v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

No Master Plan

From an article in The Atlantic on what is going on across corporations since the early 2000's-I saw this and worse during my last years in business and the rush to monetize the savings from ill-informed automations and efficiencies has created, finally, what we are witnessing at Boeing today. I can remember in the early 2000's as we were rolling out "improvements' with bad consequences a co-exec telling me we aren't running a hospital here. . .:

Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone. Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles. Visit SkyWest Airlines’ careers site, and you’ll see that the company is looking for “cross utilized agents” capable of ticketing, marshaling and servicing aircraft, and handling luggage. At the online shoe company Zappos, which famously did away with job titles a few years back, employees are encouraged to take on multiple roles by joining “circles” that tackle different responsibilities. If you ask Laszlo Bock, Google’s former culture chief and now the head of the HR start-up Humu, what he looks for in a new hire, he’ll tell you “mental agility.” “What companies are looking for,” says Mary Jo King, the president of the National Résumé Writers’ Association, “is someone who can be all, do all, and pivot on a dime to solve any problem.”

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux. It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. But that’s what I heard, recurrently, while reporting this story. “The half-life of skills is getting shorter,” I was told by IBM’s Joanna Daly, who oversaw an apprenticeship program that trained tech employees for new jobs within the company in as few as six months. By 2020, a 2016 World Economic Forum report predicted, “more than one-third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations” will not have been seen as crucial to the job when the report was published. If that’s the case, I asked John Sullivan, a prominent Silicon Valley talent adviser, why should anyone take the time to master anything at all? “You shouldn’t!” he replied.

As a rule of thumb, statements out of Silicon Valley should be deflated by half to control for hyperbole. Still, the ramifications of Sullivan’s comment unfurl quickly. Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities. It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide. And that’s to say nothing of its potential impact on product quality and worker safety, or on the nature of the satisfactions one might derive from work. Or, for that matter, on the relevance of the question What do you want to be when you grow up?

How deep these implications go depends, ultimately, on how closely employers embrace the concepts behind minimal manning. The Navy, curiously, has pushed the idea forward with an abandon unseen anywhere on land. Within a few years, 35 littoral combat ships will be afloat, along with three minimally manned destroyers of the new Zumwalt class. The effort seemed to me a good test case for the broader questions bedeviling the economy: Can a few brilliant, quick-thinking generalists really replace a fleet of specialists? Is the value of true expertise in serious decline?

Carmen Herrera ( 1915-2022)

Tom Wood Interview

From Paper Journal, interview with photographer Tom Wood:

When you were shooting most of your work, were you working at the time? How did you spend your days?

Up until 1998 I used to teach two days a week, around the corner from where I lived, and five days a week I used to take photographs. I had just enough money to live simply.

I did photography as well and what I like about your work is the aspect that it’s close to home. A lot of photographers tend to find stuff in other places and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I really like that element of finding interesting things close to home and being close to the people and the characters around you.

The Photie Man book was called that because that’s what the kids used to call me. I shot video all my life as well, so when I took my kids to the park with the video camera and I used to video them, as well as what was going on in the park, you could see peoples relationship with me, it was very clear. One time I left the video recorder in the park and these three lads bought it back to me.

Really! Well I guess there’s a trust there, they’re familiar with you…

That’s right. I used to give everyone pictures. There’s a funny story, about some of the more toughish lads I used to photograph. One of the them, I guess he was the leader of the gang; actually there’s a picture in the book, they were part of the ‘New Brighton Outlaws’ – anyway, they were sitting on top of a car and some girls were walking by and they just turned around and were looking at them. One of these lads used to like me, you know, I used to go round his house and have a coffee and stuff and he would sit there and smoke a joint, a normal guy you know? So this lad rode a scooter and one day he went to work early in the morning and where he lived was very quiet and it was 5 o’clock in the morning. He was at an intersection and went through the red light and he was killed. So there’s a picture of him in Photie Man, leading a gang of lads towards this girl infront of the Waltzer, I’m not sure if you know that picture; he’s from there, Mark, and I had that in the Last Resort exhibition at the Open Eye, a joint show with Martin Parr back in 1985; a very famous show from which Martin kind of made his career on. So that picture was on the wall and it was stolen! And guess what? It’s on the wall of Mark’s mother living room! You know, other people that you’d photograph and you’d see them 10 years later and they’re getting married and asking me to take their pictures. So it’s like an exchange, you know? They tolerate me and I try to give something back.

Do you think it’s changed much – I mean, nowadays there’s a lot more suspicion of people. Do you think if you were to be doing this now, you’d have the same response from the community?

I just don’t know, I mean I still photograph people, I still look at people but not as much. In those days you were fed up with kids pestering you, you used to take someone’s photo just to shut them up. Believe it or not in the early days, people used to call me David because the only photographer that people knew was David Bailey. And then I got the Photie Man tag… but as I said, you used to photograph someone just to shut them up. So six months later you’d make a print and you’d have a big box of prints always there by the door, so you’d see someone and tell them to go round the house to pick up a print.

It’s really nice, that element of your work. I mean people think you take a photograph and you’re taking something from someone else but you’re actually giving them something and there is a real exchange going on in your work. What is it about you as a character that makes you able to do that?

I just felt that I never had the right to exploit them in any way. On the cover of Looking for Love, it was my first book (in 1988), it was about nightclubbing. So the two girls on the front cover saw themselves in the book shop and they thought I was making loads of money and they came around to the house; I showed them the accounts and how I was making a loss every year, so I gave them a print and they were happy, you know?

When I went to the women’s market every Saturday morning for all those years, and I finally got a book out called People, there were a couple of pictures in there from the market. The market traders bought a couple of books off me to help me along, cause they were pleased. I would never sell any of the pictures for advertising, I mean I was offered lots of money for some of the nightclub pictures… it wasn’t easy walking down the Dock road and taking those pictures; I felt guilty anyway, I didn’t want to exploit the people… those doing car boot sales selling pornographic tapes; I didn’t know that. One week I’m not there and they’re raided by Trading Standards. So they’d see me the next week and they think I’m connected with the raid.

More

Wicked Algorithms

From Technology Review, some elucidation on the wicked Facebook algorithms in clear English:

How does Facebook’s algorithm work?

Colloquially, we use the term “Facebook’s algorithm” as though there’s only one. In fact, Facebook decides how to target ads and rank content based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of algorithms. Some of those algorithms tease out a user’s preferences and boost that kind of content up the user’s news feed. Others are for detecting specific types of bad content, like nudity, spam, or clickbait headlines, and deleting or pushing them down the feed.

All of these algorithms are known as machine-learning algorithms. As I wrote earlier this year:

Unlike traditional algorithms, which are hard-coded by engineers, machine-learning algorithms “train” on input data to learn the correlations within it. The trained algorithm, known as a machine-learning model, can then automate future decisions. An algorithm trained on ad click data, for example, might learn that women click on ads for yoga leggings more often than men. The resultant model will then serve more of those ads to women.

And because of Facebook’s enormous amounts of user data, it can

develop models that learned to infer the existence not only of broad categories like “women” and “men,” but of very fine-grained categories like “women between 25 and 34 who liked Facebook pages related to yoga,” and [target] ads to them. The finer-grained the targeting, the better the chance of a click, which would give advertisers more bang for their buck.

The same principles apply for ranking content in news feed:

Just as algorithms [can] be trained to predict who would click what ad, they [can] also be trained to predict who would like or share what post, and then give those posts more prominence. If the model determined that a person really liked dogs, for instance, friends’ posts about dogs would appear higher up on that user’s news feed.

Before Facebook began using machine-learning algorithms, teams used design tactics to increase engagement. They’d experiment with things like the color of a button or the frequency of notifications to keep users coming back to the platform. But machine-learning algorithms create a much more powerful feedback loop. Not only can they personalize what each user sees, they will also continue to evolve with a user’s shifting preferences, perpetually showing each person what will keep them most engaged.

Not So Smart AI

From an article on NYRB on IA costs and its shortcomings:

As Kate Crawford’s trenchant Atlas of AI demonstrates again and again, artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware. Crawford, a senior researcher at Microsoft and a cofounder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, begins her tour of the AI universe in Silver Peak, Nevada, looking at the “open, iridescent green ponds” of brine pumped out of North America’s largest lithium mine. Lithium—the “li” in “li-ion” batteries—is an essential ingredient in our digital lives. Without it there are no laptop computers, no smart watches, no cell phones.

“The term ‘artificial intelligence’ may invoke ideas of algorithms, data, and cloud architectures,” Crawford writes, “but none of that can function without the minerals and resources that build computing’s core components.” She adds:

Many aspects of modern life have been moved to “the cloud” with little consideration of these material costs. Our work and personal lives, our medical histories, our leisure time, our entertainment, our political interests—all of this takes place in the world of networked computing architectures that we tap into from devices we hold in one hand, with lithium at their core.

Calling those networked computers “the cloud” is a perfect example of what Crawford sees as “the strategic amnesia that accompanies stories of technological progress.” While the metaphor invokes an image of data floating weightlessly in the sky, the reality is that the cloud takes up hundreds of thousands of acres of terrestrial real estate, typically located where electricity is cheap. (The world’s largest data center, as of 2018, in Langfang, China, covers 6.3 million square feet, the equivalent of 110 football fields.) Cheap, of course, is a relative term. A study from researchers at McMaster University found that, if unchecked, the computing industry as a whole could account for 14 percent of all greenhouse emissions by 2040—“about half of the entire transportation sector worldwide.”

Some of this carbon intensity has been driven by the belief that ever-bigger datasets are essential to train machine learning algorithms in order to create workable AI systems. (Machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence, in which algorithms sort through enormous amounts of data using statistical methods to make classifications and predictions; the assumption is that more data delivers more accurate outcomes.) When researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst calculated the carbon emissions required to build and train a single natural language processing system—which teaches computers to interpret and use everyday language—they determined that it was around five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car.

Teachings

Here are some interesting rules to create writing or photography or painting or film, though at the site they are credited to John Cage they actually are from Corita Kent:

John Cage was an avant-garde composer whose work has left a lasting influence on contemporary music. (Thom York of Radiohead calls Cage one of his all-time heroes.) Cage's work included such experimentation as using a prepared piano (meaning objects are placed inside the piano to alter the sound) and a composition called 433, in which the musicians make no sounds at all for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a studentpull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacherpull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Dont try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everythingit might come in handy later.

From Corita Kent's book Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit.

From 2011 Trip to India-Jama Masjid Mosque

Vallejo Nocturno 2021-The Mosque

From Britanica:

Jama Masjid is Delhi’s principal mosque, the place where the city’s Muslims traditionally gather for Friday communal prayer; Jama Masjid is Arabic for “Friday mosque.” The mosque is near the Red Fort, yet another of Shah Jahān’s buildings. Jama Masjid and its courtyard stand on an outcropping more than 30 steps higher than the street, giving the mosque a commanding view of the surrounding area. The longer name, Masjid-i Jahānnumā, translates to “world-reflecting mosque” or “world-displaying mosque.” The mosque was built by a crew of some 5,000 workers. The principal construction material was red sandstone, but some white marble was also used.

Jama Masjid is oriented toward the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which lies to the west. An open courtyard facing the eastern gateway of the mosque building is at least 325 feet (99 metres) square and can accommodate 25,000 people. The eastern gateway itself was originally reserved for royal use exclusively. Others used smaller gates on the north and south sides of the building. Two 130-foot (40-metre) minarets mark the northeast and southeast corners of the building. The largest interior space is the prayer hall, 90 × 200 feet (27.4 × 60.96 metres). Above the prayer hall’s entrances are calligraphic inscriptions in Persian. Three large marble domes rise from the prayer hall’s roof.

In the 21st century Jama Masjid was the scene of two violent incidents possibly connected with terrorism. In 2006 13 people were injured when two bombs went off in shopping bags left in the courtyard, and in 2010 two people were wounded in an attack by gunmen on a tourist bus parked outside the mosque.

The Reality of Maintenace

 

A review of The Innovation Delusion at LARB, coming from this industry to a degree I hear what is being said:

Innovation-speak is not the same thing as innovation or creativity. Indeed, Vinsel and Russell, professors at Virginia Tech and SUNY Polytechnic respectively, have lots of respect for creativity, work, and ingenuity. But they argue that just as technology has the power to shape our lives, language has the power to shape our thoughts, and the Valley has used both with ruthless effect. Innovation-speak allows us to acquire the power of Imperial Rome while insisting on its fundamental innocence. It lets us declare with absolute certainty that disruption is inevitable, unavoidable, and for the long-run benefit of humankind (and, incidentally, our short-term gain). It makes us winningly bashful about all the attention we get, and the influence a few of us have over billions of others. And it helps us sustain a childlike wonder at the trillions of dollars that keep pouring onto our balance sheets, which almost (but not quite) distract us from our mission of Bringing The World Together, or whatever.

Yet all is not well. People keep complaining that we’re invading their privacy, leaking their data, giving their jobs to robots, addicting their children to screens, and letting their elections and democracies be subverted. (We also still haven’t delivered those jet packs and flying cars.) It’s starting to look like innovation-speak … doesn’t really work as a description of the future, and it’s losing its power as a distraction from the present.

Beware geeks bearing gifts, Vinsel and Russell warn. The pursuit of novelty for its own sake doesn’t just fuel income inequality or threaten the environment (though it does contribute to those): it takes resources and attention from what really matters, which is maintenance and repair. These more modest activities are undervalued in just about every way. Despite their invisibility, they are indispensable, and absolutely essential in a crisis. There’s nobility in “keeping daily life going, caring for the people and things that matter most to us, and ensuring that we preserve and sustain the inheritance of our collective pasts,” they write. “It’s the overlooked, undercompensated work that keeps our roads safe, our companies productive, and our lives happy and secure.”

How central is maintenance? As Vinsel and Russell note, “about 70 percent of engineers maintain and oversee existing systems,” and “60 and 80 percent of software budgets are spent on maintenance.” Indeed, according to one estimate, two-thirds of US workers are engaged in maintenance of infrastructures, places, or people. Yet they’re often underpaid (65 percent make less than $20 an hour), and maintenance itself is chronically underfunded. (Maintenance is also largely overlooked by Russell and Vinsel’s fellow historians of science and technology, who are as focused on innovation as any comms shop in Palo Alto.)

This comes at a cost. If, as social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously declared, “broken windows” signal a level of public disorder that invites more serious criminality, it is also true that neglected bridges and shabby public buildings impoverish civic life, slow economic growth and social mobility, and in the long run cost more to repair than to keep in good order.

Maintenance is also a deeply collective enterprise. It represents a willingness to invest in common goods, to choose the public benefit over private advantage; but public spaces also support social life in a way that private goods cannot. It takes a village to build a square; in turn, the square becomes the heart of village life.

On Writing and Re-writing

 

From a Louise Gluck, poet and new Nobel recipient, interview at Washington Square:

WASHINGTON SQUARE: I have always said you taught me how to revise—what I mean by revision isn’t just tweaking what’s on the page but reimagining the entire thing, starting over, maybe only having just an idea that is maybe interesting. The stamina to keep going through that process is always a struggle. That is a thing that I think you’ve taught me. I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about your own revision process—  
 
GLÜCK: No.

WASHINGTON SQUARE: But I was wondering about that, and whether it’s different book by book.  
 
GLÜCK: Yes. That is the quick answer to that. Some books, everything seems to be written very fast and comes out oftentimes the way it stays. But when I was starting I revised constantly. I had a sense that was instilled in me in those early classes—  

 WASHINGTON SQUARE: With Stanley Kunitz.  
 
GLÜCK: Yes. I would have a poem that I could see had a kind of authority or freshness, something I prized and felt competent to recognize, but there were places where it went dead, inert—and he was infallible at pointing these places out and handing me back the poem. What would he say? He had phrases that he used. Not “back to the drawing board.” It was more about labor. “Back to the fields with the shovel.” “Back to building the highway.” I thought that was a kind of dedication I believed in because I seemed to be a very slow writer. I thought how many real poems am I going to write? And that I’d best take pains to make each one as exciting as I could make it. I later had teachers who thought quite differently. Adrienne Rich thought, “You write, you toss, you write, you toss, you write, you toss.” You don’t critique heavily. At least this is what I heard. And you don’t try to resolve the problems there, you try to write another poem and hope that the accumulation resolves.  

WASHINGTON SQUARE: As if there’s some kind of subconscious revision process happening in each draft?  
 
GLÜCK: No, there aren’t more drafts. You just write new poems. And I’m not capable of doing that. I cherish each little utterance. Especially if there are these frustrating pockets of deadness, and I want to figure that out. So the books up through Ararat were slow. In Ararat, there were little gusts of writing rapidly. And at the beginning of Descending Figure there was a period of writing quite fluently. Then starting with The Wild Iris things were very fast and hardly revised. The last couple of books it was a lot of revision as I was working. Poems would get . . . Well, the last books have been different. A Village Life was very different because I kept getting to the end of what I had and the poems seemed a little conventional. Something wasn’t right. So I thought, why don’t I just write past the ending? I feel as though I’ve ended but suppose I keep the people moving? And that was an amazing discovery. I mean, I really learned how to write another kind of poem. Actually, I learned a bit of this from working with some young writers judging [the Yale Younger Poets, Bakeless, and Honickman first book prizes]. Spencer Reece’s The Clerk’s Tale—when I first saw it in manuscript, it was full of marvels but there was a lot that had to be just thrown out and there were a lot of poems that seemed unsatisfying. He had a gift for shutting a poem down in a pithy couplet. And the title poem, for example, was about a third shorter than it is in the book. So I could see as a critic before I could see or do anything about this in my own work. I could see the poems were just sealed off in the end because he couldn’t figure out what the next move was. It was clear they had to be opened up again and continued, and by then I knew his work well enough that I could say, “Why don’t you use the lines from this in Clerk’s Tale, pick it up here, not at the very end, pick it up there, right on the table, and go further?” So he would have this series of endings, like the Spoils of Poynton, with ending after ending after ending. I think that’s where I learned that technique—watching and realizing that Spencer’s poems needed it because they had a kind of brittleness that had to be got rid of. We would talk on the phone four or five times a day. And I’d never met the guy, but we had this intense phone relationship, and I was like a coach, saying, “Try this, try this, try this.” But it was all about getting back in and keeping the poem alive longer. He needed to get to a place in each of these expanded poems from which he had a different point of embarkation. He’d gotten to a line that had to close down, but it was temporarily closed down and then reopened, and finally he ended up in another place entirely. Then he could see a turn. I know this is all painfully abstract, but I think that’s where I learned.  

More

Our Country is Broken

From Atul Gawande in the New Yorker:

o get out of this pandemic, we need fast, easy coronavirus testing that’s accessible to everyone. From the way people often talk, you might think we need a technological breakthrough to achieve this. In fact, we don’t have a technological problem; we’ve got an implementation problem. We could have the testing capacity we need within weeks. The reason we don’t is not simply that our national leadership is unfit but also that our health-care system is dysfunctional.

Many developed countries have met their testing needs, and ready access to speedy tests has been key to containing outbreaks and resuming social and economic activity. Whether you live in England or South Korea, scheduling is straightforward. No doctor’s order is required. Tests, where indicated, are free. And you typically get results within forty-eight hours.

In the United States, getting a test is anything but easy. Take a look at the Texas public directory of COVID-19 testing sites, which features a bold, red-highlighted disclaimer: “ATTENTION: Unless otherwise stated, deductible, co-pay, or co-insurance may apply. May require physician referral or prior authorization. Please call site to confirm.” Congress has mandated that insurers fully cover the costs both of testing and of the medical-office visit that produces the test order. But providers may still require payment until the insurer has confirmed coverage. Some twenty-eight million Americans had no insurance before the pandemic, including eighteen per cent of Texans, and millions more have lost their insurance since it started. Although legislation allowed states to expand Medicaid to cover coronavirus testing-related costs for the uninsured, many states (including Texas) have yet to do so. Health-care providers are left to seek disaster-relief funds to cover testing costs for the uninsured. The Texas disclaimer also warns that its test-site directory is incomplete. On another page, the Web site alerts you to additional considerations to take into account when seeking a test site, including what the screening criteria are (sites vary as to whom they are willing to test); whether the site is covered by your insurer; and what types of tests they provide (some may have only antibody tests, which do not help establish a diagnosis).

Appointments can take days, results days more. Most testing in the United States is done by four companies—Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, BioReference Laboratories, and Sonic Healthcare. Through early August, results routinely took four days or more, making the tests essentially useless. Times improved only when testing volumes declined, because many people gave up on getting tested. The vast majority of infected Americans, including those with symptoms, never get tested. And we have not even reached the fall, when flu season will hit and coronavirus-testing needs and demand are expected to rise substantially. As the saying goes, it’s as messed up as a pile of coat hangers.

Further complicating matters, insurers don’t pay for testing that they don’t consider medically necessary. Yet testing people who don’t have symptoms will be important to getting COVID-19 under control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that around forty per cent of viral transmissions occur before an infected person has any symptoms. Yes, a combination of distancing, hygiene, and mask-wearing when people can’t stay six feet apart can markedly reduce such transmissions. But, in many situations, we can’t count on people being able to maintain those measures. Testing is the only way to know whether a person is potentially contagious and in need of isolation.

Such “assurance testing” has been required by countries such as Iceland, France, and Germany for travellers from abroad in order to avoid a mandatory two-week quarantine; by states from Maine and Massachusetts to Hawaii and Alaska for out-of-state travellers; by many U.S. hospitals for all patients admitted for non-emergent surgery; and by the film and television industry, which plans to do regular testing of cast and crew members in order to start production again. The federal government has recommended that nursing homes test all staff once a week. Numerous colleges and universities have included repeated testing in their protocols for bringing students back to campus. Individuals are seeking assurance tests before visiting older family members.

More