Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

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The decade around 1664

Published by peter on 2009-03-29 in Culture, History, Matherati, Probability theory, Prophecy, Science and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

We noted before that one consequence of the rise of coffee-houses in 17th-century Europe was the development of probability theory as a mathematical treatment of reasoning with uncertainty.   Ian Hacking’s history of the emergence of probabilistic ideas in Europe has a nice articulation of the key events, all of which took place a decade either side of 1664:

  • 1654:  Pascal wrote to Fermat with his ideas about probability
  • 1657: Huygens wrote the first textbook on probability to be published, and Pascal was the first to apply probabilitiy ideas to problems other than games of chance
  • 1662: The Port Royal Logic was the first publication to mention numerical measurements of something called probability, and Leibniz applied probability to problems in legal reasoning
  • 1662:  London merchant John Gaunt published the first set of statistics drawn from records of mortality
  • Late 1660s:  Probability theory was used by John Hudde and by Johan de Witt in Amsterdam to provide a sound basis for reasoning about annuities (Hacking 1975, p.11).

Developments in the use of symbolic algebra in Italy in the 16th-century provided the technical basis upon which a formal theory of uncertainty could be erected.  And coffee-houses certainly aided the dissemination of probabilistic ideas, both in spoken and written form.   Coffee houses may even have aided the creation of these ideas – new mathematical concepts are only rarely created by a solitary person working alone in a garret, but usually arise instead through conversation and debate among people each having only partial or half-formed ideas.
However, one aspect of the rise of probability in the mid 17th century is still a mystery to me:  what event or phenomena led so many people across Europe to be interested in reasoning about uncertainty at this time?  Although 1664 saw the establishment of a famous brewery in Strasbourg, I suspect the main motivation was the prevalence of bubonic plague in Europe.   Although plague had been around for many centuries, the Catholic vs. Protestant religious wars of the previous 150 years had, I believe, led many intelligent people to abandon or lessen their faith in religious explanations of uncertain phenomena.   Rene Descartes, for example, was led to cogito, ergo sum when seeking beliefs which peoples of all faiths or none could agree on.  Without religion, alternative models to explain or predict human deaths, morbidity and natural disasters were required.   The insurance of ocean-going vessels provided a financial incentive for finding good predictive models of such events.
Hacking notes (pp. 4-5) that, historically, probability theory has mostly developed in response to problems about uncertain reasoning in other domains:  In the 17th century, these were problems in insurance and annuities, in the 18th, astronomy, the 19th, biometrics and statistical mechanics, and the early 20th, agricultural experiments.  For more on the connection between statistical theory and experiments in agriculture, see Hogben (1957).  For the relationship of 20th-century probability theory to statistical physics, see von Plato (1994).
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2011-04-25):
There appear to have been major outbreaks of bubonic plague in Seville, Spain (1647-1652), in Naples (1656), in Amsterdam, Holland (1663-1664), in Hamburg (1663), in London, England (1665-1666), and in France (1668).   The organist Heinrich Scheidemann, teacher of Johann Reincken, for example, died during the outbreak in Hamburg in 1663.   Wikipedia now has a listing of global epidemics (albeit incomplete).
 
POSTSCRIPT (ADDED 2018-01-19):
The number 1664 in Roman numerals is MDCLXIV, which uses every Roman numeric symbol precisely once.  The number 1666 has the same property, and for that number, the Roman symbols are in decreasing order.
 
References:
Ian Hacking [1975]:  The Emergence of Probability: a Philosophical study of early ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. London, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Lancelot Hogben [1957]: Statistical Theory. W. W. Norton.
J. von Plato [1994]:  Creating Modern Probability:  Its Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy in Historical Perspective.  Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

The rain in Spain is mainly declaimed

Published by peter on 2009-03-03 in Culture and Film. 0 Comments

Through painful experience over many years, I have learnt to avoid any movie with a script written by David Mamet.   Hailed as a great American playwright and screenwriter by many, he appears to have – sadly – a tin ear for human speech and dialogue.   His film characters do not converse or speak as we humans do.  Rather, in some variant of a weird, artificial language I call americantheatrespeak, they declaim:  their words are enunciated clearly and loudly, with neither pauses, nor stumbles, nor mumbles, nor muttering, nor cross-talk, all the while speaking in entire sentences and paragraphs, pre-composed and uttered with a formality that would provoke laughter if you heard anyone actually speak like that.   It is not how we human beings speak, except sometimes in formal settings such as courts of law and important congressional or parliamentary sessions.    After seeing Montgomery Clift, with his pauses and false starts and mid-sentence hesitations and on-the-fly mods, how could anyone think to write movie speech of the stilted, unnatural style of Mamet’s?   In The Misfits, Arthur Miller wrote dialogue for Clift that played to his superb abilities, so we know it is possible for a theatre playwright to write natural-sounding speech for film.   As I said, Mamet must have a tin ear.
I now learn I am not alone in this assessment of Mamet.  Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker article about Damon Runyon, also notes Mamet’s formal, unnatural, language.   Gopnik, however, admires it, for no compelling reason that I can see.    Perhaps americantheatrespeak works OK on the stage, and people who see a lot of theatre don’t notice it when used on film.  Yet, against that, Clift was New York’s leading theatre actor before he ventured onto film.   But on film this style of speech is a disaster, as Mamet’s 2004 film Spartan demonstrates; no, Virginia, it is not the wooden acting or the unexplained gaps in the plot that make this film unwatchable, but Mamet’s stilted, wooden dialogue.   Ditto for the other scalps on his film pelt:  House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, etc.   Someone else seems to be writing (or de-Mametizing) the script of The Unit, although even here (unlike, say, The Wire), people rarely pause, mumble or cross-talk.
POSTSCRIPT:  Thinking some more about this, the issue arises because of what Gopnik calls film’s arch-naturalism.  Concepts that could work perfectly well as theatrical productions often fail on film, as, for example, the black backdrops and absurdism of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein, which was irritating in the extreme.   We have a problem suspending disbelief for film, a problem we don’t usually have for the theatre.   Perhaps the cause, as some film theorists have noted, is that films are akin to dreams, and dreams don’t require us (at least, not consciously) to do work ourselves to imagine whatever is missing from the production.  We are happy to do this work when watching theatre (and when reading books and listening to the radio), but are less so for watching films or TV.
Reference:
Adam Gopnik [2009]:  “Talk it up:  Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls.”  The New Yorker, 2 March 2009, pp. 66-71.

Urban Precedents

Published by peter on 2009-02-23 in Culture, Heroes, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

In the excitement over the USA’s first black American President, some people have become over-excited. An example is Marbury, who claims Barack Obama is also the nation’s first urban President.  This is simply not the case.

Although most US Presidents are creatures of the countryside or the suburbs, there have been at least two Presidents with as much claim to be urbanistas as does young Bam. Most recent was John F. Kennedy, raised in Boston and a sophisticated habitue of London, Washington and New York City before becoming President. Of course, as all rich kids of his time did, he spent summers sailing on the Cape or vacationing in Florida, but JFK was as urban as they come.

And before JFK, a century ago, there was Teddy Roosevelt, born and raised in Manhattan, and urban to the core. Of course he loved Nature (he could justly also claim the title of the country’s first Environmentalist President), and he decamped to the wilderness of the North Dakota Badlands to find himself after the death of his first wife. But this was a man who was such an urban-dweller that he took the job of President of the Police Commission of the New York City Police Department – the NYPD! – literally running to his office on the day of his appointment, according to the account of his friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens. While in that post, Roosevelt spent his evenings walking the streets of Manhattan to meet his policemen on the beat:

T.R. went about  at night with [journalist Jacob] Riis as his guide to see the police at work.  He had some bizarre experiences.   He caught men off post, talking together; he caught them in all sorts of misconduct and had funny, picturesque adventures, which Riis described to all of us [journalists] (so fair was he as a reporter) and which we all wrote to the amusement of newspaper readers.  But what T.R. was really doing – the idea of Riis in proposing it – was to talk personally with the individual policemen and ask them to believe in him, in the law, which they were to enforce.  T.R. knew, he said, the power they were up against, the tremendous, enduring power of organized evil, but he promised he would take care of them.”

Walking the streets of Manhattan at night is not the behaviour of a President Cornpone. Obama is the third urban President the USA has had, not the first.

Reference:
Lincoln Steffens [1931]:  The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.  (New York, USA:  Harcourt Brace and Company.)

Brand immortality

Published by peter on 2009-02-09 in Advertising, Computer technology, Culture and Telecommunications. 0 Comments

Catching up with films I missed when they first appeared, I have just watched that action-spy thriller of the almost-over Cold War, Little Nikita, which first appeared in 1988.

The story was fairly predictable, and the most exciting moment for me occurred at minute 77, when two of the protagonists, trying to flee San Diego for Mexico, turned a corner on which was located a NYNEX Business Center. These were a nationwide chain of 80 retail computer hardware and services outlets most of which NYNEX bought from IBM in 1986 (according to rumour, after a handshake over an inter-CEO game of golf), and then sold in 1991 to Computerland.    When NYNEX owned them, they comprised the third-largest non-franchise network of retail computer outlets in the US.

One of the seven Baby Bells (aka RBOCs) created by the break up of the Bell System in 1984, NYNEX was the only one to pursue an adult career as an IT services company, at one point earning sufficient revenues from software and related services to be placed in the Top-10 largest US software companies.    For all the synergies, however, telecommunications and software development are sufficiently different businesses, and/or NYNEX senior managers cared insufficiently for these differences, that NYNEX never appeared to take seriously their role as a software company.   Having cured itself of its untypical desire to be a leading software house by re-selling most of its purchases in this sector, NYNEX, a few mergers later, has now become Verizon.

It is nice to think that, in centuries to come, the NYNEX Business Centers brand will live on in the moving pictures.

A salute to Dot Crowe and Kewpie Harris

Published by peter on 2009-02-04 in Culture, Heroes, History, Jazz, Music and Obituaries. 0 Comments

In my teens, I played the church organ for wedding ceremonies, receptions, etc.  For this I had the significant help of an elderly spinster lady, Miss Dorothy (“Dot”) Crowe, who also played the organ and piano.  She lent me music, gave me performance and business tips, referred clients on to me, and, at one point, advised me to increase my fees to increase the demand for my services.  My first of many experiences of the failure of mainstream economic theory was that demand for organ-playing services increased with price – the more I charged, the more business came my way.   I learnt that potential customers, who did not know one organist from another (even if they had heard them each play), used price to judge quality: charging lower than my competitors, as I did initially, meant that I was assumed to be not as good or not as reliable an organist as they.   It was very nice of Dot Crowe, who was after all also a competitor, to tell me of this.

As far as I knew at the time, Miss Crowe, who was then aged somewhere between 60 and 75, had spent all her life quietly and staidly playing the church organ for Sunday mass and for local weddings. Recently, however, I discovered that she had had an earlier career as a swing band pianist.   According to Col Stratford’s oral history of jazz on the Far North Coast of New South Wales, Australia (see reference below), by 1938 Dot Crowe was a band member of Aub Aumos’s band, The Nitelites (photo, page 47).   She later led her own band, Dot Crowe and the Arcadian Six.   I am stunned to learn this about her, and my admiration, which was already high, now reaches the skies.   I never knew she had had this experience when I knew her, and now, of course, it is too late to ask her about it.

The Far North Coast of New South Wales was an epicentre of early jazz in Australia, largely due to the energy and influence of one man:  David Samuel (aka “Kewpie”) Harris.  Kewpie Harris arrived in Ballina in 1919, aged about 27, apparently selling suitcases.   He died, mostly forgotten, in Brisbane in 1981.   His nickname arose apparently because his youthful face was open and wide-eyed, like that of a Kewpie Doll. Harris had been born in Britain, and as a schoolboy was a chorister at St Paul’s and St. Stephen’s churches in London.   As a teenager, he was a member of the orchestra of Tom Worthington in their regular gig at the Holborn Restaurant, London.     For a time he worked in San Francisco, and also played in dance bands on the steamships of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s West Coast fleet. By 1913, he was in Australia and had formed a dance band in North Sydney, and played violin with symphony orchestras and ensembles in Sydney.  (As a violinist in Sydney before WW I, he presumably knew Alfred Hill, Australian composer and violinist, and, earlier, a player with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.) 

According to family lore, Harris learnt jazz from black American musicians he met on his travels.  Upon arrival in Ballina, Harris helped create the Ballina Jazz Band with several other players, including my grandfather and great-uncle. The original members of the band were:  Rex Gibson on piano, Harris on violin, saxes, and keyboard percussion (originally marimba and xylophone, and later vibes), Harry Holt on trombone, Charles McBurney on trumpet, and Tom McBurney on drums.   Harris then led jazz bands with regular gigs in Northern NSW till 1951, when he left to join the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Between 1936 and 30 January 1950, he managed the Riviera Cabaret, a popular dance hall in Lismore NSW, where his wife acted as hostess and his band, the Kewpie Harris Band, was resident.

Why was jazz so strong in that part of Australia?  Partly, perhaps, because Ballina, at the mouth of the Richmond River, was a major trading port – until rail replaced shipping as the main form of freight transport to and from the region, and within the region. Ports have lots of visitors, interested in entertainment and with free time and cash.  Partly also, because the area hosted a US Air Force base during WW II (just down the coast, at Evans Head).  With the end of the war in the Pacific, and the arrival of television to Australia (in 1956), weekly dances declined in popularity, and no longer regularly attracted the hundreds or thousands that dances even at tiny river ports like Bungawalbyn and Woodburn once did.  Dance bands all but disappeared.   I guess that good, entrepreneurial jazz musicians were forced to join classical orchestras or to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March for people with their minds on other things, and spend their evenings remembering what great fun they had once had, and given.

FOOTNOTE (added 2010-08-18): The Kewpie Harris Band is also mentioned in this history of Lismore’s Crethar’s Wonderbar, home of the world-famous Crethar hamburger, as the House band of the Riviera Hotel in Lismore.   A descendant of Harris’ band is the recently reformed Northern Rivers Big Band (for which, in its earlier incarnation, my father played). See here.

The photo shows the Ballina Jazz Band in 1919.  Players were (left to right):  Tom McBurney, Harry Holt, Kewpie Harris, Charles McBurney, and Rex Gibson.

References:
Julia Buchanan [1982]:  “Bandleader died a forgotten figure.”  The Northern Star. Lismore, NSW, Australia. 6 January 1982, page 50.

Interview with Tom McBurney [1977-01-11] in The Indonesian Observer, reported in Stratford [1990].

Colin Stratford [1990]:  From The Stage.  Lismore, NSW, Australia. ISBN:  0-9594070-2-2.

Mailer on Obama

Published by peter on 2009-01-15 in Culture, History, Obama speeches and Politics. 0 Comments

Norman Mailer on Barack Obama Robert Kennedy:

He was as attractive as a movie star.   Not attractive as his brother had been, for Jack Kennedy had looked like the sort of vital leading man who would steal the girl from Ronald Reagan every time, no, Bobby Kennedy had looked more like a phenomenon of a movie star — he could have filled some magical empty space between Mickey Rooney and James Dean, they would have cast him sooner or later in some remake of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, and everyone would have said, “Impossible casting!  He’s too young.”   And he was too young.  Too young for Senator, too young for President, it felt strange in his presence, thinking of him as President, as if the country would be giddy, like the whirl of one’s stomach in the drop of an elevator or the jokes about an adolescent falling in love, it was incredible to think of him as President, and yet marvelous, as if only a marvelous country would finally dare to have him.

Source:
Norman Mailer [1968]: Miami and the Siege of Chicago. (New York: Primus),  pp. 201-202.

Vale George Brecht

Published by peter on 2008-12-16 in Art, Culture, Music and Obituaries. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Fluxus artist George Brecht (born George MacDiarmid in 1926) has just died, aged 82. He was a student in the Experimental Composition class which John Cage gave at the New School in New York in the late 1950s, Regretting that I was born too late to join this class*, I took the next best step, which was to track down a copy of Brecht’s notebooks in order to pore over his lecture notes taken in this class.  His most recent exhibition was at MACBA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, in 2006.

The photo that was here showed Brecht performing “Drip Music” (1959): “For single or multiple performance. A source of dripping water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel.”

* I did once take a composition class with Gentleman Jim Penberthy (1917-1999), which makes me a grand-pupil of Nadia Boulanger. That class focused mainly on Penberthy’s compositional method of expressionist serialism.

Class struggles at the check-out

Published by peter on 2008-11-14 in Culture, Market planning and Marketing strategy. 0 Comments

Newcomers to Britain usually notice the pervasiveness of the nation’s class system.  This is a country which even has two classes of stamps!  The British supermarket chains have long been a battleground of the class struggle, with some offering mainly own-label, discounted products, and others offering mainly own-label, premium-priced products!   I can recall an elderly neighbour once asking me which of the several nearby supermarkets I shopped at, and then saying, “I’m so pleased!” when I gave an answer which she thought demonstrated that we were in the same social class.
Now there is news that some of the chains are heading down-market, in order to take advantage of the recession.   But how to do this without losing your current market-position image, nor those customers still able and willing to pay premium prices?

Epideictic arguments

Published by peter on 2008-11-06 in Argumentation, Culture, Decision theory, Politics, Rhetoric and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

Suppose you are diagnosed with a serious medical condition, and you seek advice from two doctors.  The first doctor, let’s call him Dr Barack, says that there are three possible courses of treatment.   He labels these courses, A, B and C, and then proceeds to walk you methodically through each course – what separate basic procedures are involved, in what order, with what likely side effects, and with what costs and durations, what chances of success or failure, and what likely survival rates.   He finishes this methodical exposition by summing up each treatment, with pithy statements such as, “Course A is the cheapest and most proven.  Course B is an experimental treatment, which makes it higher risk, but it may be the most effective.  Course C . . .” etc.
The other doctor, let’s call him Dr John, in contrast talks in a manner which is apparently lacking all structure. He begins a long, discursive narrative about the many different basic procedures possible, not in any particular order, jumping back and forth between these as he focuses first on the costs of procedures, then switching to their durations, then back again to costs, then onto their expected side effects, with tangential discussions in the middle about the history of the experimental tests undertaken of one of the procedures and about his having suffered torture while a POW in Vietnam, etc, etc.  And he does all this without any indication that some procedures are part of larger courses of treatment, or are even linked in any way, and speaking without using any patient-friendly labelling or summarizing of the decision-options.
Which doctor would you choose to treat you?  If this description was all that you knew, then Doctor Barack would appear to be the much better organized of the two doctors.   Most of us would have more confidence being treated by a doctor who sounds better-organized, who appears to know what he was doing, compared to a doctor who sounds dis-organized.   More importantly, it is also evident that Doctor Barack knows how to structure what he knows into a coherent whole, into a form which makes his knowledge easier to transmit to others, easier for a patient to understand, and which also facilitates the subsequent decision-making by the patient.  We generally have more confidence in the underlying knowledge and expertise of people able to explain their knowledge and expertise well, than in those who cannot.
If we reasoned this way, we would be choosing between the two doctors on the basis of their different rhetorical styles:  we would be judging the contents of their arguments (in this case, the content is their ability to provide us with effective treatment) on the basis of the styles of their arguments.  Such reasoning processes, which use form to assess content, are called epideictic, as are arguments which draw attention to their own style.
Advertising provides many examples of epideictic arguments, particularly in cultures where the intended target audience is savvy regarding the form of advertisements.  In Britain, for instance, the film director Michael Winner starred in a series of TV advertisements for an insurance company in which the actors pretending to be real people giving endorsements revealed that they were just actors, pretending to be real people giving endorsements.   This was a glimpse behind the curtain of theatrical artifice, with the actors themselves pulling back the curtain.  Why do this?  Well, self-reference only works with a knowledgeable audience, perhaps so knowledgeable that they have even grown cynical with the claims of advertisers.   By winking at the audience, the advertisers are colluding with this cynicism, saying to the audience, “we know you think this and we agree, so our advert is pitched to you, you cynical sophisticates, not to those others who don’t get it.”
The world-weary tone of the narration of Apple’s “Future” series of adverts here is another example of advertisements which knowingly direct our attention to their own style.
Apple Future Advertisement – Robots
And Dr Barack and Dr John?  One argument against electing Senator Obama to the US Presidency was that he lacked executive experience.  A counter-argument, made even by the good Senator Obama himself, was that he demonstrated his executive capabilities through the competence, professionalism and effectiveness of his management of his own campaign.   This is an epideictic argument.
There is nothing necessarily irrational or fallacious about such arguments or such modes of reasoning; indeed, it is often the case that the only relevant information available for a decision on a claim of substantive content is the form of the claim.   Experienced investors in hi-tech start-ups, for example, know that the business plan they are presented with is most unlikely to be implemented, because the world changes too fast and too radically for any plan to endure.   A key factor in the decision to invest must therefore be an assessment of the capability of the management team to adjust the business plan to changing circumstances, from recognizing that circumstances have in fact changed, to acting quickly and effectively in response, through to evaluating the outcomes.   How to assess this capability for decision-making robustness?  Well, one basis is the past experience of the team.  But experience may well hinder managerial flexibility rather than facilitate it, especially in a turbulent environment.  Another way to assess this capability is to subject the team to a stress test – contesting the assumptions and reasoning of the business plan, being unreasonable in questions and challenges, prodding and poking and provoking the team to see how well and how quickly they can respond, in real time, without preparation.   In all of this, a decision on the substance of the investment is being made from evidence about the form – about how well the management team responds to such stress testing.   This is perfectly rational, given the absence of any other basis on which to make a decision and given our imperfect knowledge of the future.
Likewise, an assessment of Senator Obama’s capabilities for high managerial office on the basis of his competence at managing his campaign was also eminently rational and perfectly justifiable.   The incoherent nature of Senator McCain’s campaign and the panic-struck and erratic manner in which he responded to surprising events (such as the financial crisis of September 2008) was similarly an indication of his likely style of government; the style here did not produce confidence in the content.  For many people,  the choice between candidates in the US Presidential campaign was an epideictic one.
POSTSCRIPT (2011-12-14):
Over at Normblog, Norm has a nice example of epideictic reasoning:  deciding between two arguments on the basis of how the arguments were made (presented), rather than by their content.  As always with such reasoning – and contrary to much educated opinion – such reasoning can be perfectly rational, as is the case here.
PS2 (2016-09-05): 
John Lanchester in a book review of a book about investor activism gives a nice example of attempting to influence people’s opinions using epideictic means: Warren Buffet’s annual letters to investors in Berkshire Hathaway:

Even the look of the letters – deliberately plain to the point of hokiness, with old-school fonts and layout hardly changed in fifty years – is didactic. The message is: no flash here, only substance. Go to the company’s Web site, arguably the ugliest in the world, and you are greeted by “A Message from Warren E. Buffet” telling you that he doesn’t make stock recommendations but that you will save money by insuring your car with GEICO and buying your jewelry from Borsheims.” (page 78)

PS3 (2017-04-02):
Dale Russakof, in a New Yorker profile of now-Senator Cory Booker, says:

Over lunch at Andros Diner, Booker told me that [fellow Yale Law School student Ed] Nicoll taught him an invaluable lesson: “Investors bet on people, not on business plans, because they know successful people will find a way to be successful.” (page 60)
 

Refs and Acks
The medical example is due to William Rehg.
John Lanchester [2016]: Cover letter. New Yorker, 5 September 2016, pp.76-79.
William Rehg [1997]: Reason and rhetoric in Habermas’s theory of argumentation,  pp. 358-377 in:  W. Jost and M. J. Hyde (Editors): Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader. New Haven, CN, USA: Yale University Press.
Dale Russakoff [2014]: Schooled. The New Yorker, 19 May 2014, pp. 58-73.