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.

Advances [sic] in Communication

According to Professor Vyv Evans at Bangor University, the development of emoji as a language has now surpassed the past rate of Egyptian hieroglyphics, making it the "fastest growing language," at least in the United Kingdom. This preference for iconic abbreviations may actually be a logical advance over strings of letters (WTF), which tend to be necessary in order to work within the limits of Twitter messaging. Still today's BBC newsbeat report that an "I feel sick" icon is being developed in which the core smiley face may now be not only sad but also spewing green vomit should give us all pause. Could it be that our fixation over efficiency has now advanced to such a state that efficiency is necessary even in the communication of snark? Have we really lost the ability of language to be so colorful as to be interesting while insulting at the same time?

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!

Rigging the Survey

I noticed that, once again, Consumer Reports gave the highest possible rating to Kaiser of Northern California for medical care. The last time they did this, I actually thought seriously about making the move from my current provider. I was given a contact, left voice mail, and never heard anything after that.

I was reminded of that incident while filling out a customer satisfaction form with regard to my annual physical from the current provider that I ended up not leaving. I realized that the level of questioning was extremely narrow and provided almost no opportunity to include any major issues of discontent. In other words the survey was basically rigged to stick to those topics for which the best answers could be expected. This led me to question whether or not Consumer Reports had evaluated Kaiser through a similar procedure, a question which, I am sure, will never be satisfactorily answered, not, at least, as long as we treat health care as an industry and treat health maintenance as a matter of efficiency, rather than patient well-being.

The Turing Test Meets Real Life

One of my pet peeves when I was writing my Reflections Beyond Technology blog was the proliferation of people who should know better asserting that the Turing Test was a definition of intelligence. This came to a head when someone named Jeff Hawkins (who hopefully has been forgotten after having his fifteen minutes of fame) wrote a book entitled On Intelligence. Hawkins was indicative of those who cited Turing without ever taking the trouble to read him, thus getting things wrong from the very beginning of his argument.

What I liked most about Turing was that he was honest enough to recognize that any useful definition of intelligence was probably beyond our current grasp and could well remain so for some time. Like any good scientist, he believed that we should focus on questions that we had a fighting chance of answering. In the interest of eating that particular form of dog food, he introduced a concept he called The Imitation Game. This was a two-player game where all "moves" involved exchanges of typed sentences, meaning that each play could be kept from seeing and hearing the other. The goal of the game was for one person to guess the sex of the other strictly on the basis of these exchanges of printed text. He then asked whether it would be possible for a computer to play the game of the person whose sex had to be determined without the other player realizing that (s)he was exchanging sentences with a machine.

I thought about this "real" Turing test the other day when I was reading "The Programmed Prospect Before Us" by Robert Skidelsky in the April 3 edition of The New York Review of Books. (Yes, I know how I get behind on my reading.) Near the end of the article, Skidelsky offering the following anecdote:

Recently, Michael Scherer, a Time magazine bureau chief, received a phone call from a young lady, Samantha West, asking him if he wanted a deal on health insurance. After she responded to a number of his queries in what sounded like prerecorded fashion, he asked her point-blank whether she was a robot, to which he got the reply "I am human." When he repeated the question, the connection was cut off. Samantha West turned out to be a system of recorded messages that were part of a computer program created by the brokers for health insurance.

This may be the best real-world account I have seen of an instance of The Imitation Game in which, for all intents and purposes, the computer "won." I should also point out that this exercise did not take place at an artificial intelligence laboratory or even one for experimental psychology. It was a piece of software deployed by a health insurance company, presumably as a result of an effort to improve "efficiency" by following those principles outlined by Frederick Taylor in his study and promotion of practices of "scientific management." Given that I have already written about how these principles have been applied to heart surgery, it seems ironically inevitable that they are now also being applied to health insurance.

A Perspective on Education

Recently, I have been reading Marc Myers' new book, Why Jazz Happened. My reaction has not been wholeheartedly enthusiastic, but I was fascinated by the chapter describing the impact of free education supported by the G.I. Bill on jazz musicians following the Second World War. I was particularly struck by the following comment by Bill Holman:

If I had not gone to Westlake on the G.I. Bill, I probably would have picked up what I learned from other people. School sped up that process, and provided an atmosphere with a like-minded bunch of people trying to get the same knowledge. That spurred me on. Within the first few weeks I attended, I found out the answers to the problems that had been keeping me from writing. I could have found those things out on my own if I had had a little more curiosity. But I didn’t. Going there was a convenient way to find out those things.

What first struck me was the pragmatism of Holman's attitude. However, after some reflection, that phrase about "an atmosphere with a like-minded bunch of people" began to sink into my consciousness. As more and more colleges try to make ends meet by offering degree programs through the Internet, there is the threat of losing sight of the extent to which education takes place in that social world of "a like-minded bunch of people," rather than the challenges of complex texts clarified through the wisdom of experienced professors. Holman missed the point in thinking that college was more "convenient" than "finding those things out on my own;" but at least he was vaguely aware that finding things out has a social dimension beyond the objective dimension of the things themselves.

Commoditizing Dreams

One particular passage leapt out at me while I was reading Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRBlog post about Beasts of the Southern Wild:

In movies the imaginary tends to be expensive, so independent live-action films generally work with what is already in place and steer clear of the realms of large-scale fantasy. Our dream worlds are elaborated for us by corporate entities with the necessary means. Beasts of the Southern Wild represents a kind of protest against this state of affairs, an assertion of the right to build one’s own make-believe world, with available tools however rudimentary, rather than submitting to the pre-imagined products of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and the rest.

It struck me that there were more meanings to that “dream factory” epithet assigned to Hollywood than I had initially imagined. Presumably the epithet emerged from the ways in which Hollywood took a mass-production approach to entertainment, putting out entertainment the way Henry Ford’s assembly line put out cars. However, there is a corollary to this interpretation, which is that Hollywood tapped into a means of production through which our very dreams would become commoditized.

Through this corollary, we see one way in which Walter Benjamin’s claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end” may be achieving validity. Storytelling (note the italics) is not so much about the story as it is about the subjective and social elements that a storyteller brings to that story. A “dream factory,” on the other hand, dispenses with such complications from the subjective and social worlds and is concerned only with efficient manufacture (and resulting return on investment) of the dream-as-product. Through commoditization, we have lost what O’Brien calls “the right to build one’s own make-believe world.” Indeed, we have become so addicted to the commodity that most of us probably do not even recognize that loss for what it is.

If we then return to my earlier discussion of Tim Parks’ NYRBlog post, “Do We Need Stories?,” we see that Parks put forth the proposition that “the self requires a story.” One may then view O’Brien’s statement as an assertion that, through commoditization, the self has lost the right to tell its own story. Max Weber may have only scratched the surface in warning that commodity-based capitalism could lead to the loss of both meaning and freedom. More serious than either of these losses is the very loss of self. Take away self and the question of whether or not freedom has been lost becomes irrelevant. Man is no longer a slave but simply an automaton that happens to have been constructed out of biological components.

Technology Discovers a Job it Tried to Eliminate

It is very rare to find advocacy for the human factor on a technocentric Web site. Nevertheless, last night Fox Van Allen filed a story for Tecca that actually used the phrase “professional editing” with absolutely no disparagement. It also began with the sentence:

Editors are pretty important people.

What was it that awakened Van Allen from his technocentric slumbers? The answer is Barnes & Noble (of course, of course). It turns out that B&N management has blocked any use of the work “kindle” in any text that is included in the Nook Book Store, since, in capitalized form, it is the name of a competing product. What happened was that a blogger named Philip Howard decided to try reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace on his Nook and encountered:

It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …

As Howard reported in his post, he eventually realized that “Nookd” had replaced the word “kindled.” Apparently what counts for editing over at B&N amounted to a Replace All operation on the full text with a case-independent “kindle” being replaced by “Nook.” Mind you, real editing would have involved a full review of the final text before it was released; and in this particular case we happen to be talking about War and Peace. What would that do to the overall efficiency of daily operations? After all, Barnes & Noble is a business, and a business has to have priorities!

"Reinventing the Textbook" (for whom?)

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

Apple: We want to reinvent the textbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convenience + Efficiency = Vulnerability?

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

Lucky Supermarkets credit card scam getting worse

Here is how he elaborates his claim:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.    It is inconvenient.

2.    It is inefficient.

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

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

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

Loss of Expertise?

In my recent posts inspired by Max Weber’s warning about loss of meaning, I have tended to dwell on specific words and concepts whose meaning has been eroded, if not entirely demolished in our era of newspeak.  However, the nature of meaning itself is also at stake, not only in terms of philosophical perspectives concerned with the “meaning of meaning” but also with regard to how meaning is put to use.  Thus, a corollary to loss of meaning is loss of expertise;  and we seem to be seeing more and more evidence of it every day.

The loss of expertise, in turn, may be seen as a consequence of the extent to which “knowledge work” has become reduced to a “sweatshop industry,” whose workers amount to little more than “mindless drones.”  The “knowledge worker” is expected to be able to deploy a limited repertoire of routines in a work setting in which efficiency counts for more than effectiveness.  It is unlikely that this worker knows why those routines do what they do;  and in some cases (s)he may not really know what they do, only the circumstances in which they are to be deployed.

We may well start to be seeing this loss of expertise where it matters most, in the development of the software infrastructure on which this degraded sense of knowledge work depends so heavily.  For those who preach that the future of our economy lies in innovations in information technology, software engineering may well be the “last best hope” for real knowledge work.  However, even where we expect to find it, it is no longer what it used to be.  My own most painful confrontation with this ugly truth has been in the shoddy nature of OS X Lion on my Mac PowerBook, an operating system so flawed that I would have taken it for a Microsoft product.

However, if this was a consequence of a new work [sic] force for which operating systems are no longer “cool,” BBC News just ran a Technology story that cuts closer to the “heart of cool.”  A whopping eighteen months after the launch of the iPad, Facebook has finally released its own “native” app.  However, if this effort was far from a day late, it is even further from a dollar short.  The initial user response has been a host of stories about all the bugs that were quickly encountered.  This puts the extended development time in an interesting light.  The BBC report claims that Facebook offered no explanation for the delay, offering only the following statement from Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor:

We’re releasing it now because it’s done.

Add “done” to that list of words that have lost meaning!

Automation has always been a threat to workers.  At a policy level we have believed that automation should be an incentive to acquire new skills.  However, those skills are now under threat, too and have been reduced to a command of fleeting techniques that are here today and gone tomorrow.  In E. M. Forster’s cautionary tale, “the machine stops” because no one is left with the skills to keep it in proper working order.  Software development has now become a machine, and it is being run by workers who really have no idea what it is doing or how it can been maintained.  Forster’s machine degraded gradually, and we may now be experiencing the beginning of such degradation in our information technology infrastructure.

Loss of Meaning for Education

Apparently the very concept of loss of meaning seems to be becoming one of falling dominos.  Having just written about the loss of meaning of “work,” I found myself confronted with the possibility that “education” is the next domino to fall.  The possibility arose in conjunction with “The Wrong Way to Lower College Costs,” a recent post to NYRBlog by Anthony Grafton and James Grossman.

The “wrong way” discussed in the blog post is a report by economist Richard Vedder.  Setting aside any jokes about economists as sources of invalid information, Vedder’s credentials should be enough to raise a red flag.  He is Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.  Note the strategic avoidance of anything having to do with education in this name.  This is basically an institution committed to that cult of efficiency that, as I observed in another recent blog post, has been responsible for the undoing of our public library system and all values associated with it.

The primary impact of loss of meaning on so many fronts is the dismantling of just about any system of values that have not only made our country a source of citizen pride but also served as an ideal for those suffering oppressive governments on their own soil.  This is not to suggest that our actions have always lived up to those values.  Indeed, our actions failed our values even when our Continental Congress was debating the language of the Declaration of Independence.  However, those values marked us as a country that believed in the power of ideals, in spite of the all-too-human frailties of every citizen.  Max Weber warned that excessive attention to market-based thinking would lead to loss of meaning;  but what has happened to our respect for such ideals may be an even greater loss.

Reading and the Cult of Efficiency

The operative paragraph in Charles Simic’s post to NYRBlog yesterday, “A Country Without Libraries,” is the penultimate one:

I heard some politician say recently that closing libraries is no big deal, since the kids now have the Internet to do their reading and school work. It’s not the same thing. As any teacher who recalls the time when students still went to libraries and read books could tell him, study and reflection come more naturally to someone bent over a book. Seeing others, too, absorbed in their reading, holding up or pressing down on different-looking books, some intimidating in their appearance, others inviting, makes one a participant in one of the oldest and most noble human activities. Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming, and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads about it—often by skipping a great deal of material and absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience, sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are reading settles in and makes its full impact.

Most important is that it shows the extent to which “some politician” has lost touch with his/her responsibilities as a representative of the electorate, regardless of whether that individual is speaking for the TEA Party, for so-called “moderate” Republicans, or for Democrats.  Now that the sorry state of the country’s economy seems to top everyone’s list of priorities, it is time to recognize that politicians use it only as agency for increasing their power bases;  and the needs of the electorate be damned.

Well, that last sentence may be a bit extreme.  However, it is not so extreme to assert that you can get your voters to approve of any of your ideas as long as you market them the right way.  When it comes to ideas about the economy, politicians all seem to think that the best marketing pitch has to do with catch terms like “productivity” and “efficiency,” which are promoted for their direct causal link to “economic growth.”  Who benefits from any of this jargon and how is a secondary matter, but the jargon explains why the political attitude towards a public service like a free lending library has turned out so wrongheaded.

The crux of Simic’s paragraph is that reading has nothing to do with “productivity” and “efficiency.”  To the contrary, it is “slow, time-consuming, and often tedious,” ostensibly a waste of time when one can just do a Google search.  The corollary of this corrupted view of reading is yet another instance of the more general problem of “loss of meaning,” through which politicians and economists can talk about recovery with total disregard to the impact of that talk on the general population.  This is not to say that life should be all about time-consuming tedium;  but it is to say that a knowledgeable life is not all about the efficiency of Google searches.  On the other hand politicians, economists, and (most importantly) those they really serve among the rich and mighty see little gain in a knowledgeable life for the rest of the public.  In other words the attack on public libraries is just another salvo in the War Against the Poor;  and, in the context of that war, it is not in the best interest of those with the power of wealth to endow those who would rebel with the power of knowledge.

Bing Gordon's Rationales

I find it a little bit ironic that Caroline McCarthy’s column for CNET News, The Social, should run an interview with Bing Gordon the day after I put up a post of my own entitled “Beyond Rationality.”  Gordon is certainly one of those Silicon Valley players who can only be viewed through lenses of rationale, rather than rationality (the general point I was trying to make yesterday).  However, it is unclear that one can get a handle on his rationale without exercising a considerable amount of rationality.

I first heard Gordon opine about five years ago.  I was attending a convention that had been organized (and probably financed) by Comcast, primarily with the objective of informing attendees about the rising tide of convergence.  At the time Gordon was an executive at Electronic Arts and sat on a panel to which he contributed his thoughts on the future of gaming in a “converged” digital world.  This included a future in which people would be playing his games on mobile devices, relying on their telephone service providers to give them the opportunity to “reach out and kill someone.”  (How could I forget those words?)

Gordon is now a partner with the venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, leading me to wonder whether his gift for provocative assertion may provide a means for filtering out would-be entrepreneurs who have “the right stuff.”  This is not necessarily a bad idea.  Entrepreneurial judgment is not necessarily the same as creative thinking, any more than, as Isaiah Berlin demonstrated, political judgment is not necessarily the same as dispassionate objective reasoning.  Nevertheless, according to McCarthy, Gordon is in charge of his firm’s new social-media investment funds;  so, beyond any heuristics he may have for filtering down the pool of candidates, just what do we know about his perception of the social world that may be impacted (and may impact) any commitment of investment funding?

One clue comes from the following excerpt from McCarthy’s column:

Many arguments in favor of limits to online social networking invoke Dunbar's number, the figure proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar that suggests that the number of real human relationships that a given individual can have is limited to about 150. That's something that could spell less than sunny forecasts for a industry in which social connections need to keep escalating in order for profits to keep expanding in turn.

Bing Gordon's take is that those limits are going away in the first place.

"Dunbar's number is changing because of the efficiency of social networks. We're going to be able to keep 500 relationships warmed up instead of 120," Gordon said. "Social networks improve social capital so efficiently that more people are doing it. People who start using social networks don't stop. There are just too many advantages. You meet significant others, you get a job, you find out what's going on, you save time."

The implication seems to be that the most promising inventions in social software will be those that most efficiently “improve social capital,” which sounds dangerously like an attempt to reduce the processes of socialization to those of assembly line manufacturing.  In other words, he is taking the premise of those researchers at IBM Almaden Services Research who tried to reduce service to a science and is trying to extend it from the social nature of service provision to all forms of socialization.  Needless to say, I find this premise to be grossly inconsistent with “our knowledge of the social world;”  and these days I would turn to social theorist Alfred Schutz for the right kind of cudgel to apply to Gordon’s head.

However, beyond the abstract properties of the social world that occupy academics (past and present) like Schutz, there is the question of our contemporary social world and the economic crisis that is consuming it.  Is venture capitalism part of the solution to our current problems, as Barack Obama and many others would have us believe;  or is it part of the problem?  Consider this Gordon quote from McCarthy’s column:

I think if you start a company, and you have a vision, and you change the vision, just do it with honor.  I was talking to one guy who's like, 27 years old, and he started a company, and I said, “Dude, if this thing works you could make 10 million bucks in a year. After that it's going to be a boring company. But go do it real fast, because in your 20s to have $5 or $10 million in your pocket changes your whole life. This is not a potential Internet treasure, this is a life foundation. Run like hell.[“]  And that's what he did--I think it's just important for every person to understand their goals.

Quite honestly, I do not know what to make of this.  Is it honorable to flip your entrepreneurial efforts for $10 million in pocket as long as you are clear that this is your goal?  Does it matter that every economic system is as much about how individuals interact as it is about how each individual pursues his/her goals?  If everyone followed Gordon’s advice, would that hasten our steps toward economic recovery?  Would it even lead to steps taken in a productive direction?

For the life of me, I still cannot figure out if Gordon actually means any of the things he says.  With my own background in social theory, I have no trouble trying to interpret his declarations as Goffman-like “moves;”  but that still leaves me puzzled as to whether or not he knows (or cares) where those moves are taking him (or those conversing with him).  I did once have a boss who believed in “rock tumbler” research management:  Bring together all the best minds you can, let them keep bumping into each other, and eventually each will emerge as a polished gem.  Perhaps Gordon sees himself as the agent that tumbles the rocks of both would-be entrepreneurs and would-be investors.  Good rock-tumbling requires considerable patience, however, leaving me to wonder whether or not Kleiner Perkins sees such a strategy as effective for the short-term gains that make for their bread and butter.

The Bee and the Travelling Salesman

According to an article that appeared yesterday on the Web site for The Guardian, a bee can solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP).  Here is a more specific account of that claim:

Bees can solve complex mathematical problems which keep computers busy for days, research has shown.

The insects learn to fly the shortest route between flowers discovered in random order, effectively solving the "travelling salesman problem" , said scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The conundrum involves finding the shortest route that allows a travelling salesman to call at all the locations he has to visit. Computers solve the problem by comparing the length of all possible routes and choosing the one that is shortest.

Bees manage to reach the same solution using a brain the size of a grass seed.

Dr Nigel Raine, from Royal Holloway's school of biological sciences, said: "Foraging bees solve travelling salesman problems every day. They visit flowers at multiple locations and, because bees use lots of energy to fly, they find a route which keeps flying to a minimum."

Using computer-controlled artificial flowers to test bee behaviour, his wanted to know whether the insects would follow a simple route defined by the order in which they found the flowers, or look for the shortest route.

After exploring the location of the flowers, the bees quickly learned to fly the best route for saving time and energy.

If this is to be more than sensationalist journalism (if one believes that mathematics can ever be a topic for sensationalist journalism), however, there are a few questions that we cannot allow to get swept under the rug.  If this is, indeed, a question of learning, what is the nature of the learning process and how long does it take?  Related to this question of efficiency is the question of how many flowers were in the controlled experiment, which might imply that a bee has only so much channel capacity for planning its route.  (This would make sense under the assumption that there is only so much nectar that the bee can harvest on a single trip.)

The problem is that the lead sentence is about as misleading as it is attractive.  Evidence that bees may be good at route planning within their own behavioral constraints does not warrant the conclusion that they “can solve complex mathematical problems.”  Solving the TSP in its full generality is just not a part of what bees do, particularly when we may not yet have a good idea how many flowers a bee can visit in a single trip.  To reason from the example given in the Wikipedia entry for the TSP, if a bee can visit fifteen flowers, then the number of possible routes from which it would have to select the shortest is 43,589,145,600.  If Raine ran his test on fifteen flowers, then I might be willing to take notice, even if the bee could not come up with a closed-form solution for the general case!

As I recently observed, even a comedian like Ricky Gervais would immediately recognize that this has more to do with Wittgenstein’s Lion than with the mathematics of complexity.  In the spirit of Wittgenstein’s assertion that we could not understand what a lion would have to say, even if that lion had some version of what we would call speech, the bee would be no more capable of describing its “flight planning” than a centipede would in describing how it coordinates its legs.  Indeed, the very concept of “planning” is probably alien to both of these scenarios.  We invoke the concept because we believe it is necessary;  but James Gibson rejected that premise in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, where he considered the related problem of how birds seem to follow their migratory paths with great consistency.

According to the Guardian story, Raine’s results have been accepted for publication.  They are due to appear this week in The American Naturalist.  I suggest that anyone curious enough to read this document begin by checking if Gibson is in the bibliography.  If he is missing, then I would worry that Raine may have been a bit too myopic in both his methods and his conclusions.

Putting the "Social" Back in Social Networking

Sharif Sakr may be on to something.  Those who do not recognize the name may have missed my “Understanding Misunderstanding” post last week, when I introduced him as the “Technology of Business reporter” for BBC News.  The post was concerned with an article that he wrote about the nature of business communication and the extent to which it may be facilitated by “technologies of simulacra” (my phrase, not his), such as avatars.  Today he has a piece about social software in business settings;  and, while a sample space of two rarely provides a meaningful statistic, what he “may be on to” is the recognition of just how fundamental communication is to the operation of just about any business.  Thus, while last week he considered the question of whether communication through avatars could be as effective as face-to-face encounters, this week he takes on the role of communication through social software in the workplace, thereby shifting the topic into the domain of “knowledge sharing” and “knowledge creation” or innovation.

By way of a case study, he considers Salesforce Chatter and its use by Scancom, a small British business that supplies software products for Blackberry users.  For the Managing Director of this company, Chen Kotecha, efficient software development is critical for the survival of the business.  Products have to be delivered rapidly and flawlessly.  Thus, it is important that any developer who hits a snag be able to leverage the experience of other developers who may have encountered similar problems, particularly when one of those others successfully resolved the problem.  Kotecha believes that Chatter encourages ongoing communication in his facility through which such “knowledge sharing” is enabled.

However, Sakr then takes an interesting twist to address whether or not Scancom constitutes a representative case study.  He considers larger and more sophisticated products, such as the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite and encounters skepticism from a representative of the Gartner Group, which puts a lot of effort into dispassionate analysis of new technologies:

"Most corporate collaboration tools are designed by people who aren't socially adept", says Gartner analyst Tom Austin.

"Google and Microsoft are populated by engineers and they are failures at social tools."

Austin's view is perhaps borne out by the fate of Google Wave - an attempt to merge document sharing with social networking, which was abandoned due to lack of interest.

The only way in which I might disagree with Austin is that, where he sees ineptitude, which may just be innocuous, I see psychopathology that reveals itself through painful consequences on an all-too-regular basis.  Indeed, in light of the “It Gets Better” movement that has arisen to counteract the bullying of young homosexuals, for which social software has been poignantly instrumental, I would say that, from the technology point of view, things will keep getting worse.

However, through Austin’s skepticism, Sakr finds his way to the conclusion he should have known from the very beginning, which is that effective communication is more important than efficient technology.  This conclusion is reinforced through one final case study:

Meanwhile, folk at the Centre of Creative Collaboration, a small building near London's King's Cross, are quite proud of the way they do things.

People come here at 10 every Friday morning to drink coffee, share ideas and start collaborative projects - and there have been some real commercial successes.

The Centre is not like social networking, because far from immersing themselves in the distracting babble of daily business, these people deliberately remove themselves from it.

But neither is it like the more 'serious' collaborative tools, because people come here to make new acquantainces rather than stick within a regular trusted team.

The approach is based on 'open innovation' and it is far less structured than any online collaboration tool currently available.

"It's a different process, that's all", says co-founder Brian Condon.

"Just because people are having fun in a pretty informal environment, that doesn't mean they're not creating things that can deliver business advantage."

Perhaps Condon and his colleagues know something the software engineers don't.

With all due respect to Condon, what Sakr “discovered” at this Centre is something that the workplace anthropology literature has known for at least fifteen years, one of the best examples being the chapter on “War Stories” in Talking About Machines:  An Ethnography of a Modern Job by Julian E. Orr.  The “modern job” that Orr studied was that of the technicians who repair copy machines, research conducted under support from Xerox Corporation.  The “War Stories” chapter addresses the same issue of benefitting from shared experiences that was so important to efficient operations at Scancom;  but the Xerox technicians did not need technology to share their stories.  Those stories, for the most part, were exchanged in the “real” social world in which technicians would meet at a bar after work and jaw about what had happened during that day;  and, while it is true that Xerox would later try to harness technology to expand the domain of those conversations from the local bar in (for example) Denver to the entire global community of technicians, it is hard to overestimate the value of a localized communication setting in which the “full bandwidth” of social discourse (whose dimensions extend beyond to the linguistic to the paralinguistic) may be utilized.

Thus, we return to the ground that I had staked out in my “Understanding Misunderstanding” post.  The underlying problem that continues to confront business operations, regardless of the size of the business, concerns effectiveness of communication;  and, from an operational point of view, effectiveness may be evaluated on the basis of how well the communicating parties understand each other.  The bad news is that the “problem of misunderstanding,” as I put it in that earlier post, is not an engineering problem;  but this can also be turned into good news, because it means that those who manage business operations must tend to not only the support technologies that are deployed but also the people who actually use them.  Such attention must recognize that those people are as likely to arrive at their “best work” without technology assistance as with it, which means that the workplace must be a social world that can work both with the available technology and beyond any of its limitations.

"The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery"

I am not quite sure what to make of the video report on the BBC News Web site entitled "India's 'production line' heart hospital." It is sure to provoke some very strong reactions; but, whether those reactions are positive or negative, the basic message of the report deserves attention. That message is that one can significantly reduce the price of quality health care (in this particular case quality heart surgery) by organizing the overall operation as an assembly line. In this report the emphasis is on having each line worker doing the part of the operation at which he (I did not see any "she" examples) is most expert; so I wonder whether or not there may also be a factor of designing the line and assigning workers to it by following some of Frederick Taylor's principles of "scientific management."

The most important question to ask is whether the site visited by the BBC is successful because of its production line organization or whether the success is due to some overlooked factor. (Note that, for now, I am willing to accept the claim that this is a successful facility. That claim is clearly subject to refutation. The health care of coronary patients is about more than giving them successful surgery. The report says nothing about what has happened to any of these patients after surgery and asking whether any crucial elements of the health care process may have been neglected as a result of looking only at making the surgery more efficient.) The reason I am skeptical about attributing any success to the production line is that the production line itself is based on Taylor's assumption that "scientific management" is about the management of unskilled labor. It thus overlooks the extent to which the very nature of the work can be alienating, particularly when workers bring more skills than they are allowed to exercise; and it overlooks the extent to which serious instances of social pathology may arise in workplaces that impose such alienating practices.

Another reason for my being skeptical is that we have been down this road before with another profession that demands highly skilled workers. That is the profession of education; and, as I have previously written, Raymond Callahan wrote a trenchant analysis of the deleterious impact that Taylorism had on the course (I cannot say "progress") of education in the United States during the twentieth century. Borrowing from the title of Callahan's book, his argument may be summarized by the proposition that American education suffered at the hands of policy makers who succumbed to Taylor's "cult of efficiency." There is an important parallel with health care here. Health care practices are, for the most part, determined by similar policy makers who know little (if anything) about what the practitioners actually do, just as most education policy makers have spent an equally minimal amount of time trying to teach in a public school classroom.

With this as context, do we really want to hitch the future of health care to a single datum? Can anyone blame me for asking whether or not the success of this particular example may be due to some factor that has gone unnoticed because all eyes have been dazzled by the surface feature of the assembly line? Before we start drinking the next batch of Kool-Aid in large quantities, we must first ask whether or not this system is as good as it seems; and, if it really is that good, we need to apply a bit more rigor in analyzing why it is good.