I have just learnt of the death last month of Sol Encel, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales, and a leading Australian sociologist, scenario planner, and futures thinker. I took a course on futurology with him two decades ago, and it was one of the most interesting courses I ever studied. This was not due to Encel himself, at least not directly, who appeared in human form only at the first lecture.
He told us he was a very busy and important man, and would certainly not have the time to spare to attend any of the subsequent lectures in the course. Instead, he had arranged a series of guest lectures for us, on a variety of topics related to futures studies, futurology, and forecasting. Because he was genuinely important, his professional network was immense and impressive, and so the guest speakers he had invited were a diverse group of prominent people, from different industries, academic disciplines, professions, politics and organizations, each with interesting perspectives or experiences on the topic of futures and prognosis. The talks they gave were absolutely fascinating.
To accommodate the guest speakers, the lectures were held in the early evening, after normal working hours. Because of this unusual timing, and because the course assessment comprised only an essay, student attendance at the lectures soon fell sharply. Often I turned up to find I was the only student present. These small classes presented superb opportunities to meet and talk with the guest speakers, conversations that usually adjourned to a cafe or a bar nearby. I learnt a great deal about the subject of forecasting, futures, strategic planning, and prognosis, particularly in real organizations with real stakeholders, from these interactions. Since he chose these guests, I thus sincerely count Sol Encel as one of the important influences on my thinking about futures.
Here, in a tribute from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, is a radio broadcast Encel made in 1981 about Andrei Sakharov. It is interesting that there appears to have been speculation in the West then has to how the so-called father of the Soviet nuclear bomb could have become a supporter of dissidents. This question worried, too, the KGB, whose answer was one Vadim Delone, poet. And here, almost a month after Solomon Encel’s death, is his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald. One wonders why this took so long to be published.
Archive for the ‘Obituaries’ Category
Page 7 of 8
Spiderwoman RIP
The death has occurred of artist Louise Bourgeois, aged 98. I can’t say I liked or appreciated her art at all, most of which I found unsettling, sinister and off-putting. Her art did not communicate anything pleasant or subtle, at least not to me, but perhaps that was her intention, or else I was not in her target audience. Her art was also obsessive (all those spiders, for goodness sake!) and very literal-minded (every one of them with exactly 8 legs). Somehow we expect our artists, of all people, to have more imagination than this. Bourgeois appears to have been true to her own vision and to her own self, but that does not mean she was someone I would want to spend any time with.
Perhaps I was not the only person repelled by her art and the personality it revealed. In gallery Dia: Beacon, upriver from New York City, Bourgeois’ art is placed in a small upstairs room on its own, hidden away from the other work like some Mrs Rochester of the art world. Perhaps the curators thought her work would infect the wonderful minimalist and conceptual art for which the gallery is rightly known; her work certainly seems out of place in this gallery. As elsewhere, I found her art there unpleasant, and a whole room full was overwhelmingly repellent. Indeed, the one great work in that room you only see as you descend the steps to leave, and is not by her or by any artist. In this former printing factory, the wall next to the steps is the original external red-brick factory wall, covered in some places with a white dust, and left as it presumably was when the gallery took over the building. This subtle, spiritual wall with its geometric pattern of red bricks overlaid with random splotches of white is the only interesting or pleasant artwork in the Bourgeois room at Dia:Beacon. It says something about Bourgeois’ art (or perhaps about my taste) that the packaging here is much better art than any of the objects inside it.
Vale: Mike Zwerin
This is a belated farewell to Mike Zwerin (1930-2010), jazz trombonist and jazz correspondent for the International Herald Tribune. An American in Paris, he was open in his musical tastes and usually generous in his criticisms; his IHT writings personally sustained many a long journey across far meridians, and helped reinforce the urbane, cosmopolitan, expatriate feel that the IHT had last century (now sadly lost, since the NYT bought out the Washington Post and brought it home to Manhattan). Obits: London Times and The Guardian.
Vale: Don Day
This post is to mark the passing on of Don Day (1924-2010), former member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (the so-called “Bearpit”, roughest of Australia’s 15 parliamentary assemblies) and former NSW Labor Minister. I knew Don when he was my local MLA in the 1970s and 1980s, when he won a seat in what was normally ultra-safe Country Party (now National Party) country – first, the electorate of Casino, and then, Clarence. Indeed, he was for a time the only Labor MLA in the 450 miles of the state north of Newcastle. His win was repeated several times, and his seat was crucial to Neville Wran’s surprise 1-seat majority in May 1976, returning Labor to power in NSW after 11 years in opposition, and after a searing loss in the Federal elections of December 1975.
In his role as Minister for Primary Industries and Decentralisation, Don was instrumental in saving rural industries throughout NSW. Far North Coast dairy farmers were finally allowed to sell milk to Sydney households, for example, breaking the quota system, a protectionist economic racket which favoured only a minority of dairy farmers and which was typical of the crony-capitalist policies of the Country Party. Similarly, his actions saved the NSW sugar industry from closure. NSW Labor’s rural policies were (and still are) better for the majority of people in the bush than those of the bush’s self-proclaimed champions.
Like many Labor representatives of his generation, Don Day had fought during WW II, serving in the RAAF. After the war, he established a small business in Maclean. He was one of the most effective meeting chairmen I have encountered: He would listen carefully and politely to what people were saying, summarize their concerns fairly and dispassionately (even when he was passionate himself on the issues being discussed), and was able to identify quickly the nub of an issue or a way forward in a complex situation. He could usually separate his assessment of an argument from his assessment of the person making it, which helped him be dispassionate. Although The Grafton Daily Examiner has an obit here, I doubt he will be remembered much elsewhere on the web, hence this post.
Update (2010-06-12): SMH obit is here.
Vale: Robin Milner
The death has just occurred of Robin Milner (1934-2010), one of the founders of theoretical computer science. Milner was an ACM Turing Award winner and his main contributions were a formal theory of concurrent communicating processes and, more recently, a category-theoretic account of hyperlinks and embeddings, his so-called theory of bigraphs. As we move into an era where the dominant metaphor for computation is computing-as-interaction, the idea of concurrency has become increasingly important; however, understanding, modeling and managing it have proven to be among the most difficult conceptual problems in modern computer science. Alan Turing gave the world a simple mathematical model of computation as the sequential writing or erasing of characters on a linear tape under a read/write head, like a single strip of movie film passing back and forth through a projector. Despite the prevalence of the Internet and of ambient, ever-on, and ubiquitous computing, we still await a similar mathematical model of interaction and interacting processes. Milner’s work is a major contribution to developing such a model. In his bigraphs model, for example, one graph represents the links between entities while the other represents geographic proximity or organizational hierarchy.
Robin was an incredibly warm, generous and unprepossessing man. About seven years ago, without knowing him at all, I wrote to him inviting him to give an academic seminar; even though famous and retired, he responded positively, and was soon giving a very entertaining talk on bigraphs (a representation of which is on the blackboard behind him in the photo). He joined us for drinks in the pub afterwards, buying his round like everyone else, and chatting amicably with all, talking both about the war in Iraq and the problems of mathematical models based on pre-categories with a visitor from PennState. He always responded immediately to any of my occasional emails subsequently.
The London Times has an obituary here, and the Guardian here (from which the photo is borrowed).
References:
Robin Milner [1989]: Communication and Concurrency. Prentice Hall.
Robin Milner [1999]: Communicating and Mobile Systems: the Pi-Calculus. Cambridge University Press.
Robin Milner [2009]: The Space and Motion of Communicating Agents. Cambridge University Press.
Vale: George Leonard
Belatedly, I have just learnt of the death last month of George Leonard (1923-2010), writer, journalist, and aikidoka. He took up aikido in middle age, a journey he wrote about movingly (see reference below), and ended up co-founding Aikido of Tamalpais. His writings on life, the universe and everything have been very influential in my thinking about life, as I acknowledge here.
The New York Times has an obit here, Quantum Tantra a tribute here, and Paul Rest here.
Reference:
George Leonard [1985]: On getting a black belt at age fifty-two. pp. 78-98 in: Richard Strozzi Heckler (Editor) [1985]: Aikido and the New Warriors. Berkeley, CA, USA: North Atlantic Books. This volume also contains a reprint of Leonard’s fine and inspiring account of Heckler’s aikido black belt examination, “This isn’t Richard” (pp. 198-205).
Vale: Stephen Toulmin
The Anglo-American philosopher, Stephen Toulmin, has just died, aged 87. One of the areas to which he made major contributions was argumentation, the theory of argument, and his work found and finds application not only in philosophy but in computer science.
For instance, under the direction of John Fox, the Advanced Computation Laboratory at Europe’s largest medical research charity, Cancer Research UK (formerly, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund) applied Toulmin’s model of argument in computer systems they built and deployed in the 1990s to handle conflicting arguments in some domain. An example was a system for advising medical practitioners with the arguments for and against prescribing a particular drug to a patient with a particular medical history and disease presentation. One company commercializing these ideas in medicine is Infermed. Other applications include the automated prediction of chemical properties such as toxicity (see for example, the work of Lhasa Ltd), and dynamic optimization of extraction processes in mining.
For me, Toulmin’s most influential work was was his book Cosmopolis, which identified and deconstructed the main biases evident in contemporary western culture since the work of Descartes:
- A bias for the written over the oral
- A bias for the universal over the local
- A bias for the general over the particular
- A bias for the timeless over the timely.
Formal logic as a theory of human reasoning can be seen as example of these biases at work. In contrast, argumentation theory attempts to reclaim the theory of reasoning from formal logic with an approach able to deal with conflicts and gaps, and with special cases, and less subject to such biases. Norm’s dispute with Larry Teabag is a recent example of resistance to the puritanical, Descartian desire to impose abstract formalisms onto practical reasoning quite contrary to local and particular sense.
Another instance of Descartian autism is the widespread deletion of economic history from graduate programs in economics and the associated privileging of deductive reasoning in abstract mathematical models over other forms of argument (eg, narrative accounts, laboratory and field experiments, field samples and surveys, computer simulation, etc) in economic theory. One consequence of this autism is the Great Moral Failure of Macroeconomics in the Great World Recession of 2008-onwards.
References:
S. E. Toulmin [1958]: The Uses of Argument. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
S. E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
Vale Richard Meale
Australian composer Richard Meale (1932-2009, pictured in 1972) has just died at the age of 77. He was perhaps Australia’s best expressionist, especially in moving early works such as Homage to Garcia Lorca, and Clouds Now And Then. In his later years, like so many 20th-century Australian modernist composers, he turned to writing late-romantic tosh, as if the only function of composers was to support the film industry.
In honour of his memory, I repeat the profound Basho haiku which he quoted on the score of Clouds Now And Then:
Clouds now and then,
Giving men relief
From moon-viewing.
SOME LINKS:
The SMH obituary is here. An account of his funeral is here and reminiscences by composers David Worrall and Ross Edwards are here. Andrew Ford’s eulogy is here. A review of a memorial concert held for him in February 2010 is here.
POSTCRIPT (Added 2013-02-23): Meale visited UCLA in 1960 on a travel grant from the Ford Foundation, and there studied and played traditional Japanese and Balinese gamelan music. I wonder if one of his teachers was Colin McPhee, who taught ethnomusicology there from 1958. (And how cool was that: to be teaching ethnomusicology at UCLA in the late 50s!)
POSTSCRIPT 2 (Added 2014-08-08): Here also is a tribute to Richard Meale’s nephew, Tony Meale.
Vale William Safire
William Safire, a speech-writer for Richard Nixon and later an op-ed columnist with The New York Times, has just died. To his memory, I retrieve a statement from his novel Full Disclosure, which nicely expresses a different model of decision-making to that taught in Decision Theory classes:
The truth about big decisions, Ericson mused, was that they never marched through logical processes, staff systems, option papers, and yellow pads to a conclusion. No dramatic bottom lines, no Thurberian captains with their voices like thin ice breaking, announcing, “We’re going through!” The big ones were a matter of mental sets, predispositions, tendencies – taking a lifetime to determine – followed by the battering of circumstance, the search for a feeling of what was right – never concluded at some finite moment of conclusion, but in the recollection of having “known” what the decision would be some indeterminate time before. For weeks now, Ericson knew he had known he was ready to do what he had to do, if only Andy or somebody could be induced to come up with a solution that the President could then put through his Decision-Making Process. That made his decision a willingness not to obstruct, rather than a decision to go ahead, much like Truman’s unwillingness to stop the train of events that led to the dropping of the A-bomb – not on the same level of magnitude, but the same type of reluctant going-along.” (pp. 491-492)
Reference:
William Safire [1977]: Full Disclosure. (Garden City, NY, USA: Doubleday and Company).
Australian logic: a salute to Malcolm Rennie
Recently, I posted a salute to Mervyn Pragnell, a logician who was present in the early days of computer science. I was reminded of the late Malcolm Rennie, the person who introduced me to formal logic, and whom I acknowledged here. Rennie was the most enthusiastic and inspiring lecturer I ever had, despite using no multi-media wizardry, usually not even an overhead projector. Indeed, he mostly just sat and spoke, moving his body as little as possible and writing only sparingly on the blackboard, because he was in constant pain from chronic arthritis. He was responsible for part of an Introduction to Formal Logic course I took in my first year (the other part was taken by Paul Thom, for whom I wrote an essay on the notion of entailment in a system of Peter Geach). The students in this course were a mix of first-year honours pure mathematicians and later-year philosophers (the vast majority), and most of the philosophers struggled with non-linguistic representations (ie, mathematical symbols). Despite the diversity, Rennie managed to teach to all of us, providing challenging questions and discussions with and for both groups. He was also a regular entrant in the competitions which used to run in the weekly Nation Review (and a fellow-admirer of the My Sunday cartoons of Victoria Roberts), and I recall one occasion when a student mentioned seeing his name as a competition winner, and the class was then diverted into an enjoyable discussion of tactics for these competitions.
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