probably be better off reading the few pages of Halpern’s review, rather than taking total immersion baptism in all 630 of Isaacson’s pages.

Nevertheless, after one has read Halpern’s opening paragraph, one has a clear sense that she is holding herself in check. She is doing everything that a responsible reviewer should do, but her choices of words reveal that she has bottled up some very strong personal opinions. Thus, as one works through her essay, one begins to wonder if she will ever uncork that bottle.

Those who dislike spoilers should probably stop right here, because the cork finally pops out in the last three paragraphs of the review. They have been so artfully constructed that I cannot resist reproducing them:

Steve Jobs cried a lot. This is one of the salient facts about his subject that Isaacson reveals, and it is salient not because it shows Jobs’s emotional depth, but because it is an example of his stunted character. Steve Jobs cried when he didn’t get his own way. He was a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator, and sometimes he was very nice. Isaacson does not shy away from any of this, and the trouble is that Jobs comes across as such a repellent man, cruel even to his best friend Steve Wozniak, derisive of almost everyone, ruthless to people who thought they were his friends, indifferent to his daughters, that the book is often hard to read. Friends and former friends speculate that his bad behavior was a consequence of being put up for adoption at birth. A former girlfriend, who went on to work in the mental health field, thought he had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. John Sculley, who orchestrated Jobs’s expulsion from Apple, wondered if he was bipolar. Jobs himself dismissed his excesses with a single word: artist. Artists, he seemed to believe, got a pass on bad behavior. Isaacson seems to think so, too, proving that it is possible to write a hagiography even while exposing the worst in a person.

The designation of someone as an artist, like the designation of someone as a genius, is elastic, and anyone can claim it for himself or herself and for each other. There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

The day before Jobs died, Apple launched the fifth iteration of the iPhone, the 4S, and four million were sold in the first few days. Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

I agree with Halpern about the elastic nature of the “artist” concept (as well as the “genius” concept). Since I spend the better part of every day working on what I write about the performing arts for Examiner.com, I find that I use both of those words with extreme caution; and I am always suspicious when the term is self-applied. At the same time I appreciate that the connotation of the word “artist” need not be strictly positive. I seem to recall at least one of my reading sources referring to Adolf Eichmann as an “artist of extermination;” but, even without such repugnant surface-level usage, history is filled with examples of dark perspectives. There are any number of reasons (including the religion of my ancestors) why I cannot possibly imagine engaging in a conversation with Richard Wagner; and I was certainly not surprised to read that Robert Schumann came away frustrated by his attempt to do so.

Still, the thing about Wagner is that we can judge him by what he did, rather than who he was. Halpern has saved her strongest feelings about what Jobs did for her final paragraph. The bottom line is that everything he accomplished was done in the service of the addictive powers of consumerism, which I continue to associate with both how we got into our current economic crisis and why our prospects for recovery are so bleak. When we add to that the impact of Jobs’ activities on both the global environment and working conditions in some of the most destitute parts of the world, that Eichmann comparison seems a bit less absurd, even if it remains distasteful. The idea that Apple may be guilty of crimes against humanity may be too extreme to stand up under rigorous argumentation; but sometime it makes sense to follow Brian Eno’s “oblique strategy” of withdrawing from an extreme position, rather than being too weak to recognize that it is a position at all.

The Gilded Cage of Slavery

2011-12-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite themes has been the extent to which the world the Internet has made has become a world that is steadily reducing workers to a new generation of slaves. The general concept is not a new one. Last April I had quoted Karl Marx on the concept of the worker who had become “the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour.” For Marx this involved the need for complex and expensive machines required for manufacturing and agriculture. He could not have conceived of the concept of a “knowledge worker;” nor could he have imagined that such workers would also be enslaved by the need for similar complex and expensive machines.

Yet that is what knowledge work has become, and today’s Dilbert provided a painfully funny reminder that, while many of the major employers of Silicon Valley have figured out how to gild the bars, a cage is still a cage. The dialog says it all:

Visitor: At Google, we’re encouraged to spend 20% of our time developing our own ideas.

Dilbert: How many hours per week do you work?

Visitor: About sixty.

Wally: It sounds better when you don’t do the math.

Yes, Virginia, what Marx has to say today applies as much to Silicon Valley today as it did to the Detroit of Henry Ford in the last century!

A Dynamic Duo of Inventors

2011-12-19T03:59:00.000-08:00

As a result of Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Lamarr’s patent for torpedo guidance based on frequency-hopping (a technology now fundamental to cellular communications) is receiving revived (and probably overdue) attention. However, for those of us more interested in music than movies, the story has an added twist. The patent application actually had two authors. The other author was the composer George Antheil, and one of his contributions was to control the frequency variations with a form of punched tape, an idea Antheil probably got from his work with player pianos. This may be the ultimate “power couple” in this history of innovation!

Convincing the Uninformed Voter

2011-12-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the stabilizing force of uninformed individuals in the democratic process, this morning I found myself reading Darryl Pinckney’s latest NYRBlog post, “Misremembering Martin Luther King.” This amounts to a “frank and open” (in diplomat-speak) assessment of Katori Hall’s play about Martin Luther King, The Mountaintop, currently running on Broadway with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. The title of the post says it all, although I am sure that most ticket-holders are there for an in-the-flesh experience of Jackson and Bassett and could care less whether or not they take home any useful knowledge about King.

Reading Pinckney, on the other hand, was a far more informative experience. The connection to yesterday comes at the very end of his post, when he quotes a passage from the famous “Letter from the Birmingham jail,” which King wrote in 1963. More specifically Pinckney quoted King’s observation that “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute understanding from people of ill will.” King’s point is that people of ill will tend to be very good at voicing exactly what they believe and why they believe it in clear language, regardless of whether or not that language may be logically flawed. People of good will, on the other hand, are more wishy-washy in their argumentation, believing that fundamental goodness is all you need to make your case.

Imagine, now, the following thought experiment: An uninformed individual is faced with having to make a major decision in the next election. Give that individual the opportunity to hear what the person of good will has to say, and then provide the same exposure to the person of ill will. Which one do you think will be more effective in swaying the decision of this hypothetical voter?

The Vital Antecedent

2011-12-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

Continuing the theme of the objective gathering and interpretation of data concerned with human nature, there is a story this morning on the BBC News Web site relating the recent publication of some fascinating results from Princeton:

Uninformed individuals are vital for achieving a democratic consensus, according to a study in the journal Science.

The researchers say that they dilute the influence of minority factions who would otherwise dominate everyone else.

This is because they tend to side with and embolden the numerical majority.

The findings challenge the commonly held idea that an outspoken minority can manipulate uncommitted voters.

"We show that when the uninformed participate, the group can come to a majority decision even in the face of a powerful minority," said lead author Iain Couzin, from Princeton University.

"They prevent deadlock and fragmentation because the strength of an opinion no longer matters - it comes down to numbers. You can imagine this being a good or bad thing.

"Either way, a certain number of uninformed individuals keep that minority from dictating or complicating the behaviour of the group."

Having not yet read the full article, I am not in a position to dispute Couzin’s findings; but I think it is important to emphasize the significance of the antecedent in the first sentence of his quoted remarks. The problem is not a question of how the uninformed vote but of whether they vote at all.

Among those countries that govern on the basis of democratic elections, voter turnout in the United States has a reputation for being pathetically low, if not the lowest of the sample set. This sets the proper context for the observations of Donald Saari, Professor of Mathematics and Economics and the University of California at Irvine, towards the end of the BBC piece. Saari sees an arc progressing from minority domination to pluralism to a “noisy” electoral process; and such an arc makes perfect sense in the absence of any “force of stabilizing inertia,” which is basically how Couzin sees uninformed voters.

Ironically, the need for such stabilizing inertia was made painfully apparent by another BBC News report this morning. This one concerns the small group that calls itself the “Florida Family Association;” but the name is a cover for a virulent anti-Muslim agenda. While this group has been good at distancing itself from Klan-like acts of violence, such as the burning of a mosque in Jacksonville in May of 2010, the BBC report makes it clear that they are doing a good job of making their voice heard, no matter how small their numbers may be. I suspect that a lot of political eyes are now on Florida to see just how effective that voice will be in the coming year of our next Presidential election.

Trying Again to Escalate the Television Mentality

2011-12-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

About two years ago I wrote a post entitled “Yasmina Reza’s Guilty Pleasure?,” basically as a way to blow off some personal steam over the news that Reza’s play God of Carnage was the hottest ticket on Broadway. I wrote as one who had seen Art and came away feeling as if I had been conned. I was more explicit in my post:

Leaving the theater, I took a look at my watch and realized that I had just sat through the duration of three Seinfeld episodes; and that seemed to capture the experience in a nutshell: a lot of rapid (but not necessarily quick-witted) banter around a situation that had gotten a bit too long in the tooth to count for an authentic situation any more.

In other words, while Reza may be the French child of an Iranian father and a Hungarian mother (both Jewish), I suggested that her “guilty pleasure” was an addiction to American situation comedy television. I then considered God of Carnage, also packaged as three half-hour episodes, and concluded that the only way in which Reza had advanced was in replacing Seinfeld with Curb Your Enthusiasm, which has been deliberately calculated to induce far more discomfort among its viewers.

This time, however, the play has become a film, directed by Roman Polanski, one of the great masters of discomfort. A. O. Scott’s review of the film is now available on the Web site for The New York Times. Without going into what he says about Polanski, I would observe that Scott managed to catch my own point in some rather nice language:

This may seem like nitpicking, but “Carnage” is partly about the narcissism of small differences — the nuances of rank, taste and behavior that take on disproportionate importance in close quarters — and fudged or sloppy details expose a larger weakness of design. Like Ms. Reza’s “Art” this play consists of a superficially provocative idea slapped onto an almost-probable situation and whipped into a froth of hyper-articulate nonsense.

I do not think that this is nitpicking. Whatever accolades she may have received, Reza shows signs of being little more than a naked emperor; and Scott is now the small boy making this point to the international forum of New York Times readers. God bless him for that!

We Have Nothing to Fear but the Status Quo Itself

2011-12-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

Those who enjoyed (if that is the appropriate verb) Charles Ferguson’s analysis of the economic crisis through his documentary Inside Job (which, incidentally, IMDb lists under their “Crime” category, as well as under “Documentary”), should derive equal satisfaction (if not pleasure) from an article by James Kwak that just appeared on the Web site for The Atlantic. Kwak is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, which means that he is more interested in underlying legal foundations, rather than the machinations of finances explored by Ferguson. The title of his article is “Too Big to Stop: Why Big Banks Keep Getting Away With Breaking the Law.”

There is no spoiler in revealing that the answer to the question he poses is a simple one: because it’s worth it. The bottom line is that few cases of even the most egregious financial abuse are prosecuted; and, when they are prosecuted, they are frequently settled with punishments that are barely significant. (Ferguson discussed the almost entire lack of jail sentences. Kwak runs the numbers on damages and reveals that those “punitive” measures barely make a dent in the balance sheets of the prosecuted institutions.)

In the immediate wake of the financial crisis, one of the popular jokes was that the best way to rob a bank was to own one. Kwak has taken this proposition up a notch: The best way to rob the government is to own a bank. This is not particularly difficult, since the banks have a stranglehold on the electoral process (not to mention public opinion, which these days amounts to stifling the Occupy movements), making the chances for serious reform implemented by those who are supposed to represent us all but negligible.

Meanwhile, according to a story by Beth Duff-Brown of Associated Press, Google is going to fork out $11.5 million to fight “modern slavery;” do they recognize the extent to which the financial sector is setting up “the 99%” for a new generation of slavery?

Objectivism on the Side of the Angels

2011-12-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

After reading Hugo Slim’s review for the London Telegraph of Steven Pinker’s new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, I am not sure I really want to slog through all 802 pages of the book itself. Having read some of Pinker’s work and having heard him lecture (thanks to Book TV), I have a fairly high level of trust when it comes to his techniques for both gathering and analyzing data. If Pinker can apply statistics to psychology, political science, and cultural history to conclude that we are progressing towards less violent times, then I am willing to respect his opinion.

On the other hand I also feel obliged to respect the opinions of Isaiah Berlin, even if he was never as gifted in mathematics as Pinker is. In particular I am referring to a remark by Berlin cited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. at the beginning of his essay “Has Democracy a Future?” In an interview he granted towards the end of his life, Berlin declared the twentieth century to be “the most terrible century in Western history.” Should Berlin’s assessment be dismissed just because his mathematical skills were not as keen as Pinker’s?

One way to approach this question is to consider Freeman Dyson’s piece in the latest issue of The New York Review on the subject of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Here is a case where we have one keen mathematical mind assessing the work of another; and, through Dyson’s account, one cannot avoid gaining considerable respect for just how much the objectivity of properly applied mathematical techniques can tell us about the complexities of human behavior. Nevertheless, Dyson is reluctant to let Kahneman have the last word on these matters. While he does not dismiss the value of scientific thinking, he also does not reject contributions from the literary arts. To this end he reviews two much earlier thinkers, who may have been less gifted in scientific rigor but whose literary gifts cannot be ignored. One is Sigmund Freud, and the other is William James. True, both saw themselves pursuing a more scientific approach to psychology; and, I agree with Dyson that both have gone out of fashion. However, I also agree that the lack of attention they now receive may stem from the fact that, by today’s standards, they were not particularly good scientists; but, in spite of that shortcoming, both of them arrived at significant insights.

The fact is that literary thinking often yields results that are orthogonal to scientific analysis, simply because literature is more accommodating to subjective and social factors that do not readily lend themselves to scientific data gathering and analysis. We thus find ourselves at a dangerous crossing as readers. Where human nature is concerned, the objective techniques of scientific reasoning seem to be getting progressively better, while, on the other hand, there are too many instances of literary thinking that just seem to be getting worse (with Malcolm Gladwell as my favorite example).

What I like about Dyson is that he does not take a dialectical approach to these opposing points of view. He does not advocate the quest for some synthesis that will yield some “ultimate truth” about human nature. Rather, as Leta Miller has done in her recent book Music & Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, he argues that we, as readers, should embrace the dissimilarity of these perspectives, allowing each to inform us in our own way. This is a perfectly natural approach to take where aesthetic judgment is concerned, but it may be just as important as we try to come to grips with just how we are equipped to get on in the world.

Newt Gingrich Takes Glenn Beck to the Next Level

2011-12-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

I rather like the way in which our vernacular has now coined a phrase for reacting to the truly bizarre: “You can’t make this shit up!” Sadly, where Middle East policy is concerned, Newt Gingrich has demonstrated that you can make it up. His declarations over the past couple of days have run the gamut from half-truths through specious deductions to flat-out misinterpretations of the historical record. He has escalated confusion to a point where Al Jazeera English is one of the few news media with the patience to tease out a version of the current state of affairs that is more accurate than Gingrich’s fantasies. Unfortunately, when it comes to dispelling confusion, the logic of Gingrich and his followers dictates that anyone who gets the news from Al Jazeera must be a terrorist.

Of course Gingrich is not interested in accuracy or logical consistency. His only priority is to build up a base of voters; and, as a pioneer of postmodern politics, he knows that one wins arguments in the eyes of those voters through rhetoric, rather than logic. As I follow his words and his actions, I am reminded of the state of affairs about a year ago when Glenn Beck seemed to be the darling of conservative Republic thinking. When he gave his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, I summarized my thoughts as follows:

The bottom line is that, whether it is a matter of fact-checking or the sort of semantic analysis that I have exercised here, Beck's claims are in sore need of valid warrants. Beck's rhetoric is neither more nor less than the 21st-century incarnation of the Big Lie, which Wikipedia describes as "a propaganda technique which entered mass consciousness with Adolf Hitler's 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf." In the simplest of terms, the principle is that people will believe anything, if you say it loud enough and long enough; and Beck has certainly demonstrated that he can be very good when it comes to being both loud in volume and long in duration.

This is not the first time a conservative Republican has tried to win votes through demagoguery. After all, Sarah Palin was one of the speakers invited to Beck’s rally. The real question is whether or not we have enough voters who, even though they may know demagoguery when they see it, have decided that they want it. After all, last night Mitt Romney took a very confrontational stance in calling out Gingrich’s distortions; but will it win Romney any percentage points in the polls? Enquiring minds want to know!

Is Customer Relevance a Secret?

2011-12-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

The good news about Rafe Needleman’s column today for the Rafe’s Radar department of CNET News is that it presents a brief and cogent account of why every new technology business needs to remember that the customer is always more important than the product. The bad news is that this argument was delivered under the headline “Startup Secret No. 3.” The connotation is that this is some arcane insight of great value to every would-be entrepreneur but not readily available. The fact that this precept is not common knowledge (let alone the highest priority) among those obsessed with “innovation Kool-Aid” as the only remedy for our economic crisis goes a long way to explaining why that Kool-Aid is as toxic as it is.

The fact is that our current dire economic straits have a lot to do with the reckless actions of those who never bothered to see customers as anything but “emergent phenomena,” not necessarily directly related to all the data points casually gathered and manipulated on spreadsheets. Put in the bluntest of terms, you can never have a business without customers; if you ignore them, then they will ignore you, even if it is later, rather than sooner. This applies as much to those who have been recklessly innovative with financial products as to those obsessed with promoting the next “killer app” (a metaphor more applicable, so to speak, than most would like to suppose) or the toy to displace the iPad. Needleman has had a long-standing reputation as a voice of common sense for CNET. Today’s piece reminded me of just how short the supply of that common sense is!

Convenience + Efficiency = Vulnerability?

2011-12-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of “news of fresh disasters” from the Beyond the Fringe mock history of World War II, Don Reisinger’s latest post to his The Digital Home blog on the CNET Blog Network offers the following title:

Lucky Supermarkets credit card scam getting worse

Here is how he elaborates his claim:

The company announced the scam in November, saying customers and employees who used the self-checkout kiosks in more than 20 of its 234 stores might have fallen victim to tampered credit card readers. The hackers reportedly used devices called "sniffers" that recorded credit card numbers.

Soon after the information was made public, Lucky Supermarkets, as well as its parent company, Save Mart Supermarkets, said it was unsure how many people might have been affected but urged customers to monitor their accounts.

"We recommend our customers who used a self-checkout lane in the affected stores verify and monitor all credit/debit accounts with their financial institution to ensure everything is in order," the company said in a statement at the time. In subsequent announcements, the company has advised customers who used self-checkout lanes to close their accounts "and seek further advice."

Earlier this week, Save Mart said it had recorded "80 employee and customer reports of either compromised account data or attempts to access account data, with the majority coming over this past weekend." The company said, however, that its checks were not complete and that the number of recorded incidents could rise.

Reisinger then provided background on what sniffers do and what hackers can do with them:

Although Lucky's outbreak is major, it's by no means the biggest credit card scam consumers have faced. Earlier this year, Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison after confessing to stealing millions of credit card and debit card numbers in attacks on customers at T.J. Maxx, BJ's Wholesale Club, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.

Gonzalez was accused of using a laptop to find unsecured wireless networks in stores and then installing sniffer programs to collect data. That information was then placed on clone cards and used to withdraw cash from ATMs.

Once again, it is time to revive what I have previously called “the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time approach to dealing with crisis situations,” which begins by asking “How did we get into this mess?” Probably the most significant cause has been a prevalence of head-in-the-sand thinking about data security, particularly where wireless networks are concerned. However, there is also the thinking that justifies this negligent position, which appears to based on two premises:

1. It is inconvenient.

2. It is inefficient.

Both of these have justified deploying self-checkout in the first place. Machines are more efficient than human clerks; and their cost can be recovered by saving on the salaries paid to those clerks (by removing them from the payroll). Furthermore, the machine can be designed with a simple enough interface to make it as convenient as dealing with a human, if not more so. The problem is that introducing security measures that have any “real” teeth will almost certainly lead to less efficiency (since time must now be taken for validity-checking) and probably less convenience (since the user will have to participate in some form of identity-establishment).

This is just another whirlwind that we have now been forced to reap as a result of our eagerness to consume what I like to call “innovation Kool-Aid.” Put another way, the most impressive bright idea may also turn out to be toxic. (There is nothing new about this insight. Those my age are likely to remember that nuclear reactors would solve our needs for electrical power to such a degree that it would be “too cheap to meter.” That slogan is probably not playing very well in Fukushima these days.) The problem is that we either cannot or will not try to assess that bright idea in terms of its consequences; or, as I have generalized this predicament, our capacity for time-consciousness has become so fixated on the present that we either lack the ability or the will to reason about the future.

The current situation at Lucky’s is unlikely to change matters. After all, the people who make the decisions are not the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of poor judgment. Those consequences will be visited upon Lucky’s customers, who were never given a say in the matter. In other words once again we have an instance of 99% of a population suffering from the failure of the 1% at the top to think about what they are doing before doing it.

The Mainstream Media have Always been with Us

2011-12-06T18:42:00.000-08:00

I suspect that most TEA Party advocates have a knee-jerk reaction to San Francisco as a hotbed of destructive liberalism (which is to say socialism undermining “the American way” of life). However, this being a culture that prides itself on its ignorance of history, I suspect that such folks would shake their heads in disbelief at the suggestion that things were not always that way in my City by the Bay. Indeed, back in the days of the New Deal, when the cry for social justice was just as strong as it is today, San Francisco was dominated by a conservative press. Those who are amused by the ways in which things seem to stay the same as change works its course might enjoy this passage from Leta Miller’s Music & Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War:

However, San Francisco’s overwhelmingly conservative press (the News being the sole exception) blatantly pressured the public to support Alf Landon and excited hysterical opposition to FDR’s New Deal. The Examiner was particularly strident. The day before the election, it ran nearly a dozen long articles in its front section endorsing the Republican ticket: “Why the New Deal has been Repudiated by Distinguished Democrats,” “Landon Offers Security,” “What Landon Stands For: Good Government,” and most prominently, “Tomorrow: The American Way or the Road to Socialism.” this last article began with a frightening projection were FDR to be reelected: “Tomorrow may be the most momentous day in the history of this country since July 4, 1776,” the article stated. “Forty-five million voters will decide whether their country is to remain a constitutional democracy or become a socialistic nation.”

Of course this was a time when the United States had been dealing with “Red scares” of one sort or another in every decade since the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless, it is valuable to remember that the press was as rabid in 1936 as Fox News is today and for exactly the same reason, which is that those who hold the power can exercise that power over what the rest of us see in print.

The Survival Value of Crassness

2011-12-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

While I am no fan of Robert Hughes, I think very highly if Ingrid Rowland. She reminds me that there are still a few souls out there who value scholarship. Furthermore, since her work has led to expatriate life in Rome, she tends to be as reliable a narrator of contemporary life there as she is in her Renaissance studies.

Thus, while I am always cautious about Hughes tendency to go on rants for the sake of attracting eyeballs, I figured I could accept any verdict from Rowland regarding his latest book, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. (For the record that includes the fact that Hughes has never actually lived in Rome and therefore lacks Rowland’s “insider,” albeit as an expatriate, status.) Ultimately, this all comes down for her endorsement of Hughes’ summing-up of his findings:

As he says at the very end of Rome: “For all its glories, and for all the legacy it left in art, thought, and politics, Greek civilization did perish. That of Rome is still somewhat with us.” And the reasons for Rome’s staying power, he argues, have to do with the city’s eternal crassness, as intrinsic to Roman grandeur as majesty, beauty, and spiritual transcendence.

One way to appreciate that staying power is through the joint effort of HBO and the BBC to produce the Rome miniseries. Not only was that crassness never short-changed but also there were any number of ways in which contemporary Americans (and, presumably, contemporary British) could see themselves in the character developments, particularly the “incidental” roles. By way of contrast, consider how the character portrayals of Oliver Stone’s film about Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander floundered. Consider how few efforts there have been to dramatize any episode from the life of Socrates, including the trial that led to his death. (Can you even remotely imagine a conversation between Socrates and Harry Korn?)

Since I am a devout Darwinist, this leads me to wonder whether or not there is some kind of “civilization survival factor” in crassness. One way to consider this is by speculating about the contrary: Subtlety and refined reasoning can take you only so far and only with respect to your peers, which makes for a rather limited population sector. The rest of the population is likely to side with Lucy van Pelt in Peanuts when it comes to normative practices of settling differences through argumentation:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

Another approach would be to invoke my favorite corollary of Murphy’s Law:

If brute force is unsuccessfully applied, that just means you are not applying enough of it.

This is often expressed in even simpler language:

When in doubt, use a bigger hammer.

It goes without saying that this approach to “survival factors” applies particularly well to politics. Republicans never seem to be shy about going for the lowest common denominator without ever worrying about being accused of being too crass. (Newt Gingrich is likely to be a major test of this proposition. If he prevails over Mitt Romney, the reason may well be Romney’s reluctance to descend into crassness. Remember when Ed Muskie’s career was ruined because he responded to an attack from the Manchester Union Leader with tears, rather than two-fisted aggression.) Barack Obama thought he could hold himself above such base behavior, but doing so may end up working against his prospects for reelection. He should be spending more time watching Boss to reconnect with the sort of crassness that is essential when it comes to gaining, exercising, and maintaining power, whether in the Mayor’s Office of Chicago or the White House.

This will be the Week that Was

2011-12-04T10:06:00.000-08:00

In covering the Centennial Season of the San Francisco Symphony over on Examiner.com, I have tried to be both polite and persistent in expressing my disappointment at how little attention has been devoted to the actual “birthday” of the Symphony. This took place on December 8, 1911; and the date only became fixed in my consciousness after I read about it in Larry Rothe’s book, Music for a City, Music for the World: 100 Years with the San Francisco Symphony. Indeed, one of the delights of Rothe’s book was that the image of the program for that first concert was reproduced; and, when I reviewed the book for Examiner.com, I made it a point to include not only the image but a text summary of the selections that were performed:

The prelude to the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger
Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Opus 74 symphony in B minor, his sixth (“Pathétique”)
An orchestration of the theme and variations movement from Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/75 string quartet in G major (the theme being the “Emperor’s Hymn”)
Franz Liszt’s “Les préludes”

I continue to be saddened by the absence of any of these works from the current Symphony season but was at least pleased to see that both the date and the program were acknowledged on the Contents page of the Datebook section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

This week, however, I may take some comfort in irony. December 8 happens to be the date that will begin the week’s series of subscription concerts; but more interesting is that, as part of the Centennial celebration, those concerts will be preceded by a two-day visit by the Boston Symphony Orchestra as part of the American Orchestra Series, one of the most promoted highlights of the Centennial Season. Part of the irony is that the Boston Symphony had a role of its own to play in San Francisco’s musical life: The Boston Symphony, under the baton of Karl Muck, was one of the featured performers at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition and gave thirteen performances in conjunction with this event. Indeed, as Leta Miller observed in her recent book, Music & Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, the popularity of the Boston visitors was a sign of public “ennui” with how Henry Hadley was running the newly-formed San Francisco Symphony.

However, there is an additional edge of irony around the more general theme of honoring history. It turns out that 2012 will be a major anniversary year for the Boston Symphony, because the first concert in the Berkshires of the Tanglewood Music Festival took place on August 5, 1937. (This was an outgrowth of the Berkshire Music Festival, which was initiated by Henry Hadley, Associate Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, in 1934 and featuring performances by the Philharmonic.) This 75th anniversary will be celebrated by reproducing two programs from that initial season. The 2012 Festival will begin on July 6 with a performance of the same program that began the 1937 concert series: the third of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Leonore overtures, Opus 72a, followed by two of his symphonies, Opus 67 in C minor (the fifth) and Opus 68 in F major (the “Pastoral” sixth). This will be followed later in the season by a reproduction of an all-Wagner program from the 1937 season.

I do not know whether this amounts to a significant difference in attitude towards history between Boston and San Francisco. However, regular readers know that I assign considerable signification to that attitude, even taking the extreme position that our ability to think historically may be related to the more fundamental capacity for time-consciousness. Furthermore, I feel that knowledge of history is necessary in preparing any performance of music of the past (even when that past may stretch back only a matter of months), regardless of whether or not the performer is seeking an explicitly “historically informed” interpretation. Given how rarely I am discontent with performances here in San Francisco, my guess is that most of the musicians themselves understand this appreciation for history; but, as we all know, the circumstances under which musicians perform almost always depend on some body of individuals who are not, themselves, musicians.

Bach's Other Mass Settings

2011-12-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

Having spent last night enjoying yet another performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 232 setting of the Mass text in B minor, this time by Philharmonia Baroque, I found myself curious this morning about Bach’s other settings of that text. In Wolfgang Schmieder’s catalog there are four such settings listed after BWV 232 with catalog numbers from 233 to 236. While BWV 232 is a tota (complete) setting, the other four are brevis (short), consisting of only the Kyrie and Gloria sections.

As I mentioned in my Examiner.com review, all of the sections of BWV 232 were not composed at the same time. Rather, the entirety accumulated its material between 1733 and 1747. The four brevis settings, on the other hand, were believed to have been composed between 1738 and 1739. These are sometimes called “Lutheran” masses; but the text is in Latin. One theory is that they were written for Count Franz Anton von Sporck, who, as a loyal subject of the Hapsburg dynasty, was probably a devout Catholic (or at least expected to be, since, according to his Wikipedia entry, his intellectual interests seemed to drift towards the heretical).

It is a bit unfortunate that these shorter works tend to get short-changed in the current repertoire. I certainly would not want to detract attention from BWV 232; but these four brevis settings are perfectly respectable examples of “Bach the musician at work.” The fact is that our understanding of Bach should not be limited to what others (not always particularly well informed) judge to be “masterpieces.”

Did YouTube Change?

2011-12-02T09:05:00.000-08:00

I had to read the report on the BBC News Web site in order to learn that YouTube (or I suppose it would be more accurate to say “Google”) had redesigned its Web site. I also got to read the BBC account of how the change was received:

Around 17 hours after an official "Get More Into YouTube" clip explaining the move went live, 6,703 members had clicked the "dislike" button compared to 2,280 who had clicked "like".

Well, I never knew the clip existed; and any changes I experienced seemed like minor cosmetic ones. Why? Because almost everything I want from YouTube I find through search, either my Firefox search bar or for a Google search where I decide to view Videos.

The BBC story also included the following sentence:

The site's owner, Google, has posted a blog saying that the new design was "focused on helping you discover a broader range of entertainment", but said there might be "further tweaks" depending on members' feedback.

Anyone who follows me either here or on Examiner.com should know by now that I really do not need “a broader range of entertainment.” I can barely manage my current range! My guess is that this is part of Google’s designs on taking over television viewing habits and ruling the roost with their own television service. Given the current like-dislike vote, I would think that they may need to reexamine their long-range plans! At least I can appreciate the irony that Google’s own search tool may be the greatest enemy of the new YouTube design.

Accountability Knows no Boundaries

2011-12-01T10:31:00.000-08:00

Continuing their practice of covering stories likely to be spiked by the American mainstream media, Al Jazeera has just released a report based on the following statement released by Amnesty International:

Amnesty International recognises the value of raising awareness about cervical and breast cancer in Africa, the stated aim of the visit, but this cannot lessen the damage to the fight against torture caused by allowing someone who has admitted to authorising water-boarding to travel without facing the consequences prescribed by law.

This statement was directed at the governments of Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia, because former President George W. Bush will be visiting these three countries next week as part of a personal campaign in support of efforts to fight cervical and breast cancer. In other words the Amnesty position is that good works in the present do not compensate for bad ones in the past, particularly when those bad ones involve crimes against humanity through acts such as violation of international torture laws.

I am surprised that Henry Kissinger did not advise Bush about the risk of such travel, given his own judicious efforts to avoid similar prosecution. There is, of course, the possibility that Bush was warned and chose to ignore the warning. Perhaps, as was the case with the acts of torture themselves, Bush simply decided to rely on advisors who would tell him what he wanted to hear. Alternatively, he may have decided that none of the three countries he will be visiting are likely to honor the international criminal justice system, with or without pressure from Amnesty International.

Dangerous Generalization

2011-11-29T12:50:00.000-08:00

Today’s post to the Social Business blog by Rich Harris on ZDNet has a fascinating headline:

Will advertising lose the war against word of mouth?

While this question may entail “a consummation/Devoutly to be wished,” Harris’ supporting argument has at least one questionable proposition:

59% of Americans believe offline word of mouth is highly credible, 49% believe online is.

Is this really true? My guess is that the answer to this question is the rabbinical one:

It depends.

In other words it depends on just whose mouth is the source, whether that source is offline or online. Thus, my neighbor may spend as lot of time reading Consumer Reports; but, if he has never driven a car, I would be unlikely to hold a conversation about the best car for me to buy. My guess is that there is an analogy to this assertion for just about anything I would be thinking about buying.

This does not negate Harris’ assertion that most people recognize that any advertising source is suspect. However, that is a trivial conclusion to draw once you accept the premise that any communicative action has a motive, since you are unlikely to share the motive of the advertiser. Nevertheless, identifying motive is never easy, even in the most conducive of settings. Thus, however effective word-of-mouth may be, the question of finding a reliable and authoritative “mouth” is still with us and not easily solved.

On the Balance between Saving and Consumption

2011-11-25T10:51:00.000-08:00

Sheldon Garon has a provocative and informative piece on the op-ed page of today’s New York Times. His title is “Why We Spend, Why They Save;” and his argument is distilled from his recent book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. The “they” of his piece today is a bit more specific than the title of his book, since all of his contrasting examples come from European countries. I suspect that “the world” is a bit too much of a generalization, Particularly if you are going to include much of the African and Asian continents.

Nevertheless, his point is a good one. The key differentiating factor between the United States and his counterexamples, according to Garon, is that, as a culture, we lack “a balanced approach to saving and spending.” He then offers several examples of how saving is accepted as a way of life in major European cultures. By contrast, he describes conditions in the United States following the Second World War as follows:

The United States emerged from the war with unparalleled prosperity and hardly needed further savings campaigns. Instead politicians, businessmen and labor leaders all promoted consumption as the new driver of economic growth. Rather than democratize saving, the American system rapidly democratized credit. An array of federal housing and tax policies enabled Americans to borrow to buy homes and products as no other people could.

This “unparalleled prosperity” ultimately led to unparalleled deregulation, reinforced with an apparent amnesiac attitude towards the past history of the Great Depression. Garon then traces the nuts and bolts of the consequences of deregulation to current conditions in which most of the 99% have enough wealth to consider saving any of it.

I would like to suggest that another approach to Garon’s argument may be framed in terms of how we think about time. Consumption is driven by thinking about the present, which entails an entirely different mindset from thinking about the future, that being the motivation behind spending. Furthermore, that motivation can be reinforced by thinking about the past, at least as far back as that history of the Great Depression. I have argued often that we are a culture that has lost touch with the value of history and that this has induced an underlying amnesia in our thinking about economics. I have further argued that our consumerism is an addiction that may have emerged from that “unparalleled prosperity” but is now aggravated by the power of our many recent technological innovations. It is through that addiction that our ability to think about the future has been suppressed, resulting in our radical imbalance between saving and consumption, particularly in comparison to our European cousins.

In other words consumerism may have undermined more than our grasp of history and savings in “economic reasoning;” we may also be experiencing a more pernicious atrophy of time-consciousness itself!

The Potential for Dialog

2011-11-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Whatever we may say about issues, it would appear that the British Parliament is better equipped in argue its way out of economic crisis than is the United States government. One reason may be that none of the Members of Parliament have achieved their seats by taking a pledge to oppose taxation in any form or by appealing to an electorate motivated only by personal hatred (which seems to be a not insignificant sentiment towards our President). Rather the debate is one over strategies and tactics for achieving a substantive recovery before the United Kingdom finds itself in the same dire straits as Greece.

Thus this morning we have the BBC News report of a speech by Labour leader Ed Miliband that cuts right to the fundamental strategic difference between his party and the Conservatives. As is the case in our own country and in most of the European Union, the prevailing Conservative opinion is that the most important problem is one of a growing deficit than can only be managed by austerity. This is based on the prevailing opinions of economists with close ties to major financial institutions, often called “technocrats” by the news media. The Labour argument, on the other hand, is that those beholden to such financial institutions care only about the success of those institutions, with little concern for that “99% segment” of the general population. That negligence is the primary reason for popular demonstrations that have sprung up not only in the United States but in most other “developed” countries.

The Labour argument is that recovery and growth can only come at a price. Unfortunately, that price can only be paid by that “1%” with the capital to do so. Such spending, however, would look bad on the balance sheets that have to be presented to their shareholders. Thus, we have the technocrat philosophy that a choice between unhappy shareholders and an unhappy electorate is a no-brainer. The shareholders will win every time.

This is a good time for us to watch what is happening in the United Kingdom. Politics is still local over there. Representatives are still elected on the basis of whether or not their own segment of the population believes that their interests will be served. Furthermore, the United Kingdom is not locked into our fixed scheduling of which elections are held when. If things come to a head, a general election can be called, which would lead to a referendum on the public reaction to austerity. True, most voters do not understand economics with the sophistication of technocrats. However, as the saying goes, they tend to be good at recognizing when an egg is fresh, even if they cannot lay the eggs themselves.

The current economic crisis is also a crisis over philosophies of governance itself, and what happens in Great Britain may tell us a thing or two about the future of other governmental institutions.

Confusing the Reader

2011-11-24T05:09:00.000-08:00

Normally, my rants over sloppy news coverage are directed at Yahoo! However, every now and then a blooper pops up from the other side of the pond; and fairness dictates that I recognize that more reputable sources blunder, too. It was not that long ago that I took Ivan Hewitt of the London Telegraph to task for his silly declaration of Wayne Shorter as “the Wagner of jazz;” but this time we are dealing with news rather than opinion (at least on The Telegraph’s part).

This morning the Music News section on the Web site for The Telegraph has a story sporting the following headline:

Jimi Hendrix named 'greatest guitar player in history'

That hyperbole is supplemented with a sub-headline:

Legendary musician Jimi Hendrix has been named the greatest guitar player in history by Rolling Stone magazine in a list compiled by a panel of music experts and top guitar players.

Fortunately, the report itself begins with a quote from Tom Morello that is far less sloppy:

Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could be: He manipulated the guitar, the whammy bar, the studio and the stage.

Kudos go to Morello for appreciating the value of that adjectival “rock.” Why The Telegraph decided to omit those four letters from its headline is a mystery. Did they really think that the guitar did not exist before the rock era? My guess is that Rolling Stone knew better, designing their poll around the genre they knew best. I guess The Telegraph, conservative as it may be, could not resist the temptation to look cool for this story.

Getting Rid of Dead Wood

2011-11-23T05:37:00.000-08:00

This morning BBC News reported that Google is getting rid of seven of its products. The general consensus is that Google is finally recognizing the seriousness of competition, and the BBC story cited Facebook as a specific example. It described Google’s action as a “cull” and observed that this was the third such effort.

I suppose it comes down to whether you prefer animal or vegetable metaphors. Personally, I thought that Knol was dead wood from the day of its launch. In this case I suppose that I preferred vegetable to animal because, at the time of launch, no one bothered to take word “BETA” off of its Web site. It was as if one faction thought this “knowledge product” was cool but another likened it to a bowl of leftover lima beans. It was definitely hard to think of Knol having any animal qualities. At best is was a product of let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom thinking; and now it has suffered the fate of all those flowers that bloomed in Mao’s garden!

Freedom to Consume?

2011-11-21T08:55:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Tim Parks’ New York Review account of Ingo Schulze’s novel Adam and Evelyn. This is basically a comic novel, much of whose plot depends on the division of Germany into East and West, The “Adam” is a skilled Taylor in East Germany, who has, by Eastern standards, made a comfortable life for himself. Nevertheless, he follows his girlfriend into the West after Hungary opens its border with Austria. Adam’s life changes, but not for the better. A tailor cannot make a living in a culture where people have no end of choices of clothes they can buy off the rack, even if those clothes do not fit very well. What struck me was how Schultze (at least in the English translation by John E. Woods) was able to encapsulate Adam’s plight in a single sentence:

Too much, too many, an inflation of stuff that buries everything else, the essential things, the real things.

I do not take this as nostalgia for either the ideals of Marxism or the reality of Communism. However, in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal vision of an America that would make the world safe for democracy, it seems as if our country has succumbed to a distorting conflation of democracy with consumerism. Freedom of choice has less to do with selecting those who govern and more to do with choosing Coke over Pepsi (or, in the case of a recent Harry’s Law episode, choosing to ban the presence of foreign cars within the limits of one’s city).

In the past I have written about losing touch with the real as it pertains to people so absorbed in their personal mobile devices that they are oblivious to the real world around them (such as traffic). However, reality has also been buried (to use Schulze’s metaphor) under mounds of ideology that have, once again, crippled our government to the point of failure (or so it seems in the wake of the deadlocked “super-committee” on spending cuts). This is the sort of thing that makes the 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" look pretty good in their petition to have their taxes increased; but here, too, we need a reality check. These millionaires may appreciate the value of a “public good;” but that does not mean that they recognize the differences between corporate management and governance. Perhaps the more dire consequence of Max Weber’s “loss of meaning” is that, through our addiction to consumerism, we have become a culture that can no longer accommodate reality in our shared life-world (let alone the proposition that the life-world must, out of the necessities of social theory, be shared). From a Darwinian perspective, I would think that this will make our chances for survival pretty low. Then again, most fundamentalists, regardless of their specific faith, always seem to have a pretty low opinion of Darwin!

The Ubiquity of Mozart's Opera Technique

2011-11-19T16:57:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, at the Annual Meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America, I saw a video by New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, produced as part of an effort to build up his “Web presence.” In introducing the video, he said he was motivated by a desire to promote the same interest in serious music that Leonard Bernstein had achieved through television. His example involved a keyboard demonstration to warrant the hypothesis that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s finest operatic qualities could also be found in his instrumental music, Tommasini’s example being a movement from one of the piano sonatas, easily demonstrated through his talking above his own keyboard performance.

I have to confess that I like this thesis. However, I can also confess that my interest in Bernstein was already waning once I got out of high school. I think that one of his problems was that he always seemed to resolve everything into cut-and-dried answers; and now, looking back on all of that stuff, I realize that the greatest joy in listening is that it is always capable of stimulating new questions and new perspectives.

I also later learned that Bernstein could be sloppy when it came to giving credit where credit was due. His best ideas often came from some source that tended to be left unacknowledged. (Television is not very kind to footnotes.) Therefore, I was not surprised to discover that Tommasini’s thesis about Mozart was not original. By the same count I should not have been surprised to discover that the “prior art” could be attributed to Arnold Schoenberg. I guess I was surprised because I encountered it in Schoenberg’s famous “Brahms the Progressive” essay. Here is the text from Schoenberg that he then generalizes from opera to other genres:

Accommodation of the music to every change of mood and action, materially or psychologically, is the most essential problem an opera composer has to master. Inability in this respect might produce incoherence—or worse, boredom. The technique of the recitative escapes this danger by avoiding motival and harmonic obligations in which it might have engaged. But the ‘Finales’ and many ‘Ensembles’ and even ‘Arias’ contain heterogeneous elements to which the technique of lyric condensation is not applicable. In pieces of this type a composer must be capable of turning within the smallest space. Mozart, anticipating this necessity, begins such a piece with a melody consisting of a number of phrases of various lengths and characters, each of them pertaining to a different phase of the action and the mood. They are, in their first formulation, loosely joined together, and after simply juxtaposed, thus admitting to be broken asunder and used independently as motival materials for small formal segments.

This may lack the “multimedia appeal” of talking over a keyboard performance; but it also goes beyond the what-a-pretty-mud-pie rhetoric to seek out just which nuts and bolts of Mozart’s operatic scores generalize so well. Alas, this is the sort of argument that ultimately resides in the power of words and the kind of reflective thought we can bring to reading from the page, rather than watching a demonstration through video.

Some (138) of the One Percent Speak!

2011-11-17T08:53:00.000-08:00

Here is a tidbit from what appears to be Al Jazeera English’s own sources:

Nearly 140 millionaires have asked a divided US congress to increase their taxes for the sake of the nation.

"Please do the right thing, raise our taxes," the entrepreneurs and business leaders wrote to President Barack Obama and congressional leaders on Wednesday, noting that they benefited from a sound economy and now want others to do so.

The letter was signed by 138 members of "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength".

The group was created a year ago during a failed bid to persuade congress to end tax cuts for millionaires enacted under Obama's predecessor, the Republican George Bush.

Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher, reporting from Washington DC, said the group is now making the same request of a 12-member congressional "super committee", which is struggling to reach a bipartisan deal to cut the deficit by at least $1.2tn over the next decade in order to help put the nation on sound financial footing.

While I do not wish to question the patriotism of those 138 members, I am not sure their strategy is the most effective approach. The Occupy movement is as much about the failure of our government to “do the right thing” as it is about the prevailing obscene division of wealth. It is time to give serious consideration to the hypothesis that our government may be responsible for the lion’s share of the problem, not because (as the TEA Party wishes us to believe) it is too big but because (as Senator Bernie Sanders observed this morning on C-SPAN) it just is not working very well for reasons having more to do with preoccupation with power than with the inefficiencies of size.

Thus, it may be better for those 138 millionaires to circumvent the government, rather than petition it. It should not be difficult for them to set up their own non-profit beneficent organization that can make its own decisions as to how wealth can be distributed to address problems such as health care and unemployment. They could then donate their wealth to this organization (in an amount that factors in the tax break they would receive for doing so). This could well be a major shift from current European logic, where it appears that power is passing to technocrats who only want to think about austerity. The premise seems simple enough: If you have 138 individuals who care more about the public good than our elected representative do and they have the fiscal clout to do something about the degradation of that public good, why should they assume that only government can provide a solution?

Occupy Apple?

2011-11-17T07:36:00.000-08:00

Raj Jayadev offers a new perspective on the Occupy movement in his “Occupy 101” column for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His first sentence provides the perfect summary:

The One Percent are not only the bankers and traders on Wall Street — they’re alive and thriving in Silicon Valley.

If this point needed reinforcing, one only has to turn to yesterday’s Apple Talk report by Josh Lowensohn for CNET News:

Disney President and CEO Robert Iger will be pulling in just over six figures after joining Apple's board, when you consider both his annual retainer and his initial grant of restricted stock units.

In an SEC filing today, Apple noted that Iger--who joined Apple's board of directors yesterday--will get "the standard $50,000 annual retainer" which is to be paid out in quarterly installments.

Additionally, Iger gets an initial grant of 142 restricted stock units, as part of the company's Director Plan, worth about $55,000 based on Apple's current trading price. According to Apple's annual proxy filing earlier year, those shares are set to vest in February.

Other perks Iger gets as an Apple board member include "one of each new product" Apple introduces, free of charge, under the company's Board of Directors Equipment Program; that's if he requests them, the program's description says.

As a frame of reference, Iger's base salary last year as the CEO of Walt Disney was just shy of $2.8 million. However he pulled in more than $28 million when including a mix of performance-based bonuses and annual equity awards.

In many ways this is yet another version of the premise that Silicon Valley is a hotbed of elitist discrimination, which is why there was a recent debate on ZDNet over whether or not Silicon Valley is racist. As I put it in my comment on that debate, “elites neither know nor care very much about the broader social consequences of all that innovation they are so eager to promote.” In other words Silicon Valley is no different from Wall Street in that, for those who succeed, it’s all about the money; and nothing else matters other than indulging in that money once you have it. The Macintosh used to be advertised as the computer “for the rest of us;” but, now that Apple has its current farm full of cash cows, they could care less about anyone who does not keep bumping up the bottom line on their balance sheets.

The World is Watching

2011-11-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

Just for the record, the police raid to clear Frank Ogawa Plaza of the Occupy Oakland protestors received coverage from both BBC News and Al Jazeera English.

The Luxury of Scholarship

2011-11-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

Last night’s San Francisco Symphony subscription concert, with its emphasis on the chamber music of Franz Schubert, was more disappointing than I had anticipated. However, when I set about trying to write my “examination” of the event for Examiner.com, I realized that this was one of those cases where the usual techniques of criticism would not necessarily serve either the performers or myself very well. Indeed, because last night’s audience seemed to be a bit at sea over the whole affair, this struck me as one of those situations in which “examining” would be more useful than “reviewing.”

The thing about examining, however, is that it tends to be highly context-dependent; and one is not always certain, when undertaking the task, just what contextual elements are likely to be appropriate. Therefore, I find it is useful, when dealing with context, to defer the usual introduction of the basic facts about the performance itself and follow the lead from Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” in preparing a suitable introduction. (Aristotle talks about this as “paving the way, as it were, for what is to follow.”) Thus, I found that I needed two introductory paragraphs to address the nature of performing chamber music before launching into any account of what actually happened on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall.

This strikes me as more than the usual question of how many “column inches” should go into writing about a performance (although I certainly enjoy the luxury of not having to worry about how many paragraphs it is going to take me to say what I want to say). Rather, it is a matter of recognizing, at the outset, that any fair account entails some prerequisite level of scholarship. Now I realize that the very concept of scholarship tends to turn off many readers, particularly those “enthusiasts” who bring their I-know-what-I-like attitude to the performance; so there is the added challenge of making the scholarship not only palatable but also interesting.

Aristotle may have drawn upon flute music for his advice about introduction; but I have discovered (often from the efforts of others) than a well-chosen anecdote is often the best way to lure the reader into territory that (s)he tends to be disposed to dislike for being too “heavy.” In this case I had the luxury of being able to tell a story of personal experience, whose authority could be reinforced because it had taken place at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and had “name appeal” (in the form of Robert Mann, founder of the Julliard String Quartet). Whether or not my strategy was a good one from the reader’s point of view, it definitely provided me with the framework I needed then to write down the points that mattered most about my disappointment with last night. I suppose what mattered most to me was that I could make a case that involved something less superficial than merely picking nits, but I could not do this without first establishing what it was below the surface that was so significant. This required Aristotelian introduction, and I guess that whether or not that strategy worked is a matter between me and my readers!

What Matters to Today's College Students

2011-11-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

Stephen Douglas seems to have come up with a relatively thorough on-the-spot account on The Big Lead of last night’s reaction at State College, Pennsylvania, to the dismissal of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. The climax seemed to come with the flipping of the media van for the local CBS affiliate. Having just read Anthony Grafton’s “Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?” in the latest New York Review, I wonder how he feels about this adding to his rather impressive pile of evidence. No one is spared in Grafton’s jeremiad; but probably the most depressing part of his account is that, by and large, college students are interested in just about every aspect of college life except for getting an education. Is it any wonder that this leads to a crop of alumni that would rather shell out to support the football team rather than provide the library with the funds to purchase the latest professional journals?

Yes, my point of view is biased. I had more than my share of student unrest during my time as both undergraduate and graduate student. To this day, however, I continue to be thankful that I went to a school that did not have a football team (and was proud of it).

Hopefully, this is all a side show that will evaporate after its fifteen minutes of fame have passed. Students may have led the protests against the Vietnam War and racism; but today the Occupy protestors are those who have been burned by the real world, rather than sheltered by college life. The Paterno affair was important enough to make it to BBC News World Service Radio this morning, but what must listeners outside the United States think?

Actually, scratch that question. The BBC ran their Penn State report in the same segment that reported Rick Perry’s debate fumble. We know what the rest of the world thinks, and we know their grounds for thinking it. Over at Penn State, however, I would guess that few, if any, of the students care very much about what our country has become or how the rest of the world perceives it.