Callow journalism

I often read the Guardian, the ex-Manchester Guardian, the venerable trust-funded independent paper. It valiantly and explicitly attempts to clearly separate facts from opinion, and has a wide range of points of views, but is definitely to be categorized as left-leaning.

Recently, in the wake of the UK election, it has suffered from a kind of existential angst. Many of its columnists, Oxbridge graduates and smartypants, could not bring themselves to support Corbyn. His strong showing at the polls exposed a disconnect between the "smart left" and the populist left.

The Guardian must (rightly so to speak) show support for Corbyn, while swallowing its pride at the nasty things it said about him before, things like "un-electable", "weak", etc.

Some sectors of the UK obviously still suffer from class considerations. It appalled me to read about the jibes against the "non-toff" Corbyn, both in the Commons, by people like Cameron (the tie etc), Blair, sniping from the manure-infested sidelines, and May. I think the Guardian columnists could have done more to express outrage at this. I also believe that there is a smell of class bias in their attitude and sneering, a small whiff.

I still read the Guardian, but I do not trust it as much as I once did. To be fair, some columnists stood by Corbyn, courageous iconoclasts like Monbiot.

More and more, I invoke Hunter Thomson's warning about journalism, how it is a kind of storytelling, and how it has to stop pretending to be objective. The positivist mind-set of the Anglo-Saxon world needs to be reviewed, and merged with the Continent's existential views, not the salon existentialism that they sneer at, but the stance that sees human affairs as intrinsically engaged with their observers. Journalism is a form of history, and the teller matters there.

The future of medicine

Tugs - A. Barake - All rights reserved 2014

An item on this morning's public radio twigged my imagination. It was an interview with someone preparing to go on a medical mission to a developing country, with a fully equipped hospital ship.

Usually these kinds of stories annoy me, because there is the whiff of self-righteous do-gooding, and I know I am probably misguided about feeling this way, but pride is a big factor in human behaviour and the recipient's pride is rarely discussed.

Anyways... because I was annoyed, my mind strayed to alternatives to charity, in the same way that accessible ramps on buildings or at curb crossings benefit everyone, not just people with mobility impairment, why not try to overhaul the way medicine is delivered to everyone, using these mission approaches. For example, there are fully equipped ophthalmology planes that can land in remote sites to do eye surgery, there are the above mentioned hospital boats that provide all kinds of services including surgery, and there are travelling emergency teams that go to disaster sites for first response.

Well how about eliminating our (bloated) static hospital infrastructure, that is continuously growing its administrative load following Parkingson's laws, and make all medicine mobile?

The current ubiquitous Web and mobile telephony infrastructure combined with good scheduling software could provide the required efficiencies. The MD's and support staff would travel to the patients and treat them in-situ, with the best mobile equipment money can buy. I think it would be cheaper than maintaining the infrastructure we have now. It would be the return of the house call.

Fake Control Through Cheap Realities

Just reread Susan Sontag's famous book on photography. One of the later essays starts with what could be a comment on the Internet: images are necessary to alleviate the anxieties of modern culture, things like class and money stress, consumerism, emptiness and lack of privacy. Images provide a surrogate sense of power, of ownership and control over reality as well as enough variety to keep desire down, or at least to channel it.

Hey, this is why the Internet is not censored in our culture. It is a pacifier.

We have more than just the photos Sontag was writing about, more of the pseudo-real to keep us occupied and calm. Hell, interactive stuff too, live feeds, tweets that are like ESP antennae hums, and eyes everywhere taking and framing pictures that are pasted to a map. It reduces the biological need for face to face, for real politics, for making art and for ultimately making trouble...except when it is used an means of communications and of organizing. So we need to watch out for that, to suck it up and store it so that we can incriminate those who use it that way.

Keep on doing selfies.

A Tale of Two Realities

I have just begun a new job. No hiatus between this new one and the old. One day I am in hell, the next in paradise.

The one I left was as a software manager in a large organization, and the current one is as a software lead in a very small organization.

Other objective differences: the previous job was bureaucratic, there were many processes and constraints and a network of communication and decision paths, and the systems my team built had to reflect the complex interrelated and often historically constrained requirements.

The current one is technical, working within a small team and with very precise mostly self-defined scientific requirements, adjusted to meet specific customer requests. The software has to run precision equipment to capture and calculate results within extremely tight tolerances, both in time and numerical accuracy. The only measure of quality is repeatable precision. The culture is one of technology and science.

In the new job, I report to people who have the same engineering training as I do, who have more experience in the R&D business than I do, who I can ask questions of without risk of offending or destabilizing them emotionally. Peers and superiors in all senses.

In my previous job, I reported to people who asked me to explain what I did "in simple terms" and who liked to hear themselves talk so that they could pretend to make sense of their lumbering thoughts in public forums, often referred to as "meetings" but which felt like beatings. Dissent could be career limiting.

The analogy I would like to give to dispel any conclusion that I may be a pretentious ass is as follows:

Suppose you are a medical practitioner, a physician, and you see patients in a clinical context. You have to diagnose and prescribe treatment as part of your day to day routine.

Also, suppose that you are "managed" by someone who had not undergone the same level of training as you, say a registered nurse, who knew the lingo, understood the context, but did not feel confident enough to make life or death decisions affecting patient health, but felt competent enough or was somehow appointed to tell you, the physician, how to run your practice.

For example, "please use language that is easier to understand in your charts". Or  "make sure your handwriting is legible for the pharmacist", or " you have not seen your quota of patients today, why did you spend 6 minutes more than average with Mrs. Smith today?".

Could you practice under such circumstances? How long would you last?

I lasted 5 years in the analogous IT context. My manager was a technologist, previously a school teacher who joined th IT boom of the nineties and hung on. She did a bit of COBOL programming, hated it and went into management because she could talk better than she could listen or understand.

She is proud to claim that she does not understand the need for system architecture versus program design, her eyes glaze over when there is talk of latency, language choice, servers, data flow analysis, code profiling, and factoring and she had no patience for options analysis or proof-of-concepts. She will not deign to read code. She has trouble with email client software and spreadsheets.

She wants simple, clear explanations and plans, and wants to set deadlines before beginning design, because iterative work can only lead to grief. She always used waterfall approaches in COBOL, and they worked fine for her.

Her weakness and fear prevent her from adding value, from making decisions. She was a pass-through for her manager's decisions to me and my peers. No value added, but lots of aggravation and delay. Never understood or wanted the concept of situational management, which is probably the most effective way of managing people, so effective that there have been lawsuits about who has a right to claim authorship and teach it. She is a scared rabbit, hanging on until she can retire and cash in.

Others in that environment have said that we, the technical folk who did the work, should not "speak Neanderthal" when in the presence of senior executives, by which it was meant that we should use non-IT terms of less than 3 syllables. The executives in question were the CIO and her direct reports.

But all this is now in my past, one-day-old stuff. I am now in another world, where the conversations around me centre on measurement tolerances, ADC resolutions, real-time interrupt-driven code, clock speed and sampling rates, hierarchical state machine approaches, language selection and compiler efficiencies. I have scope probes and micro-controllers on benches beside me, no fuzzy walled grey cubicle partitions in sight, and a project to deliver with people I can talk to who want me to talk dirty.

I am in heaven.

Gender relations

Franz Erhard Walther, 1983 - Paris, Centre Pompidou - by A. Barake

Still digesting the readings from Thanksgiving...

I read Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" recently, and as I was driving in this morning, it hit me how such a study can be a good reflection on the state of gender relations at a point in time yet how it is just that, a touch point  since these relations are so varied, so much in flux, constantly evolving and I asked myself if her study was of any use in day-to-day life.

The sample size being dealt with is huge- 3 billion give or take a few million on each side of the equation, and this results in a large variety of sexual behaviours, variability and variety. The middle of the bell curve is very broad, even if we limit it to Western culture, as she does.

Yes, we are a laboratory for sex, as we should be. Until we get totally artificial about it, survival and renewal require this experimentation. Since our brains are so adaptable, interest in sex requires huge variety I guess. There is no end to the variations, and the minor things are as exciting as the major ones, however you define the categories. Marketing and advertising depend on this instinct as their currency of the new.

Despite the difficulty of categorizing such a complex topic, De Beauvoir's expose covers and uncovers much ground. Her method is to work at the delta she perceives between gender status, behaviour and emotion in every context of her time, and historically where she can.

One observation which struck me was the notion that a large number of  women she observed define themselves through a male spouse or mate, as a means to gain territory, because of the cultural power disparity that existed. Desire and power, the old story, examined with great perspicacity and dissected and countered with new approaches. The central thesis of the book.

I extrapolated this notion to the study of relations between gay men and hetero women - to try to answer the question of why there can be friendly attraction without sexual attraction. Also, to test whether there was a converse with lesbians and hetero men. There isn't in a general sense. De Beauvoir has a chapter on lesbianism, and she concludes that the relation between heterosexual and same-sex desire is much closer and symmetrical in women than in men.

Having also read what Camille Paglia says about homosexuality, I am not sure that one can conclude anything like that. The spectrum is very broad as I wrote earlier, and maybe de Beauvoir's snapshot is just a reflection of what she could see, or what was visible when she wrote the book at mid-century.

Gender relations and sex remain very difficult things to generalize about, and I think it goes back to the idea that we are attracted to the new, to variety, and that behaviours that test and taste that variety are usually good for evolution, for survival, so long as they are not culturally or biologically damaging.

As the culture and the population widen, the behaviours that can be experimented with can grow, there are wider safety margins, and there is also motivation and opportunity. The taboos and secrecy around sex that act as cultural anchors to maintain tribal cohesion loosen as the tribe expands to include the planet's population. The need for protectionism disappears, reflecting the monetary and commercial globalization.

This may be why there is a resurgence of fundamentalist thought, a backlash, a clinging to what can be perceived as a moral high-ground, based on limited communications, limited population size, limited cultural migration. Pockets of resistance.

Oh yes, the book was banned by the Vatican. Go figure.

Cognitive Philosophy

There seems to be a movement afoot - long overdue - to embody the foundations of intelligence and philosophy. It is partially old news, the heroic AI of the 50's, 60's and 70's has been discounted despite our benefiting from the results of that research in today's mainstream technology: neural nets, machine speech recognition, handwriting recognition, natural language translation, cars that drive themselves, and all kind of other low-level intelligent (unconscious?) activities simulated by programs.

I think that it is the Minsky flavour of AI (now re branded cognitive science), the one grounded in logic, seems to have fallen out of favour -since the fruits of that work did not rise up to the expectation of the "I" in AI; an AI based only on logic, a formal game with symbols that pretended to be words. How can that be smart without the observer having to make all kinds of allowances and assumptions?

This stuff was subject to sometimes acrimonious debate for a while, until technology and big data made many of the arguments moot.

The good news is that there is now a strong movement towards the recognition of the role of the perceptual environment and its embodiment in animals like us as part of the equation.

This realization may be due to the Web, indirectly, since it should be now be obvious that the seeming "intelligence" of the Google search would not exist without the "environment" of all the Web sites, which are of course interactions with people's brains (in fact there was a very simple AI program that used "Google distance" as a way to measure metaphorical strength between concepts. For example "Castro" and "cigar" scored pretty high on that scale).

So now there is a movement, a possibly serendipitous program of research coming together to ground AI in the real-world of experience, and some of the people that I think are leading this effort align themselves along a somewhat elegant but odd symmetry of ideas.

Let me explain.

There is David Gelernter, the computer scientist and columnist who wrote "The Muse in the Machine" and "Mirror worlds". These books made me want to go back and look at AI again. In fact I ran back. His arguments are so cogent, so seemingly simple and common-sensical that I almost missed their radical novelty. He states that data and the links between data is the key to intelligence. These links are often emotional gradients, in the sense that logic is not always what binds ideas; it is similar emotional affect!

The brain associates memories based on the closeness of the emotions they evoke, the sensory input parallels that occurred as the memory is created. The whole model, not just the idea...how you felt, how cold or hot or tired or dizzy you were. This links data to environment so elegantly that it is a mystery to me why no-one has picked up on this earlier. He breaks the syntax/semantics dichotomy very deeply. Also, Gelernter has very conservative political views - right of centre. I am noting this now so as to make my strange symmetry argument a bit further down. Bear with me.

There is George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist. His work with Johnson on embodied philosophy and with Nunez on the origins of math, takes the empirical evidence around the links between our brain wiring and the perception of the world and uses it as a foundation for philosophy.

Basic brain mechanisms are considered to be foundational and ideas grow as hierarchies of metaphor (i.e. links).

Metaphor becomes a key mechanism for cognition. Similarly to Gelernter,  Lakoff et al propound that metaphors are based on evolutionary and environmental constraints, not some platonic logic ideal. No such thing as the separation of  mind from the world of things. These guys are existentialist scientists. Finally! The rampant positivism and Platonism of the English speaking world, the Whitehead/Russell school, is giving ground. Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are now more visible in the world of scientific cognition.

Lakoff is an ex-student of Chomsky. He seems to disagree with the flavour of Chomsky' thesis of hard-wired syntax in the brain. He believes syntax and semantics to be more of a spectrum of complexity in cognitive biology than a differentiator between humans and other animals. Also he is a non-neo-con, a strong and vocal opponent of  right wing politics as it is played in the US today, and although I hesitate to slot him with Chomsky on the political front, they are on the same side of a hypothetical centre line.

So we have right and a left wing thinkers on cognition who fundamentally disagree in the political realm, the realm of people relations, nations, influence, and power. That is a healthy and good thing. This lends support to the notion that there is a grounding in "objective" reality for this thinking on cognition, it is much more than opinion.  (A slim argument, I know, but hey, this is my blog, I can say what I want.)

Aside from the political thing, I want to continue to talk about is the cognition thing. There is another thinker/scientist that seems to be breaking new ground along those same lines.

He is a neuro-scientist, one who gets his hands dirty opening up craniums, working with brain surgeons. William H. Calvin. I read two books of his: "Conversations with Neil's Brain" and "How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence Then and Now". His ideas centre around the notion that cognition is an initially subconscious Darwinian process among neural bundles that remember perceptions, integrate them and ultimately model the environment perceived by the body, and that the successful "species" of memories/emotions (let's call them cognitions) are the ones that we call conscious, the ones that rise to the top of the noise of cognition, to differentiate themselves as our inner voices.

His research fundamentally agrees with the models put forth by Gelernter and Lakoff. Like Lakoff, he believes that most cognition in the brain is fomented through unconscious processes. Like Gelernter he finds that memories are linked through non-logical processes. He shares with Lakoff a deep knowledge of Chomsky's ideas on innate language ability and like Lakoff disputes the simplicity of these models, without denying the human brain's ability to parse language. He also talks of metaphor, not surprisingly, since all this is supported by empirical evidence at the chemical and behavioural level.

So I am very happy that this stuff is happening. I tended to get hot under the collar when I read "classic" texts by Minsky or Pinker on intelligence. They seemed simplistic and smug. I was always perplexed by the lack of attention given to Grey Walter's ideas which preceded but anticipated Gelernter's. I wanted 'The Muse in the Machine" to be discussed more, but to my chagrin, Penrose's strange books on quantum brain hypotheses got more press.

Let's get back to empirical research, let's continue the program of work that will ultimately bring philosophy and psychology back into science.The foundational thinkers list above should also include Turing. Even Penrose mentions his "other work". He did mathematical research on molecular biology (plants mostly) and how stem cells can become complex structures. His mathematically-based hypotheses on these matters were validated experimentally just this year in the UK. Ultimately this theoretical work may prove to explain some of the brain mechanisms underlying the work Calvin and others are doing.

There are conceptual layers to all this analysis, from the bottom-up: the molecular, the cellular, the systems (bundles of neurons evolving), and the cognitive and behavioral, leading to metaphor, logic and science, including physics, on to philosophy, morality  and politics. The gaps needs to be filled so that we have a continuum of understanding. A New Science in the Vico sense. Something we made and understood that we made, but that is grounded in experience.

(I just found an earlier post that was wishing this stuff would happen, and so here we are.)

Djerassi and Houellebecq

I wrote earlier about my disappointment with Djerassi's "science-in-fiction". I would point him to the much more effective and artistic Houellebecq style, directly descended from Aldous Huxley, but done with much more panache (bien-sur). It is over the top in some of its narrative descriptions of extreme behaviours, deadpan and not suitable for every audience, but if I were to recommend some books for anyone studying human motivations (and that includes business types and techies, not just the humanities majors), it would be "The Elementary Particles", "1984" and "Brave New World". They talk of biology and power and the link to human affairs. Free will is mediated by biology and biology is the layer just below power.

Palomar's Hale Telescope

Finished reading Ronald Florence's "The Perfect Machine" about the project to build the 200 inch telescope. A couple of things struck me.

1. The most interesting characters are the ones who are presented as being the most problematic, for example, Edwin Hubble and his huge ego, or Fritz Zwicky and his crazy sounding lateral thinking. Both are presented in a somewhat worse light than the "reasonable" folk like George Hale. Cooperation and cooperative people get things done but the competitive bastards are the ones who are valued more if they manage to prove something. I guess it is because the competitive route is more risky, more likely to move the culture in new directions, painful as it may be to the culture.
2. The other striking insight has to do with a line near the end of the book that mentions that charged-coupled device (CCD) sensors are so much more efficient than film for capturing light that a one meter telescope today could do what the 200 inch one did with film. This is certainly an example of disruptive technology, given the herculean efforts made to build the Hale machine, with its precision movements and optics. Of course CCD's can be used with the 200 inch mirror, but one must wonder if such efforts would have been made if CCD's had been available in the 1920's.

The Art of (tech) War

(photo copyright 2007, A. Barake)

Where I talk about more-or-less obvious but infrequently discussed strategies by Sun, IBM, Microsoft et al.

I think it was in during the last century, with the advent of the hardware/software dichotomy that this type of strategy evolved. IBM may have been the first to use it successfully. A prerequisite is a pair of complementary things to sell, with at least one that you control completely, through secrecy, patents or a huge market lead. Let me describe it.

Suppose you sell hardware, and you make and sell software for it too. Your competitors also sell hardware and software of course. Your hardware is different and possibly proprietary or difficult to clone or to re-brand. So the strategy is to make software that runs on both your own and your competitors' box. You under-price or give away the software, and call it bundling.

Better still, you give away stuff that is almost or as good as your competitor’s, and you value-add and sell a version that runs only on your platform.

Sounds familiar?

IBM with Java and Linux
Sun with Solaris
And both are also attacking Microsoft with Eclipse and OpenOffice respectively.

Yet Microsoft thrives.
Explain in 2 pages or less....

Microsoft fights back using another strategy; they sell software that runs mostly on smaller cheaper platforms. They have an arrangement of co-dependency, as their releases grow and become more bloated, they require bigger and bigger Intel horsepower, until that low-cost hardware begins to overtake the computing power of big boys. This is an attrition strategy; much vaunted in management theory courses.

Microsoft's core business is software, so it is the protected commodity. The hardware is Intel, but multi-vendor and commoditized so competition drives the price down below the proprietary guys’ stuff. They are pursuing a software-first strategy and the other guys are pursuing a hardware-first strategy. Are you still with me?

It is with reason that IBM fears Microsoft more than it fears Sun or HP.

IBM and HP also sell Intel servers, but they are branded, not commodities. Both try to mitigate the hardware-first exposure by also making money on professional services (which can sometimes be an adjunct to sale - nudge nudge), server software and very big boxes. Forced upgrades due to byzantine dependencies among their software offerings help too, and the upgrade cycle is one way to drive this.

IBM has little software presence on the desktop except with IDE’s and I’m not sure they sell workstations since the Lenovo deal. In other words, they threw in the towel for now.

On the Internet side:
The classic version of this story is, of course, Microsoft vs Netscape, where hardware becomes system software and software becomes the browser. We know who won.

More subtle, as chronicled by others before me, Google learned a thing or two from this. They give away email, blogging, API’s, server side apps - to counter Yahoo’s offerings in that space. Free and easy Web access for the masses, no emphasis on paid subscription modes, whereas Yahoo does act as an ISP. Google’s core business depends on search and on page views, all the rest of their offerings simply draw customers into their portals while at the same time undermining Yahoo’s non-search businesses. They are not evil but almost...they followed in the footsteps of the well-tried IBM and MS strategies.

Yahoo - has no strategy that I can tell. They are like Sun. Java was a gift to the community that hurt Sun, since it is platform independent. I guess they thought that they could make an OS/hardware combo that ran the JVM better than the other guys, but IBM with its marketing (and technical) clout claims that that is not the case. In a way, it is as if Microsoft had written Linux. That is what happens to a nice earnest tech company that swims amongst the sharks.

Is their hope for the "good tech" to overcome the "mediocre tech" with good strategy?
My proposal would be combine the Apple, Sun and Yahoo brands as the high-end stuff of computing. The champagne. Then market it to consumers and businesses as the cream of the tech-savvy crop. Apple and Sun are an almost perfect match, and it would get Apple into that server market they so covet. R&D would be a plus rather than a risk, since the audience would want to take those risks, it would be cool, fodder for the early adopters. Yahoo would provide even more channels for Apple’s media side

There. Free strategy. Why don’t I command the multi-million dollar bonus?

I know many tech types who can't bring themselves to believe that that kind of “deep thinking” goes on; but this is exactly what the people who took biz courses when you were toiling to understand complex stuff end up doing, and they make the big bucks. Hustlers, thugs, ruthless opportunists... having the only kind of fun they can, since they can’t make things, are too competitive to collaborate with anyone, and certainly can’t code. I think they are missing out, because in the end, what's left is an abstract and hollow victory, scorched earth, and lots of resentment against inferior technologies. Real satisfaction can only come by making things better, and not just in the monetary sense as noted here. The alternative is growing entropy until the next cleansing crisis.

P.S.
This just in.