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.

Should Berners-Lee Testify Before Congress?

The testimony by Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple's Tim Cook at the House of Representatives probably made for good television, and there was much to be gained from subsequent analyses, particularly from sites such as BBC News. While I am no fan of those that skew the distribution of wealth to such a radical extreme, I suspect that most of our Congressional representatives may have missed out on a significant elephant in the room and how that elephant got there. While questions about work practices at all levels of the hierarchy are important, just as relevant is how this new generation of “captains of industry” got to be where they now are.

I would like to consider the possibility that all four of these gentlemen constitute the leading edge of a new generation of prospectors. I am more interested in how they came by their wealth than I am with what they are now doing with it. I propose that all four of them succeeded in “mining” a new “field” of resources that turned out to be very precious and thus very valuable. That “field” is the World Wide Web itself and its global impact on information flow.

For about two decades prior to the emergence of the World Wide Web, many research organizations came to appreciate the value of both shared data and shared software for processing data resources. That sharing was realized through the technology of computer networks. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was one of those organizations. During his time working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee saw the value of sharing within that organization; but he also realized that researchers could be even more productive if such sharing could take place across organizations. That was the motivating concept from which the World Wide Web would eventually emerge.

One of the original platforms for sharing across organizations was Usenet and the bulletin board system it supported. Simply put, researchers from different organizations were provided with “gateway” technology for both reading bulletin boards and contributing to them. The “gateway” allowed information to cross from one network to another; and the World Wide Web introduced new protocols for communication that did not have to take such gateways explicitly into account.

Fun fact: The very first unsolicited advertising, better known as “spam,” was distributed through Usenet before the World Wide Web had come up to speed. The fact is that dedicated researchers, such as Berners-Lee (and, for that matter, myself), seemed to take it for granted that sharing information could only be for the good. However, by the time the Internet as we know it was enabled, a new generation of those prospectors was beginning to emerge. They were more interested in the growth of capital, rather than the growth of collective knowledge. Four of those prospectors that “struck it rich” in a big (gargantuan?) way were called to account by our Congress yesterday.

One way of viewing this history is through that old guns-don’t-kill-people-people-kill-people cliché. One of the side effects of this new generation of prospecting was a growing myopia where issues of consequences were concerned. The prevailing motto was, “If you build it, they will come.” There was little concern over who “they” were or what they would do after they arrived. This leads me to wonder whether or not that myopia can be traced back to Berners-Lee himself. Nothing would please me more than to see him testifying before a Congressional committee and being confronted with that question of myopia.

Mind you, I suspect that anything Berners-Lee would say today would amount to little more than a historical perspective that is beyond the ken of those that have wealth and power. Nevertheless, the extent to which the very concept of information is now being undermined, simply because no one ever really bothered to view deceptive information (otherwise known as “fake news”) as a problem, amounts to a serious crisis situation. Ironically, I used to write about a book that took on the question of how serious crises should be addressed.

The title of the book was Thinking in Time, written by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May. It amounts to a collection of case studies concerning Presidential decision-making. When I used to write about this book, I summarized its “punch line” as a recommendation that any crisis situation should be addressed through two fundamental questions:

1. How did we get into this mess?
2. If we take this particular action, what will the consequences be?

In that context, I feel that the Congress might benefit from what Berners-Lee might have to say when it comes to answering the first of those questions!

Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Tenney’s Effort to Move from Theory to Practice

The ninth chapter of From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, seems to be the second-longest in the book: “Hierarchical Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music: A Metric Space Model (with Larry Polansky).” This was written in 1978 and was subsequently published by the Journal of Music Theory in 1980. It basically involves first distilling a hypothesis out of the theoretical speculations that first emerged in Tenney’s “Meta + Hodos” Master’s thesis and then testing the hypothesis by implementing its content in a computer analysis program, which was written by Polansky and executed on input from three scores of twentieth-century music compositions.

Before discussing the model, the hypothesis behind the model, and the testing of the hypothesis, however, I want to call attention to a published review of “Meta + Hodos.” This took place after “Meta + Hodos” itself was published as a monograph by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research in 1964. The Spring 1966 issue of the Journal of Music Theory published a review of the monograph by A. Wayne Slawson, which was pretty devastating.

Slawson provided the reader with a paragraph explaining the the “birth” of Gestalt psychology as a result of observations made by Max Wertheimer in 1912. However, Slawson then accused Wertheimer and his colleagues of oversimplifying the theory they developed, concluding that “the Gestalt movement failed to go beyond a particularly apt and persuasive presentation of new questions.” This was the stick he used to subject “Meta + Hodos” to a rather merciless beating.

Thus Tenney’s effort to develop a model that could then be realized through software-based testing amounts to a response to Slawson’s review. The fact is that this was a time when painfully little was known about the “wetware” of a brain embedded in the larger complex system of the human body. Thus, even a precept as straightforward as Donald O. Hebb’s famous postulate that “neurons that fire together wire together” could not be tested in the absence of technology for observing the “wiring.” One of the reason’s that I have been citing the work of Gerald Edelman is that he recognized that his own theory of perceptual categorization could not be tested through direct observation; so, as an alternative, his team developed a computer-based simulation model of Hebb’s “wiring” process. Tenney’s model, on the other hand, was based on an attempt to turn the theoretical speculations of “Meta + Hodos” (a product of the theoretical speculations of Gestalt psychology) into practice.

At this point I feel it is important to note that the term “metric space” that appears in the title is never explicitly invoked in the article’s text. Nevertheless, there is an implicit sense of “distance” that Tenney seeks to apply to his “temporal gestalt-units” (TGs), focusing primarily on those constructs captured by the terms “element,” “clang,” and “sequence.” The model requires a quantitative representation of the amount of difference that distinguishes two TGs. A metric space is a topological construct that defines the concept of distance in terms of four criteria:

1. The distance from a point to itself is zero.
2. The distance between two distinct points is a positive number.
3. The distance from point A to point B is the same as the distance from point B to point A.
4. For any point C, the distance from A to B is less than or equal to the sum of the distance from A to C plus the distance from C to B.

(That last criterion is sometimes called the “triangle rule” because the length of the hypotenuse is always shorter than the sum of the lengths of the other two sides of a triangle.)

As we liked to say as freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, these properties were “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.” However, those of us who went on to major in mathematics discovered that the most interesting insights were those involving counterexamples to the constraints of those criteria. Every math major knew about the book Counterexamples in Analysis by Bernard R. Gelbaum and John M. H. Olmsted and the critical role it played when trying to solve homework problems. So, in the interest of seeking out counterexamples, it is important to determine whether or not the concept of distance can actually be applied to comparing two TGs.

Let’s start with something simple. Imagine music as it is printed on score pages. Imagine, then, that you take a pencil and draw circles around groups of notes that you wish to identify as TGs. You can then take a ruler and measure distances between TGs on the score page. Even if those distances are somewhat rough (since a TG is not a simple point on the page), it is easy to see how the four distance criteria are satisfied.

However, as we all know, the marks on the score pages do not constitute the music. The music only exists through the experience of listening to a performance, even if that performance involves playing a recording. I would now suggest that the time-consciousness required for such listening involves awareness of differences that do not necessarily satisfy the distance criteria.

To make my point, I need to appeal to the reader’s imagination. Think of a flowing stream. Now, imagine that every point along that stream can be established as a fixed position (through a very precise measurement of latitude and longitude, for example). Suppose, now, that “distance” is not measured by difference in latitude and longitude but in the amount of time it takes a reference object, such as a fish, to swim from one point to another. By virtue of the flow of the river, the third property of a distance metric is violated because swimming “downstream” takes less time than swimming “upstream,” even though the beginning and ending points are fixed! I would argue that the passing of time is like the flowing of that stream and that Tenney’s model, while it looks good on paper (such as score pages), does not adequately capture the phenomenology of difference in a situation requiring the dynamic nature of time-consciousness.

After I first performed this exercise, I realized that I had been about as merciless in approaching Tenney’s work as Slawson had been. The reason is that the model that provided Tenney’s point of departure was required a quantitative foundation based on the topological properties of distance. Even the hypothesis being tested in his article, involving relationships among elements, clangs, and sequences, had been undermined in the absence of how those relationships could be represented quantitatively; and, if the hypothesis was no longer sound, then testing it was out of the question.

Once again I find myself thinking about the problems with Tenney being ahead of his time in terms of the tools available for his efforts. This particular paper predates the earliest efforts that would eventually lead to MIDI. For all of its shortcomings, MIDI provided a symbol representation that could capture not only marks on score pages but also the time-dependent factors inherent in any performance involving the interpretation of those marks. As a result of MIDI representations, it has been possible to investigate structural questions that go beyond music notation and enter the realm of time-dependent interpretations of the notation. It is in those interpretations that we need to seek out patterns and make sense of both what they are and why they are, and it is a pity that Tenney did not have such tools at his disposal when he first set off down his phenomenological path of inquiry.

Naive and Sentimental Musical Sensemaking

Readers who have followed this site for some time know that I have a tendency to fall back on the noun “sensemaking” when talking about the nature of listening to music. While this word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (although the hyphenated version “sense-making” is), it had been adopted by several of my former research colleagues to address the rising problem of being able to extract “useful meaning” from very large bodies of data. The Oxford definition of the hyphenated version does little more than echo the two component words; but, if we look back about half a century, we find that Friedrich Hayek was dealing with the same issue when addressing sensory data, rather than databases. The term he introduced was “sensory order,” the biological drive to find order in what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals.

from the Amazon.com Web page for Comparing Notes

With that as context, I found it hard to resist reading the book Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music by Adam Ockelford. Ockelford is Professor of Music at Roehampton University (in England). He also directs the university’s Applied Music Research Centre. He occasionally makes reference to his doctoral studies in music, suggesting that he got his advanced degree in music. However, much of his research has involved the acquisition of musical skills among young people with sensory or cognitive disadvantages. His practices thus keep one foot in music and the other in psychology.

That sort of background should, by all rights, have made this book both fascinating and valuable reading. For my part, however, I was profoundly dissatisfied; and that dissatisfaction can be traced back to the second word of Ockelford’s title. At the end of the day, he has little to say about anything other than those marks on paper that all practicing musicians are expected to be able to decode. What that as his foundation, he dwells on that tiresome question of what music actually is, how it “works” (whatever that means), and, ultimately, how we “make sense” when it comes to either performing the music or listening to it. Only at the beginning of his final chapter does he cite sociomusicologist Christopher Small’s contention that music is not some kind of “thing” but, rather, “an activity, something that people do.”

My decision to devote personal time to writing about music owes much to my ability to spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which is only about half a dozen blocks from where I was living. Through my own experiences in higher education, I have come to a naive but probably useful conclusion about where who learns what. In universities we learn about theories about music; in conservatories we learn about how music is practiced.

Universities occupy their curricula with things, to such an extent that one might almost say that education can be reduced to a knapsack of noun phrases. Ockelford’s noun phrases come from a wide variety of sources, almost all of which have to do with academic publications that may or may not signify to anyone beyond other academics. The grammatical infrastructure of the conservatory education, on the other hand, is build on verb phrases. One emerges (hopefully) with refined skills for doing, often without necessarily verbalizing (or, for that matter thinking about) what one is doing.

In his academic context it is understandable that Ockelford cannot get his head out of all those notes on staff paper. He has some clever ideas (which he calls his “zygonic conjecture”) about a foundation based on replications and transformations of patterns; but these are just familiar concepts dressed up in a new notation. As a doctoral student I was taking the same sort of approach to music in my thesis, except that my patterns were modules of computer code and the transformations resulted from parameters passed to those modules.

As a result of observing master classes at SFCM, I came to appreciate just how limited my perspective had been. Apparently, Ockelford has yet to encounter that revelation. Nevertheless, to be fair, shifting attention from nouns to verbs is no easy matter. Even the very idea of how one describes grammar for verbs has major qualitative differences from the almost computer-like formality of noun grammar. However, Ockelford never seems to accept that sensemaking cannot be anything other than an ongoing process. Like sound itself, if you try to freeze it in a single moment of time, it all vanishes.

When I read Ockelford’s title, I approached his book in the hope that someone had finally come up with, if not an underlying theory, at least a usable roadmap for negotiating the complexities of verb-based thinking. Instead, I encountered that very noun-based song-and-dance that I have been trying to escape for at least a decade. My guess is that those music-makers who really “get” the verb-based activity of their work are too occupied with the work itself to waste any time theorizing about it.

The Bleeding Edge: 7/17/2017

Today is a “lucky seven” day, since the digit seven appears in the date, month, and year. Things being what they are, it is the second of three occasions this month, after which we shall have to wait ten years for the next round. Out on the bleeding edge, good fortune has come with an increase in concert-going opportunities. Several of these have already been reported, including the return of the Friction Quartet to the Old First Concerts series, the second (of two) MicroFest North events at the Center for New Music, the free Touch the Gear expo that will precede the sixteenth annual Outsound New Music Summit, and the 75 Dollar Bill concert at The Lab. Remaining events of interest will, for the most part, occur earlier in the week as follows:

Wednesday, July 19, 8 p.m., Peacock Lounge: The Peacock Lounge continues to host the reincarnation of what had been the Monthly Experimental Music Showcase at Second Act in the Haight. The program continues to follow the four-set format. This month’s performers will be as follows:

1. Ralph White will accompany his own vocal work on six-string (Texas style) banjo, violin, accordion, and chain-draped kalimba.
2. Chris Cooper and Jess Goddard will perform as the Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase duo.
3. Raub Roy will continue his electronic pursuits performing as Scy1e.
4. RTD3 decodes as Ron Tom Doug Trio, referring to trombonist Ron Heglin, who also contributes electronically enhanced vocalizing, Tom Nunn playing on his invented instruments, and cellist Doug Carroll, who also works with electronic enhancements.

The Peacock Lounge is located in the Lower Haight at 552 Haight Street. Doors will open at 7:45 p.m. Admission will be $5 and will be restricted to those age 21 or older.

Thursday, July 20, 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 23, 2 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA): As part of its Global Sounds on Screen series, YBCA will present a selection of short films on the evolution and formation of what came to be called free jazz. The program will be guest curated by Brian Belovarac and will focus on the New York-based ESP-Disk label:

ESP-Disk poster courtesy of YBCA

While Atlantic Records is rightfully acknowledged for having released Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet in September of 1961, ESP provided a much broader account of the new movement, which included groundbreaking records by artists such as Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Sun Ra. It also offered live recordings of historically-significant predecessors of the free jazz movement; and, when I was writing for Examiner.com, I devoted attention to two major reissues of Bud Powell performances at Birdland in 1953 and in Paris in 1961, respectively. Belovarac has prepared a program of five short films covering several of the ESP projects, including one about The Fugs, which was less involved with free jazz and more interested in subverting prevailing trends in both folk and rock music.

This event with take place in the YBCA Screening Room. YBCA is located at 701 Mission Street on the southwest corner of Third Street. Regular admission will be $10 with a $9 rate for students, seniors, and teachers. Tickets may be purchased at the Box Office, which is open when YBCA is open, Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets may be purchased by phone by calling 415-978-2787. Finally, online purchased may be made at separate event pages for the Thursday and Sunday screenings.

Thursday, July 20, 8 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery: This week’s installment of the Luggage Store Creative Series will be a two-set evening with an emphasis on signal processing rendered as artistic expression. The first set will present the Ear Spray trio, which features Ann O’Rourke combining percussion work with processed vocals and live-processed video samples. She will be joined on percussion by Mark Pino with additional electronics work from Carlos Jennings. Pino will then join Mika Pontecorvo for a project entitled Alien Call Signs with technical roots in both complex adaptive systems and generative design architectures. Pontecorvo will handle digital and analog electronics, while Pino will shift over to waterphone. They will be joined by Adriane Pontecorvo on cello. There will also be some solo pieces, also involving complex adaptive systems, played by RiotNozzle, who will then do some duo work with Pontecorvo. The Luggage Store Gallery is at 1007 Market Street, directly across from the Golden Gate Theatre at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. Admission for this performance will be on a sliding scale between $6 and $15.

Zuckerberg Goes Head-to-Head with Aristotle

One of my favorite topics, outside of the domain of music, on this site has been Max Weber’s proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. My own effort to keep loss of meaning at bay has involved a concerted effort to read texts that require sustained cogitation, rather than simple “consumption” based on a “bottom line.” This is the sort of reading that sticks with you long after you put the book or article down; and experience has taught me that it often involves interaction with the physical medium (not only annotation but also leafing back and forth through the pages to recall what one thinks one has previously read). Thus, it is not reading that fares very well on a computer screen, whether we are talking about a monitor or a desk or the surface of a tablet.

Not too long ago I posted a “progress report” on my efforts to work my way through the “Nicomachean Ethics” of Aristotle. I am still at it, but I have just embarked on a domain that has already started my reflecting on the fact that I have begun to spend more time on Facebook since the demise of Examiner.com. It turns out that Aristotle devotes two entire books (the eighth and ninth) of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to friendship; and in the revised Oxford translation edited by Jonathan Barnes and published by Princeton University Press (in the Bollingen Series), this comes to about 27 pages. In other words there is a lot more to friendship than creating a social network by clicking a Friend button!

To some extent I might be accused of trivializing Facebook by writing that last sentence. However, I prefer to look through the other end of the telescope: By its very nature, friendship is a highly complicated dimension of human interaction that, by its very approach to interface, has been trivialized by Facebook to a degree that the noun has been almost entirely stripped of meaning. This may seem like an extreme position to make over a rather innocuous piece of software. However, it is basically yet another instance of a precept expressed by H. L. Mencken that I cannot cite too often:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It is through clarity and simplicity that Facebook has managed to build up such a large user community, but size signifies only in matters of marketing rather than the complexities of social interaction that occupied so much of Aristotle’s thought. One might almost argue that a Presidential election came down to choosing between a candidate that was not afraid to confront complexity and one that had a clear and simple answer for everything without caring very much whether or not that answer would be effective if put into practice.

Nevertheless the nature of meaning has not yet been entirely lost. The good news is that there is still a body of individuals out there, however small their numbers may be, that are not afraid of big books and complex arguments that do not always result in easy resolutions. We may have to keep a low profile for the next four years; but, as long as we continue to express ourselves through media that exceed the prevailing attention span, we have a fighting chance of keeping at our business. We just have to view that low profile as a safety measure, rather than a sign of weakness.

Diane Ravitch Offers More Lessons that Those in Power will Willfully Ignore

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a particularly valuable article by Diane Ravitch entitled "Solving the Mystery of the Schools." On the surface it is a review of two books analyzing two projects to improve the quality of education in our country. The first book is about throwing money (much of it from Mark Zuckerberg) and rock-star enthusiasm (from Newark Mayor Cory Booker) at the Newark school system. The problem is that those with wealth and power saw no reason to bring those with hands-on experience in hands-on education into the planning meetings; so, as might be expected, the book is a chronicle of high hopes and dismal failure. This is coupled by a second book about more active classroom involvement by those knowing what they are doing, bringing about any number of positive results but failing to translate those results into better numbers on standardized tests. Taken together, these books provide object lessons about how ignorance in policy-making always seems to trump wisdom in practice.

The second book actually tries to diagnose this pathological precept. Ravitch quotes the author, Kristina Rizga on this matter:

Some of the most important things that matter in a quality education—critical thinking, intrinsic motivation, resilience, self-management, resourcefulness, and relationship skills—exist in the realms that can’t be easily measured by statistical measures and computer algorithms, but they can be detected by teachers using human judgment. America’s business-inspired obsession with prioritizing “metrics” in a complex world that deals with the development of individual minds has become the primary cause of mediocrity in American schools.

In other words our educational system is as flawed as our health care for exactly the same reason. Both are dominated by market-based thinking according to which each is to be viewed as an industry that needs to be efficiently managed for the sake of turning a lucrative profit. Never mind that only "the one percent of the one percent" ever really benefit from such thinking. If they are rich, then they must be doing the right thing.

This then takes us to Ravitch's own punch line, which she reserves for her final sentence:

As a society, we should be ashamed that so many children are immersed in poverty and violence every day of their lives.

The real shame is that we have entrusted that responsibility for "human judgment" to those whose only achievement is the creation of wealth. Because nothing else matters, we allow poverty to flourish at greater and greater levels as a corollary to the widening distribution of wealth. Is it any wonder that violence follows poverty as night follows the day? Perhaps this is what "the one percent of the one percent" actually want. Perhaps they figure that such a corollary of violence will eventually lead to poverty self-destructing, after which the super-rich can live in the happiness of their wealth without feeling guilty about any harsh realities. The only question they seem to have overlooked is whether or not they will be able to sustain themselves in such a world. Unfortunately, the rest of us will not be around to witness their encounter with that revelation.

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!"

The Many Faces of Martyrdom

Last Friday I felt it necessary to recognize BBC World Service Radio as one of the few sources willing to acknowledge the complex relationship between free speech and hate speech. In the wake of all of the demonstrations that took place over the weekend (including here in my home town of San Francisco), I have to say that the cool voice of BBC reason seems to have taken a permanent back seat to righteous indignation. However, I use that adjective "righteous" precisely for its religious connotations.

Several sources have now shown an interview with one of the Charlie Hebdo casualties in which he said explicitly that he would not be surprised if he ended up dying as a consequence of his determination to exercise free speech in the cause of biting satire. Had such words been uttered by a Muslim fundamentalist, we would dismiss it as a fanatical embrace of martyrdom; but is Charlie Hebdo any the less fanatical just because it is a secular publication that, for all intents and purposes, lives by the creed that nothing is sacred, whether it involves religious, governmental, or any other establishments? The amount of blood spilled as a consequence of the exercise of free speech by Charlie Hebdo is relatively small in comparison with the lives lost on 9/11, but both incidents seem to share a paralysis of reason on the part of those determined to write analysis in the wake of the catastrophic turn of events. Actually, when one takes into account the many dimensions of mindlessness induced by not only the Internet but also a mass media industry dominated more by consumerism than by any drive to inform, it would be fair to say that paralysis set in a long time ago. It just takes mass tragedies to bring it into the foreground, where, as in Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, we have our official rites of mourning before going back to business (perhaps that should be capitalized) as usual.

A Possible Insight from Genetics

The headline for an article by Helen Briggs, Health Editor for the BBC News Web site reads:

Same genes 'drive maths and reading ability'

In the body of the article, Briggs makes it clear that these results are far from conclusive. Nevertheless, they may provide a way for us to refine the questions we ask, even if the answers have yet to be resolved.

One way of looking at the results is to ask where there is commonality between the ability to read and reason with text and the ability to do the same with mathematics. Several years ago I did some tutoring; and I realized that, for this particular student, an equation was just a string a symbols whose only structure lay in the left-to-right ordering. The idea that it was necessary to "parse" the equation as part of understanding it (and, therefore, solving it) seemed to be absent. In a similar respect reading with understanding requires getting beyond the string of words to the recognition of how that string is structured.

Gerald Edelman recognized that there was a "cognitive leap" that had to be taken between the ability to identify objects and the ability to identify structural relationships among those objects. He called the first stage "perceptual categorization" and the second "presyntax." The idea that there may be genes associated with the capacity for presyntax suggests that we may also wish to ask whether or not there are also brain regions with a similar association. At the very least, scientists should be thinking about how to design experiments to explore this matter in greater depth. After all, the capacity for reading the symbols of text and mathematics should also apply to reading music notation!

Does it Really Make Sense to Talk about the "Semantics" of Music?

Every now and then I browse through past posts to this site to see whether or not some of the things I have written in the past still have some validity and whether or not there are some that would be better off "forgotten" (since that particular action now seems to be of great interest to the European Union). I discovered that it has been a little less than a year since I wrote a post entitled "Does it Really Make Sense to Talk about the 'Syntax' of Music?" I encountered it as a result of the time I am currently putting into reading John A. Sloboda's The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music, where I recently encountered the following observation:

Musical semantics is of a similar type to poetic semantics. This does not mean that either subject is necessarily opaque to scientific understanding, but that we may be mistaken to seek for musical meanings in the same way as psychologists have so far attempted to elucidate the semantics of normal speech.

This reminded me that any such question that I pose about syntax may also be asked about semantics.

My guess is that many readers will nod enthusiastically at the first sentence in that quote. Certainly, there are differences in how we try to grasp the semantics of:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

as opposed to (for example):

If you are going by the pharmacy, can you pick up my prescription?

I would probably even suggest that the distinction goes beyond John L. Austin's speech act theory and probably just as far beyond the efforts of Jürgen Habermas to generalize Austin's efforts into a "theory of communicative action." Indeed, rather than raising the question about semantics, we may do well to ask the broader question of whether or not the acts of making music can be taken as instances of such "communicative action." About three years ago I tried to take on this issue on my national site for Examiner.com with an article entitled "Acting to communicate and communicating to act." Looking back on that article, however, I realize that, at that time, I was writing about how musicians communicate among themselves when engaged in such acts of making music, rather than any question about whether or not the music itself communicates.

One way to approach this broader question is through what has become my favorite joke about John Cage:

Q: Mr. Cage, what is your composition 4'33" about?
A: Well, it is about four minutes and thirty-three seconds long.

This is one of those cases where a clever play on words may home in on "ground truth" more effectively than all the resources of just about any approach to what we would call "music theory." Part of that ground truth may have to do with the fact that, while it may make sense to talk about there being some kind of "engagement" between performers and their audience, the nature of that engagement is too far removed from the axiomatic foundations of Habermas' theory to be considered as a "communcative action;" and the same may be said of the relationship between a poet and his/her reader or listener.

Sloboda's sentence thus manages to weasel out of a difficult situation while, at the same time, homing in (perhaps inadvertently) on a fundamental principle of the act of making music. I tend to agree that studying that principle and its implications is not "necessarily opaque to scientific understanding." However, I would prefer to identify "scientific understanding" with "consistent reasoning," rather than identifying it merely with disciplined data collection and interpretation. If I were pressed to say more about the nature of such reasoning, I would, at least at the present time, follow the advice of Ludwig Wittgenstein and "pass over" that matter "in silence." In that silence, however, my mind will be churning over the related questions in the hope that, eventually, I can break that silence with at least a modicum of confidence.

Inside the Emergency Room

The latest issue of The New York Review contains an interesting exchange of letters following up on Arnold Relman's February 6 article "On Breaking One's Neck." This was a fascinating account of a highly experienced doctor describing his own treatment for a serious condition. The exchange was prompted by a letter from a doctor in Puerto Rico asking whether or not Relman's treatment would have been different had he himself not been a famous doctor. Relman replied that did not not think his emergency room treatment would have been any different. He wrote the following:

In the emergency room of a world-class hospital, like the Massachusetts General Hospital, the staff are trained to deal efficiently with every dire emergency. All resources are mobilized to save a life, regardless of the patient’s identity and usually with little or no need for personal communication between doctor and patient.

While this is probably true, it is important to remember that not all hospitals are such "world-class" institutions. Indeed, when my wife was recently admitted to an emergency room, I discovered that all operations there were outsourced. The hospital itself had nothing to do with what went on in the emergency room other than choosing to engage a third-party company to handle those matters.

Perhaps the most important part of Relman's article was his analysis of the nature of communication taking place at all stages of his treatment, including his admission to the emergency room; and I have to wonder whether, in an organization as complex as a hospital, outsourcing imposes a barrier to communication that had not been present when the hospital itself was responsible for all operations.

Leonard Bernstein: Champion of the Middle-brow?

I have no desire to read all 606 pages of The Leonard Bernstein Letters, no matter how good a job Nigel Simeone did as editor. I figure that reading Robert Gottlieb's account of the book for The New York Review has informed me to a level of satisfaction that does not need to be further advanced. I rather like Gottlieb's dispassionate approach, providing background material when it was necessary and being "frank and open" about many of the warts without getting overly judgmental about any of them.

For better or worse, however, I realize that my own opinions of Bernstein have been shaped, at least in part, by the time I have put into reading Amiria Baraka (writing as LeRoi Jones) writing about jazz. If was from reading Baraka that I confronted that hard truth that not everyone who pays to attend a performance of music is necessarily committed to actually listening (in Igor Stravinsky's sense of that word) to that performance. For Baraka such lackadaisical audiences were simply symptoms of a "culture of middle-brow thinking." Among the middle-brow, Bernstein was the ultimate source of knowledge of the concert repertoire. I have even known music critics capable of writing accounts of concerts that I have felt were worth reading who still, perhaps out of reflex, regard Bernstein as the ultimate authority when it comes to bringing a better understanding of music to the general public.

From my point of view, I recognize that he could labor long and hard to simplify the complex. Unfortunately, there are too many situations when he achieved that goal through distortions that run the gamut from simply confusing to creating dangerously false impressions. The good news is that he tended to focus on topics that he figured would "sell" to the general public. One positive result is thus than Arnold Schoenberg was spared his distortions (as, for that matter, was Thelonious Monk). On the other hand I shall always remember when he decided it was time to explain what was happening to popular music in the wake of The Beatles and eventually came to the conclusion that the epitome of how things had changed could be found in the music of Janis Ian!

I would now like to skate out on some thin ice and suggest that Bernstein could thrive in New York because so many New Yorkers were eager to gobble up the stuff he was dishing out. Baraka was obviously not one of them. Indeed, among those who took teaching very seriously, I get the impression from available biographical material that Lennie Tristano knew the limitations of Bernstein' superficial capacity for perception. One consequence is that, for some time, if you wanted to go to Lincoln Center to inform yourself on how a piece of music ticked, you would learn more from watching the choreography of George Balanchine at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) than you would from buying a ticket to get into Avery Fisher Hall. Those were days when it seemed as if Chicago had better taste in conductors.

Fortunately, the New York Philharmonic now has Alan Gilbert, and life seems to have become more interesting. I am left wondering, however, if Bernstein would ever have figured out what to make of a composer like Magnus Lindberg. My guess is that Lindberg would have been too far from Bernstein's comfort zone; but in that distance Lindberg would have enjoyed the company of Frank Zappa, Edgard Varèse, and John Cage!

Getting Closer to a Time-Based Understanding of the Brain

In my most recent Examiner.com article in which I continue to try to puzzle out the complex relationships among the brain, the mind that emerges from brain behavior, and the responses to music by both brain and mind, I cited Temple Grandin's "very jaundiced view of the rush to use scanning and imaging technology to observe what the brain is doing." One of the reasons I am so supportive of her position is that I believe strongly that we cannot talk about the "brain on music" (to use that somewhat trivializing phrase of Daniel J. Levitin) without taking time-consciousness into account. However, at the time that Grandin made her observation in her recent book, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, imaging technology had been confined to snapshots separated by significantly long intervals of time.

If I am to believe Elisabeth Armstrong Moore's post yesterday afternoon to her Cutting Edge blog on CNET, things may be changing. Here is the critical sentence (with hyperlinks) from her article:

So researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Institute of Technology and Advanced Biomedical Imaging at the University of Chieti in Italy are turning to faster technology called magnetoencephalography (MEG) to sample neural activity every 50 milliseconds.

The operative word in that sentence is "activity." By taking those "snapshots" with a finer degree of resolution, we should begin to develop better models of what the brain does, rather than confining our interpretations to currently crude efforts to model the brain in terms of noun-based regions.

This technology is in its infancy; but, for those of us trying to understand not only the nature of mind itself but also the (probably complex) relationship between mind and music, it has the potential to revolutionize the directions of future research.

Putting "Gun Guys" in Perspective

One of the books that David Cole reviews in his article, "Facing the Real Gun Problem," in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum. The portion of his review addressing this book begins with Baum's litany of stereotypes:

Newspaper editorialists called gun owners “a ridiculous minority of airheads,” “a handful of middle-age fat guys with popguns,” and “hicksville cowboys” with “macho” hang-ups. For Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, gun guys were “bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Mark Morford of SF Gate called female shooters “bored, under-educated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin’ suburban white women from lost Midwestern towns with names like Frankenmuth.”

However, this builds up to a punch line which really caught my attention:

It was impossible to imagine getting away with such cruel dismissals of, say, blacks or gays, yet among a certain set, backhanding gun owners was good sport, even righteous.

In other words, Baum felt it necessary to make is clear that those interested in gun control will only negotiate with gun owners once those gun owners feel they are no longer an object of discrimination that may even count for bigotry. Having endured such discrimination as a Jew (a religious upbringing I share with Baum), I appreciate his point, which we can all still observe in the intransigent stance that Israel takes toward efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East. I would even go so far as to suggest that the National Rifle Association goes to great lengths to aggravate that sense of discrimination, perhaps even using the same techniques that one could find among extreme Zionists, particularly in the early days of Jewish settlement in Israel.

There is no simple solution to draw from this argument. One can only appreciate the complexity of the situation. That includes the complexity of what it will take for either side to take a first step towards closing this "discrimination gap."

From the Figurative to the Literal

As recently as this past January, I was using the phrase "arms race" with respect to malware in the metaphorical sense that Udi Manber had originally intended. However, a special report for Reuters by Joseph Menn, which was released last Friday, throws a new light on the current state of play in cyberwarfare. The development of malware has now become a literal arms race. Unfortunately, while the original arms race of the Cold War involved a "coevolutionary" link between two parties, the United States and the Soviet Union, the "ecology" of malware development has become far more complex, perhaps to the point that no one has any reliable estimate of just how many "runners" are participating in a race that, for all intents and purposes, is no longer purely metaphorical.

On the Pornography of Bogus Science

Alissa Quart has a wonderful op-ed piece in today's edition of The New York Times. The title is "Neuroscience: Under Attack." The crux of the title is that the study of neuroscience by qualified and competent practitioners is being undermined by writers to peddle their wares to pop culture and therefore do not even deserve the be called journalists in any professional sense of that term. Quart is not shy about naming names: Naomi Wolf for Vagina, Chris Mooney for The Republican Brain, Jonah Lehrer for Imagine: How Creativity Works, and, of course, Malcolm Gladwell, the undisputed master of drawing unwarranted conclusions from mountains of anecdotal data.

I particularly like the way Quart has assigned a label to this particular genre of writing about neuroscience. She calls is "brain porn." She even has a nice one-sentence characterization of the category:

Another way of saying this is that bogus science gives vague, undisciplined thinking the look of seriousness and truth.

Mind you, Stephen Colbert already gave us the noun "truthiness;" but I much prefer the pornographic connotation.

If Quart had been given more column inches, however, she might have point out that neuroscience was hardly the first scientific discipline to be so undermined. Think of all the ways in which genome research got distorted into equally distorted speculations about genes far too bogus to be dignified with the label "hypothesis." I was beginning to think that Richard Lewontin would have to spend the rest of his life straightening out the misconceptions of those searching for a "gene for creativity," a "gene for homosexuality," and (most recently and perhaps most chilling) a "Jewish gene."

I recently read a paper with the fascinating title "When the Brain Plays Music: Auditory—Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Production." It was a review paper. Review papers are not for casual readers. Indeed, back when I was involved with more specific projects, I used to hate them because they were too broad for the narrowly-focused goals I was trying to pursue. These days I can take things at a more leisurely pace, which means I can be patient with plodding through a review paper; and, as readers of this site know, I was rewarded with some fascinating insights into what we now know about how the brain deals with such matters as rhythm. It is a perfect example of a question to which there is no simple answer but which there are valuable insights for those willing to live with the complexity.

Quart is one of those who appreciates when complexity is necessary. She probably also recognizes that those who can manage complexity are in a very small minority. My fear is that the minority is so small that, in the brutality of social Darwinism, it may have lost its survival value.

Security and Offense

It goes without saying that Innocence of Muslims is more than just an “anti-Islam film,” the rather neutral description used this morning by Associated Press writer Hrvoje Hranjski in a report with the headline “US embassies step up security after Libya attack.” It is a cleverly conceived and executed project that, thus far at least, has been successful at keeping all of its production team anonymous (at least according to the current version of its Wikipedia page). While it was given a private screening last June in Los Angeles, primary distribution has been through YouTube. As a result, Muslims around the world have come to recognize it as an “American product;” and, to make matters worse, the film has been promoted by Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who established his own fifteen minutes of fame by making a public show out of burning copies of the Quran.

As a result, the film has an American imprimatur, regardless of whether or not any Americans were explicitly involved in its production or distribution. (Anyone can upload to YouTube from any country.) In this context the State Department should have been prepared for hostile reactions in countries that have a substantial number of Muslims in the population. Unfortunately, the essence of the reaction turned out to be the promotion of freedom of speech as an American value.

The obvious question is whether or not Innocence of Muslims constitutes an act of hate speech. If we are willing to draw the line between hate speech and other acts protected by freedom of speech, could we not at least have issued a statement in traditionally neutral State Department language saying that we would investigate whether either the film or its explicit promoters (such as Pastor Jones) could be prosecuted for hate speech under American law? Even if the investigation went no further than determining whether or not Jones was indictable, it would have sent a signal to the international Muslim community that we recognized the offense and would try to “make it right.”

Mind you, this not a matter of disowning freedom of speech. It is just an explicit recognition of hate speech as a separate category. At least our government has the good sense to avoid the extremist rhetoric of Mitt Romney (as reported by Holly Bailey):

"It's a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values," Romney told reporters. "It's never too early for the U.S. government to condemn attacks on Americans and defend our values.… When our grounds are being attacked, being breached, the first response of the United States must be outrage."

Unlike Romney, our own position at least recognized that there were values other than our own. Nevertheless, we were at least perceived as prioritizing freedom of speech without first deliberating over whether or not, under American law, this was really a “freedom of speech case.” This narrow sense of values ended up costing the lives of four Americans in Libya, one of whom was an ambassador with a comprehensive understanding of conditions there.

Meanwhile, as owner of YouTube, Google has now blocked access to Innocence of Muslims. It is not often that I have an opportunity to assert that Google is showing better sense than the United States Government. (Usually I argue to the contrary.) However, this case definitely serves as a significant exception.