You Can’t Heal What You Can’t Diagnose

I feel a bit sorry for mayors and governors currently trying to deal with a growing pandemic that has nothing to do with medicine. Rather, it is the pandemic of outrage aimed at a prevailing social context that is more obsessed with economic value, rather than the productivity and well-being of the overall population. The outrage may have been triggered by what appears to be deliberate brutality motivated by racism, but that trigger may be part of a larger context in which the very idea of a healthy society has gone by the wayside. I would like to suggest that there are two key aspects of this malady, which are unlikely to be addressed under the current conditions of governance.

One of these is poverty. When one considers how much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the one percent of the one percent, it should be no surprise at the intimidating magnitude of the number of those than cannot earn a wage sufficient to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Indeed, wealth resides with those that do not have to worry about those three factors. To them productivity is simply a matter of manipulating instruments whose only design is to transform wealth into more wealth. Associating productivity with any particular “product” is irrelevant when the health of an enterprise is measured only by the value of the stock it issues on a major exchange. Until attention is redirected towards both productive workers and satisfied consumers, those that are not part of the one percent of the one percent will be ignored by any excuse for a social contract.

The other aspect is health; and, to some extent, it is related to the circumstances behind poverty and the consequences of those circumstances. During my lifetime I have observed the very idea of health care devolve from a public service to a network of private enterprises, all of which prioritize positions on stock exchanges over the effectiveness of all levels of practitioners and the effective treatment of those served by those practitioners. In other words health care, by virtue of having been industrialized, has become yet another puppet whose strings are pulled by the one percent of the one percent.

The idea of a social contract was originally conceived as a model for the relationship between the individual and the state. However, similar contracts must exist between an individual and those organizations with which that individual must interact. Interaction may involve provisions, employment, or ongoing relationships, such as health maintenance rather than treating maladies after they arise. For the one percent of the one percent, however, any instance of a social contract is nothing other than a fiction of convenience that will “keep the outsiders in their place.” Until countries around the world develop and maintain more equitable approaches to the management of wealth and health, those “outsiders” will continue to wallow in discontent. That discontent will continue to lead to frustration, that frustration will lead to pots that cause damage when they boil over too energetically.

The Resurrection of HP Will Not Be Televised

I just finished Stephen Shankland’s CNET report of his interview with Ron Coughlin, who runs the Personal Systems Group at HP, the computer and printer business that split off from Hewlett-Packard in 2015. Coughlin believes that personal computers are still a hot item and that HP is bringing a plethora of innovations to that market. He may be right, but his optimism does not necessarily provide grounds for feeling bullish about HP.

The problem is one of a legacy that goes all the way back to the days when William Redington Hewlett and David Packard were still actively involved in their company’s future. Hewlett-Packard was originally a hardware company. It designed and produced an impressive variety of devices that changed the nature of work in the technology sector. However, these were devices that were designed by engineers for use by other engineers.

As a result, for example, the idea that a digital computer could be “personal” was never part of the HP mindset. The same could be said for the idea that the value in a personal computer had more to do with its software than with its hardware. Thus, in the early days of HP’s venture into digital technology, they may have set a world record for some of the most user-hostile interfaces on the market. Apparently, this legacy does not signify in Coughlin’s mindset. Do a text search on Shankland’s article; and you will discover that the word “interface” never appears.

For those of us for whom computers dominate over the working environment, the future is far from the rosy one that Coughlin anticipates. That is because the software we are using keeps getting progressively worse. This is not just a problem of protection against malware. It is also a matter of basic functionality.

For example, part of my work involves using a Web-based “B2B” (business-to-business) download service. Most downloads are large and are therefore delivered as compressed files that need to be “unzipped” after they have been downloaded. This past summer, many of us using this service discovered that we were getting defective ZIP files that could not be decompressed. Over the course of several months, some of us participated in a variety of test cases, none of which showed signs of much progress. Then, one day, my Inbox had a message that asked if I had tried using Chrome. Sure enough, the Chrome browser downloaded perfectly sound ZIP files while both Firefox and Safari were fumbling the ball!

More recently, I have been making heavier use of audio streaming. For this I need to explain that I use a MacBook Pro, whose lid is kept closed while I work from an HDMI feed to a wide-screen display with “entertainment quality” speakers. Many of my audio resources require Flash, which is software that I try to avoid as much as possible. As a result, I have a setup in which only Safari permits the use of Flash from the sources I need. After the latest Flash “upgrade” (scare quotes intended) I discovered that the audio was no longer coming from my display but, instead, was squeaking out from under the lid of the MacBook! This time I was prepared; and, sure enough, things worked properly once I used Chrome instead of Safari!

I suppose we could turn this into a story about how Google will take over the world. I suspect that Google may have the best talent pool of software engineers in the technology sector, but I do not think that this is necessarily a matter of malicious intent. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that the basic skills behind writing, testing, and releasing software have all been condemned to SNAFU status. Furthermore, we are so dependent on the technology that, as E. M. Forster predicted in “The Machine Stops,” we basically self-adapt to accommodate every degradation of the services we require. This happens not only at our desks but also in the face-to-face purchases we make, whether on a checkout line or at a food truck.

As the title of Forster’s short story suggests, things eventually come to a head with an across-the-board failing of all service technologies. This does not lead to mass chaos, because people have been so numbed by their dependence that they cannot even think about what to do next. In terms of contemporary culture, Forster assumes a mass of aimless zombies, rather than an angry mob with torches and pitchforks! Was he successful in seeing the future, and are we it?

Signal and Noise from Music Choice

I used to be a faithful subscriber to Sirius/XM as one of the more reliable sources of music for serious listeners. Unfortunately, the prevailing climate of property development here in San Francisco put an end to that. For about a year (at least), I have had to live with the fact that there is no longer a clear path along which I have been able to receive an effective signal from a Sirius/XM satellite. As a result I discovered the Music Choice service that I can receive as part of my Comcast service.

The good news is that this service provides channels that offer an impressive variety of both classical and jazz recordings, and the classical selections have turned out to offer a fascinating journey of discovery. The bad news is that the listener is not always sure just what it is that his/she is discovering. There is an abbreviated display of composer, title, and performers, which definitely provides more content than my old XM receiver; and, for my money, I prefer those displays to the babble of announcers that do not seem to know that all much about what they are playing.

Unfortunately, many of those displays have serious noise problems. Thus, one will read the name of an orchestra conductor while listening to solo piano music. On the other hand, when the music is orchestral, one may read the name of an ensemble that did not even exist when the conductor was alive!

This system is obviously driven by a data base. The problem is that the data base has been "fed" by a process that has no check for data accuracy. Given the size of the library available to Music Choice, one can appreciate their need for efficiency; but efficiency in the absence of accuracy does not count for very much!

For the most part this is little more than an annoyance; and, like those depicted in E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," we live in a world in which we tolerate annoyance, because we no longer have the technical skills to remedy it. Nevertheless, one has to wonder just how many other instances there are as disinformation being presented as legitimate content for no reason other than the premise that fact-checking costs too much and takes too long to do correctly. Meanwhile, my network connectivity is such that it may be worth checking on whether I can receive Sirius channels through an app on my television or Blu-ray player; but can I count on them to provide more reliable content?

Attacca Quartet Explores Music by Michael Ippolito on their New Album

This Friday Azica Records will release its second album of performances by the Attacca Quartet, whose members are violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee. As usual, the album has already been assigned a Web page on Amazon.com, which has been set up to process pre-orders. The title of the album is Songlines; and it consists of four compositions by Michael Ippolito, all of which are less than ten years old.

Azica’s first recording of Attacca came out in March of 2013. Its title (following the case conventions on the cover) was fellow traveler: the complete string quartet works of JOHN ADAMS. While Adams himself has endorsed Attacca’s performance of his music, I must confess to finding it a bit disconcerting to encounter the adjective “complete” applied to a composer who is still alive (particularly when the age of that composer is so close to my own)! Furthermore, if we take “string quartet works” to include music involving string quartet and orchestra, then the album overlooks “Absolute Jest,” which was first performed by the St. Lawrence String Quartet performing with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) conducted by SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas. (It would have been simpler, and more accurate, to say just “string quartets!”)

Nevertheless, it is worth dwelling on the “fellow traveler” part of the title, since Songlines seems to have been a product of such fellow travelers. Last year Attacca was named Quartet in Residence at Texas State University of Music, where Ippolito is currently Assistant Professor of Composition. So, at the very least, Ippolito and Attacca are “fellow travelers” in academic life. Nevertheless, all of the compositions on this album predate the arrival of Attacca at Texas State in 2016. (The group was formed in 2003 when all four members were students at the Juilliard School.)

This recording was my “first contact” with both the ensemble and the composer. I feel necessary to begin with a sort of disclaimer when it comes to the general topic of new music for string quartet. Those who follow this repertoire probably know that San Francisco is the “home base” of the Kronos Quartet; but it is also a city that enjoys a generous number of more recently-formed quartets that share Kronos’ interest in exploring and presenting new repertoire, often motivated by commission. To highlight two particularly appropriate examples, Friction Quartet celebrated its fifth anniversary this past September; and the Thalea String Quartet, which is currently quartet-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was featured as a “next generation” string quartet during KRONOS FESTIVAL 2017 at the beginning of this month.

This posed a difficulty when it came to listening to Ippolito’s music. The problem was that all five of the selections on this album suggested that the composer had been listening to too many Kronos recordings. This is probably a warped perception. However, it highlights the fact that, while there is, indeed, far more diversity to the string quartet repertoire than Kronos has covered, it was unclear that Ippolito had established a a voice that is distinctively his own in this genre. His biographical statement in the accompanying booklet suggests that he has cultivated a substantial catalog that includes orchestral writing, as well as chamber music; but, even across this single album, there is a sense that he has not explored very far beyond the bounds of a relatively limited comfort zone.

To be fair, this may be an occupational hazard in the world the Internet has made. Results of creativity are often subjected to almost immediate distribution on a global scale, meaning that just about anyone interested in “new music” has opportunities to explore far more than (s)he can handle. The downside to all this is that we run the risk of becoming a society in which the superficiality of “consumption” tends to trump the slower-paced culture of attentive listening. It used to be that universities provided sanctuary from market-based thinking that cares about little more than efficient production to satisfy consumption; but the “inconvenient truth” is that a university run by such market-based thinking often ends up questioning whether or not a music department provides “value for money.” In such desperate times my personal feelings about Ippolito’s work as a composer seem to pale against more serious questions concerned with whether or not our society is willing to view him as productive member.

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.

Why They Still Hate Us

Today's Al Jazeera Web site has a Talk to Al Jazeera article that is positively cringe-inducing, if not worse. It amounts to a transcript of an interview with Secretary of State John Kerrry and Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes. The ostensible topic concerned current conditions in Syria and the impact of ISIL. However, as the old cliché goes, context is everything. In this case the context was defined by the seventh Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which was recently held in Silicon Valley and included a visit by President Barack Obama almost exactly a week ago.

The interview quickly devolved into a sort of cheer-leading session around the premise that entrepreneurship was the key to solving all of Syria's problems, as well as the threats of expansion by ISIL. Here we had two men with pasts rich in the domain of foreign relations; and the only message that seemed to matter was that what was good for business would naturally be good for Syria and the well-being of the Middle East. Back when posts occurred more regularly on this site, one of those posts included the phrase "innovation propaganda" in its title. Back then Jonestown Kool-Aid was one of my favorite metaphors. I knew that we have yet to get over that poison, but I had not anticipated that anyone with the serious responsibilities of Secretary of State would be drinking the stuff.

Another favorite trope from the past on this site was Max Weber's proposition that too much attention to market values and consumerism can lead to loss of meaning. When our country has lost the capacity to establish a dispassionately clear-eyed view of what is going on in the rest of the world, particularly when it involves violent hostilities and refugees, that should be taken as a sure sign that not only has meaning been lost but it is not even missed. Is it any wonder then that so much of the rest of the world now views us with suspicion, if not fear and loathing?

"Until the Real Thing Comes Along"

Anyone of my generation, who spent time of the East Coast and had strong feelings about Chinese food, probably had a chance to sample the food in Philadelphia's Chinatown. Those who were lucky got to do so at a restaurant with a chef who know about fish lo mein (yú lo mein). In contrast to most lo mein dishes, this was a delicate affair in which flakes of fish (probably steamed or lightly braised) intermingled with ginger, spring onions, and a bit of lemon peel, all on a bed of soft but slim lo mein noodles. I was fortunate enough to discover this the summer after my freshman year, when I had an internship with graduate students in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. We used to go to one particular restaurant (South China) about once a week for this treat; and I continued to do so when I would return to visit my family in later years.

By the time I was teaching at Penn, South China was no longer serving fish lo mein. However, Computer Science departments tend to be inhabited by adventurous and enterprising graduate students. One of them figured out where the chef had moved, and I got to resume my culinary habit. Unfortunately, my later travels took me away from Philadelphia for several decades, which is how I discovered just how unique fish lo mein was. Even when I was working in Singapore, the very idea of such a dish would raise eyebrows. Things were no better when I moved from Singapore to Palo Alto.

Then I got to attend a conference in Philadelphia. I happened to be held at a new hotel built on top of the old Reading Terminal Market. That was a treat in itself, but it also put me only a few blocks away from Chinatown. My first night in Philadelphia I combed every street there in search of a chef who knew about fish lo mein. Unfortunately, when I finally found someone who knew what I was describing, he said, "I remember that chef! He died several years ago!"

About two decades have past since then, and I may finally have found a viable alternative. Several restaurants in Chinatown now serve a noodles dish with ginger and spring onion. The first time I tried it, I asked the waiter if the chef could add some fish the next time and basically got a dirty look. Today I found a place that did not give me a dirty look; and, while what I ate was not the "real thing" of personal memory, it will probably be the closest I can get. I figured I had a good chance because the name of the place is Kam Lock Seafood Restaurant; and they knew just how to do the right thing with the fish, even if the pieces were larger than those I used to get in Philadelphia. the balance of flavors, on the other had, was about as close to memory as I could expect. So, for those who may have had to endure the same "Philadelphia withdrawal" in their Chinese food diet, Kam Lock is on 834 Washington Street (just west of Grand Street) in San Francisco Chinatown; and it is open from 11 AM to 9:30 PM seven days a week!

Is Eric Schmidt the Donald Trump of Technology?

There was a time when I could always count on Eric Schmidt (now Executive Chairman of Alphabet, the corporation formerly known as Google) to get my dander up every time he made a public statement. However, I see that the last time I had such a reaction is more than a year ago; and I was kind of thankful that he was finally allowing me more time to concentrate on my interest in the performance of music. This weekend, however, Schmidt was at it again, using the BBC News Web site as his bully pulpit for a muddled sermon about artificial intelligence that betrayed just how much the use of that noun "intelligence" is little more than a con job.

This morning, writing for CNET News, Lance Whitney decided to focus of Schmidt's interest in music recommendation and his accusation that Apple employs "elite tastemakers." As usual, Schmidt offered up a flamboyant display of his own ignorance. Anyone who still believes that the Internet is involved in anything other than efficient marketing must be under the spell of some pernicious Kool-Aid. Whether it involves ranking search results (not to mention displaying those results in a frame of advertising links) or making recommendations to "music consumers" (not to be confused with those who actually take the time to listen to music), the game is never about predicting future trends, as Schmidt seems to think. The fundamental premise of marketing is that consumers are sheep, and all they need is a sheepdog to follow. What this means is that recommendation need involve little more than what everyone is consuming now, rather than what they are likely to be consuming in the future. When a trend starts to form, no matter for what reason, technology can amplify it; and this basically makes for a larger body of happy consumers (not to mention the performer involved in the trend). This is not so much rocket science as freshman statistics, and Schmidt probably knows this full well as it applies to the core competency behind Google.

What is more interesting than whether or not Schmidt "gets" any concepts involved "knowledge-based" technology is that he seems to have latched on to learning the rhetorical style of Donald Trump. Having seen how Trump has managed to garner so much attention by saying so many outrageous (not to mention inconsistent) things, it would appear the Schmidt has decided to get in on that game. Could it be that his BBC gig was little more than a rehearsal for a desired appearance on Fox News?

Welcome to Dismaland

I thoroughly enjoyed the video tour of Banksy's Dismaland that showed up recently on BBC World Service News on television. Today's article by Bryony Gordon on the Telegraph Web site was the perfect follow-up. However, I am old enough to remember when the satirical magazine Mad had its way with the original Anaheim Disneyland and its creator "Walt Dizzy" (as they were probably obliged to call him to avoid libel). They went through the different sections, such as Adventureland and Tomorrowland, concluding with Fantasyland and its epithet, "the happiest land of them all." They then moved on to "the happiest land of them all (for Walt Dizzy)," which was Moneyland! That was all one needed to know about this initial venture by the Disney empire into new territory!

Rage Against the Technology

Those who get high on the Kool-Aid of disruptive technologies are usually too stoned to realize that, if not properly managed, disruption can result in an eruption of violence. This is what happened when 2800 Parisian taxi drivers went on strike to protest against UberPop. As one can read in Hugo Leenhardt's report for ABC News, things got really ugly; and, as is usually the case in war, the ugliness infected both sides. So, while Uber cars were vandalized, it appears that one Uber driver decided to deal with a cabbie blocking his way by running over the guy. What makes things all the more depressing is that the French government had already declared UberPop to be illegal, banned due to unfair competitive practices. As a result Paris has discovered something that any American city with a plethora of bike riders aggressively competing with motorists on city streets has known all along: A practice is only illegal if legality is sustained through enforcement. Clearly, such enforcement did not not take place "with all deliberate speed" in Paris. This led to the usual problem with vigilante justice: offended parties taking the law into their own hands, usually with violent results.

It is unclear that there is a way out of this mess. The fact is that technology evangelists have managed to disrupt the world of governance while pursuing an agenda that seems to have involved disrupting the world of work. The primary consequence is that all of us are living in a world in which goods are more likely to be defective and services are less likely to be reliable. It is hard to imagine our arriving at a closer approximation to the apocalyptic world that E. M. Forster envisaged in "The Machine Stops." Unfortunately, one of the services that has been disrupted beyond recognition is education. Thus, while in Forster's world people just got more tolerant of an increasing number of flaws, we now seem to be creating a new generation too stupid to realize that those flaws even exist.

Clash of the Idiots

Gary Wills had a great post on NYRblog yesterday. The title was "Holy Ignorance," which he appropriated from Olivier Roy, a French anthropologist who specialized in studying belief systems. The basic argument is that fundamentalists are immune to argument based on reason. They see the use of logic to justify any with which they disagree as a test of the strength of their faith, which makes them hold to their beliefs with even greater strength. Wills wrote this in an analysis of the Pope’s decision to write an encyclical on climate change and its connection to selfishness. Almost immediately five Catholic Republicans who are part of the rush to candidacy in the next Presidential election denounced the Pope for knowing nothing about science, regardless of the fact that they knew even less (even collectively)! Clearly, Wills saw all five of them as evidence of “holy ignorance!”

What is interesting, however, is that a parallel line of argument can be developed about Muslim fundamentalists. This, in turn, may tell us something about what makes IS tick. While they are not necessarily grounded in Islam, their goal is to subvert all Western forms of government in their territory and replace it with a caliphate. This actually turns out to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they are determined to reinstate a pre-Enlightment approach to governance based on little more than raw power. However, at the same time they know they can appeal to Muslim values to win others to their cause. Ironically, they do all this through some of the most sophisticated Internet advertising (yes, that is ultimately what it is) yet to be designed.

Perhaps the Pope should pay more attention to the book of Revelations. The prediction of the great war of Gog in the land of Magog could well involve Christian Fundamentalists in battle with Muslim Fundamentalists (hence the inspiration for my own choice of title for this post)! That is quite a change from the early nineteenth-denture hasidim, who thought Napoleon was Gog (worth remembering on this anniversary of Waterloo)!

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.

Spending Money Singapore Style

Leave it Singapore to find a cuteness factor in the act of spending money. Here in San Francisco I experience "contactless payment" through my Clipper card, which gets me on to most of the forms of public transportation that I use and can be "fueled" through machines and selected underground stations or remotely through a Web site. Singapore seems to have decided that a plastic card is just not cute enough, so they have replaced them with charms of the Hello Kitty character. Not only does this explore a new dimension to payment, but also it provides a new avenue for marketing. Here is how Aloysius Low described the business angle in his CNET article:

Each charm retails for S$24.90 ($18) and comes with no stored value. There are a total of four designs to choose from: pink, red, black and blue. The blue one is not sold individually -- you'll have to buy all four together, or be one of the first 1,000 customers, who can redeem one through the use of loyalty points.

O brave new world that has such cute toys in 't!

Is the NBA the Ultimate Toy?

It has been a while since I wrote about one of Chris Matyszczyk's Technically Incorrect columns for CNET. Today's, however, was an irresistible gem, devoted to Steve Ballmer's behavior as a Clipper's fan. The headline definitely captured the flavor of it all: "Steve Ballmer screams louder than at any developer conference." Reminiscent of the old I-love-this-game commercials, Balmer, at least according to Matyszczyk, has found his calling as the ultimate fan:

His eyes bulged. His mouth opened to the wingspan of a pterodactyl. His commitment spewed over the Staples Center, until it surely engulfed all who were there.

My guess is that Ballmer lives by the rule that life is all about having the most and the best toys, and in now having the Clippers he seems to relish having a toy for all the world to see.

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!"

Packaging

One of the more depressing consequences of delivering music through downloads is that no one seems to care very much about physical packaging any more. Still, in my own writing for Examiner.com, I still encounter a fair share of physical media; so I think I now have enough experience to offer what I hope is a judicious mixture of rant and praise. That major target of rant is not a new one. What Sony has done, particularly when it involves both classical and jazz recordings in the Columbia library, is orders of magnitude beyond reprehensible. About the only explanation I can come up with is that there is some kind of corporate policy that music exists only for background purposes, which puts the whole corporate mindset at odds with my mission, which is to encourage attentive listening among my readers.

I cannot say that any particular label has managed to stay on the positive side consistently. Where large collections are concerned, I like products that facilitate search. Labels like BMG reissues of RCA tend to be good about such things, although it did not take me long to find an item missing from the Toscanini index. Then there are the oversize collections with a booklet that is roughly the size of an old album for a twelve-inch LP. RCA had one of these for Ellington, and Deutsche Gramophon (DG) had one for their Karajan collection. Both of these were so poorly bound that they fell apart the first time they were opened. The index pages were great, but you had to get to the track listing page with considerable delicacy! On the other hand I have been really happy with the DG complete Brahms collection and the DG collection of Bach's organ music originally released on Archiv.

Still, the bottom line is that no one cares about these things any more, perhaps working from the premise that an uninformed listener is a better instinct buyer.

Service Providers that Don't

As a followup to yesterday's post about reality-checking innovation, I feel it worth noting that the problem goes beyond the invention of artifacts. Yes, we are drowning in innovative artifacts, all of which are developed to realizes scenarios about how much better things will be when they work, as if the failure of any mere artifact was not an option. However, things are no better in the service sector, possibly because prevailing thinking (such as IBM's effort to declare and then study "service science") seems to have gotten hooked on trying to reduce service to a product. However, Google does not help you find which shelf has the eye drops at your local pharmacy; and, even automatic checkout systems (like the one at Safeway) need a human to see to what happens when human behavior does not meet the expectation of the machine. Similarly, one of the channels on your cable system does not black out all by itself: A machine may implement breaking the connection, but it is responding to some policy decision (or, perhaps, the refusal of the service provider to accept the terms proposed by a particular channel).

These are not consequences of what happens when the technology breaks. They are "corollary events" that arise because, no matter how many machines there are, we are still part of a sector of people inhabiting the world. As people we are consumers of both products and services. The providers may wish that they would not have to deal with our all-too-human frailties, but they seem to have decided that denial is a better strategy than coping.

Still, there is a lesson to be learned here. Don't waste your time raging against the machine. Find out (perhaps with the help of one or more machines) who are the people behind the machine. They are the ones who should feel your rage!

An Afterthought on Using and Building

Almost as if it had been intended as a follow-up to yesterday's post about the distinction between using and building technology, Jane Wakefield, BBC Technology Reporter, ran a story last night on what appears to be a nationwide commitment in the United Kingdom to encourage children towards becoming "digital makers" in a framework that has more to do with education and less to do with mere consumption.

Valuing the Goods

I am not quite sure what to make of J. Bradford DeLong's essay "Making Do With More," which I read on the Facts & Arts Web site. He begins with the premise that "just three out of ten workers are needed to produce the deliver the goods we consume." He accounts for the other seven as follows:

The rest of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next.

He then wonders why we are not all bathing in prosperity.

Like many he attributes the problem to changes brought on by the information age. He argues that we are no longer producing goods that are either rival or excludible (terms which he defines clearly). Such goods are hard to value; and, in the absence of what he calls "true value," we have become a society of "techno-plutocrats and their service-sector serfs." Whether or not this is the sort of serfdom that Friedrich Hayek had in mind, DeLong's analysis gives one pause.

Nevertheless, he may have overlooked the fact that serfdom is not confined to the service sector. Increased reliance on high-technology equipment means that those three out of ten workers are also little more than serfs. If they are not mindless, then they are still passive for more time than they are active. The question is whether or not this state of degraded mindfulness has had an impact on what is being produced. It strikes me that there is a need to investigate whether the goods now being produced and delivered are now really shoddier than they used to be or whether the consequences of their being shoddier just happen to be greater (as in that cockpit door that locked out the pilot). Either way, we may need to own up to the fact that the information age has given us a world in which not only are fewer people doing work to which value can be attached but also they are not doing it very well.

Swimming in Repertoire

One of the unforeseen consequences of my having made the move from IT research into writing about music is that I seem to have built up a voracious appetite for repertoire. As I learned from reading Leonard Slatkin's memoir, Conducting Business: Unveiling the Mystery Behind the Maestro, such activity is one of the cornerstones of a conservatory education, at least at places like Juilliard, which Slatkin attended. It presumes that a comprehensive knowledge of music requires the broadest possible account of what has been documented, preferably coupled with devoting time to both recordings and performances to account for what has been made from those documents.

The good news is that I can pursue this activity through both attending as many performances as my schedule (and personal endurance) will allow and following up on opportunities to write about recordings. As of the beginning of March, I shall have been writing for Examiner.com for six years. That was preceded by building up my writing chops through several years of blogging, initially casual and progressively more and more serious. I have thus been evolving out of the state of a "passive consumer" for about a decade, perhaps to the point that repertoire now constitutes the medium of my existence, rather the way in which water does for a fish.

Every now and then someone will ask me how I retain it all. The fact is that I don't; and, at my advanced age, I am less and less likely to do so as time passes. I sometimes joke that I now depend on Google when my memory is failing, meaning that I write as much as I can "into" Examiner.com simply to make sure that Google will help me when I need it.

On the other hand I still make it a point not to take notes during a performance. Paying attention to writing down something means you are not paying attention to your auditory channels, and I simply will not abide by that latter option. Besides, human memory is not a file cabinet. It is an ongoing process of recollection. Just looking at a printed p program seems to be enough to set the wheels of that process in motion. What it yields provides the substance of what I write, and anything that does not emerge from that process was probably not worth writing about anyway.

I thus find myself in a somewhat complex and possibly tenuous relationship with both knowledge and memory. Exercise is as fundamental to maintaining that relationship as physical exercise is in maintaining the health and fitness of my body. (Because the latter is not particularly demanding on mind, I often use it as an occasion to begin to rehearse the thoughts that will find their way into writing.)

Does this protect me against lapses of memory when I need to recall something? Not at all. However, I think it does help me to sharpen my skills as a writer, even when mind is not always up to summoning up the specific memories I need or want.

Will I be able to keep this up indefinitely? I have no idea. Nevertheless, back when I was writing dance reviews as a student, I got to know Kathleen Eaton Cannell, who wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. She kept at it to the very end. One night she wrote up the performance that she had just attended, went to bed, and died peacefully in her sleep.