A Questionable Birthday Present for Wikipedia

Today the Opinion section of the Al Jazeera Web site ran an article with the primary headline “Learning to trust the internet again” followed by the secondary headline “Wikipedia can serve as a model to combat disinformation and distrust online.” Given the recent beating that the very concept of truth has been taking, not only in the domain of politics but also, more recently, in that of health care, one might think that this article would be a breath of fresh air. Then the reader may proceed below those headlines to discover that the author of the article was Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia twenty years ago. So the article amounts to a “birthday party” for Wikipedia with Wales as the Master of Ceremonies.

Those who read this site regularly know that Wikipedia has been a valuable tool for me. Where music history is concerned, the best resource in English remains what is now The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is now available through the Oxford Music Online Web site. However, that site is not available without charge for general public access. My own ability to use it comes from the fact that I can get into the site once the San Francisco Public Library Web site has validated the identification code on my library card. As a result, I almost never provide hyperlinks into the Oxford site, since I prefer not to lead my readers into a paywall.

Instead, I provide hyperlinks into Wikipedia. When it comes to nuts-and-bolts data about composer biographies and lists of their compositions, I have rarely been disappointed. Indeed, in accounts of more arcane topics, such as the diversity of tuning systems, I have been just as satisfied; and, where ethnomusicology is concerned, it would not surprise me if Wikipedia was a better source than Oxford. My guess is that these assets of Wikipedia are due to a great abundance of contributors, probably consisting of graduate students and junior faculty members, that have been writing such content for other reasons and then appreciate being able to upload it to a site for the benefit of others. As one reads the Al Jazeera article, one quickly realizes that this is the world that Wales wanted Wikipedia to sustain.

However, it is important to acknowledge what Wales took (and continues to take) to be Wikipedia’s greatest asset:

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and that means that hundreds of thousands of people are also involved in the integrity of protecting the knowledge that we find on it.

While this may be true of the global community of music scholars, we all know that they amount to a rather small minority of the community of “citizen editors” that sustain Wales’ project. The fact is that, as recently as 2008, Wales’ ideal vision was taking a serious beating.

In February of that year, Mary Spicuzza wrote an article for SF Weekly, which was published in print as “Wikipidiots” and can still be found archived on the SF Weekly Web site under the title “Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco.” By way of endorsement, I wrote an article of my own on this site in which I offered my own take on Wales’ idealization of “citizen editors:”

While it is true that Plato tried to enhance the readability of his dialogs by providing his “characters” with (often contentious) personalities, I doubt that he would have appreciated the extent to which the discussion of entries in a would-be encyclopedia that has become a major Internet resource has assumed all the personality traits of WWE Friday Night Smackdown!

Hopefully, at least some of my readers were able to observe that my hyperlink pointed to a Wikipedia page!

To be fair, things have improved since then; so I have no desire to rain on Wikimania 2021, Wales’ “all-virtual celebration” of the efforts of all those writers and editors that contributed content on a strictly voluntary basis. Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that the current century has emerged as one in which marketing has prevailed over truth in ways that those of my own generation could not have imagined, let alone anticipated. Wales’ ideal is one of “a collaborative movement of knowledge seekers;” but, in the “real world,” the very concept of “informed action” is on life-support and has been for longer that we would like to admit. So, while I can thank Wales with providing me with a tool that has become essential to my current work, I am more than a little skeptical that his ideals will be realized.

The Wikipedia Fight Club Goes to Congress

Back in March of 2008, it seemed worthwhile to call attention to the extent to which editing of the content of Wikipedia articles was succumbing to a "fight club" mentality. Things have calmed down considerably since then to the point that, when used properly, the whole idea of a wiki can actually prove to be a beneficial resource. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been more proactive in trying to detect and prevent malicious use of what would otherwise be a source of useful information.

I was therefore amused to read this morning the following lead sentence in an article by Technology Reporter Joe Miller for BBC News:

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

Of course reading this report would not be any fun without at least one example. My favorite would have to be updating the page for Donald Rumsfeld to describe him as an "alien lizard who eats Mexican babies." Miller makes it clear that this is more likely the work of Congressional staffers, rather than the Congressmen themselves (although there is always the possibility that one of those staffers basically takes an overheard remark and then tries to turn it into "Wikipedia truth"). Ultimately, this story is not so much about the integrity of Wikipedia as it is about the Congress as a workplace, since it carries the suggestion that the workplace is closer in spirit to Animal House than to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington!

An App for Bloomsday

Those who are not fanatical about the writings of James Joyce should probably be warned that tomorrow is a major day for those who are. Joyce's challenging (and, for some, offensive) novel Ulysses takes place, in its entirety, over the course of a single day, June 16, 1904. According to its Wikipedia entry, Joyce aficionados have been celebrating June 16, which came to be called "Bloomsday," named after the protagonist of the novel who parallels Odysseus in the Homeric epic Odyssey, since 1924. Some celebrations have used the occasion to real aloud the entirety of the novel. The one time I attended a celebration, at Symphony Space in New York, only selected excerpts were read; but the program also included readings from Finnegans Wake.

Nevertheless, there are many who find Ulysses little more than an inscrutable puzzle, wondering whether or not working on the puzzle is worth the effort. It is thus no surprise that, in this age of "digital reading," such folks can now be greeted with the familiar motto, "There's an app for that!" Naxos has now released an iPad app called James Joyce's Ulysses: A Guide. It includes not only the unabridged version of the novel with 800 annotations but also the complete text of the Odyssey. There is also a wealth of background material, including extracts of the music that Joyce cites in the novel.

Personally, I would prefer to stick to the print version (both editions, if necessary), but reading it with a laptop at my side; so, if I need to track down a particular line of thought, I have the Internet close at hand to assist!

Scholarship in the Internet Age

The latest issue of The New York Review has an article by Robert Darnton entitled "A World Digital Library Is Coming True!" The piece is basically a paean for the growing empowerment of scholarly practices enabled by the Internet with little care that those actually engaged in those practices are declining in number at a painful rate. Nevertheless, it was interesting to see mention of a software tool that "makes it possible for a reader to go from a Wikipedia article to all the works in the DPLA [Digital Public Library of America] that bear on the same subject." Such an endorsement by Darnton carries far more weight in accepting the legitimacy of Wikipedia than any anecdotal evidence from yours truly.

Indeed, I read Darnton's remark shortly after learning that Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG) just announced plans to go digital. Considering how long Grove Music Online has been available, the obvious question is, "What took them so long?" The other question will be, "Will this make any difference?" The fact is that, when writing my thesis, I made no use of either of these encyclopedic sources. I started from full-length books on the topics I was pursuing and then used their bibliographies to seek out primary sources. As Wikipedia authors take the practice of writing more seriously, Wikipedia readers will take the practice of reading more seriously; and those great minds that once labored over producing qualities entries for both Grove and MGG may need to recognize that there are better ways in which they can spend their time.

Wikipedia Trumps Grove!

In my writing for Examiner.com, my rule of thumb has been to use Wikipedia for quick convenience and Grove Music Online (which I can enter through a gateway provided by San Francisco Public Library) for authority. Yesterday, however, I happened to be attending the San Francisco premiere performance of Artur Schnabel's piano trio; and I felt that this deserved digging into some background material. Schnabel's Wikipedia page provided a generous biographical account with discussions of both his performing career and his efforts as a composer. Unfortunately, the piece performed yesterday was not included in the list of his compositions; and this led me to check his Grove Music Online entry. This turned out to be a skimpy two paragraphs by William Glock taken from the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music! I am not sure who at Grove decided that Schnabel was that insignificant, but I was glad to see that the anonymous musicologists who hang out on Wikipedia felt that he deserved more attention.

The Motive behind the Manuscript

Yesterday I used my national site on Examiner.com to write about Marie et Marion, the latest recording by Anonymous 4 on harmonia mundi to perform music from the Montpellier Codex. Taking my musicology studies seriously, I took issue with the fact that the Wikipedia entry for this manuscript described the music it contains as having been "composed." Those who have been following my posts on this site know that I have been fascinated with the fact that the very concept of "composing" did not exist (at least in any recognizable form) in the thirteenth century and only began to emerge in the sixteenth (which also happened to be century in which the printing of music emerged). More proper descriptions of the activities of the Montpellier monks would be that they were "compiling" or "documenting" music that was being "made in the field" (or in a more ecclesiastical setting), rather the way Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály did on their ethnomusicological adventures.

On the other hand, it would probably be fair to say that those monks did not see themselves as ethnomusicologists. If that was, indeed, the case, then why did they go to so much trouble? As one who is particularly interested in motivated action, I found myself asking just what motivated them to do this task. The simplest answer is that just about anything that any monk did was done "for the greater glory of God" (or words to that effect). While this may have been the primary motivation, it is worth observing that there is a fair amount of secular material in the codex, particularly on the subject of courtly love (thus accounting for "Marion" in the title of the new Anonymous 4 recording). Did the monks include this material, perhaps covertly, for the sake of a "guilty pleasure?"

That is certainly one possibility. Another is that they anticipated a remark that Martin Luther would make when he was compiling his own hymn book a few centuries later. He had no trouble appropriating secular tunes to go with the words of his hymns, and Albert Schweitzer's biography of Johann Sebastian Bach even goes so far as to claim that he was known to observe that the Devil cannot have all of the good tunes to himself! One could imagine the monks of Montpellier feeling the same way. They may not have ever said such a thing to anyone, but they still could have believed it!

Wikipedia Comes of Age?

It does not seem that long ago that the very idea of accepting Wikipedia as an authoritative resource for any scholarly pursuit was regarded as a risky, if not totally undesirable, proposition. I therefore found it interesting that, in the conclusion of a letter appearing in the current (April 3) issue of The New York Review of Books taking issue with Freeman Dyson's review of the book Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio, Michael Konrad's account of errors in Dyson's article concludes by advising the reader to consult "Wikipedia to get a far more insightful (and correct) history" of the careers of the scientists Dyson had discussed. Bearing in mind that any biographical account of the intellectual pursuits of an individual involve a hazardous minefield in which an opinion disguised as fact that can blow up in your face (consider Peter Brooks' "The Strange Case of Paul de Man" in the same issue), I still take this as an indication that there is value in Wikipedia as long as it is not used as some kind of all-purpose crutch.

Two years ago I even wrote a post suggesting that the free service provided by Wikipedia is preferable to the one provided by Encyclopædia Britannica, and I have yet to consider drawing upon the latter since then. Indeed, my articles for Examiner.com frequently use hyperlinks to Wikipedia for those readers who do not have access to the fee-based Grove Music Online. Going even further, in a recent piece about Carlo Grante's project to record the complete keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, I even advised by readers to consult "a very valuable Wikipedia page that cross-indexes the catalog numbers provided by Kirkpatrick and Pestelli, as well as the earlier version by Alessandro Longo and an even earlier (and not particularly thorough) one by Carl Czerny."

The bottom line is that scholarship tends to involve a lot of grunt work, and most scholars realize that making the results of that effort readily available to the rest of the community advances the progress made by all. Where music history is concerned, the results have been not merely satisfactory but downright impressive. There is still the risk of using Wikipedia as a crutch, but that is true of just about any resource. Perhaps it is time to recognize that Wikipedia is now playing a valuable role in furthering many scholarly pursuits.

On Education and Entertainment

This morning's Business section on the BBC News Web site has an article by Education Correspondent Sean Coughlan based on an interview with Jimmy Wales. This is likely to set up any number of red flags for many readers, beginning with the idea of an article about education classified as "business" and following through with the controversial subject of the interview. While I remain skeptical about the value of Wikipedia, I seem to have developed a reasonably reliable set of work practices for putting it to use, particularly when doing my writing for Examiner.com. (I like to provide readers with hyperlinks to details for particularly obscure matters. Because Grove Music Online is behind a paywall, I like that hyperlink to point somewhere accessible to all readers.) However, I feel it is important to distinguish between how Wikipedia works and how Wales thinks, or at least how he talks about what he thinks (which is not always the same thing).

I would thus like to call attention to one of the sentences captured in Coughlan's interview:

I thought at that time, in the future, why wouldn't you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people's heads?

This provoked me about as much as I had been when I heard Wales talk about the virtue of search results on Genghis Khan giving priority to his role in a battle that included Alexander the Great and Napoleon, even though that battle was a fabrication of Marvel Comics. It is not that I am opposed to entertainment. I like being entertained as much as anyone else. However, entertainment takes place in what I have called the "private reality" of the individual being entertained, which does not necessary have any relevant consistence with the reality of the social world in which that individual lives.

I would therefore like to argue that education is something that must, out of necessity, take place in both "private reality" and "social reality." Thus, just about all of the education that supported any of my most extensive research projects, as both a student and a professional, was grounded in a massive amount of reading and note-taking. This all took place in my private reality. Indeed, much of that reading involved Mortimer Adler's idea of the reader engaged in a conversation with the author; but any such conversation clearly existed only in my private reality. However, it then equipped me to emerge from that private reality to have real conversations about the ideas taking shape in my head.

Looking back on my undergraduate life, I sympathize with Wales dismissing large lectures as being tedious and boring. However, I worry more about the fact that undergraduate education is grounded on a considerable amount of reading, perhaps beyond the level of cognitive overload. Can one really relish the many poetic virtues of Homer's Odyssey when one also has to be fathoming the mysteries of angular momentum to prepare for two different classes the next day? To this day I am thankful that I did not have to read Marcel Proust as an undergraduate. I could only really appreciate him by reading him without external pressures, letting his text unfold at the pace I set for myself.

Entertainment does not solve this problem of cognitive overload. At best is masks it with an appealing surface, but that surface is distracting. The best teachers are the ones that allow you to make the transition from those conversations in your private reality into conversations in the social world. This cannot happen in a large lecture hall, nor can it necessarily happen in a video recording.

Wales' vision is one of education without effort. However, experience has taught me that one is only informed through the effort one exerts, whether the mental effort of wrestling with a text or the physical effort on trying to get your fingers around a late piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven. Yes, education needs to be reformed. However, that reform will require providing more social engagement of a higher quality; and entertainment is unlikely to contribute very much to creating and facilitating such engagement.

Integrating “Dennis the Menace”

In today’s panel for Dennis the Menace, we see that he has an African American baby sitter complaining that her book on child psychology was of no use. I think this was the first time I saw an African American in the series. Checking the Wikipedia entry, I discovered that the effort to integrate it had an interesting history:

… in the late 1960s, Ketcham decided to add an African American character to the cast named Jackson. Ketcham designed Jackson in the tradition of a stereotypical cartoon pickaninny, with huge lips, big white eyes, and just a suggestion of an Afro hair style. In one cartoon that featured Jackson, he and Dennis were playing in the backyard, when Dennis said to his father, "I'm havin' some race trouble with Jackson. He runs faster than me." The attempt to integrate the feature did not go over well. Protests erupted in Detroit, Little Rock, Miami, and St. Louis, and debris was thrown at the offices of the Post Dispatch. Taken aback, Ketcham issued a statement explaining that his intentions were innocent, and Jackson went back into the ink bottle. However, another African American character named Jay Weldon appeared in the 1986 animated series to far less controversy as he was not a stereotype.

The panels are now written and drawn by Hank Ketcham’s former assistants, Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand; and they may have decided that one could keep up with the times without stereotyping. After all, one assumes that a babysitter lives nearby, if not in the same neighborhood; and the implication is that this kid takes her job seriously. It may have taken half a century, but Dennis the Menace may have caught up with contemporary reality!

Is Encyclopædia Britannica Really Ready for the Digital Age?

Today the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica used their blog to post the discontinuation of their print edition and establish themselves strictly in the online domain.  As I discovered in a post of my own from April of 2008, this is not the first time that Encyclopædia Britannica has tried to take on Wikipedia on the basis of quality of content.  Nevertheless, I suspect that Britannica has a long way to go, at least as far as my personal needs are concerned.

Once again, the editors are trying to lure eyeballs through a free access offer.  Once again, I have taken them up on their offer.  Bearing in mind that I always design particularly challenging tests, I still feel my first experience was a telling one.  Because I happened to be chatting about him last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I decided that György Kurtág’s name would make a good test case.  I used only his last name, typing it first without the accent.  The bottom line is that Britannica could not find a match for his name either with or without the accent.  What made this pathetic, rather than merely sad, however, is that the search without the accent turned up a Google Ad for CDs of this composer’s music available through ArkivMusic.com!

In other words Google Ads knows more about Kurtág than Britannica does!  Meanwhile, even with the inadequacies explicitly cited by the Wikipedia editors, the Wikipedia entry for Kurtág is as good a place to begin looking for background on this composer as any (unless, like myself, you can get access to Grove Music Online with your library card).  Yes, Britannica has a tradition of employing quality writers to provide material for their entries;  but, while I am not fan of crowdsourcing, I fear that, whatever their aspirations, Britannica just cannot keep up with the “knowledge explosion.”

Indeed, it would appear that Britannica cannot even muster editorial quality when presenting themselves.  Consider this “infographic” included on another one of today’s blog posts:

This is as sloppy as it is jumbled.  Would you really want to give these guys your eyeballs?

In Praise of IMSLP

I think I have Scott Foglesong of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to thank for first making me aware of the Petrucci Music Library at the IMSLP Web site.  For those unfamiliar with this service, here is the “About Us” text from the home page:

IMSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project. The logo [which appears at the top of the home page] is a capital letter A, taken from the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, published in 1501. Its author, Ottaviano Petrucci, is this library's namesake.

While working on an Examiner.com preview piece for a concert by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra featuring Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 (better known as the “Goldberg Variations”), I was delighted to discover that this site included a PDF file of a facsimile of the first edition of this music in Bach’s series of Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice) publications.  This is not the sort of thing you are going to prop up on your piano’s music stand, but it is about as close as you are going to get to Bach’s own account of this body of music.  The Internet really is changing everything, at least when it comes to sparing those of us with limited resources from having to travel to distant libraries, where we then have to worry about handling anything from the stacks with extraordinary care.

Indeed, one could get lost just reading the “Featured” box on the IMSLP home page.  If BWV 988 is not enough, the autograph manuscript of the BWV 582 C minor passacaglia has recently been added to the collection.  For those with more nineteenth-century tastes, there are also autographs of Johannes Brahms Opus 90 F major symphony (his third), Camille Saint-Saëns’s Opus 22 G minor piano concerto (his second), and one of the great hits of bel canto opera, Gaetano Donizetti’s Emilia di Liverpool.  (Say what?)  The source pages for all entries are kind enough to provide both pages counts and file sizes, so you have a pretty good idea what you are getting into before clicking are a download.

The whole site is implemented as a wiki.  So, from a look-and-feel point of view, it follows the basic conventions that any Wikipedia reader (or contributor) knows and loves.  This also means that all contributions are the result of voluntary efforts, which implies the corollary that there are a lot of people out there (probably of varying levels of music scholarship) putting in generous amounts of time for the common good of those for whom “music” means something more than using iPod ear-buds to create “background insulation” from the harsh assaults of the “real world.”  It also appears that these volunteers are less inclined to the “fight club” mentality that has undermined the value of Wikipedia in certain subject domains.  It is nice to know that, where the sharing of scores is concerned, the community of those who both love and study music is a comfortably stodgy bunch!

Making Sense of Corporate-Speak

Perhaps the most consistently running theme that emerges in the interviews that the media have been conducting with Japanese citizens is that of distrust, particularly regarding conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.  This understandable, even if at least some of that distrust may have been induced by the ways in which the interviews were conducted.  Japan is the first country to have experienced the impact of a nuclear catastrophe, and that is not the sort of thing to fade from collective memory.

The problem is that both the Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) have been trying to inform the public with simple statements.  These tend to mask any underlying complexity and/or uncertainty.  Consider the following lead sentences in an Al Jazeera English article based on wire sources:

Plutonium has been found in soil samples taken from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, operator Tokyo Electric Power said as efforts to bring the situation at the earthquake-stricken facility continue.

The samples were taken a week ago but the levels didn't pose a risk to human health, said Sakae Muto, TEPCO's vice-president.

Is Muto’s claim credible?  This is one of those cases where there are not sufficient data to answer this question.  Therefore, as a public service it seems worthwhile to reproduce the paragraphs provided by Wikipedia on plutonium toxicity:

Isotopes and compounds of plutonium are radioactive poisons that accumulate in bone marrow. Contamination by plutonium oxide (spontaneously oxidized plutonium) has resulted from a number of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents including military nuclear accidents where nuclear weapons have burned.^[85] Studies of the effects of these smaller releases, as well as of the widespread radiation poisoning sickness and death following the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have provided considerable information regarding the dangers, symptoms and prognosis of radioactive poisoning. PMID 19454804

During the decay of plutonium, three types of radiation are released-alpha, beta, and gamma. Alpha particles can travel only a short distance and cannot travel through human skin. Beta particles can penetrate human skin, but they cannot go all the way through the body. Gamma radiation can go all the way through the body.^[86] Alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma radiation all expose the body to ionizing radiation. Either acute or longer-term exposure carries a danger of unfavorable health outcomes including radiation sickness, cancer and death. The danger increases with the amount of exposure.

Though alpha radiation plutonium emits does not penetrate the skin it does irradiate internal organs when plutonium is inhaled or ingested.^[32] The skeleton, where plutonium is absorbed by the bone surface, and the liver, where it collects and becomes concentrated, are at risk.^[31] Plutonium is not absorbed into the body efficiently when ingested; only 0.04% of plutonium oxide is absorbed after ingestion.^[32] What plutonium is absorbed into the body is excreted very slowly, with a biological half-life of 200 years.^[87] Plutonium passes only slowly through cell membranes and intestinal boundaries, so absorption by ingestion and incorporation into bone structure proceeds very slowly.^[88][89]

Plutonium is more dangerous when inhaled than when ingested. The risk of lung cancer increases once the total dose equivalent of inhaled radiation exceeds 400 mSv.^[90] The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the lifetime cancer risk for inhaling 5,000 plutonium particles, each about 3 microns wide, to be 1% over the background U.S. average.^[91] Ingestion or inhalation of large amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and death; no human is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.^[76]

The "hot particle" theory in which a particle of plutonium dust radiates a localized spot of lung tissue has been tested and found false – such particles are more mobile than originally thought and toxicity is not measurably increased due to particulate form.^[88]

However, when inhaled, plutonium can pass into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, plutonium moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, or other body organs. Plutonium that reaches body organs generally stays in the body for decades and continues to expose the surrounding tissue to radiation and thus may cause cancer.^[92]

Several populations of people who have been exposed to plutonium dust (e.g. people living down-wind of Nevada test sites, Hiroshima survivors, nuclear facility workers, and "terminally ill" patients injected with Pu in 1945–46 to study Pu metabolism) have been carefully followed and analyzed.

These studies generally do not show especially high plutonium toxicity or plutonium-induced cancer results.^[88] "There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during the 1940's; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."^[93][94]

In other words there is no good way to determine whether or not Muto’s claim is credible.  At the very least that decision rests on the form of the plutonium that was detected.  By all rights this information should have been included as part of the official response from TEPCO.

Further Reflections on the 1970 Time Frame

Writing yesterday about the 1970 concerts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York reminded me just how exciting that time was.  I suppose I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time as a corollary to a series of writing and composing activities that began in the summer of 1968, a pivotal time in my life about which I have written in other contexts.  This morning I found myself thinking about the various ways that I came to know about Cornelius Cardew.

I first became aware of Cardew when the MIT Music Library purchased a copy Treatise.  I was not sure what to make it at the time, and I am not sure I know any better today.  Cardew’s Wikipedia page describes it as “a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation;”  and I doubt that I can come up with a better description.  (John Cage included a preliminary sketch of a page in his Notations anthology.)  The thing is that the phrase “considerable freedom of interpretation” may be the height of understatement.  The American edition was published by Gallery Upstairs Press in Buffalo.  So, from my point of view, it is highly reasonable that one reader (such as the Wikipedia author) would “interpret” this document as the score for a piece of music, another might take it as an innovative approach to graphic art, and yet another might take it as a semiotic exercise of a text represented by a non-standard repertoire of signs.  (I was actually surprised that this breadth of “interpreting interpretation” has not yet come up on the Wikipedia Talk:Cornelius Cardew page.  There is a Mode recording of a “performance of the score” by Petr Kotik’s QUaX Ensemble (Petr Kotik, flute; Pavel Kondelik, tenor sax; Jan Hyncica, trombone; Josef Vejvoda, percussion; Vaclav Zahradnik, piano).  It is from a live performance in  Prague on October 15, 1967 lasting about two hours.  Having spent a fair amount of time with this score, I agree with Amazon.com reviewer Michael A. Duvernois that the performance itself is rather a “short take” for the number of pages;  but I am still impressed that someone decided to follow up on this approach so soon after the “score” was published.

As a result of my own fascination with Treatise, I later leapt at the opportunity to hear Cardew speak when Christian Wolff invited him to the Goethe Institute in Manhattan.  His topic was the Scratch Orchestra, an improvisatory ensemble that Cardew formed for the performance of another one of his major projects, The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound.  To the best of my knowledge, The Great Learning has yet to be performed in its entirety;  and, according to its Wikipedia page, the Scratch Orchestra was “effectively inoperative” by 1974.  However, the Deutsche Grammophon recording of their performance of Paragraph 2 and Paragraph 7 is still available from Amazon.com;  and there may still be copies of the organ of Corti CD that includes these two performances, recorded in 1971, as well as one of Paragraph 1 made in 1982 (after the date Wikipedia gives as that of the ensemble’s “demise”).

Those familiar with Cardew will probably notice that I have judiciously avoided saying anything about his politics.  This is because politics never came up during the talk I heard him give and because I never saw anything to be gained from a “political reading” of Treatise.  According to his Wikipedia page, Cardew did not turn to his extreme left-wing politics until after he lost hope of The Great Learning ever receiving a complete performance.  His beliefs were sufficiently extreme and vociferous that, when he died of a hit-and-run accident on December 13, 1981, his friend John Maharg told his biographer, John Tilbury, that MI6 had probably been involved.

I could care less about his politics.  Musically he was an anarchist, but I have never been afraid of anarchy.  After all, the Internet is also anarchic;  and I figure that I can approach Cardew’s anything-goes attitudes about making music with the same cautious awareness I now bring to the Internet.  I would like to believe that, if Cardew were alive today, he would be more interested in the Internet as a new medium for performance, rather than for the promotion of his extremist political positions;  but this is a moot point based on my having him speak only once, and then in better times for all of us.  The bottom line is that I continue to enjoy listening to recordings of his music and would welcome an opportunity to encounter that music in concert performance.

Do We Need a Sociology of Robots?

It took me a while to appreciate that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were not primarily about engineering.  Rather, they presumed that, because robots shared the social world with humans, robot-makers should strive to endow them with a code of normative behavior.  Whether or not such a “normative code” could be “engineered” into “software code” remains a debatable issue (one for which Lawrence Lessig has had much to say);  but, since Asimov had confined himself to fiction, he could presume this to be the case and then use his stories and novels to pursue the likely consequences.

Dr. Markus Waibel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is not interested in the world of fiction.  He is interested in a decidedly likely future in which robots will be part of everyday human life.  What will that part be?  Waibel plans to approach that question through a project called RoboEarth, which he described to Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, in a story posted this morning:

"Most current robots see the world their own way and there's very little standardisation going on," he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said. "Something like that does not exist for robots."

Waibel clearly has some sorting-out to do.  He does not seem to appreciate the distinction that social theorists draw that separates objective, subjective, and social worlds;  so Waibel thinks he can reduce everything to storing and communicating data.  Thus, it is unclear whether his verb phrase “see the world” is merely an overly-enthusiastic metaphor or a serious failure to grasp the subtleties behind bringing order to sensory signals.  Similarly, he seems to view Wikipedia as a data resource maintained by multiple individuals, rather than an ongoing process of social interactions that sometime take a turn for the pathological.

Asimov projected a future that remains beyond our grasp.  However, in writing the history of that future, so to speak, he envisaged agents who anticipated serious consequences and tried to plan for them.  This made him far more utopian than, for example, Lessig, who recognizes, along with James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton), that men are not angels and are definitely not the puppets of a benevolent author.  Thus far at least, his speculations have not led him onto the turf of social theory;  but, in the face of Waibel’s aspirations, it is probably time to start exploring that turf.  After all, the question is not whether robots are capable of sharing data as self-motivated agents;  clearly they can do this,  The more important question is what they will do with that capability, and it is about time for those in “real-world” robotics to take that question as serious as Asimov did.

You've Got Arianna Huffington!

The best way to approach this morning’s news about AOL and Huffington Post may well be through the first sentence of the story filed by Associated Press Technology Writer Michael Liedtke:

Internet company AOL Inc. is buying news hub Huffington Post in a $315 million deal that represents a bold bet on the future of online news.

However, those curious about just what the future behind that bet is likely to be will have to wade all the way through the Liedtke’s final paragraph, which basically tells you everything about Huffington Post that you need to know:

Huffington Post grew quickly from startup to online colossus. Over time, it launched city-specific pages and developed a roster of sections such as food and books. The work of its 70-person paid staff is augmented by content from news outlets and 6,000 bloggers who write for free.

In other words “the future of online news” is one of 6000 unpaid bloggers.  Put another way, online news will be “liberated” from professional journalism.  It is hard to imagine how a paid staff of 70 can effectively edit 6000 bloggers.  Those familiar with the Huffington Post know how this problem is resolved.  The paid staff is not responsible for editing.  Editing is a “community-based” undertaking, basically managed through comments submitted to articles, often with the style and substance of the “Wikipedia Fight Club.”  However, since the future of the press conference seems to be heading in the same direction, that just means that the future will be one of press conferences without journalists, just as those journalists will also fade from the platforms of online news.  In other words these are just more bricks in the wall of ignorance behind which the consciousness industry ultimately plans to isolate the American public.  After all, the uninformed voter is the demagogue’s strongest weapon!

SOURCE Nostalgia

Every now and then I like to wax nostalgic over how the Downtown Music Gallery has helped me find the CDs to replace some of the more valued vinyls that I had to give up upon moving into smaller quarters.  In the past I have focused on Brian Eno’s Obscure series;  but lately, due in part to my writing on Examiner.com about The San Francisco Tape Music Festival, I have found myself listening to the CD collection that replaced the vinyl records included with selected issues of Source magazine.  I first learned about Source in the summer of 1968.  I have previously described this summer as “the first time I did any serious writing about [Merce] Cunningham's approach to choreography and John Cage's approach to the composition and performance of music,” although it was from Gordon Mumma, who worked with Cage and David Tudor in providing the music for performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, that I first learned about Source.  Mumma had a keen sense of signal processing, how he wanted to use it, and how he could build circuits to satisfy his goals;  so he provided me with many wonderful opportunities to converse about music and technology.  He was the one who encouraged me to subscribe to Source;  and eventually I managed to acquire a complete set of all published issues (something I still wish I could have done with Die Reihe), which I continue to treasure.

Source was one of the best channels for content about avant-garde music for its time.  It included articles, interviews, and scores.  It provided me with my first opportunity to examine the score for Cage’s 4’33”.  It also facilitated my reflections on my first serious encounter with the avant-garde through a performance given by the Sonic Arts Group, which had emerged from the ONCE Group and would late be known as the Sonic Arts Union.  (Under that name they give a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in a series that also offered me my first exposure to the music of Philip Glass.)

Six ten-inch vinyls were included in selected issues of Source during the run of the magazine.  There was an emphasis on in-concert recordings of what, at the time, was called “live electronic music,” conceived with an emphasis on performance, rather than conception.  However, with the Tape Music Festival about to begin on Friday, I find myself thinking back on “I am sitting in a room,” by Alvin Lucier.  Among the avant-garde composers, Lucier was “geographically closest” when I first got to know him, since he was running the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music at MIT.

Thanks to WikiProject Classical music, “I am sitting in a room” has its own Wikipedia entry;  and it deserves it.  Lucier conceived it to deal with his stuttering.  It begins with a tape recording of his reading his own speaking voice, describing what he is doing and occasionally impeded by stutters.  He then began a repetitive process of recording that tape on another tape, doing the same with the resulting tape, and so on “through many generations,” as Lucier described the process in Source.  What happens is that the physics of the room gradually enhances certain resonant frequencies, making the source text less and less intelligible.  However, while the frequencies of the vocal formants give way to the resonant frequencies of the room, the rhythm of the speech endures, meaning that the rhythms of the stutters begin to articulate the sounds of the frequencies imposed by the room.  This is a gradual process, so listening requires more than a little patience.  However, the phenomenon leads to interesting effects that the patient will find rewarding.  I am not sure I would call this work a “classic;”  but it is one that deserves the attention of anyone aspiring to be a serious listener.

The Degradation of the Knowledge Worker

Back when I was working on the research turf of knowledge management, the name most associated with the concept of “knowledge work” was that of Peter Drucker.  However, I was surprised to discover, by poking around in the Wikipedia Discussion page for “Knowledge worker,” that the term was basically as old as I was.  Drucker apparently introduced the term in his book Concept of the Corporation, which first appeared in 1946!

At the very least this makes for an interesting lesson in academic silos.  When knowledge management was on the rise, I had several colleagues who were fond of recalling Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was first published in 1973.  Given the vintage of Drucker’s work, I figured that he would figure in Bell’s study (which was concerned with the more general idea of a “knowledge society”);  but there appears to be no mention of Drucker in the book.  (He is certainly absent from the Name Index.)  One gets the impression that Bell and his colleagues felt too “elevated” to give much thought to anything Drucker may have written.

These days the very word “knowledge” seems to reside in two worlds.  On the one hand we have the academics, who are still wrestling with the concept as Socrates had done (as least as he was depicted by Plato in Theaetetus).  On the other we have the stark reality of how the words “knowledge worker” are actually used (following the semantic criteria pursued by Ludwig Wittgenstein).  I recently suggested that the “real-world usage” of the phrase now denotes “a mindless drone,” sitting in a call center behind a computer terminal concerned with little more than reading scripts and filling out forms.  In this context the following words, delivered at a conference in 1994 before knowledge management really hit its stride, offer a quaint nostalgia for academic thinking:

Knowledge workers solve problems and generate outputs largely by resort to structures internal to themselves rather than by resort to external rules or procedures.

I was amused to see that one of the contentious topics of discussion on Wikipedia involved whether or not a blacksmith was a knowledge worker;  but, according to the above criteria, any blacksmith (past or present) probably brings more knowledge to his/her tasks then one is likely to find behind that voice at the other end of the phone telling you what to do when your broadband connection is malfunctioning.  Nicholas Carr would probably argue that it is the technology itself that has degraded workers who could be drawing upon such internalized knowledge, turning them into those “mindless drones;”  but I think the issue is a broader one.  Basically, the knowledge worker is a victim of a social trend, identified by Max Weber and discussed at length by Jürgen Habermas, that involved loss of meaning.  It is basically a reflection of semantic manipulation that George Orwell had recognized, according to which the meaning of a word reverts to its own antonym:  The most “productive knowledge worker” is the one who operates out of ignorance, delegating all authority to support technology.  As I have previously suggested, the consciousness industry is the chief beneficiary of such loss of meaning;  and it has been frighteningly successful in turning Bell’s social forecasting of a knowledge society into the more harrowing present of a society of wage slavery.

CHUTZPAH over "CHUTZPAH"

I received an interesting piece of electronic mail from a friend who is greatly interested in Friedrich Nietzsche and wanted to respond to my efforts to compare him with Slavoj Žižek. In concluding her argumentation, she provided the disclaimer of unfamiliarity with the concept of chutzpah and then made a final observation based on the Wikipedia entry for the word. Needless to say, it had never occurred to me to check out what Wikipedia would have to say about this word, which might be a bit like a fish consulting Wikipedia to find out about water! However, in the interest of being able to provide a better response to the points she raised, I realized that I was now obliged to find out just what kind of "world model" she had constructed for this little gem of Yiddish wisdom.

For my part, when I have felt it necessary to tease out the finer semantics of the word, I have always turned to Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, which is my source for appreciating the rich context of any Yiddish word. I was therefore glad to see that the "wisdom of the Wikipedia crowd" had taken the trouble to consult Rosten; but the article still falls far short of establishing context as well as Rosten did. Indeed, there is a fair amount of material on the Discussion tab, which is prefaced by a statement attesting that the entry has not yet been rated for either quality or importance by the "WikiProject Jewish culture, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Jewish culture on Wikipedia." In other words, in true Talmudic tradition, there is a lot of haggling going on over just what to do with this piece of text.

I have no intention of joining that haggling. However, when I say that the current entry does not capture the spirit of Rosten's in The Joys of Yiddish, my primary warrant is that the Wikipedia entry says nothing about wit. To be fair Rosten never uses that word himself; but, in the rather broad palette of usage examples he provides, wit is always present, often as the most salient ingredient. Far more important than the question of whether the word can carry a positive connotation (and I believe that it can) is the question of whether or not wit figures significantly in the account of chutzpah. I may not have always followed this rule as strongly as possible in assigning Chutzpah of the Week awards, but that is a fault of my own judgment rather than a question of semantics and pragmatics.

This provides the perspective for considering what I actually wrote:

Nietzsche took himself far too seriously to admit any spirit of chutzpah in his writing (which may have led to his descent into madness, if I may exercise some chutzpah of my own); but Žižek has no such compunctions.

While Nietzsche's language can be poetic, it is hard for me to read it in any tone other than dead seriousness. Hence, my implication that Nietzsche might have staved off madness had he been more amenable to the lighter touches of wit from time to time. (Jack Point makes this sort of observation in The Yeomen of the Guard, but at the end of that operetta he is so thoroughly devastated that those more romantically inclined might think him capable of suicide.) Žižek is diametrically opposed to Nietzsche where wit is concerned. His wit is so virtuosic that he is positively manic about it, which may yet lead to his own descent into madness. Nevertheless, as John Cage once put it, Žižek has a "sunny disposition;" and that may be sufficient for him to maintain society's arbitrary criteria for sanity!

Eclogue

I just realized with some embarrassment that I have used the word "eclogue" in two of my recent Examiner.com reviews without a particularly clear sense of what it means. Last week it came up in my writing about the performance of Leonard Bernstein's "The Age of Anxiety" by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Then it showed up again yesterday morning in my account of this week's San Francisco Symphony subscription concert, since it was the title of the second movement of Igor Stravinsky's Ode.

It is not as if I was entirely ignorant of the word, but my memory needed refreshing. Also, I suspected I was prodded a bit when Michael Tilson Thomas called it "ecologue" while talking about Stravinsky's music before performing it. I knew the pronunciation was wrong, just as I knew that the word was not about an ecology-based travelogue. Beyond that, however, I realized that I needed to pay a visit to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

A short poem, esp. a pastoral dialogue such as those of Virgil.

That was sufficient to revive my memory. Almost a year ago, while spending part of my summer in Maine, I had brought along for reading a chapter from Ernst Robert Curtius' book European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (in the translation by Willard R. Trask). I may not have known much about eclogue before reading Curtius, but one passage leapt out at me by throwing new light on my ignorance:

To know only the Aeneid is not to know Virgil. The influence of his eclogues on later times is hardly less important than that of his epic. From the first century of the Empire to the time of Goethe, all study of Latin literature began with the first ecolgue. It is not too much to say that anyone unfamiliar with that short poem lacks one key to the literary tradition of Europe.

I had probably come across something like this while reading The New York Review, but Curtius' text had a way of making me feel guilty! After the dictionary pointed me towards the Virgil connection, I returned to that text to brood over it again.

From this point of view, I was very pleased with what I found by checking out the entry for the term in Wikipedia. It begins with the following clarification:

For the first of the three major works of Virgil, see Eclogues. For the work of the same title by Dante, see Eclogues (Dante).

The article itself begins with the following summary:

An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.

The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga. However it is also attested in Middle English as eclog, and this form was apparently taken directly from Latin ecloga. The Latin ecloga is a Romanization of the Greek eklogē (έκλογή), meaning "draft, choice, selection (particularly of short passages)". The term originally referred to short poems of any genre, or selections from poetry-books. The ancients referred to individual poems of Virgil's Bucolica as eclogae, and the term was used by later Latin poets to refer to their own bucolic poetry, often in imitation of Virgil. The combination of Virgil's influence and the persistence of bucolic poetry through the Renaissance imposed "eclogues" as the accepted term for the genre. Later Roman poets who wrote eclogues include Calpurnius and Nemesianus.

Ironically, Auden never arises in the "Modern eclogues" section. On the other hand, the "In music" section was nicely informative about Stravinsky:

Igor Stravinsky titled the second and third movements of his Duo Concertant (1932) "Eclogue I" and "Eclogue II". The middle movement of his three-movement Ode (1943) is also titled "Eclogue".

I am more familiar with Stravinsky's earlier 1932 composition; but, having known it through the choreography of George Balanchine, I realized that I had not checked out the Greek-oriented movement titles.

Bernstein got his title from W. H. Auden's extended poem, whose full title is The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue; and presumably Auden was being ironic. Dialog is certainly at the heart of the text; but even the most die-hard New Yorker would balk at the "pastoral" label for the settings for the dialog, a seedy bar and an even seedier apartment. As to the "baroque" adjective, that probably applies to Auden extending the brevity of the original form with a wealth embellishment that borders on the grotesque.

I suspect that, if I really want to fix the word "eclogue" in my working vocabulary, I need to let it associate securely with Stravinsky, rather than either Auden or Bernstein!

When Crowdsourcing can be Useful

BBC News Technology Reporter Jonathan Fildes came up with a fascinating story that (finally?) throws crowdsourcing in the globalized world the Internet has made into a positive light. As might be guessed, however, this story of global consequences had relatively local origins. It concerns Ushahidi, an aggregation technology that was launched in the wake of the 2008 election in Kenya to document and distribute accounts of violence following the election. As Fildes described it:

Ushahidi is an online mapping tool that can be used to collect and plot reports coming in from citizens via e-mail, SMS or even Twitter.

This is not particularly advanced technology, just a means of providing useful visual accounts of "events of interest" and where they are occurring.

Fortunately, for this technology it was a short step from man-made post-election disruption to natural catastrophes. Ushahidi escalated from local to global attention by contributing to the relief efforts following the Haitian earthquake:

"That was probably our biggest success story," said Mr [Erik] Hersman [a volunteer in Nairobi who works with a team responsible for feeding Ushahidi with collected data].

"It proved what we said all along - you can crowd source useful crisis information."

The tool was used to plot thousands of reports, which were then used by organisations such as the Red Cross to coordinate their relief efforts.

The US secretary of State Hilary Clinton said in a speech that hi-tech relief efforts had played a "critical role".

"The technology community has set up interactive maps to help us identify needs and target resources," she said during a speech in Washington on 21 January.

"On Monday, a seven-year-old girl and two women were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed supermarket by an American search-and-rescue team after they sent a text message calling for help."

Ushahidi is now providing the same service to relief workers in Chile; and, according to Hersman, the system was up and running in less than an hour after the earthquake hit.

There is no doubt that this is good news. At the very least it is a source of hard data of instances in which crowdsourcing has been put to beneficial use. However, before the technology evangelists get their teeth into this story and gnaw it to death, we should remember that it does not in any way negate other data that record less beneficial consequences of crowdsourcing, particularly in the social world. I would argue that the success of Ushahidi has less to do with aggregation and visualization technologies and more do to with the seriousness of purpose that motivates the volunteers who keep the system running properly. To paraphrase Number 51 of The Federalist, those volunteers provide an element of governance to compensate for the fact that not all of those "sources in the crowd" are necessarily angels. That is the element that the technology evangelists, particularly those who see the Internet as the ultimate tool of their libertarian beliefs, tend to overlook; but without it the system could easily and quickly deteriorate from a significant instrument of disaster recovery to yet another "fight club" for insecure egos.