Is Facebook Asking the Right Questions?

I just finished reading a BBC News post entitled “Facebook reveals most-seen posts are inane questions, not politics.” The story itself begins as follows:

After being accused of spreading right-wing content, Facebook has revealed that its most-viewed posts include asking if sugar goes with spaghetti.

Its first-ever report on the contents of people's news feeds in the United States focuses on how many people see a post rather than any other measurement.

The good news is that, at the very least, this counts as an attempt to clear Facebook of any accusations that is has become an instrument for “politics by other means” (or, perhaps, the more activist proposition, “revolution by other means”). The bad news is that they may have engaged inadequate analytic techniques to arrive at questionable conclusions. The fact is that people were bombarded with “things to see” long before Facebook added to the bombardment.

We might do well to think of the mechanisms behind Facebook posts the same way we think about advertising. We are all used to the high volume of advertising that we encounter through television. (There are other sources, such as billboards and newspapers; but my guess is that television advertising draws more attention, simply because it can deploy more attention-grabbing techniques.) Furthermore, the advertising business is not just about drawing eyeballs. It is a matter of drawing the right eyeballs in the interest of getting “the mind behind the eyeballs” to take some desired action (usually buying something, whether you need it or not).

In that context the concept of “most-viewed posts” is a relatively meaningless metric; and rank-ordering the posts themselves according to that metric is even more meaningless. Indeed, even the question of passing a post to others may not be that significant. The more difficult question to deal with is whether acts of reading and sharing lead to actions being taken that have nothing to do directly with reading and sharing.

In other words Facebook needs to be addressed on the same turf as the question of whether the storming of the Capitol building was the result of deliberate incitement. This is a complex question that cannot be answered by simple bean-counting. It is not so much about “spreading the word” as it is about how persuasive those words are and if they are persuasive enough to lead to action.

My guess is that there are no analytical tools for identifying such persuasion, not among Facebook resources or anywhere else. Those in the business of advertising may have a richer qualitative understanding of human nature, but they probably know better than to reduce that understanding to quantitative metrics. The best we can do in the face of a possible crisis is ask, “How did we get into this mess?” Where the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex is concerned, the House of Representatives tried to address this question. Whether or not any useful results will arise is still up for grabs.

Meanwhile, we should be as careful with Facebook’s accounts of its own analyses as we are in taking any television commercial to be verifiable truth.

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics”

The title of the eighth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of the articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, is “The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’s Melodic Style.” The essay was written in 1977; and those who have been following Tenney’s intellectual development by reading the chapters of From Scratch in their chronological order might expect that this would be an article in which Tenney takes his theoretical speculations about phenomenology and tries to put them into practice by examining the relatively limited (but decidedly revolutionary) repertoire of a single composer. Such readers need go no further than the last sentence of the first paragraph to abandon such expectations:

In this paper I shall report the results of some statistical analyses of Ruggles’s melodic lines, carried out with the aid of a computer.

Readers who now look at the above headline can probably see where things are going. I was rather pleased to see that this phrase actually has its own Wikipedia page. On that page one may read the “source sentence” taken from an article by Mark Twain entitled “Chapters from My Autobiography.” Wikipedia reproduced that sentence as follows:

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

In the context of this particular Tenney article, that sentence deserves to be paired with another quotation:

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

The Quote Investigator Web site has an impressively extensive discussion about the many possible origins of this witticism.

Those who have been following my progress through From Scratch may recall that I concluded my last article with a rather waspish dig about “misconceptions that Tenney probably picked up from Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois.” Hiller was trained as a chemist but became known as a pioneer in the domain of computer music, a rather loosely-defined area of both research and practice. The misconception I had in mind involved the technical term “entropy” as it is applied to the discipline of information theory. From a mathematical point of view, information theory amounts to a specialization within probability theory and its relation to statistical analysis. Statistical analysis is, in turn, a technique that has such a history of abuse that, in 1954, the journalist Darrell Huff published a book that remains one of the best plain-speaking accounts of the discipline. Huff chose to title his book How to Lie with Statistics.

Now I have far too much respect for Tenney and his efforts to accuse him of being a liar. However, I fear that he may have fallen victim to at least some of the misconceptions that Huff made it a point to explain. Most important is the basic principle that statistical analysis can only be applied to what is usually called a “representative sample space.” Put in plain talk: You are trying to identify some common property shared by a very large number of objects. That number is too large for you to examine all of those objects, so you limit your analysis to a smaller number of them. That limited quantity is your “sample space;” and there are a variety of statistical tools one may apply to determine whether the small number of objects in the sample space accurately represents that larger collection of objects.

Tenney’s decision to apply statistical tools to the melodic lines in Ruggles’ compositions must be grounded in the way in which he chose to define a sample space. However, his approach to analysis presumed that the elements of that space (i.e. the notes in those melodic lines) had some underlying uniformity that made them all “equal” with respect to the mathematical tools applied to them. The problem is that, in just about any piece of music, there are always some notes that (to paraphrase George Orwell) are more equal than others. In other words, whether in the act of composing or in the act of performing, there is almost always some underlying sense that differentiates an embellishing note from the note it is embellishing. Thus, the methodology behind Tenney’s data analyses levels a playing field that is not supposed to be level.

Now, to be fair, sorting out the embellishing from the embellished in a Ruggles score is no easy matter. Because of the constrains of copyright, only one Ruggles composition can be found on IMSLP, a very early song titled “Toys.” Finding those melodic lines that Tenney decided to analyze is no easy matter; and, even if one limits oneself to the vocal part, resolving questions of embellishment is a significant challenge. Nevertheless, between changes in duration and breath commas, it is a challenge that can be met given adequate time to work with the content. (One can also take advantage of a perfectly good recording of a performance of “Toys.”)

I suppose the underlying fallacy in Tenney’s essay arises from his using mathematical tools that apply to abstract constructs. However, the concrete qualities of his “source data” cannot be reduced to such abstract constructs. As a result, the output of his techniques cannot reflect the properties of his input sources that reflect the music that Ruggles composed, rather than the marks on paper that try to document that music.

To be fair, Tenney was neither the first nor the last to be ensnared by this methodological trap. When I first started doing my own research, it did not take me long to recognize the shortcomings of Hiller’s work in both theory and practice. Ironically, 1977 was the year in which I sat as Respondent in the Current Advances in Computer Methods session of the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society. At that time much of my active research involved using that aforementioned programming language LISP to translate the somewhat cryptic graphic system of notation used by Heinrich Schenker into more formal symbol structures that better captured Schenker’s own representations of relations between the embellishing and the embellished. The more of Tenney’s work that I read, the more I regret that our paths never really crossed!

Are Trump Supporters Having Second Thoughts?

The headline for Alfred Ng's Tech Culture article on CNET felt like a faint glimmer of good news: "Most Americans wish Trump would stop tweeting so much." Admittedly, 69% is a bit narrow for the adjective "most;" and, more to the point, it is unclear to what extent 1000 constitutes a representative sample, particularly in the absence of any information as to just how those polled were selected. Nevertheless, a faint glimmer is probably better than total darkness, which may be what we shall get should Trump decide that the best way to respond to this article is with a Tweet.

More disconcerting is the Trump quote from his 60 Minutes interview justifying his heavy use of Twitter:

When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story...I have a method of fighting back.

To be fair, anyone who thinks that politics is not adversarial has to be living in some idealistic alternative universe. Nevertheless, having an argument need not be treated as a matter of going into combat. Indeed, Carl von Clausewitz' famous aphorism about war being diplomacy by other means seems to suggest that combat is what one resorts to when the cooler reasoning of argumentation no longer yields mutually beneficial results.

It goes without saying that Twitter was not conceived to be a medium for argumentation, and trying to use it that way is bound to be frustrating. To the contrary, the whole raison d'être behind Twitter is that it would provide a medium for spontaneous impressions. It would not surprise me to learn that those who first conceived of it saw it as a way to use words when a simple emoticon would not do. The "better angels" of the Internet may even still see it that way; but the Internet is an entropic environment that devours better angels. Donald Trump's use of Twitter has become an object lesson that demonstrates where such entropy will lead.

Post-Truth Invades My Turf

It has been a while since I went on a rant about Jonah Lehrer. The last time I indulged was when I decided to take on an excerpt from his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. The result was a post to this site entitled  “Performing Precise Research with Blunt Instruments.”

I suppose that one of the symptoms of the post-truth era is that you cannot keep a sloppy researcher down. This afternoon I found myself reading the “Igor Stravinsky” chapter from Lehrer’s more recent book, Proust was a Neuroscientist. This turned out to include an analysis [sic] of Stravinsky’s score for the ballet “The Rite of Spring;” and, by the second page of the chapter, I was already fuming over the inaccuracies and misconceptions in Lehrer’s efforts to try to describe the riot that took place when this ballet was first performed. His basic point was that, in the due course of time, mind usually figures out how to make sense of what first strikes it as disturbing noise; but Stravinsky himself made that point much better in his Poetics of Music lecture. (Lehrer even quotes a significant excerpt from that lecture. He credits Stravinsky but neglects to mention the source.)

Truth be told, however, I am less annoyed with Lehrer than I am with Google. This morning I was trying to track down the source of a Stravinsky comment that I have frequently cited:

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

Basically, Google kept pointing me at Web pages that were full of clever quotations, none of which offered up anything about source (or, for that matter, context). A PDF file of Lehrer’s chapter was one of the few search hits that promised to provide useful background. However, as may be guessed from the above, Lehrer was no better at crediting the “duck” source than he was in acknowledging Poetics of Music.

Eventually I realized that the source could well have been one of Stravinsky’s conversations with Robert Craft. So adding Craft to the Google search got me to Stephen Walsh’s book, Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America, 1934–1971. An Amazon search got me to just the right page, which provided far more context for those sentences than I had dared imagine. Unfortunately, while I could get the chapter number and the footnote number, I could not read the footnote itself. (Thanks, Amazon!) Fortunately, the book is in the San Francisco Public Library; so I should be able to settle the source question tomorrow morning!

Ignoring Consequences Continues to be Dangerous!

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books includes a scathing article bu Geoffrey Wheatcroft entitled "Tony Blair's Eternal Shame: The Report." The report in question is the so-called Chilcot, whose proper title is The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, the review of the motives and consequences associated with Great Britain entering the war in Iraq as a partner of the United States. The report was prepared by a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot. This is a massive document, 6275 pages distributed across twelve volumes. However, as Wheatcroft observes, it should suffice for most to read the "62,000-word executive summary." To the extent that Wheatcroft's article amounts to a summary of that "executive summary," even that may be hard to take.

As might be guessed from the title, Wheatcroft's major target in former Prime Minister Blair. While he does not call
Blair's relationship with George W. Bush an "unholy alliance," it is clear that he was straining very hard to avoid that phrase. (He does, on the other, rather neatly deflate that concept of a "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom as little more than a deceptive myth.)

The summary of Wheatcroft's summary comes with his concluding assessment of Blair:

And yet in the end Tony Blair isn't a messiah or a madman or a monster. He's a complete and utter mediocrity. He might have made an adequate prime minister in ordinary days, but in our strange and testing times he was hopelessly out of his depth. Now we are left with the consequences.

Since Wheatcroft is British, he kept his attention focused primarily on Blair. Whether or not that description holds just as well for George W. Bush is our business, not his. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize that the most powerful word in that quotation is the last one.

I have long held that we have become a culture that has tried to banish the word "consequences" from our working vocabulary. The last time I expressed this explicitly was in March of 2015. The idea emerged in my writing through observations that everyone seemed to be eager to jump into new technologies without thinking through the implications that technology might have for "unanticipated use." In other words we think only about the cool things we shall be able to do, assuming that they are also good things, totally overlooking the possibilities that "the next new thing" may serve more nefarious purposes we never bothered to consider. By all rights the aftermath of our adventures in Iraq should have been a wake-up call to us all to think about consequences before taking action, yet in today's immediate present, it would seem that few are bothering to think about how the vote they case in November (or the decision they make not to vote) is likely to have consequences on the same magnitude of those examined by Wheatcroft.

Reproducing Music Without a Microphone

I suppose that my background in technology has a lot to do with my fascination with player pianos. Back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in the Seventies, I knew someone who was passionate about restoring old player pianos; and it was from him that I first learned that, in the most advanced models, there could be up to five additional columns for holes that would control the amplitude. The makers of player pianos understood the digital-to-analog converter long before the electrical circuit for such a device had been built!

Nevertheless, there is a downside to that story. It involves the promotion of the Welte-Mignon, a reproducing piano that was first introduced in 1904. To promote the instrument, members of the Welte family sought out as many of the best pianists of that period as they could muster, inviting them all to allow their performances to be captured by their technology. The reason I can remember that there were five additional columns comes from a story I heard about what happened when Artur Schnabel was approached. Whichever Welte was making the pitch to him boasted that their system could capture 32 levels of loudness. Schnabel replied curtly, “I have 33;” and refused to make any recordings for the instrument!

It this respect it is interesting that MIDI representations are based on eight-bit “words,” meaning that, unless extended by different interpretation software, the representation of amplitude has 256 levels (including silence). I was actually reluctant to doing anything with MIDI when it first appeared. This was not because of Schnabel but because I was interested in microtonal tuning at the time and had not yet encountered a representation of pitch that would satisfy the representation I had developed for my own EUTERPE language, which divided the octave into 72 equal parts.

However, when I moved to Singapore in 1991, I knew that I was not going to bring along my Baldwin grand. So I visited a Yamaha showroom and got myself a Clavinova with sampled sounds and support (sort-of) for three functioning pedals. (“Sort-of” meant that the “virtual dampers” controlled how long a note would be sustained but not how it would cause other open strings to reverberate.) Because this instrument supported MIDI control, it was not long before I bought a Macintosh, perched it on the instrument, and started playing around with MIDI software.

In Singapore Yamaha ran a music school in conjunction will selling instruments. I got to know one of the piano teachers, and she started asking me questions about MIDI. I happened to have one piece of software that would provide numerical representation of MIDI content in terms of time (both start and end), piano key, and degree of loudness. I showed her a printout of my own performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 2 minuet (which has only 24 measures). Once I explained what the numbers meant, she immediately started to critique my performance; and she could explain what she was saying in terms of the “raw data” of the numbers themselves.

Thus began one of the most interesting projects from my time in Singapore. Two colleagues and I developed a music-based visualization of MIDI recordings. This meant that the display was structured around score notation constructs. Amplitude was represented by coloring the note heads on a color scale that would “dissolve” from high-intensity red (loudest) to high-intensity blue (softest). We also developed a “virtual metronome” that would insert tick marks corresponding to the position of the beat with respect to the notation. Finally, there was a representation of “articulation,” basically how much of a pause there was from one note to the next.

Such visualization provided a new “channel” through which teacher could communicate with student. The object may have been to get the student to be a better listener, but establishing what the student should pay attention to while listening could be tricky. Visual cues, even relatively primitive ones, could go a long way towards guiding auditory attention.

Having established a relationship with Yamaha, I could now devote some of my attention to some of their own efforts to promote reproducing pianos, such as the Disklavier, which was basically a grand piano with the ability to translate MIDI data into physical hammer and pedal actions. Yamaha was trying to market a library of floppy discs recording performances by famous classical and jazz pianists. (As I recall there was even a floppy with MIDI transcriptions of player piano rolls recorded by George Gershwin.)

Needless to say, these sounded pretty feeble on my Clavinova. However, I discovered that the effect was not much better when I listened to the same recorded performance on a Disklavier in the Yamaha showroom. Was this just another example of Schnabel’s complaint that there were “not enough bits?”

My current thinking is that this was not the case. I thought about some of the vinyl recordings I had of Welte-Mignon performances; and I recalled that the audio recordings were based on using the instrument on which the piano roll had initially be created. This led to the hypothesis that reproduction was as much a matter of what the pianist heard as of what the pianist did physically. Our research in visualization had offered a representation of audible features; but there was a listening-playing loop that would be unique to any performance, regardless of how it was visualized.

This hypothesis has two serious corollaries. One involves “scientific” approaches to researching the nature of piano performance. One can take recordings of pianists and abstract them to a MIDI-like representation. That representation will provide a representation of what the pianist was doing that would be at least adequate. However, when isolated from the sounds of the recording, it abstracts out any information about how the pianist is responding to the sounds (s)he is creating. This seems to be a critical gap in the data that are available. It also suggests that, when a pianist is warming up on an unfamiliar instrument (s)he is aware of not only the physical responsiveness of the keys and pedals but also of how the whole instrument reverberates and how some frequencies may be stronger than others.

The second corollary goes back to Yamaha’s interest in marketing those floppy discs. Because every piano has its own unique sonorities, playing one of those floppies on a piano that is different from the one on which it is recorded may well have unsatisfying results. In other words the abstraction of the data on the floppy, which is probably grounded in MIDI, cannot capture the impact of listening on the nature of the performance.

Can the capture technology be improved? This would require a richer understanding of the nature of that listening-playing loop. At the present time we can do little more than come up with some highly general hypotheses. However, this is one of those cases in which the devil is in the details; and we still have quite a ways to go before we even know which of those details are the relevant ones!

Don't Shoot the Messenger!

Once again President Barack Obama is trying to present himself as a voice of reason at a global forum. He is currently at a G7 summit in Japan; and chose to offer a "sidebar" about Donald Trump's ability to deal with world affairs. A report on the BBC News Web site attributed the following observation to Obama:

They [world leaders] are not sure how seriously to take some of his pronouncements, but they're rattled by him - and for good reason, because a lot of the proposals that he's made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude.

My guess is that anyone taking the trouble to read this post will probably agree with Obama, but that's not the point. Now that Trump has officially crossed the threshold of having a majority of delegates the the Republican National Convention, isn't it about time that we stop wringing our hands in righteous dismay and ask just how he managed to get there? Any number of analysts who tracked the Republican primaries know that there is not an easy answer to this question. and the answer will probably involve a mix of factors. It may even be possible to estimate the balance of that mix, but there is a good chance that rationality is not part of it. Thus, unless we understand the reasons for the underlying irrationality, we shall not be in a position to diagnose how we got where we are, let alone what the consequences are likely to be.

Remembering Marvin Minsky

I just finished reading the BBC News report of the death of Marvin Minsky, who succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88. Minsky served as adviser for both my senior and doctoral theses. The former amounted to a systematic implementation of some ideas he had been playing around with through which he could compose music with the aid of computer software. The latter was basically an extended analysis of that what implementation could and could not express and what means of expression were involved. As is the case with many doctoral students, it led to a few publications, one of which I particularly enjoyed, since it got me into the Journal of Music Theory, which had been a major source for much of my background research.

I suppose what I remember most about Minsky was that he was a "hands off" adviser. He would let me go off on my own with relatively little guidance, but he would then subject my findings to intense criticism. At the time he was running the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was getting its funding from the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He had other areas of research to supervise to keep those guys was happy. I was a side show. So I had the freedom to run it myself while enjoying the facilities of the Laboratory. My best move came when the composer Ezra Sims became my "unofficial" adviser (and composition teacher); and much of what went into my thesis was the result of not only Sims' coaching but also his own experiences in using my software.

However, even before my graduate studies, Minsky made a mark in the world of computer music that never really got duly acknowledged. What I built for my senior thesis was basically a symbol manipulation system, whose symbols amounted to a hybrid of the fundamental constructs of music notation and the basic operators of a programming language. The former was, in just about any imaginable way, a predecessors of the MIDI coding system. Had Marvin been more concerned about intellectual property instead of chipping away at enormous research challenges, he probably could have made a strong case that what finally showed up in concrete form in my senior thesis would have been prior art for what MIDI had been trying to do. (On the other hand my work with Sims came about through a shared interest in microtonality. One of the first things I did, to satisfy the sort of expressiveness that most interested Sims, was divide the octave into 72 equal internals. My attachment to that representation was why I ignored MIDI during its first years of application.)

On a broader scale I acquired from Minsky the basic precept that finding the right questions to ask is always more important than answering them. In that respect I was glad to see the BBC quoting him on the downside of companies like Google and Facebook getting into artificial intelligence. He sees those companies trying to make money by commercializing things that never worked very well in the early stages of research. (There used to be a joke among graduate students that a thesis was based on a demonstration project that could only be applied to one example and did not even work reliably in that limited case!)

I suppose that Minsky was more interested in intelligence as a process, rather than a product that might eventually be marketed. In this respect he was a direct descendant of Alan Turing, whose "Turing Test" has been bastardized by contemporary technology hacks as a product that can vie in a competition, while Turing himself was more interested in the sorts of processes through which his "Imitation Game" could be played successfully. If those processes worked for a human player, then there was a good chance they could be implemented on a machine.

Minsky's background also endowed him with an appreciation of intelligence having a subjective dimension, that is elements that had more to do with psychology than with mathematics. Mind you, he believed that such subjectivity might eventually be mapped into a more objective domain; but he still knew enough to appreciate the difference. On the other hand I am not sure he appreciated that there was also a social dimension to intelligence, which may explain why he was often so impatient, if not bored, in many of his conversations.

That same comment that objects to commercialization advocates, instead, "giving support to individuals who have new ideas." I suppose that is why he took me on as a doctoral student. However, back when I was still trying to make a living in scientific research, I found very few such individuals when interviewing job candidates. Graduate schools were now coming out a crop of students who were most proficient at following orders, passed from funding organizations down through thesis advisers. I suppose that is why I am now happier these days writing on my own nickel (or, to be fair, nickels coming in part from the Social Security Administration). Even in the world of music, it is getting harder to come across "new ideas;" but I find the odds of finding them at a conservatory are better than those of finding them at even the best of the universities!

Pierre Boulez and the Second Viennese School

I wanted to wait until after I had documented my own "obituary thoughts" about Pierre Boulez before reading anyone else's. Fortunately, because of the print cycle of The New Yorker, I had a generous amount of waiting time before having an opportunity to look at what Alex Ross had to say. His article for the January 25 issue is now available for reading online; and, while my personal attitude towards Ross has been variable, I thought that he did an excellent job of giving Boulez his due (which does not mean that I liked reading his piece because it showed that he agreed with me)! One observation that we share has to do with Boulez' acute understanding of the music of the Second Viennese School and his consummate skill at making what they wrote sound like music at a time when most other conductors were lost at sea.

Here is the operative passage from Ross' text:

His lucid approach to classic works of early modernism, particularly the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, changed how that music is played and heard. Simon Rattle, one of many forward-thinking conductors who received Boulez’s encouragement, described the status quo: “What one heard was only a struggle.” Boulez took away the struggle—the muddiness and the messiness. As if seen through polished glass, the music assumed an unearthly beauty.

I am inclined to agree, but I think it is necessary to clarify the nature of the struggle. One element came with Arnold Schoenberg's decision to add Hauptstimme (primary voice) and Nebenstimme (secondary voice) markings to his scores. This seems to have led to a slavish allegiance to Schoenberg's priorities without necessarily grasping the logic behind them. However, the more serious problem came with the move into the use of the twelve-tone row. Amateur mathematicians, such as Milton Babbitt, were quickly drawn to how Schoenberg's technique involved working with a limited number of permutations of the twelve chromatic pitches. This led Babbitt to jump to the conclusion that the foundation for Schoenberg's theory must be the abstract algebraic theory of permutation groups.

It is unclear if Schoenberg knew or cared what Babbitt was trying to do. Fortunately, we do know his famous caustic remark in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

Unfortunately, by the time I was an undergraduate, music teachers seemed to prefer drinking Babbitt's Kool-Aid to reading Schoenberg's letter.

Perhaps it was because Boulez had his own intense brush with permutations and the "principles" behind them that he came to realize that there was music behind those principles that was "where the action was." Boulez may thus have been the first high-profile conductor of Schoenberg's music after Schoenberg's death to chuck the mathematics and worry instead about where the music was. Boulez turned out to be very good at doing this, perhaps because he was already beginning to grasp where the music was in other composers, such as Olivier Messiaen. Rattle would then emerge as another such conductor, and it now appears that Rattle is willing to credit Boulez for encouraging him into that frame of mind. Meanwhile, Babbitt's work has been pretty much forgotten. As one of my former colleagues put it:

No one is afraid of Uncle Miltie any more.

Can Clear Writing be Dangerous?

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has an essay by Timothy Snyder entitled "Hitler's World." It may be one of the best efforts to distill the basic principles of Mein Kampf without getting bogged down in the inflammatory rhetoric. It goes without saying that Snyder also does an excellent job of pointing out the abundance of flaws in Hitler's approach to argumentation.

In many respects it is probably about time that someone gave such a serious and dispassionate reading of a document that had such a strong impact on the twentieth century. However, do we need to ask whether or not there is a risk in summarizing that document in readily accessible language, even if that language also explains the many instances of faulty reasoning? We know from institutions such as Fox News that selective reading and attention has become the order of the day for those who try to promote personal ideologies. Do we have to worry that Snyder's clarity might fuel the fires of current and future generations of neo-Nazi thinking? When we live in a world in which willful irrationality seems to be "the new normal," we have to worry about such matters!

Who Serves Whom?

In the latest issue of The New York Review, David Cole, in his article "The New America: Little Privacy, Big Terror," makes the following statement:

When we carry our cell phone, use (or have downloaded) apps on those phones, browse websites, send e-mails or texts, drive in our cars, or make purchases with a credit card, we send digital information about our whereabouts, our association, our interests, and our needs and desires to the corporations that serve us.

It is that last phrase that gets to me. We may be customers or clients; but, thanks to all those opportunities that Cole outlines, it is no longer fair to say that any corporation "serves" is customer or client base. Simply by providing all those data, we now serve them. It is almost as if, by virtue of the data they acquire, corporations now, for all intents and purposes, own us and deliberately manipulate us to generate numbers that look good on balance sheets and stockholders' reports.

I should have seen this coming. Back when I was trying to pursue "knowledge management" as a legitimate domain for research, I was first exposed to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While the ideals of CRM looked good enough on paper, allowing me to address questions of how knowledge management might leverage CRM by providing more personalized interactions with customers, once I saw the technology in use, I realized that it was pointing in the opposite direction. As I put it in a post back in 2010, it was basically a technology for "desubjectivizing" customers, transforming them from agents acting according to their personal motivations into data points to feed banks of analytical software. While others were looking for technologies that would commoditize knowledge, the game was going to those who had figured out how to commoditize their own customers!

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

The Harley Recall: Bad News and Good News

The latest bad news from Detroit is that Harley-Davidson is recalling 185,000 motorcycles made in 2014 and 2015. The problem is that the saddlebag can come loose and fall off of the bike. It is unclear how many times Harley has issued such a recall, but my guess is that there have not been many. It would not surprise me if Harley had a better manufacturing record than Cadillac. So this may be yet another case of skilled labor just not being what it used to be, at least where quality control is concerned.

On the other hand, Harley detected the problem through analysis of warranty claims. This is definitely good news. Because, apparently, there have been no reports of crashes or injuries due to this defect. In other words, unlike some of the automobile companies (and not just the American ones), the folks at Harley believe in closing the barn door before the horse has been stolen (and then filing their own insurance claim on the stolen horse). Harley seems to be a company that still believes that the customer is more important than the shareholder.

The fact is that the company had a rough past, particularly when Japanese bikes were on the rise. However, they managed to rise above that mess. One reason is that many of their customers are "true believers." Apparently, they want to make sure that they believe in their customers as strongly as their customers believe in them. How many Chief Executive Officers of publicly-traded corporations can make that claim with a straight face? (Harley does not always keep a straight face, by the way. Their ticker code on the New York Stock Exchange is HOG!)

Depending on Defective Software

My recent "Confluence of 'Glitches'" piece suggested that the sorts of systems failures that have recently plagued institutions as large as United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange may be traced back to a major nosedive in what, when I was both teaching and research computer science, used to be called "software quality." Indeed, it has been so long since I have encountered that phrase that I have to wonder whether or not it still has any currency in current software engineering practices. The fact is that our day-to-day life is more and more dependent on software embedded in the devices and systems that we now use heavily. This is no longer a question of OS X software not being as good as it used to be. Within the last 48 hours I had an encounter with a security guard dealing with screen freeze on his cell phone. I have a Blu-ray player that keeps telling me to wait while it upgrades its software; and even after that "improvement" it still freezes on some Blu-ray discs. Comcast recently decided to implement a "smarter" HDMI interface, which has now been upgraded to make it worse than it was when I first used an HDMI connector. To add insult to injury, OS X Firefox can no longer display Blogspot pages with the utility bar at the top of the screen!

Recently, the Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the rise of "coding boot camps" in the Bay Area. This was a corporate-based response to the observation that coding talent is not what it used to be. Still, there is it worth asking just what sort of training those boot camps are providing? Could it be that software has gone down the tubes due to a competitive environment in which fast delivery is more important than product reliability? (After all, Microsoft conditioned us to expect that all software needs periodic updating.) Is this a sign of just how badly we are at the mercy of technology that no longer works according to plan?

A Confluence of "Glitches?"

It is not often that I agree with the FBI, particularly after Director James Comey's fumbling Congressional testimony on why his agency should have access to all encrypted communications. However, his response to three major computer outages (United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange, and The Wall Street Journal) taking place all on the same day was the right one. Those who investigate criminal acts cannot afford to be "big believers in coincidence."

Indeed, this may be one of those cases in which investigators have to exercise the full scope of imagination to come up with a wide variety of qualitatively different hypotheses. One should be able then to assess systematically each hypothesis. Some will be easy to eliminate, while others will require more intense scrutiny and investigation. (The very question, "What will it take to refute this hypothesis?" can be a valuable driver for deciding the directions investigation should take.)

Even the hypothesis that this was, indeed, a confluence of accidents needs to compete with the other hypotheses. The point is that confluence is not necessarily a matter of coincidence. In this case, for example, it may simply be the result of the general decline in software quality, regardless of the particularly function being served by the software. In other words things went south for United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange, and The Wall Street Journal for the same reason that they keep going south for OS X with increasing frequency.

Follow the Money to the Man Cave

CNET News reporter Max Taves provided an interesting summary of venture capital investments that were concluded over the past week. I treat this as highly recommended reading matter. I further recommend that every reader review the entire list to look for any sort of common trends. My personal interpretation is that the current generation of venture capitalists is being drawn to self-indulgence in a big way. This is not just a shift from products that do useful things to services that allow the idle rich to be more idle. Rather, it seems to be a calculated response to analytical results suggesting that the fastest way to quick profit is through the exploitation of infantilism. Mind you, this amounts to a corollary of the principle that any form of consumerism involves the exploitation of the potential for infantile behavior. So it should be no surprise that, if you want to follow a venture capitalist's money, the path will probably lead you to the man cave.

Thankful for Ligeti Fans

I must confess that I have been pleasantly surprised to have Google Analytics inform me of just how popular my report for my national site on Examiner.com on the interactive Web site for the piano music of György Ligeti was. It has been some time since I had an opportunity to write a review about technology, rather than the music being delivered by that technology. In this case I felt that I was covering a relevant part of the story that had been neglected by The New York Times, even though the Times had relegated it to a post on their ArtsBeat blog. In cases like these, the delivery technology matters as much as the content. Perhaps it matters even more. If the technology is poor, the content may as well be a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Apparently, I managed to attract the attention of a healthy chuck of readers who agree!

Bobby Jindal's "Parlor Games"

Last night the Republicans held their Lincoln Day dinner in Des Moines. Chris Good was there covering the story for ABC News. Apparently he decided to confront Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal with the same question that managed to get Florida Governor Jeb Bush to fumble: Knowing what we now know, was the decision to go to war in Iraq a good idea? Jindal dodged the question, dismissing the consideration of such hypotheses as "parlor games." In doing so, he may have earned himself poster-child status in representing our prevailing culture that seems to lives by the motto "Ignorant of history and proud of it."

Put another way, Jindal appears to assign little value to a critical question:

How did we get where we are?

Whether "where we are" is particularly good or really bad (which seems to be the case at present); we need to deal with the present with some frame of reference other than "shit happens." If Jindal's were an isolated voice that could be ignored when cooler heads prevail, then his reinforcement of our willful ignorance of history could be dismissed as a statistical outlier. Unfortunately, he is more likely right there in the center of a statistical norm; and, if, as a culture, we dismiss as a "parlor game" the need to reflect on how we got ourselves into our present mess, then it is likely that the next mess will come soon and with even greater impact.

HBO Becomes Part of its Own Story (again)

HBO seems to be running up an interesting track record when it comes from taking the news as a point of departure and then becoming the news. I suppose I was first aware of it when John Oliver ran a monologue about net neutrality that concluded by encouraging viewers to make their thoughts known to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), explaining how they could do so through the Internet. It was pretty simple, since the FCC had set of a site for collecting comments; and the viewer response to Oliver was massive enough to crash that site. More recently, The Jinx led to a revival of attempts to investigate the role of Robert Durst in several unsolved murder cases.

Last night, however, Oliver raised the stakes to an unexpected height. His show had been off the air for a couple of weeks, and he had told viewers that this would be the case. Last night we found out why: Oliver had traveled to Russia to interview Edward Snowden on the issue of government surveillance. This turned out to be a major undertaking, and the show ran about fifteen minutes longer than usual. As had been the case with net neutrality, Oliver began with an extended monologue with his personal stamp of low humor aimed at bringing awareness to admittedly complex issues. There was also a fair amount of low humor in the Snowden segment, but not enough to mask when things got serious. Oliver even persistently argued that at least some of Snowden's actions could justifiably be called irresponsible, and he even managed to milk a reluctant acknowledgement from Snowden. Nevertheless, he let Snowden say his piece about the irresponsibility of current surveillance activities; and, to his credit, Snowden gave some rather good explanations for the why and how the National Security Agency could get away with doing what they did (and are probably still doing).

I suspect that the most important result of the show was that Oliver went a long way towards undermining the efforts of our government to demonize Snowden. It is clear that Snowden will never set foot in the United States as long as he runs the risk of being tried for treason and then executed. Nevertheless, his is a major voice in any debate that takes place over the complex relationship between security and privacy; and last night he demonstrated that he is given more to calm and rational speech than to the strident rants that have become so popular in our excuse for national discourse.

The net neutrality broadcast had particular impact because it ended with an action item. Last night there was also a need for action regarding a legislative stand on the content of the Patriot Act that must be reviewed by June 1. However, Oliver did not push for a write-in campaign, because it would be more difficult in this case. Therefore, the major impact of his broadcast may have been to demonstrate to the so-called "news" networks that neither Snowden's voice nor the issues he has raised can be ignored if we are to maintain even the pretense of a free society. Unfortunately, this is a matter of considerable complexity. Perhaps Oliver's next program should discuss how our country has allowed its educational system to deteriorate to a point that we no longer have the skilled minds to take on such complexity.

Rating the Freshness of Food Purchases

I have to say that I have been relatively pleased with the alliance formed between KGO-TV (the ABC affiliate for the Bay Area) and Consumer Reports, particularly since the latter seems to have dropped the "lifetime" subscription as a reward for a donation I made many decades ago (reminding me a bit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Nevertheless, I have always been skeptical about Consumer Reports articles about food and nutrition, since they would often base their findings on attributes that different from the criteria stressed by other concerned organizations, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Therefore, I have to question the value of today's report on the quality of fresh produce at different outlets. Regardless of the criteria behind the evaluations, the entire path that brings an item of produce to a customer's shopping bag is long, involved, and totally local. Thus, I have to wonder if, when a particular store is listed in operating out of a large number of states, the resulting rating is an averaging over all of those states or the result of examining only a few (or even one) of them. Even more problematic is that the ratings may have depended in when the outlets were evaluated, since it is not hard to imagine conditions changing radically from one week (or day) to the next.

These days my biggest concerns with inventory, fresh or processed, is how decisions are made. It is not hard to imagine that the large chains now relegate all such decisions to software. They all have had problems making ends meet since the economic downturn, meaning that they have all had to downsize, meaning that they probably let go of a good deal of "expert knowledge," letting some fast-talking consultant convince them that the knowledge would be "preserved" in the software. Indeed, I think we all have cause for concern that the expertise of a human evaluator may be out of the loop for just about any purchase of food made anywhere, with the possible exception of farmers' markets. Furthermore, I suspect that Google-informed consumers have less intuitive knowledge about when the food they buy may be contaminated or just spoiled. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders whether this all amounts to a skillfully calculated plot to "reduce the surplus population!"