Another Cookie for Another Mouse

Some readers may recall that, at the beginning of this year, I used Laura Joffe Numeroff’s children’s picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie as a metaphor for conditions in Venezuela and President Donald Trump providing refuge for Nicolás Maduro when he had to flee that country. Apparently, the metaphor has now extended beyond Venezuela. An article for The Guardian by Aisha Down suggests that the consultancy business also has to contend with tempting cookies and hungry mice.

The KPMG Australia building (photograph by Diego Fedele, Australia Associated Press)

Here are the first three paragraphs:

A partner at the consultancy KPMG has been fined for using artificial intelligence to cheat during an internal training course on AI.

The unnamed partner was fined A$10,000 (£5,200) for using the technology to cheat, one of a number of staff reportedly using the tactic.

More than two dozen KPMG Australia staff have been caught using AI tools to cheat on internal exams since July, the company said, increasing concerns over AI-fuelled cheating in accountancy firms.

As a “veteran” from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), my immediate reaction to this report was: “Well, what did you expect?” AI is just another cookie, and any “hungry mouse” will probably figure out how to use it with little effort.

When I began my freshman year, I quickly learned that there was a rich “hacking” culture at MIT. For the most part, this involved relatively innocuous pranks enabled by basic technology tools and techniques. Every and then, the pranks would go “over the top;” and, very early in my freshman year, I encountered four students that had been suspended for a year due to one of those pranks. As I recall, all four of them were relatively resilient and completed their degrees after returning, perhaps with a broader perspective than that of most undergraduates.

Personally, I am not surprised that someone at KPMG that had ascended to partnership may have acquired a portfolio of “hacking” skills during his student days. After all, “hacking” usually arises from “thinking outside the box;” and consultancy is little more that providing clients with “outside the box” perspectives they have overlooked. It all comes down to the “Cui bono?” question: Who benefits from those perspectives? An innocuous prank is one thing; but, if a “corporate ox” is being gored, the issue is far more serious!

Making America (or San Francisco) Sick Again

Yesterday Madilynne Medina filed her latest article for SFGATE, the Web site for the San Francisco Chronicle. The headline title for that article was: “San Francisco's pharmacy crisis deepens with another store closure.” The store was a CVS pharmacy located at 701 Van Ness Avenue. This happens to be right across the street from where I live in Opera Plaza. When I first moved to that place, I could walk one block to the north to a Walgreens. I cannot remember when it went out of business, but it was probably more than a decade ago, making CVS the “alternative of choice” whether I liked it or not.

The good news was that I could engage with just about anyone working there. All encounters with the pharmacy went smoothly; and, for the most part, I could get along with the staff managing the rest of the shop. Probably the greatest frustration came from the need to have a staff member present to unlock any door to provided access to the item I needed. This was the “solution” to dealing with shoplifters. I remember a time when the floor had a security guard, but that is now in a distant past.

The most important sentence in the the Chronicle article is the following:

CVS did not cite an exact reason for the closure, but the company said some of the factors it considers are “market dynamics, population shifts and a community’s store density.”

My guess is that those at the level of management that decided on this closure did not realize that those factors were little more than what George Orwell call “newspeak.” In Orwell’s context, this amounts to providing for a reason to go through with an undertaking without first considering the resulting assets and/or liabilities.

The irony is that CVS became the only “pharmacy of choice” for my neighborhood after which it had abruptly eliminated Walgreen’s from the neighborhood. Now, the only “choice” that customers will have will be to start using the CVS at 1059 Hyde Street, which is about a mile to the west of the shop being closed. Of course, I have never had trouble walking the distance of a mile, but only as long as I did not have to contend with bad weather in the process. Given how many things seem to be going wrong in this situation, Murphy’s Law would add that any such walk will inevitably involve bad weather!

San Francisco City Hall (photograph by Mike Hofmann, from the National Register of Historical Places in San Francisco, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license)

For my generation, the usual reaction to this situation is: “There Oughta Be a Law!” This was a comic strip that took on (as the Wikipedia page puts it) “minor absurdities, frustrations, hypocrisies, ironies and misfortunes of everyday life.” I think about that every time I look at the City Hall dome as I walk down Van Ness Avenue. Sadly, I once responded to an invitation to see our City Council in session. I came away thinking about those absurdities and frustrations, wondering whether, as in thermodynamics, governance is entropic, meaning (in simpler words) that disorder will always prevail over order!

Speculative Fiction Gives Way to Potential Fact

 I just read an article that Arwa Mahdawi wrote for The Guardian entitled "Privatising the moon may sound like a crazy idea but the sky’s no limit for avarice." Since there is no biographical capsule for her, it is difficult for me to establish the context for this position piece. Those of my generation with an interest in science fiction, on the other hand, are likely to encounter a chilling similarity with what Robert Heinlein envisaged at the end of the Forties, when he wrote the novella The Man Who Sold the Moon. In my case that happened to be my first encounter with Heinlein, which would ultimately lead to my taking a deep dive into his entire series of "future history" narratives.

The fact is that "vulture capitalism" figures throughout the entire series. However, The Man Who Sold the Moon was written at a time when real estate capitalism was "on a roll" by way of providing housing that would be affordable for our military forces after they had returned from Europe and Asia while also providing generous slices of the pie to the providers. Mind you, I am not taking Mahdawi to task for not citing Heinlein in her article. However, I would recommend her setting aside some time for the entire "future history" cycle to see what other fictional projections are beginning to bounce of factual reality.

Getting the News in the South Pacific

Following the reports about Facebook blocking access to news in Australia has been a disquieting experience. For the record, I have never used Facebook as a news site. Indeed, the only reason I have a Facebook account at all is because Blogger no longer notifies my readers whenever I create a new article. As a result I have created a “shadow” page, also called The Rehearsal Studio, which readers can follow to receive hyperlinks to new articles as they are published.

Furthermore, that limited use of Facebook was reinforced by Mark Zuckerberg himself, when he told a Congressional committee that the business of his company was advertising. Any “distribution of information” was assessed more on what advertisers would pay to share space with that information than on whether the information itself was accurate or willfully deceptive. Why would anyone want to get news from such a source, particularly in a setting that allows users to compare reports from different sources, either through a search engine or by maintaining multiple RSS feeds?

For the record, I have three such feeds for international news: Al Jazeera, BBC News, and The Guardian. I am writing this just after having read a Guardian article by Sheldon Chanel about the accessibility of news across the South Pacific. For the record, this article was written with financial support from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. The operative content of this article comes down to the citation of an observation made by Amanda Watson, a research fellow at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs based at the Australian National University:

Facebook is the primary platform, because a number of telco providers offer cheaper Facebook data, or bonus Facebook data. Many Pacific Islanders might know how to do some basic Facebooking, but it’s questionable if they would be able to open an internet search engine and search for news, or go to a particular web address.

One reason for this limited approach to access appears to be that most of these individuals connect to the Internet through a cell phone, rather than a computer. (I should also observe that my own experience has taught me that the efficiency of search increases with the size of the screen displaying the results.)

My guess is that Tim Berners-Lee would have puppies if he encountered Watson’s analysis of Internet use in the South Pacific. He would probably accuse the Islanders of trying to ride bicycles on his eight-lane superhighway! I was reminded of the sobering experience I had when I once attended an advertisers’ conference. One talk began with a sobering observation:

We spend much of our time flying over the people we influence.

In other words the primary target of advertisements lies in those population centers that are not on the coast of either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

Internet usage is sort of the “flip side” of that proposition. Internet content is driven heavily by a handful of technology companies, and most of the drivers think that the whole world sees the Internet the same way that they do. This is, to say the least, a fatuous fantasy. As a result, we now have an extensive demographic that is likely to be deprived of timely news simply because Facebook is more interested in more revenue, rather than in seeing to the needs of one category of its user base. (It goes without saying that one of those needs is the distribution of content vetted for validity!)

Zuckerberg might want to give that proposition some thought, were it not for the fact that his only view of the South Pacific would probably be restricted to a luxury resort on one of the islands.

A Spoonful of Eye Candy Makes the Counterpoint go Down

Originally written in September of 2007

As I prepare to see the San Francisco Opera production of Samson and Delilah next Sunday, it is hard to forget that this opera embodies what is probably the most well-worn cliché of the music literature, at least over the course of the twentieth century when it was worked to death by just about every comedian on stage or screen (including the animated ones in the latter case). This moment is all the more ridiculous, since the "official" title of this particular musical episode is "Bacchanale," in spite of the fact that Bacchus-worship was not a practice of the Philistines. (Indeed, the libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire makes it clear that this scene is celebrating Dagon, which is one of the details from the Book of Judges that is kept intact.) However, once we get beyond the hackneyed, this opera reminds us that spectacle was not an invention of Cecil B. DeMille, or even D. W. Griffith, and that "grand" was quite a meaningful adjective in the phrase "grand opera!"

We are also reminded that music was just as much a business in late nineteenth-century France (or, for this particular opera, Germany) as it was about three-quarters of a century later when Lennie Tristano was bemoaning the sorry state of jazz in the Forties of the twentieth century. However, if we get beyond the eye candy on the stage and even the "star turns" of the leading characters, this opera provides us with many opportunities to see that Camille Saint-Saëns was just as as serious about his music as Tristano was about his. We get to hear Saint-Saëns display his command of both counterpoint and choral writing with a refinement that we miss if we limit our attention to the "Bacchanale" or other his spectacles, such as the second piano concerto or the "Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso." Then, if we listen "behind" the mezzo-soprano's delivery of Delilah's seduction aria ("Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix"), we hear some wonderfully delicate management of orchestral texture and chromatic lines that, in other hands, would have been written off by my own composition teachers as "slimy."

This leaves us with an impression of a Saint-Saëns who was able to achieve a dialectical synthesis of the ideals of his art form with the pragmatics of the business that provided him opportunities to compose. He could produce music that, as Roger Sessions would put it about a century later, he could listen to (and present to his students) "without blushing." If the general audience cared only about seeing a sexy Delilah, lapping up orgiastic choreography, and finishing it all off with the collapse of the Philistine temple, that was their affair. Today's audiences tend to have the same interests; and, if that benefits the budget of an opera company, we are all the better for it. The rest of us can seize the opportunity to listen to the music that probably gave Saint-Saëns, himself, the greatest satisfaction; and we, too, benefit.

Uninformed Thoughts about the Nasdaq Index

I have gotten into the habit of using the Apple Stocks app to track significant indices in the United States, Europe, and Asia on a daily basis. (I review my own portfolios on a monthly basis based on statements provided by my broker.) As I write this, the Nasdaq index is at 117.33. This is the highest it has been since the index peaked at 118.67 on February 4!

Let's not kid ourselves. No stock index is a measure of "value." At best the level of an index can be taken as a level of confidence or, perhaps more specifically, willingness to trade. Why should that willingness be higher for the Nasdaq portfolio than it is for the S&P 500? Since I am not in any way an expert on these matter, my best conjecture is that Nasdaq holdings represent businesses that can function with much, if not all, of the employees working from home. Nasdaq reflects companies that "push bits," one way or another, rather than build houses or manage grocery stores.

In other words, while it might be easy to promote Nasdaq as a sign of recovery, the basis for computing the index value may not be a statistically significant indicator of the health of the overall economy.

A Necessary Departure from the Usual

When this site was first created, it involved examination of many issues other than those involving the performance of music. Over the last few years I have narrowed my focus, simply to keep my plate from getting too full. Nevertheless, I feel that the following opinion piece is one that deserves all the circulation it can get:

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/free-market-deepen-coronavirus-crisis-200408122743522.html

Mind you, there is probably nothing in this article that cannot be found in the writings of Max Weber; but this particularly piece has the advantage of being less opaque!

Calling Out the Real Humbug of the Season

Whatever Charles Dickens may have written about the matter, December is definitely the month of the humbug. Sadly, in writing A Christmas Carol, Dickens may have unknowingly contributed to the proliferation of that humbug. Thus, while the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge may have made for a comforting moral tale, in the context of a society in which the value of currency was rising above the less monetary “social” values (such as peace on earth and good will towards men), the tale itself was, itself, a humbug that never really confronted the social priorities beginning to prevail during the middle of the nineteenth century. One wonders what Dickens would have felt had he been around to see that, by the time of the middle of the twentieth century, A Christmas Carol had become a “media cash cow,” providing no end of ways in which different commercial interests were able to cash in on not only the narrative itself but the characters at play in that narrative. Indeed, the commercialization of Christmas was such a successful enterprise that it had little trouble spinning off into other faiths, not only in the United States but also in any number of other countries around the world.

Over half a century ago, Stan Freberg used his radio broadcasts to call out commercialization at its most venal in “Green Chri$tma$,” a sketch in which Scrooge was reborn as the head of an advertising agency. The sketch included parodies including “Deck the Halls with Advertising,” and, my personal preference, “We wish you a Merry Christmas/and please buy our beer!” Freberg died on April 7, 2015; and, for my money, his message is as relevant as ever. Indeed, the devaluation of anything other than currency just keeps getting worse.

Indeed, every year at this time, marketing bombards as many people as it can to promote the proposition that the “holiday spirit” is about spending money and little else. Naturally, the music business plays a major role in milking this cash cow, resulting in an annual flood of “holiday spirit” music. These are products that are less interested in listening and more interesting in promoting the spirit of spending; and no end of seriously talented musicians find themselves recruited in the manufacture of those products.

This raises the question of whether or not the Libera choral group should be examined as a product of exploitation. The ensemble consists of children from South London between the ages of 7 and 16, and they have already become a significant presence in the recording industry. Indeed, by my count, the recently released Christmas Carols with Libera is the group’s third Christmas album; so, as they say in marketing, we are dealing with “serious product.”

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording begin discussed

To be clear, the members of Libera are more than competent in their musical practices; and I certainly do not want to be called out for suggesting that making music at a young age is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, I am sure that every member of Libera will come away with an impressive skill set for choral singing if not for vocal solos as well. Nevertheless, it is hard to find anything nice to say about Christmas Carols with Libera because the chorus itself is reduced to a “sideshow” in what might be called a Carnival of Commercialization. My guess is that the guiding forces behind this album (including the design for the front cover shown above) are more interested in how many buttons can be pushed by feel-good arrangements, whose only message is, “How much money are you spending on loved ones this month?” In other words, what is merely drivel when albums like these are released during the other eleven months becomes positively venal during the month of December.

It would be nice to mount a just-say-no-campaign that simply switches off media offerings that have nothing other than marketing in mind. However, I am afraid that a recording like Christmas Carols with Libera would have to be included in that mass rejection, not for the selections of the music but for the disturbingly manipulative techniques behind the presentation of that music. These practices probably do not descend to anything as serious as abuse; but it would be naive to deny that some level of exploitation, however mild, lies behind the production of this album.

A Critique of Judging New Opera

I found it interesting to review Damian Fowler’s book American Impresario: David Gockley’s Life in Opera almost exactly one year after Matthew Shilvock took up the torch from Gockley as General Director of the San Francisco Opera. While there was much to enjoy in this book (including the sumptuous photographs), I have to say that it was Gockley’s own words, compiled in a “Finale” section entitled “Gockley on the Future of American Opera,” that set my own “little grey cells” buzzing. I enjoyed the extent to which these “text clips” could be frank and open without giving the sense that they were deliberately trying to provoke.

However, even if we set aside provocation, there are some passages that deserve to be held open to question. My guess is that different readers will feel different ways about which passages these are. For my part, I would like to dwell on just one of them:

And we must remember that critics have too often misjudged a work at its premiere, witness A Quiet Place and Nixon in China.

Now, without trying to speak for or against any of my colleagues, I feel it necessary to point out that, in many ways, a fully-staged opera is a bit like the elephant in that old joke about three blind men trying to describe it. Given my own predispositions, I almost always begin by grabbing that elephant by the music, trying the best I can to sort out how much of my listening has to do with the composer and how much has to do with how the music is being performed. Others prefer to grab the elephant by the libretto, approaching the music in the role it plays in telling the story. Then, of course, there are those who grab the elephant by the stage director, who sometimes has his/her own priorities in how to approach that story or the music through which the story is told.

However, what those of us who write try to do goes far beyond description. As Gockley rightfully observed, we need to draw upon description in the service of judgment. This is no easy matter.

Those whose knowledge of Immanuel Kant goes beyond any handy “bluffer’s guide” probably know that he wrote three major works that he called “critiques.” The last of these is the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and it was preceded by the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. These, of course, parallel the so-called “transcendentals” of the beautiful (judgment), the true (pure reason), and the good (practical reason). Furthermore, each is situated in what Jürgen Habermas chose to call a separate “world,” truth in the objective world, beauty in the subjective world, and goodness in the social world. Lest this all feel like an unnecessary sideshow, I should observe that I was first drawn to read the Critique of the Power of Judgment when I found out that the first half of the book was devoted entirely to aesthetics.

This is what takes us back to the Gockley sentence quoted above. Whether or not we admit it, those of us who exercise that “power of judgment” in our writing will probably agree that judgment is context-dependent; and we will probably agree with Kant that our own subjectivity is part of that context. Where things get tricky, however, is that, even if we know that there is a context, we are not always positioned to specify just what the context is. One reason for this paradox is that, for better or worse, each of us engaged in the act of writing cannot avoid bringing our own personal history into that context.

This is not meant to serve as an excuse when someone (such as Gockley) accuses one of us of “misjudgment.” Rather, the very complexity upon which judgment is contingent should affirm that, at least where aesthetic matters are concerned, there is no “misjudgment.” There is the exercise of judgment, and there is the possibility for argumentation when different conclusions of judgment disagree. However, because we are doing what we do in the subjective world, there is no exercise of “pure reason” that will unfailingly resolve the argumentation one way or the other. All there is is the inevitable premise that each of us has a point of view and some of us are better at appreciating another point of view than others are.

None of these thoughts are likely to be of much use in the real world. The general director of a performing arts organization has to reconcile fiscal solvency with the fact that the audience side of any performance space is going to be filled with a wide diversity of “powers of judgment.” At the end of the day it all comes down to donations and subscriptions; and, now that the Internet has created a culture in which we expect everything to be free, the game that the general director must play is getting harder and harder to win.

These days I am thankful simply for having capacities to both have and express opinions. However, those opinions are cultivated in a field of experiences, so to speak. Given prevailing economic and social conditions, I have no idea how long that field will remain fertile. All I can do is hope for the best!

Opening an Old Wound

Over the last few weeks I have been working my way incrementally through Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times, having saved it on my xfinity box after recording it from a Starz channel. The film was released for public distribution in 2011, and I suppose I was drawn to viewing it after having derived so much pleasure from observing the work practices in the film Obit. Life on Deadline, which was also set at the Times. Nevertheless, the films could not have been more different. While Obit. follows the ups and downs of a small team of writers, who come across as being very good at their jobs because they work very hard at it, Page One is an uncompromising examination of a business (not just a single newspaper) on life support. Towards the end we see David Carr addressing a conference of journalists, telling them that the fact that they are still around is an achievement unto itself.

I was writing about journalism and the changes in its work practices long before The Rehearsal Studio was launched. One of the tags I had created for my old Yahoo! blog, Reflections Beyond Technology, was “news;” and I was already worrying about the extent to which the Internet had become a platform for “fake news” as early as 2006. This was a time when I was reading Truthdig regularly, and it provided me with a quote from Joe Conason that is as relevant today as it was when I first read it:

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy.

This was a painful reminder that the mess we are in is not the fault of the Internet. Rather, it is part of a bigger picture that meant so much to Max Weber, who recognized that a society whose only value is market value faced the two-horned prospect of loss of meaning and loss of freedom.

From an idealized point of view, newspapers provided a base of activity for professionals whose primary expertise could be found in making sense out of what happened in the world on any given day. Unfortunately, when advertising ceased to be a source of sustaining revenue for newspapers, making sense was no longer a priority. Indeed, all priorities were lowered with the rise of simply being able to have enough cash on hand to pay the bills. In such a setting, meaning no longer has priority; and the noble effort of making sense out of a confusing world, which is captured admirably in the narrative threads that are woven together in Page One, is more likely to be punished than rewarded.

As my own writing progressed, I found myself less and less inclined to rail against a world in which meaning no longer had any currency. I suppose that music provided me with an escape hatch. I could deal with matters of meaning and sensemaking in a domain that had a limited audience, but it was an audience that still took those matters seriously.

Mind you, it is not as if the performing arts have elevated themselves above the dominating forces of market value. They have to worry about paying the bills just like the rest of us; but, as long as I can thank the Social Security Administration for my being able to pay my own bills, I can continue to keep my own attention focused on performance itself. Given Carr’s prioritization on the value of still being around to do one’s job, I suppose I should be thankful for what I have!

The Audience Experience and its Discontents

I see from today’s Digital Media article by Joan E. Solsman on the CNET Web site that Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has gone on a soapbox about how “movie theaters are strangling the movie business” (Hastings’ words). It less provocative words, it would be fair to say that businesses like Netflix have definitely changed the rules of the game as they apply to the distribution of films; and it has probably also followed as a corollary that the rules for film production are at least in flux, if not already metamorphosed. This made me reflect on my own experiences with movie theaters, which seems to have been on a downward slump for at least thirty years.

The first time I felt that cable television had changed my attitude towards going to movie theaters came with the release of Platoon. Because movie theaters operate in chains, this film happened to find itself at a movie house in Marina del Rey, which was a short drive from where my wife and I were living at the time. However, our decision to go to that particular theater was slanted by a report that the venue had become a favorite among Vietnam veterans, many of whom had not really recovered from their experiences and were now venting by shouting their reactions to the movie screen as the narrative unfolded.

About half a decade later, we were living in Singapore. As one might guess, one did not encounter such acts of extreme expression in any public space, including movie theaters. On the other hand it was clear that subtler forms of disruptive behavior were surfacing. Cell phones were just beginning to be ubiquitous; and, as might be expected, Singapore was ahead of that curve. Thus, it was not unlikely that one would find someone in the audience having a conversation on a cell phone while a film was in progress. This marked a metamorphosis in the social contract. The new rule was that you could do anything “within reason” as long as you paid for the ticket; but you could exercise your own judgment over what was “within reason.”

These days I cannot remember the last time I went to a public screening in a movie house. My wife and I compared expenses and decided that we would prefer to pay extra for our cable service and wait for the movies to show up there. Part of the decision came from the fact that movie houses had become more unpleasant, rather than just more expensive. We both felt that any film that deserved attention also deserved a more private viewing setting, and we continue to feel that way.

This then raises the question of “live” performance settings. Even when concerts were the domain of the aristocracy, there was a general acceptance of the premise that the performance of music involved a shared social experience. That premise hit a few speed bumps when performances became more public. Think, for example, of how promoters would hire claques to sway audience reaction in the nineteenth century. However, it would not surprise me to learn that, for the better part of the twentieth century, audiences were better behaved around the world than they had been in the presence of eighteenth-century aristocratic settings. The major exceptions came with rejection of the unfamiliar, usually taking the form of unrestrained coughs that could shatter the spell of the brevity of Anton Webern as effectively as that of a hushed prelude by Richard Wagner.

These days the social contract is in the same sort of metamorphosis that is hitting movie theaters. People are more occupied with their “personal technology” than with what is taking place up on the stage. They can also be less restrained in personal behavior. (The last time my wife and I saw Tristan und Isolde, there was a young couple necking in the box next to ours. Yes, the narrative is an inspiring one; but should it be enabling as well?)

Still, as was the case in Singapore, the bottom line is that bills need to be paid. Ticket revenue still signifies in how budgets are managed. Nevertheless, to the extent that public behavior is not writing itself a new set of rules, it is hard to avoid thinking that, from time to time, audiences are a “necessary evil.”

Clearly this should not be the case. Back when I was writing about the concept of “communion” this past August, I did not dwell on the possibility that the relationship between listener and performer was more than a line with two ends. When the audience is a good one, communion is a shared experience with sharing taking place on both sides of the proscenium. My concern, then, is that, as individuals become more and more occupied on personal engagements through their devices, they will become less receptive to social engagements in which even just the presence of others is a contributing factor. It is not the passing of the concert hall as a structure that I fear as much as the passing of those willing to accept the “concert experience” on grounds similar to those accepted as normative half a century ago.

Why They Still Hate Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Marvin Minsky

I just finished reading the BBC News report of the death of Marvin Minsky, who succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 88. Minsky served as adviser for both my senior and doctoral theses. The former amounted to a systematic implementation of some ideas he had been playing around with through which he could compose music with the aid of computer software. The latter was basically an extended analysis of that what implementation could and could not express and what means of expression were involved. As is the case with many doctoral students, it led to a few publications, one of which I particularly enjoyed, since it got me into the Journal of Music Theory, which had been a major source for much of my background research.

I suppose what I remember most about Minsky was that he was a "hands off" adviser. He would let me go off on my own with relatively little guidance, but he would then subject my findings to intense criticism. At the time he was running the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was getting its funding from the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He had other areas of research to supervise to keep those guys was happy. I was a side show. So I had the freedom to run it myself while enjoying the facilities of the Laboratory. My best move came when the composer Ezra Sims became my "unofficial" adviser (and composition teacher); and much of what went into my thesis was the result of not only Sims' coaching but also his own experiences in using my software.

However, even before my graduate studies, Minsky made a mark in the world of computer music that never really got duly acknowledged. What I built for my senior thesis was basically a symbol manipulation system, whose symbols amounted to a hybrid of the fundamental constructs of music notation and the basic operators of a programming language. The former was, in just about any imaginable way, a predecessors of the MIDI coding system. Had Marvin been more concerned about intellectual property instead of chipping away at enormous research challenges, he probably could have made a strong case that what finally showed up in concrete form in my senior thesis would have been prior art for what MIDI had been trying to do. (On the other hand my work with Sims came about through a shared interest in microtonality. One of the first things I did, to satisfy the sort of expressiveness that most interested Sims, was divide the octave into 72 equal internals. My attachment to that representation was why I ignored MIDI during its first years of application.)

On a broader scale I acquired from Minsky the basic precept that finding the right questions to ask is always more important than answering them. In that respect I was glad to see the BBC quoting him on the downside of companies like Google and Facebook getting into artificial intelligence. He sees those companies trying to make money by commercializing things that never worked very well in the early stages of research. (There used to be a joke among graduate students that a thesis was based on a demonstration project that could only be applied to one example and did not even work reliably in that limited case!)

I suppose that Minsky was more interested in intelligence as a process, rather than a product that might eventually be marketed. In this respect he was a direct descendant of Alan Turing, whose "Turing Test" has been bastardized by contemporary technology hacks as a product that can vie in a competition, while Turing himself was more interested in the sorts of processes through which his "Imitation Game" could be played successfully. If those processes worked for a human player, then there was a good chance they could be implemented on a machine.

Minsky's background also endowed him with an appreciation of intelligence having a subjective dimension, that is elements that had more to do with psychology than with mathematics. Mind you, he believed that such subjectivity might eventually be mapped into a more objective domain; but he still knew enough to appreciate the difference. On the other hand I am not sure he appreciated that there was also a social dimension to intelligence, which may explain why he was often so impatient, if not bored, in many of his conversations.

That same comment that objects to commercialization advocates, instead, "giving support to individuals who have new ideas." I suppose that is why he took me on as a doctoral student. However, back when I was still trying to make a living in scientific research, I found very few such individuals when interviewing job candidates. Graduate schools were now coming out a crop of students who were most proficient at following orders, passed from funding organizations down through thesis advisers. I suppose that is why I am now happier these days writing on my own nickel (or, to be fair, nickels coming in part from the Social Security Administration). Even in the world of music, it is getting harder to come across "new ideas;" but I find the odds of finding them at a conservatory are better than those of finding them at even the best of the universities!

An Unexpected Exercise in Archiving

Like the Lord, Examiner.com giveth and taketh away. Around the middle of this year, I was informed that everything I had written in 2009 had been "unpublished." This came without any warning and probably had only to do with the fact that those articles did not fit with the change in page formatting. (There may also have been a tacit assumption that anything written in 2009 no longer had any value.) The Content Director who was my point of contact suggested that I could just republish them in the new format, indicating when they had originally been published. This turned out to be a rather time-consuming process; and I abandoned it when one of those articles got unpublished again. Fortunately, it turned out that I had the rights to the content; and there would not be a problem with my creating my own archive. I have now used this blogging tool to do so; and the new "archive blog" was completed today. I may be the only reader, but at least I can use the search tool!

Speaking Truth to Power is no Guarantee that Power will Comprehend

This past Tuesday James Gleick put up a fascinating post on the NYR Daily blog. His title was "What Libraries Can (Still) Do;" and it amounted to a valuable analysis of how the resource of a public library could be qualitatively different from that of a computer connected to the Internet, emphasizing the positive value of that difference. He then signed off with a zinger of a punch line:

The masters of Internet commerce—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple—sometimes talk as though they’re building a new society, where knowledge is light-speed and fungible, but a marketplace is not a society.

This allowed him to hit squarely on the head a nail in desperate need of being hit. Unfortunately, that desperation has a lot to do with the prevailing ignorance among those "masters of Internet commerce." We have known for some time that the movers and shakers in the world of the Internet have been blithely ignorant of the social world. Many of them might even attribute their success to that ignorance. The bottom line is that they are so fixated on the marketplace that they believe that the very concept of society is outmoded, if not downright counterproductive. Thus, whenever social disruption rears its head, whether it involves death threats, identity theft, or just plain harassment, the "masters of Internet commerce" turn a blind eye and hold to their faith that the workings of the marketplace will take care of everything. Unfortunately, the result goes beyond the disappearance of society (and, along with it, any viable sense of the concept of governance) from the Internet. Because the Internet is so ubiquitous, society no longer signifies in the world at large except among terrorist groups for whom cultures that have neglected both society and governance can now be recognized as easy targets.

Does "Nimbler" Mean "Better?"

One gets the impression that Jack Dorsey returned to the Chief Executive Officer position at Twitter because someone (probably the heavy-duty investors acting as a collective) felt that the company needed a good hatchet man. In this case the hatchet will lop off 336 jobs, constituting 8% of the workforce. Given that unemployment is still a major problem, that amounts to a mighty hatchet.

One sentence from Dorsey's statement about the layoffs stuck in my craw:

We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce.

This is very much the newspeak of the world that the Internet has made. My guess that all of us are now encountering software coming from "a smaller and nimbler team." What we notice most is that it is more error-prone. It is the latest generation of the old Microsoft motto: "Get it out as soon as possible and fix it later." It is also the latest example of what happens when pleasing the shareholders is more important than pleasing the customers.

Do You Judge a Man by his Credentials?

Like many, I have taken a rather jaundiced view of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The fact that just about everything discussed in the preparation of this plan was performed in absolute secrecy (strict enough to avoid penetration by WikiLeaks) was enough to give me pause as a first impression. This seemed like another one of those gatherings inspired by organizations such as the World Economic Forum, whose motto ought to be, "Making the rich and mighty richer and mightier." Thus, when I got a hyperlink to the article "Why Support the TPP?" on the Facts & Arts Web site (which I read primarily for the arts), I decided to click with curiosity heavily seasoned with skepticism.

I did not take long for skepticism to come down like John Henry's hammer. The author is Jeffrey Frankel. His credentials are listed as "Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University." Say what? This says as much about Harvard as it does about Frankel. I suppose it would be really cool (at least to the rich and mighty) to have a resume that describes you as having a degree from Harvard in "Capital Formation and Growth." The fact that Harvard has become so specialized is just as disturbing as its efforts to displace the University of Chicago as the recognized haven for the "paid brains" of the rich. Time to get a home in that rock.

A Composer who Moves and Shakes

Those who read my SF Classical Music Examiner site may recall that, back on August 20, I ran the story that Nick Benavides, one of the original founders of the Guerrilla Composers Guild, had been named as the new Managing Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Attentive as ever to timeliness, the San Francisco Chronicle finally got around to running this as news this morning. Furthermore, it was reported in the "Movers and Shakers" column in the Business Report section. It is not often that a composer gets into that part of the paper,;but this is one that has certainly moved and shaken at least one member of his audience, all in a good way!

Bad Gecko!

The following was released on the ABC7 News Web site late last night:

Insurance giant GEICO, Government Employees Insurance Company, says it will pay $6 million to settle a complaint accusing the company of unfairly over charging poor, low-and-moderate income women, and single drivers.

This is the sort of thing that happens when a company spends more money on its advertising budget than it does on providing customers with the services they think they are going to get after paying attention to those ads. (In GEICO's case, that involved a veritable deluge of clever advertising.) I am reminded of the terrible service from United Van Lines back when they were sinking all of their money into Stiller & Meara radio commercials.