Becoming Aware of Other Voices

Last week saw the launch of Al Jazeera America. To my surprise (and delight), Comcast assigned it the channel slot previously held by Current TV (which had been bought out by Al Jazeera). As a result, after several "dry" decades, I actually had the ability to choose between two channels, both of which showed the same attentive respect to the coverage of hard news that had once been the agenda of CNN.

The launch has had major impact on our home viewing habits. When everyone was covering the Senate Committee hearing on taking action against Syria, my wife and I chose Al Jazeera America. We felt that it would be the most likely source of both sides of opinions, and we were not disappointed. The same could be said of the discussion prior to Barack Obama's address on Tuesday evening.

Once again, American television viewers are getting the opportunity to listen to points of view other than those that the rich and mighty want us to hear. One result seems to be a renewal of reluctance to engage in another military exploit being given a more "legitimate" voice than it had received in the wake of 9/11 hysteria. Perhaps that is why Vladimir Putin chose to make his case directly to the American public through an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Regardless of how many people will actually read the piece (which was written with a well-honed sense of convincing rhetoric), the word is sure to circulate heavily that the Times took the trouble to run it today.

Whether this will make a change in what seem to be our culturally-embedded trigger-happy inclinations, it is a sign that at least a few media outlets are beginning to honor the fact that ours is not the only voice in any conversation with global repercussions.

As might be guessed, there seems to have been a general attack on Putin's article coming from a variety of different "establishment" representatives. I was most trouble to read, in a report on the BBC News Web site, that Leon Panetta went "on the record" by declaring that Putin was not in a position to lecture the American people about human rights. On the basis of this country's track record since we first ventured into Afghanistan, does Panetta really believe that Putin is any less qualified than any representative of our own government to take strong positions of human rights?

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.

Asking the Wrong Questions about Conversation

Last night BBC News Technology Reporter Dave Lee put up an article on the Web site entitled “The quest for the online water-cooler experience.” It began with a critical assessment of the purported “solutions” of enterprise software technology regarding their failure to deal with the proper fundamental issues of effective work practices:

All these well-intentioned schemes hope to do is recreate the water-cooler effect: the incidental discussions, those informal links between departments that are the very foundation of sustaining success and encouraging great ideas.

The water-cooler has long been a Holy Grail for enterprise software, going back long before it was even called “enterprise software.” However, rather than pursuing the question of why this Grail has been so elusive, Lee then launches in to what is basically a promotion piece for two new technologies, Yammer and Spiceworks.

What Lee seems to have missed is the extent to which those encounters over the water-cooler are more than “links” or even “informal discussions.” Rather, they are instances of a general category, which Jürgen Habermas chose to call “communicative actions,” in his effort to explore a concept broader than the “speech acts” of John L. Austin. Habermas’ “theory of communicative action” (the title of his two-volume magnum opus) tried to get beyond technological thinking predicated upon reducing communication to the exchange of sentential forms that could be represented in some objective logical calculus (often called “transactions” by many of the software systems that have evolved). Rather, he was motivated by the anthropological efforts of Erving Goffman to view the fundamental unit of any conversational exchange as a “move,” a unit that is not strictly “answer-oriented” (Goffman’s language) but entails both psychological and sociological “baggage” beyond the need to have a question answered.

Those who place technology before solutions look at a water-cooler and see nothing more than a corpus of texts. They can then analyze those texts both grammatically and ontologically, even going so far as to build a “world model” to embrace what is being exchanged in those conversations. What is missing, however, is a phenomenological point of view, such as that proposed by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred Schutz. Rather than trying to home in objectively on what those words and sentential forms are, one must accept the broader view of how they appear to the participants in that encounter at the water-cooler.

This is not, as Georg Ell of Yammer seems to believe, simply a matter of being more “passionate about user-interface design,” however much I sympathize with Ell about the significance of such design and the consequences of its neglect. Rather, it is a recognition that conversations take place in the social world, rather than the objective world. Every now and then a system emerges that actually accepts the social world of its users and may even facilitate the moves that take place in that world. The Xerox Eureka system, which supported a global network of repair technicians, was such as system. However, the success of Eureka had less to do with the functionality of its software and more with how its design grew out of observations from anthropological field work concerning how these technicians exchanged “war stories” at the end of the working day.

Until purveyors of enterprise software learn how to address phenomenological questions about the social world in which their “solutions” are to be embedded, those “solutions” are likely to be no more effective than snake oil!

Thought for the Day (so to speak)

Jan Strupczewski has been covering the stalemate in negotiations between Greece and the European Union (EU) over the next stage in financing its debt.  Things have now progressed to a point where one encounters the noun “default” in these dispatches.  This led to a quote on this matter from one unnamed EU official that was too good to resist:

They think, that we think that the unthinkable cannot be thought. But they better think again.

I think I shall need a strong cup of Greek coffee before trying to process that!

Davos Needs Descartes!

Today’s report from Davos by Tim Weber, Business Editor for the BBC News Web site, can be boiled down to a single sentence summary:

Everyone attending the World Economic Forum is worrying about youth unemployment.

My guess is that most of us 99% folks in the real world will respond to this with the immortal line from Rocky Horror:

No shit, Sherlock!

Even those whose knowledge of history is pathetically myopic probably realize that unemployment may well have been a more significant motivating factor behind the Arab Spring than the more idealistic quest for democracy.

So, having been blessed with a flash of insight into the obvious, what are the folks in Davos doing about it?  Given the length of Weber’s article, it is clear that a lot of people are doing a lot of talking.  Then there is this photograph that gives some indication of what else they are doing:

 

I used to attend meetings where diagrams like this emerged.  They are supposed to be a product of free-for-all brainstorming, drawn by a “facilitator,” who tries to summarize the results of the meeting in a diagram that is as informative as it is attractive.  It is clear from this photograph that Weber’s camera could not fit the whole diagram.  This is a bad sign.  If you cannot go away from a meeting with an image that “fits the mind’s eye,” you are likely to lose your grip on the whole affair.  Unfortunately, the reason this particular diagram is so crowded is that it is filled with platitudes, all the usual content-free phrases that you learn in business school to “keep the conversation going” without sounding like a dummy.  If the 1% are trying to convince the 99% that they are actually trying to do something about the most serious problem on the table, then Weber’s report seems to indicate that they have managed to invest a day in nothing better than shooting themselves in the foot.

It’s time for a modest proposal to break this logjam.  The problem with brainstorming at Davos is that everyone there has pretty much the same mindset.  Put another way, there is some fundamental set of propositions (which could probably fit on one of those whiteboards) that are simply accepted as axiomatic by all conferees.  What is needed, then, is a strong injection of Cartesian doubt.  For René Descartes reasoning began with the capacity to doubt everything and accepting as truth only that which withstands the challenge of doubt.  Thus, if one can create a whiteboard of “Davos axioms,” one should also be able to run each one of them through a wringer of doubt, driven by the likelihood that no individual axiom is necessarily shared by everyone in the room.  If those axioms can be brought down like a house of cards, then there would be at least a fighting chance that the Davos conferees could shift their attention to finding solutions, rather than drawing a big pretty picture of the problem.

Dangerous Generalization

Today’s post to the Social Business blog by Rich Harris on ZDNet has a fascinating headline:

Will advertising lose the war against word of mouth?

While this question may entail “a consummation/Devoutly to be wished,” Harris’ supporting argument has at least one questionable proposition:

59% of Americans believe offline word of mouth is highly credible, 49% believe online is.

Is this really true?  My guess is that the answer to this question is the rabbinical one:

It depends.

In other words it depends on just whose mouth is the source, whether that source is offline or online.  Thus, my neighbor may spend as lot of time reading Consumer Reports;  but, if he has never driven a car, I would be unlikely to hold a conversation about the best car for me to buy.  My guess is that there is an analogy to this assertion for just about anything I would be thinking about buying.

This does not negate Harris’ assertion that most people recognize that any advertising source is suspect.  However, that is a trivial conclusion to draw once you accept the premise that any communicative action has a motive, since you are unlikely to share the motive of the advertiser.  Nevertheless, identifying motive is never easy, even in the most conducive of settings.  Thus, however effective word-of-mouth may be, the question of finding a reliable and authoritative “mouth” is still with us and not easily solved.

The Heart of the Problem

Catrin Nye, of the BBC Asian Network, has an interesting background piece on the Internet on today’s BBC News site.  In concerns a study by an independent research group, Demos, that tried to assess the level of trust that current students in the United Kingdom put in the reliability of what they read on the Internet.  The results are, to say the least, mixed and may ultimately involve factors that have nothing to do with what is sometimes called “digital literacy,” the capacity for critical thinking and evaluation applied to any content discovered on the Internet.  Thus, for example, students at school whose student body is predominantly Bangladeshi Muslim appear more inclined to believe conspiracy theory stories involving 9/11 and the death of Osama bin Laden.

It seems to me that the real point behind these results is that the underlying question is not one of being able to distinguish signal from noise on the Internet (or any other media source, for that matter).  It also is not a matter of how well any individual is trained in “critical thinking.”  Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that every individual’s thought processes has a social dimension and that interpersonal communication cannot be achieved without accepting that this dimension plays a critical role.

Jamie Bartlett, a senior research at Demos quoted in this article, probably came close to acknowledging this proposition, even if she only closely grazed it.  She has the last word in Nye’s report with the following quote:

Without a common base of history that we all understand and accept and agree upon it's very hard for people to have a shared understanding of where we are now.

This is one way of recognizing the role of the social dimension;  but that claim about “a common base of history” is probably seriously misguided.  Ultimately, it is the prerequisite for “shared understanding;”  and, as I have previously argued, this tends to be a self-centered framing of the problem of understanding:  You understanding me once you share my point of view.  It is why I have rejected the concept of shared understanding in favor of one of negotiated understanding.  This latter does not require “a common base of history.”  It requires, rather, an awareness of differences in history among those parties trying to achieve understanding, which serves as a platform upon which negotiation over differing worldviews may take place.

In terms of how we use the Internet, we may be dealing with a world in which one man’s signal is another man’s noise.  The problem is that, if both men are locked into their respective signals, they will never communicate.  The question is not one of how we get rid of the noise on the Internet.  Rather, the question will always be what any body of content may actually be trying to tell us and, as a result, how we should respond to such communicating “move” (as Erving Goffman would put it).  This requires considerable mental effort on the part of all communicating, which may be asking too much of a global society whose only commonality has become a tendency towards laziness.

Trying to Explain Obama's Failures (and why they are likely to continue)

In his review of Adam Phillips’ On Balance for The New York Review, Michael Greenberg cites a perspective on liberalism that may do much to explain why Barack Obama’s attempts to deal with the Republican Party have amounted to little more than fiasco.  The source of the perspective is John Gray.  Greenberg summarizes it as follows:

Modern liberalism is based on the premise that all views can be discussed, fundamentalism on the fact that there is nothing to discuss.

If we consider Republican ideology as a brand of fundamentalism that strays beyond religious convictions on matter such as abortion into rigidity in secular matters such as taxation, this summary makes a lot of sense.  Back in my days of research in knowledge management, I used to observe that there is a difference between “shared understanding” (which had a lot of currency among knowledge management evangelists) and “negotiated understanding.”  The latter is a situation in which parties with different opinions can “agree to disagree” and then move on to complete the work on whatever job happens to be facing them.  To reduce this position to a simple example, when an automobile assembly line is forced to halt, it is not the time to argue over whether or not the blueprints were drawn to conform to all the necessary standards.

Every time Obama has made a concession to the Republicans, whether over taxes or environmental regulations, he has done so as a Goffman-like “move” towards advancing a conversation of negotiated understanding.  Every time the Republicans have accepted the concession and rejected the move.  As Greenberg puts it, they are firm in their conviction “that there is nothing to discuss.”

That firmness of conviction is the ultimate in stubbornness.  Whatever animals may have become political party mascots, the animal most closely associated with stubbornness is the mule.  Ultimately, Obama has never recognized the joke about how you get a mule to do any work for you (whack him on the head with a two-by-four to get his attention).  It is about time for Obama to realize that the Oval Office is a seat of political authority and that there are times when negotiation has to be abandoned in favor of exerting authority.

On the Danger of Devaluing Conversation

I seem to have spent a fair amount of time recently brooding over Max Weber’s warning about the “loss of meaning” in a society that becomes too preoccupied with marketplaces.  From this point of view, I wanted to raise a red flag over a word whose loss of meaning may be particularly hazardous.  That word is “conversation;”  and it means a lot to me, because I happen to have been working for Fuji Xerox back when Xerox decided to launch “keep the conversation going” as a marketing slogan.  Ironically, this phrase seems to have originated with Richard Rorty, whose Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argued that "keeping the conversation going" was fundamental to the practice of philosophy;  but it is hard to imagine Xerox promoting either products or services on the basis of their contributions to the work of philosophers.

Back in the early days of social software, I posed the question, “What if we all gathered in conversation and nobody had anything to say?”  My point was that this was a technology in which the very nature of interaction, so fundamental to how we socialize, might get overwhelmed by an onslaught of babble for the sake of babble, rather along the lines of what we now see in so much of the use of Twitter.  I suggested that the very semantics of “conversation” might get undermined by a new form of “hollow conversation.”

However, it was only while reading The Social Construction of Reality:  A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge, by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, that I realized how fundamental conversation was.  Indeed, it was fundamental enough to be relevant to the interests of the Xerox Corporation, at least back when Xerox was trying to establish itself in the knowledge management market.  Here is the critical passage from this book about conversation:

To be sure, an individual usually remembers the realities of his past.  But the way to “refresh” these memories is to converse with those who share their relevance.

This immediately resonated with me, because one of the key problems of knowledge management involved the effective maintenance of organizational memory:  Is it possible for the knowledge of the individual to “migrate” to the organization as a whole;  and, if so, how is this achieved?  Conventional wisdom assumed that this was a problem to be solved by bigger and better databases with bigger and better search tools.  Some even argued that Google had “solved” the organizational memory problem.  Only a few of us suggested that “artifacts of knowledge” were far less important than “acts of knowing” and that conversation was probably the most fundamental such act of knowing.

Berger and Luckmann reinforced this position by suggesting that memory itself depended on conversation;  and it was gratifying to see that they did this back in 1966, back in the same time frame when Jacques Derrida was warning against the problems of dependency on “dead and rigid knowledge.”  Unfortunately, a culture that has lost touch with the value of history has also lost touch with the nature of memory.  As a result, we have become a culture in which not only is there conversation with nothing to say but also there are technologies of knowledge management with no “knowledge to manage.”

The Global Water-cooler

The water-cooler used to be the emblematic embodiment of television as a shared social experience whose scope extended beyond the family living room.  In an office setting in which most viewed work as drudgery, this physical oasis of refreshment became a social oasis of shared experience;  and, for the most part those experiences involved the previous night’s television viewing.  It may have begun with sports broadcasts;  but, as serial drama migrated from afternoon soaps to prime-time evening slots, the water-cooler, physical or virtual, became the venue for extended conversations over what just happened and what would next happen.

Since most of my work took place in rather lively research laboratories where extended conversation was vital to daily activity, the water-cooler was less significant.  However, I remember my wife coming home to report the “water-cooler effect” in the faculty lounge of the school where she was teaching on the morning after the first episode of Twin Peaks aired.  This was when I first became aware of how social television actually was, and it is interesting to see the impact of the Internet on that social element.

Ironically, the first major example I encountered of a water-cooler in cyberspace, so to speak, was on the ArtsBeat blog site of The New York Times.  I discovered that every Monday morning brought a recap post about the latest episode of Mad Men.  True, most of these programs now have their own Web sites supporting similar discussions;  but I saw the commitment of the Times to this particular aspect of social software as the crossing of a Rubicon of sorts.

Now it would seem that the modest breadth of the Rubicon has been exceeded by the width of the Atlantic Ocean.  We are now in a brave new world in which we are sharing the serial televised drama experience with our British cousins.  Where once my reading of the London Telegraph allowed me to learn when the British were finally going to see the concluding series of The Wire, now I see that both sides of the Atlantic are viewing the unfolding episodes of Game of Thrones almost simultaneously.  This may not have been picked up by ArtsBeat;  but Ed Cumming now seems to be in charge of the Game of Thrones water-cooler.  Furthermore, he takes his responsibility seriously enough to check for corrections submitted as comments, amending his source text when appropriate.

For my part I rather like the idea that the water-cooler has gone global.  After all, its original role as oasis-from-drudgery has now be replaced by the Internet itself (an entirely different topic for discussion).  Cross-country conversations about television drama struck me as interesting;  but I never found ArtsBeat particularly compelling.  Perhaps I have just been seduced by the idea of the conversation going global.  Perhaps, because of the nature of the Game of Thrones narrative, I am just glad that British voices have joined the conversation.  Whatever the reason, the water-cooler has become a more interesting, and possibly even more informative, place.

Music in the "Mathematical View of the Universe"

I was attracted to Stephen Shankland’s Deep Tech column for CNET News this morning by its title, “Wolfram education apps raise teaching dilemma;”  but I quickly discovered that my personal interest departed significantly from the primary substance of his article.  Here is the core of that primary substance:

Wolfram Research got its start with the hard-core Mathematica software, itself an offshoot of Stephen Wolfram's attempt to explain his mathematical view of the universe embodied in his book, A New Kind of Science. It was therefore fitting that the company's "knowledge engine," Wolfram Alpha, took a rigorous approach to facts and data.

So perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise that the company's first mobile application to use Alpha was similarly tailored for a refined audience and came with a correspondingly expensive price tag of $50. No doubt displeased with the response, Wolfram shortly after decided to "focus on ubiquity" and cut the price to $2.

Now Wolfram is showing signs that indicate a deeper understanding of consumer sensibilities, announcing new iOS applications called Wolfram Course Assistants to help students with algebra, calculus, and music theory. They tap into Alpha's Mathematica abilities behind the scenes, but they're focused, packaged, and reasonably priced at $2 for algebra and music theory and $3 for calculus.

Like just about everyone of my generation with an interest in computers, I have known about Mathematica for some time.  Indeed, I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when its pioneering predecessor, MATHLAB, first surfaced at The MITRE Corporation.  There is no questioning that Mathematica was a great leap forward from MATHLAB;  but, for the sort of research I was doing, I never needed to take that leap.  Most of my work involved symbol manipulation but had little to do with the symbolic forms of higher mathematics.  LISP was sufficient to serve my needs, and I am happy to say that I have never lost my capacity for expressing my computational needs in this programming language.

On the other hand those same research activities have set me apart from Wolfram’s belief in that “mathematical view of the universe” ever since I first encountered it.  The more I learned about the impact of technologies, particularly information technology, on human behavior in the “real world,” the more skeptical I became about that view and the more inclined I was to dismiss it as outmoded deleterious Enlightenment thinking.  The piece on A New Kind of Science in The New York Review reinforced my skepticism;  and my basic reaction to the launch of Wolfram Alpha was your classic “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.”

Nevertheless, I was no more surprised than Shankland to see Wolfram venture into the wonderful world of apps;  nor was I surprised that this would launch a debate similar to the one that arose when sophisticated pocket calculators first started appearing in classrooms.  In this debate I continue to side with Seymour Papert, who, in his pioneering work on LOGO software as an educational tool, wrote a perceptive paper arguing that it was more important to teach children to “be mathematicians” than to teach them mathematics.  I continue to believe that a good teacher can, indeed, teach students of any age to be mathematicians;  and I accept the premise that software like Mathematica can contribute to that teaching process.  Does it matter that bad teachers may misuse Mathematica?  Of course it does, just as it matters that they may misuse pocket calculators, slide rules, and, for that matter, pencil and paper.

Where I really get uneasy, however, is the way in which Wolfram and his colleagues have now used apps to fit music theory into that “mathematical view of the universe.”  This led me to examine in more detail than Shankland provided just how that “fit” was established by the Music Theory Course Assistant app.  On the surface it seems to provide a useful path of entry to what one might call the “lexical basics” of music theory:

• Hear and view accidentals and octaves anywhere on the staff
• Choose from both common scales and hundreds of more advanced scales
• Explore triads and major, minor, and seventh chords
• Input up to four chords and hear their progression
• Learn how to identify music intervals by their name and what they sound like
• Find interval inversions for every interval type
• Reference musical terms like "melody" and "fortissimo" in the abbreviated music dictionary

Nevertheless, there are certain fundamental matters that really need to be covered from the very beginning.  The most important of these pertain to listening, and I have to wonder whether or not they are being properly honored.

The most challenging of these is the matter of enharmonic intervals.  These are the intervals that sound the same when they are played on the keyboard of an instrument using equal-tempered tuning;  and this tends to cultivate the misconception that enharmonics are nothing more than intervals spelled in different ways.  However, those who practice music know that this is about as specious as the proposition that homonyms are words that mean the same thing spelled in different ways.  It is thus important that even the earliest stages of ear training recognize that these differences involve more than spelling and that students begin to learn the logic behind what the proper spelling is.  The mere fact that the interval training portion of the Course Assistant includes a keyboard display leaves me worrying that any sound synthesis provided by the software never gets beyond equal-tempered tuning and may ultimately mislead the beginning student.

This then leads to the related question of how this software handles those “more advanced scales.”  The sample display on the Web site indicates that one of these categories is “Grecian Scales.”  Our knowledge of the music of Ancient Greece is very limited, particularly when it comes to how (if at all) it was notated and how it actually sounded.  (The Wikipedia entry does not do a bad job at summarizing the current state of knowledge in this regard.)  We know from sources like Aristeides and Ptolemy that the “music theory” of the Greeks was based on the interval of the perfect fourth, the interval between the third and fourth overtones in the natural harmonic series.  This interval was divided into 60 equal parts.  On the piano keyboard the perfect fourth consists of five semitones, which means that an equal-tempered semitone would be divided into 12 equal parts.  Therefore, the entire octave would be divided into 144 equal parts, making it twice as refined as the EUTERPE system I developed for my own experiments in microtonality.  Now it turns out that the term “enharmonic” can be traced back to the Greeks;  but, given their refinement of the perfect fourth, it goes without saying that it refers to something more sophisticated than different ways of spelling the same interval!  If the Wolfram app recognizes this sophistication, I shall be surprised;  and I shall be even more surprised if the audio it provides is good enough to help the student recognize it too!

All this may be a classic example of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, as one of my teachers used to say.  However, the real purpose of the sledgehammer is not to pick nits over microtonal intervals but to generalize Papert’s precept.  Teaching music is all about teach the students to be musicians.  One must start with approaches to making music;  and, through those approaches, one may introduce music theory for its capacity to facilitate how we can talk about making music.  Such conversations can probably benefit from an easily consulted dictionary;  and it would certainly be nice to have such a dictionary on a portable digital device (as it would be for a dictionary of the English language).  It does not appear that the Wolfram app was intended to be such a dictionary;  and, if it can serve as one, consulting it may not be as easy as we would expect from an English dictionary.

Today is Sophie Tucker's Birthday!

Share a dirty joke with a friend!

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Death Penalty

The new (December 23) issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article on the death penalty by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.  I have to say that I have been impressed by The New York Review for their ability to arrange contributions from Supreme Court Justices, present and past.  The Review provided a platform for Stephen Breyer to preview material from his latest book, Making Our Democracy Work:  A Judge’s View;  and now we have Stevens using this same platform for “another judge’s view.”  Even more interesting is that, in this case, Stevens is actually reviewing a book, David Garland’s Peculiar Institution:  America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.

Stevens was clearly qualified to write on this topic, since the Supreme Court is often invoked as the “court of last resort” in efforts to overturn death sentences.  Furthermore, since Garland makes it clear that his book is neither for nor against the death penalty, Stevens is particularly qualified as one who appreciates the need to approach problematic issues from many different points of view, regardless of whatever conclusions are eventually drawn.  Indeed, if Garland never takes either a pro or con stand, the reader is likely to be left wondering what will be concluded by reading his book.  Stevens provides an answer to this question that serves to make his review so intriguing:  “the American death penalty has been transformed from a penal instrument that puts persons to death to a peculiar institution that puts death into discourse for political and cultural purposes.”

However, this raises the troubling question of why we should need such a “peculiar institution.”  The best answer I can propose is that we, as a culture, desperately need discourse about death because our mass media have so saturated us with the issue.  Consider the ongoing popularity of crime drama on television.  When was the last time you saw a story about crime in which the crime was not homicide?  Were it not for all the recent attention to different forms of white-collar crime in the financial sector by documentary makers, a visitor who knew nothing about our culture might conclude that homicide was the only act we regarded as criminal.

Admittedly, it is easier to tell a story about homicide.  Just about any television program on the subject begins with someone finding a body somewhere.  From there one could begin to pin down the act responsible for the body getting there, whereas it is not as easy to similarly pin down why so many people on Main Street are still worrying about unemployment, foreclosed homes, and retirement funds that lost value catastrophically.

However, because stories of death are easier to tell than other stories of crime, we fall into the trap of believing that death is a simple matter, which often entails other simple matters such as defense or revenge.  Indeed, we tend to tune out when it emerges that the matter is not simple;  and, if we do not have the luxury of tuning out, we often turn hostile, one of the points that Reginald Rose made so well in 12 Angry Men.  This leads to a troubling corollary:  Perhaps we put death into political discourse because we believe that our perceived simplicity of decisions about death will help us simplify other decisions, such as political ones, that we have to make.  Think of how the debate of abortion was inflamed by invoking language that turned it into a debate over whether the act of abortion is homicidal.  Thus, what we talk about when we talk about death (with apologies to Raymond Carver) is how we try to simplify that which cannot be simplified;  and, where major decisions are concerned, such simplification really is a “fate worse than death.”

Nietzsche Speaks to the Tea Party

I just finished watching a Book TV broadcast of a panel discussion held on September 10, organized by the National Press Club on the subject of the Tea Party movement.  Consistent with my current opinion of panel discussions, this was an event that shed precious little light on its topic area while providing more than the usual heavy dose of ego-strutting.  The result, however, was that I found myself thinking about prevailing Tea Party stereotypes while reading the following passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Rather know nothing than half-know much!  Rather be a fool on one’s own than a sage according to the opinion of others!

Without getting side-tracked by Dick Armey’s participation in the panel, where it seemed as if he could not let the slightest remark pass without trying to maneuver it to his advantage, there is at least one aspect of the fool that is far from pejorative and may tap into the wisdom of Nietzsche’s second sentence.

I would guess that Nietzsche had in mind the fool who knows he is a fool.  In the current political context, this is the Joe-the-Plumber kind of guy, who knows that he cannot keep up with the verbal legerdemain of either politicians or pundits and is not ashamed of his seeming (note the qualifier) inadequacy.  If, through his self-proclaimed foolishness, he has the courage to ask questions that others would deem “foolish,” he stands some chance (perhaps even a good one) of turning the conversation away from the usual formulaic cant and towards matters of substance.  As proud members of the “Republic of Letters,” our Founding Fathers were never afraid to disagree with each other in either face-to-face conversation or the exchange of correspondence;  and often the most heated disagreements could be settled by agreeing on what was the question being asked, rather than any details regarding how that question should be answered.

Ironically, one of the best proponents of this “significance of the question” principle is neither a politician nor a pundit (and is decidedly no fool).  She is the soprano Patricia Racette.  When she ran a master class here last summer, I wrote on Examiner.com that every student she coached was hit with the same message:

You should always be asking questions about what you are doing;  and often being able to express the question is more important than how you decide to answer it.

While I may have serious questions about the motives and values of those under the Tea Party tent (and, where most position statements that Armey has made are concerned, there is not “may” about it), their efforts to ask questions about what both our government and its citizens are doing strike me as the fool’s quality that Nietzsche admires in the above quoted text.  I would even continue his logic and argue that those embarrassed by such questions and respond with ad hominem attacks rather than even hypothesized answers are those who “half-know much” and are the targets of this particular prankish remark.

The most important point I tried to make yesterday was not that economic crisis is still with us.  It was that too many people feel as if they have been excluded from the conversation that still needs to take place;  and that feeling is grounded in the harsh reality of how things are getting done, whatever Barack Obama was saying back when he was trying to get elected.  Being able to ask questions should be grounds enough to justify joining the conversation;  and being able to formulate a question that “only a fool would ask” may ultimately justify sitting closer to the head of the table!

Artistic CHUTZPAH

Yes, I know it is really early in the week;  and thinking about the Chutzpah of the Week award runs the risk of being premature.  However, this one is too good to resist for a variety of reasons.  It concerns a recent decision made by Mike Leigh to decline an invitation to teach at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem.  Dave Itzkoff documented Leigh’s justification on his ArtsBeat blog for The New York Times as follows:

Mr. Leigh wrote that he “always had serious misgivings about coming,” adding that he almost canceled after an incident in May in which Israeli commandos raided a Gaza-bound flotilla. The “last straw,” Mr. Leigh wrote, was the proposal of legislation by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, requiring that Israeli citizens pledge a loyalty oath to the “nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Leigh added that these and other actions by the Israeli government had left him “in an untenable position, which I must confront according to my conscience.”

Under most circumstances this could simply be accepted as an act of conscience;  but what makes this particular episode interesting is the way in which Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, director of the Spiegel School, chose to respond to Leigh’s statement:

Mr. Schorr wrote to Mr. Leigh in a letter dated Oct. 15, “I am certain that the decision is sincere and that it reflects your detailed, legitimate political views,” but added, “Boycotts and ostracism are the antithesis of dialogue.”

Mr. Schorr wrote that “the public will interpret your decision as indicating an irrevocable rift between us, a boycott of Israel, and a rebuke of its current and future artists.”

“To me,” he said, “this is a red line. Thus, I cannot justify your decision.”

Schorr basically escalated Leigh’s rather simple statement of conscience into an insult that required riposte, oblivious to the extent to which this intuitive reflex to counterattack would be fraught with irony.  At the simplest level we have the “surface” reading of Schorr’s motive in his final sentence.  If Leigh was following the dictates of his own conscience, Schorr’s “justification” is at least irrelevant and at most intrusive.  However, the strongest irony lurks in that sentence about dialogue.  Schorr is perfectly correct in asserting that ostracism is antithetical to dialogue, but his own ideological blinders prevent him from recognizing the extent to which that same spirit of ostracism by Israelis continues to undermine any substantive dialogue taking place between them and Palestinians.

In other words Schorr’s primary refutation actually serves to reinforce Leigh’s conscience-based motives.  Leigh turned his rejection letter into a judo-like act of disarming his opponent through his opponent’s own weakness.  In the context of the current volatility of the Middle East, such an act may be appreciated as an act of chutzpah, even if it was not initially conceived as such,.  So, while there is always the possibility that a stronger case will arise later in the week, I am going to stick my neck out and name Leigh as the holder of this week’s Chutzpah of the Week award.

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.

Beyond Legal Victory

Last week it seemed as if Goldman Sachs' reaction to the civil fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was that, if the matter came to court, Goldman Sachs would have no problem winning the case. However, a lot happened last week; and it now appears that, between the beating it took from both its Senate hearing and the public reaction to that hearing and the decision by the Department of Justice to begin a formal investigation based on the SEC charges, Goldman Sachs is showing signs of rethinking its position (an ironic word choice considering how much of this case hangs on their own particular semantics of the noun "position"). As I argued last Friday, Goldman Sachs sees no grounds for fraud, since they were only engaged in "normative business practices consistent with the constructed reality of Planet Wall Street." It now appears that, while Goldman Sachs still feels that this provides valid grounds for defense, it might actually be in their best interest to rethink their business practices.

This is based on a report that Justin Baer and Francesco Guerrera filed last night for the Financial Times, suggesting that Goldman Sachs is now leaning towards an out-of-court settlement that could be facilitated by this "good faith effort" (my words) towards business practices showing more respect for the interests of clients. I use that noun "respect" in the context of Richard Sennett's 2003 book, Respect in a World of Inequality, even though Sennett was more concerned with the gutter of the disenfranchised than with the elevated games of the financial sector. One of Sennett's points is that we need to call out the concept of the "level playing field" for the myth it really is, recognizing that it no longer is (if it ever was) a "fiction of convenience." (Again, those quotes are my own words.) Of course money, itself, is a "fiction of convenience," as has been observed by Niall Ferguson and many of his predecessors. However, many of the instruments behind the current economic crisis and SEC accusations of fraud are based on mathematical theories which assume that all parties can know the layout of the playing field, even if it is not perfectly flat, and that, provided with such knowledge, any party can make decisions to optimize its own returns. The fact that those theories are also fictions plays a significant role in Benjamin M. Friedman's recent analysis of the economic crisis for The New York Review.

One of Friedman's key points is that reality is messier than any model posed by those mathematical theories, and one might say that Sennett's book suggests that the social capital of respect is more effective in negotiating the messes of reality than any of the fictions of convenience of the financial sector. So will respect figure into the ways in which Goldman Sachs rethinks its normative business practices? The report by Baer and Guerrera makes it clear that they have not yet progressed beyond "leaning." However, they have teased out a few hints of the possible directions of that leaning:

According to one person familiar with Goldman’s plans, it would now tell employees to seek confirmation from clients that they understand the risks associated with any given security, and how their dealings with Goldman might change their total exposure.

Goldman is also studying ways to ensure that complicated securities are marketed only to appropriate clients, the person said. Goldman’s push to “tighten up” standards suggests its willingness to adapt in the face of mounting scrutiny.

At the very least this seems to indicate that more communication will take place before any transaction is settled. The real question will be whether or not that communication is effectively informative. If what is ultimately at stake is a normative acceptance that Goldman Sachs will respect each of its clients, then the real sign of respect is not that Goldman Sachs communicates but that the client understands; and the nature of understanding is one of the messiest aspects of reality, which is why someone like Jürgen Habermas has invested well over a thousand pages of text to come to grips with that concept.

This is not to suggest that trying to achieve better client understanding is a fool's errand. However, it is not necessarily a goal that Goldman Sachs can achieve if left to its own devices. Because it is an instance of reality at its messiest, it is a situation that demands what I previously called "invoking the methods of Ian Mitroff, through which different perspectives of those realities duke it out with well-formed arguments as part of a process of critical inquiry that makes sense" of the mess in all its complexity. Put another way, if Goldman Sachs really wants to take on this problem, then it would do well to invite the SEC to present its own perspective of this messy reality. The confrontation could be as antagonistic as a court case. However, there is a better chance that fewer people will get hurt; and more people might actually benefit!

The Corollary of Helplessness

Naomi Klein has filed a report for The Nation from Cochabamba in Bolivia, the site of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. However, there is one path that her logical analysis does not follow; and I think it is important, because it addresses a line of reasoning far more general than current environmental problems. Let me begin with how she sets the stage with her opening paragraphs:

It was 11 am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant classroom, marshaling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups, disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicolored ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change, "we need to recover the values of the indigenous people."

Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that at its best would raise average global temperatures 2 degrees Celsius. "That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers," Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn't have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.

Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness.

It's little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia's most pressing, existential crisis--the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities--Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

That's because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialized countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political will in the North just wasn't there. More than that, the United States made clear that it didn't need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubber-stamp the accord, the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million, respectively. "It's not a free-rider process," explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. (Anyone wondering why activists from the global South reject the idea of "climate aid" and are instead demanding repayment of "climate debts" has their answer here.) Pershing's message was chilling: if you are poor, you don't have the right to prioritize your own survival.

The concept that deserves more attention than Klein allotted lies in the center of this excerpt, subsequently reinforced by the following two paragraphs. The heart of the problem is the helplessness of those who try to act and the recognition that the only reaction to that helplessness is rage, rather than logic.

I found myself dwelling on this proposition because last week I happened to see Leila Khaled, Hijacker on the Sundance Channel. Much of this documentary amounts to an account of the making of a terrorist, and the fundamental argument is that one resorts to terrorism to get the attention of those who have willfully chosen to ignore one's plight. In other words, when one is helpless, whether as a Palestinian refugee, a disgruntled American citizen living on (or over) the economic brink, or a resident of a country facing "existential crisis" as a result of current climate conditions, there is little one can do but rage. That rage can be localized, but that amounts to banging one's head against the wall. The alternative is to warp that old motto of the Sixties into a more sinister proposition:

If you are not part of the problem, make the problem so bad that someone will have to do something about it.

The consequent of that conditional is basically a prescription for terrorism.

In the wake of 9/11, we experienced the better part of a decade immersed in rhetoric about a Global War on Terror that was as passionate as it was misconceived. After he took office, Barack Obama tried to undo those misconceptions with a concerted effort to establish better communication between the White House and the rest of the world on both national and international scales. From his speeches we felt that he appreciated the nature of helplessness in the face of abusive practices; and we all hoped that he would deal with the helpless with more substance than the I-feel-your-pain platitudes of Bill Clinton. What we probably did not anticipate is that Obama's own strategy would basically follow the first chapter of the Book of Isaiah (Jerusalem Bible version):

"Take your wrong-doing out of my sight.
Cease to do evil.
Learn to do good,
search for justice,
help the oppressed,
be just to the orphan,
plead for the widow.

"Come now, let us talk this over,
says Yahweh.
Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
thought they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.

"If you are willing to obey,
you shall eat the good things of the earth.
But if you persist in rebellion,
the sword shall eat you instead."
The mouth of Yahweh has spoken.

For those who have resorted to terrorism in the face of helplessness, an invitation to "talk this over" just does not cut it, not when it involves conversations with the likes of someone like Pershing who will not even grant you the priority of your own survival.

After 9/11 Tony Judt invoked considerable wrath with an article in The New York Review that presumed that there were deeper motives behind those acts of destruction in New York and Washington. His position was that it was more important to address those motives through meaningful actions than to presume that one could wage war on terrorism the way the Allied powers had waged war on the Nazis. It would be fair to say that there are any number of reasons why the Bush Administration did not want to get Judt's message, but now it seems as if the Obama Administration is not getting it either.

If we are defuse the rage against helplessness, we need to turn not to Isaiah but to Oliver Cromwell:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Let us not presume that the objective of talking things over is to get others to obey. Rather, let us "think it possible" that, in the eyes of the helpless around the world (including in our own country), we are the ones perceived stereotypically as terrorists. Even if we do little more than entertain the premise, talking things over might then lead to productive actions, rather than meaningless circumlocutions that can only provoke further rage.