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Who Wrote That?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture. No Comments on Who Wrote That?

Plagiarism was, unfortunately, an activity with which I had to deal regularly in my career. Typical definitions and/or policies define it as representing the words or ideas of someone else as one’s own. Plagiarism has become a news topic in recent years, and not always with any good reason; I will leave that discussion to a future post.

Now retired, I got to thinking about it in a different context by a discussion of plagiarism in music that I heard on CBC’s It’s About Time program of classical music.

Before I tell you about that, I expect we can all recall some famous instances of alleged plagiarism in popular music in recent decades. One of the most publicized was when a copyright infringement suit was filed against George Harrison, claiming that his song ‘My Sweet Lord’ was a rip-off of the song ‘He’s So Fine’, which was written by Ronnie Mack and was a #1 hit for The Chiffons in 1963 (the year Mack died, interestingly). The suit was brought by Bright Tunes Music Corporation in 1971, the year Harrison’s song was released.

The words of the two songs, the story they tell, if you like, are in no way similar. Thus, the suit was entirely about the music in the two songs, and Bright Tunes won the suit, and a big settlement (which was eventually reduced, after legal wrangling that continued into the 90s).

I admit to having a hard time wrapping my head around any plagiarism case involving 20th century popular music, by which I mean music that is encoded in verses and chorus melodies, chord progressions, lyrics (or not) and harmonies. I’m not a musician, but it seems like there are only so many ways to string chord changes and such together. I like (most) popular music, jazz, blues, rock, country, roots, whatever, but it is all more than a little derivative. A musician I knew back in the day said ‘There’s only one blues song, it just happens to be a great f-ing song’.

One opinion I have read about the Harrison-Mack case was that exactly that – the derivativeness of popular music – was ignored in setting the large settlement Harrison originally had to pay. In addition to that, the judge in the original case said the following:

“Did Harrison deliberately use the music of “He’s So Fine”? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear that “My Sweet Lord” is the very same song as “He’s So Fine” with different words, and Harrison had access to “He’s So Fine”. This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.”

I get it, of course. A court of law cannot be expected to determine whether the copying of music was intentional or not. If the songs are the same, then they are.

Another series of accusations of plagiarism in rock centres on the band Led Zeppelin, who were sued by a number of companies and individuals for the same offence. For example, Zep put Howlin’ Wolf (aka Chester  Burnett)’s composition ‘Killing Floor’ on their second album, naming it ‘The Lemon Song’. Not only the chords and melody were the same in that case, so were most of the lyrics. They gave Wolf no songwriting credit (hence no royalties) on the original release, but then had to change that after losing a suit in court.

Full circle now back to the case I heard about on CBC, which seems to me very different. It concerns one Fritz Kreisler, a classical violinist born in Austria in 1875, whose career embraced the new recording technology and industry of the early 20th century. That career was very successful, and included recordings of him playing previously unknown violin pieces by composers such as Vivaldi and Corelli, which Kreisler claimed to have found in an old French monastery. When he turned 60 he confessed to the world he had written those pieces himself and then lied about their authorship.

Thus, he denied no one any revenue from his playing of those compositions, indeed, had he fessed up that they were his, I presume he would have earned writing royalties as well as performance royalties from the recordings people bought. His motivation was that apparently he believed that people would be more likely to buy those recordings if they thought they were hearing newly-discovered music by old masters. I suspect he was correct about that. And, according to one of the accounts of this that I read, Kreisler’s popularity ‘skyrocketed’ after his revelation of his fraud. Similarly, I have seen no evidence that Led Zeppelin’s popularity suffered after they lost the Burnett (or any other) copyright infringement suit.

Plagiarism seems to me to come under the general category of fraud rather than theft, and both the pop and classical instances above are that, but still – those classical musicians are a different breed, man.

 

Johannes Brahms, Meet Sidney Crosby

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture. No Comments on Johannes Brahms, Meet Sidney Crosby

Last week my sweetheart and I went to a performance by London Symphonia. We hadn’t attended a symphonic concert in years, and it was absolutely wonderful. Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major and Sibelius’s 2nd symphony. Magnificent playing of great music. It got me thinking how I got to be a classical music buff. (Not an  expert, I love it but claim no serious knowledge of it.)

I was raised on mid-20th century popular music. My dad would play his vinyl records for me when I was quite young. I remember Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Gerry Mulligan and the soundtrack from the Peter Gunn TV show, music by Henry Mancini. Oh, and Spike Jones on 78s. I loved listening with him, what kid doesn’t enjoy that kind of attention from his Dad?

It kindof stuck with me, although like most of my generation I became a big Beatles fan when they hit the charts, then it was The Doors, Cream, The Who, etc etc as the Rock Era washed over us all. But I owned some recorded jazz as I got older, too. Brubeck and Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and such. There was some R&B and blues mixed in there, too, but I had no experience of classical music. The only youthful exposure I remember was the local orchestra coming to our grade school for a performance, as such organizations do, and the principal of my high school complaining bitterly that no one wanted to play the violin any more since the electric guitar had come along.

Anyway, into my 40s, that was my music listening, mid-century popular music, as I said. At some time during my period as department chair in the early 2000s, the University’s Faculty Relations department – which used to do useful things from time to time – sponsored a Night at the Symphony. Discounted tickets to go hear a performance by Orchestra London (as it was then known), and I decided, trying to be a good team player, to buy a ticket and go.

They played in Centennial Hall in those days, a horrible old barn with miserable acoustics. I remember that I had trouble even hearing the cello soloist. I have no recollection of what pieces were played, but I was quite taken by it. Watching and hearing a symphony orchestra, even a mediocre one in a hall with bad acoustics, is an all-encompassing experience. There is almost too much sound to take in, as well as a hundred things to watch. I enjoyed it very much, and from that time on I was hooked. I bought tickets to more concerts and started making trips on the train to Toronto to catch the much-better Toronto Symphony playing in acoustically-wonderful Roy Thomson Hall.

And, I started buying classical CDs, mostly symphonic, but small-group recordings, also.

That is what makes symphonic music like hockey: nothing compares to seeing/hearing it live, right in front of you. I played my cd of Sibelius’s 2nd the morning after the concert, and enjoyed it, but it reminded me there is no substitute for sitting in a hall and listening to an orchestra.

Similarly, watching hockey on TV is nothing like being in an arena and having it happen in front of you. Hockey is a game of sounds, the snicking of the skates on the ice, the bang of a hard-shot puck hitting the boards or ringing off the iron goal posts, and the sounds of the players yelling to one another. And, no sport moves as fast as hockey, and you only realize that sitting in an arena watching talented players do their thing.

A TV broadcast of a hockey game is a sterile thing, in comparison. It may well be possible with current technology to send those sounds through your TV or laptop during a game, but then the hockey chatterers hired by the broadcasters would have to shut the hell up, and they won’t do that. TV broadcasting of all sports is predicated on the belief that if you are not distracted by all sorts of things having nothing to do with the sport, you will get bored and go do something else. Talk-talk-talk, often about shit having nothing to do with the game being broadcast.

You may remember when Fox first started broadcasting NHL games in the US, they did some techie thing to make the puck light up in red on TV screens, so Americans who had never seen a game live could follow the play. It was much mocked, but I understand Fox’s instinct.

My own intro to hockey was much like my intro to classical music. I grew up within spitting distance of the Canada/US border, so my dad’s big-ass antenna picked up the CBC station in Windsor, Ontario, on which we could – and occasionally did – watch Hockey Night in Canada, and some Detroit station carried Red Wings games. That was all well and good, but I was in no sense a fan until my son started playing around age 9, and I spent hours in cold rinks watching games for years. Even kids (this was not a NHL-prep league, believe me) skating around in a game gives you a feel for hockey, and the sounds are the same. Then we started going to London Knights games. That’s Ontario Major Junior A level hockey, which is NHL-prep, and you could get good seats in the big old barn they used to play in. It was great, and I was by then a real fan.

I don’t actually watch much hockey on TV any more. North American football, and – strangely enough – baseball, are the only sports worth watching on TV, in my view. Football is too many people over too large an area to enable anyone (or at least me) to take it in while sitting in a stadium. And baseball is mostly about the mano-a-mano contest between pitcher and hitter, which TV delivers well. Still, the commentators on those broadcasts would also make me very happy if they would just shut the hell up….

Anyway, my point, if not obvious, is that one cannot really come to appreciate and love symphonic music from cds, however good your audio equipment is, and one cannot really love and appreciate hockey from watching games on TV, no matter how big-screen and HD is your equipment. You gotta get yourself to the concert hall or arena.

And….I’m just as likely to sit down and have a chat with Sidney Crosby as I am with Johannes Brahms.

What Does it Mean?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Popular attitudes. 1 Comment on What Does it Mean?

There is a T-intersection near the back of my property line, where recently the city, in its infinite wisdom, put a controlled crosswalk. You know, one of those where the pedestrians push a button and a set of flashing yellow lights come on, supposedly stopping traffic. People have been crossing here safely, although not in large numbers, for the 20 years I have lived in this house. Never been a pedestrian so much as nicked, so far as I know, and I would know.

Whatever. The other day I left my house and headed downtown, a walk which involves my crossing that same street. I walked to the curb, perhaps 30 yards south of the new crosswalk, saw no cars coming from either direction (one can see a looong way in both directions on that street) and so walked across. Just as I stepped off the curb, a young fellow (in his 20s, I would say) stepped up to the new crosswalk, pushed the button, and waited for the yellow lights to flash before crossing the street. I could not stop myself, I said ‘oh my god’ out loud.

This caused me to remember something I saw happen on my old employer’s campus all the time. By now every building has one or more doors to the outside that can be opened by an electro-hydraulic system. You just push a button on either side of the door, and wait, and the door slowly swings open. This allows, for example, people in wheel chairs to go through the door unaided. It is common to see a student or group of students, all 20-something and perfectly healthy, walk up to such a door, push the button, and stand there and wait for the door to sloooowly open before walking through.

I have on several occasions walked by those students, yanked the door open using, you know, my rather old arm, and walked past them. No indication it phases them in the least.

Letting the hydraulics open the door of course leaves said door open for a loooong time, so as to give a person in a wheelchair time to get through it before the mechanism sloooowly closes it. This allows plenty of cooled air to leave the building in the summer and a long gust of cold air to enter the building in the winter. Lovely.

I don’t know what to think of this behavior – I have more questions than answers.

One, is this a youth thing or perhaps a Canadian thing? I have long noticed that Canadians are more likely than Americans to stand on a street corner devoid of any traffic and wait for the pedestrian signal to say ‘Walk’ before crossing. Are American university students also likely to let the electrical system open doors for them, or less so? Are older people – like me – less likely to behave in these ways?

Is this an indication that we have raised a generation of sheep who can do nothing without official permission, or who are too lazy to use their limbs?

I dunno, but I find it…..depressing.

Any thoughts welcome.

The AI World to Come

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. No Comments on The AI World to Come

This is about an article in Inside Higher Ed from November of ’23. I just saw a reference to it on Gelman’s statistics blog. It’s titled ‘Study Uses AI to Review Admissions Essays’

and the first sentence is –

“A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania have created AI tools to help admissions officers by analyzing students’ application essays.”

What a great idea, eh?

Another quote:

“Humans have limitations,” Benjamin Lira, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “You’re not going to read the first essay of the day in the same [way] you read the last one before lunch.”

It’s a good thing AI has no limitations, isn’t it? And, AI can do things like this

“If I say, ‘I donated clothing to a homeless shelter,’ the AI will tell me that it has a 99.8 percent probability of showing prosocial purpose,” Lira said. “But if I say something like ‘I like cheese,’ that drops to less than 1 percent.”

Is that brilliant, or what? No human can match that, surely.

Then –

“The researchers did caution that as students—particularly higher-income students—become more savvy with technologies such as ChatGPT, they could alter their essays to fit what they believe will bring the best results.”

Indeed, I’m sure that until ChatGPT came along, students – particularly higher income students – never tried to match what they wrote in their essays to what they thought the university readers were looking for.

Oh, and about those human ‘limitations’? Well…..

“The AI algorithm can also make mistakes. For example, in the study, if a student were to say they donated heroin to the children’s shelter, it brought a very high score in the “prosocial purpose” category.”

Ah, a mere glitch. I’m sure they’ll clean that up in the Beta version.

It is clear where this is going, and Gelman pretty much says it. In no time we will be at the point where students use AI on their computer to write the essay, and the university uses the AI on their computer to read and evaluate it. No need whatsoever for any human involvement, and Bingo! You’re in university. Or not.

There are so many analogous possibilities. One day AI can write movies which are then reviewed by AI and used by other AI as input to write more movies. Same for e-books.

My favourite though, is this, for which I quote Gelman directly….

“Same thing with internet advertising. The AI writes the ad and conducts the bidding to put the ad online. The ad is then read by various bots so that the company that sells the ad gets to say they have traffic. We human users fight through the muck to find actual content.”

I can hardly wait.

Super Bud Light Debacle   

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, LBOs, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Super Bud Light Debacle   

Whether you are a sports fan or not, you probably know that Super Bowl Roman Numerals is going to happen on Sunday. As an actual fan of Uhmurikan football, I plan to watch it, along with millions of others who only watch this one game each year. You probably also know that much of what is written about the Super Bowl every year is actually about the commercials. Firms spend stratospheric amounts for a 15-second spot during this event, and they also spend a lot producing commercials to be shown during the SB that they hope everyone will talk about for days and weeks afterward.

This morning I was reading an article in The Free Press titled ‘The Sad Saga of Bud Light’, written by one Anson Frericks, who spent 11 years as a top executive at Anheuser-Busch InBev, the multi-national company that produces and sells beer all over the world, including here in Canada, where it owns Labatt Brewing, Limited, the largest brewer in the country. Frericks notes that there will be a Bud Light commercial shown during the game, and suggests that it is an attempt by AB InBev, the maker of said beer, to say ‘Sorry’.

Sorry about what? According to Frericks, about what happened back in 2023 (ancient history, I know) when AB InBev launched an advertising campaign for Bud Light that featured a ‘transgender influencer’ named Dylan Mulvaney. So, full disclosure. I do not and never have drank Bud Light, because it has two problems associated with it. Those would be the ‘Bud’ and the ‘Light’. I like beer, but Budweiser is fizzy yellow water that bears a distant resemblance to beer in my estimation, and beer labelled ‘Light’ is like yogurt labelled ‘nonfat’. It isn’t yogurt if it has no fat in it, and it isn’t beer if you added water to it to get the alcohol content down.

But that’s just me, as prior to the ad campaign mentioned above, which launched on April 1, 2023, Bud Light had the highest sales revenue of any beer in the US.

I remember discussions, some heated, most amused, about this ad campaign when it came out, but honestly paid little attention. I do not understand why having some nominally well-known person in a commercial for any product has any impact on anyone’s decision to consume that product. Morgan Freeman, Peyton Manning, Jennifer Garner or Dylan Mulvaney, I am not interested in their views of or association with anything I might consume. Apparently that makes me odd, but we already knew that.

I also knew some kind of boycott of Bud Light was proclaimed by somebody after those ads appeared. Didn’t drink the stuff, didn’t care, but honestly my guess was that it would all blow over as these things do, and the folks who liked Bud Light for reasons I do not understand would go back to drinking it eventually.

Well, according to this Free Press article by Mr. Frericks, I could not be more wrong, and this is what prompted me to write this column.

Here is what he claims, and I have not verified these numbers, but I expect one could.

“Bud Light sales declined 11 percent that week compared to the previous year. By April 15, 2023, sales were down 21 percent. In the ensuing months, the company shed billions of dollars of shareholder value, laid off hundreds of employees across the Anheuser-Busch ecosystem, damaged its reputation, and plunked itself in the middle of a highly contentious political issue.”

Then later he writes –

“Nearly two years later, Bud Light has yet to win beer lovers back; sales remain roughly 40 percent below where they were before the boycott began.”

40 per cent? Really? That’s astounding. That’s big.

Today, according to the article, Bud Light is the third-largest selling brand of beer in the US, after Modelo and Michelob Ultra. Even worse, if you were an AB-InBev shareholder, on March 31, 2023, the day before the Mulvaney campaign launched, AB InBev stock was $66 per share with a market capitalization of $132 billion. Today, the stock price is $49 a share with a market cap of $87 billion, a loss of over $40 billion in value.

Clearly, my original thought that the kerfuffle would end and Bud Light sales would revive was rather wrong. That ad campaign apparently did do some long-term serious damage to the company that ran it. (I hasten to add that we cannot look at the counterfactual: what would sales of Bud Light be today if that ad campaign had not happened? It is entirely possible that other things – good marketing by Modelo, for example – have something to do with the fall in Bud Light sales.)

The Free Press article (you can read it here) goes on to document the path AB-InBev took to get to that point, starting with the appointment of a new CEO, Michel Doukeris, in July of 2021. Frericks lays out the re-orientation of AB-InBev in a new direction, emphasizing ESG and DIE initiatives, that Doukeris led.

Leaving aside my or anyone else’s views of all that sort of thing (and I surely do have a view), it seems to me the most salient question one can ask about this is: what in the hell were these people thinking?

To put it differently, how can the CEO of a multi-national corporation like AB-InBev not realize what an utterly idiotic idea it was to have a ‘transgender influencer’ promoting Bud Light??!! How can anyone – never mind someone being paid an eye-watering salary (plus bonuses, plus…plus…) to run this company – be so hopelessly clueless about the company’s product and customers?

I am sure plenty of folks will point at the whole ‘woke’ mindset as the cluelessness culprit here,  and I can imagine that played a role, but I also strongly suspect it is deeper than that. However woke Mr. Doukeris and his fellow C-suite inhabitants might be, I wonder if he ever spent a moment of his time working in the business of making, distributing or selling beer. Did he even drink Bud Light when no reporters were around?

His Wikipedia bio says he has a degree in chemical engineering and post-graduate degrees from U Penn’s Wharton Business School and Northwestern’s Kellog School of Management. He joined AB-InBev in Brazil in 1996, when he would have been 23 years old, but it doesn’t say what he did. I’m betting he wasn’t driving a delivery truck, but I suppose it is possible he was a chemical engineer in one of their breweries to begin his career. However, he seems to have quickly become a rising star in the company, which meant leaving behind any actual association with the business in which AB-InBev was engaged. There lies the path to cluelessness.

So, woke or otherwise, his foolish approval of this ad campaign (with blame to be shared by Alissa Heinerscheid, whom Doukeris had apparently promoted to vice president of marketing) was a clear disaster for AB-InBev’s bottom line. And, here’s the thing – he is still the company CEO.

When I read about people railing against the inefficiency of government, typically asserting that ‘in the private sector if you make bad decisions there are consequences, dammit!’, I think of stories like this one.

In the 21st century, in any LBO, private or public, non-profit or commercial, there are rarely any consequences for fucking up. At least, when you are near enough to the top of the LBO hierarchy.

You do want to be very near the top, however. The article also notes that

“Alissa Heinerscheid was placed on leave in April 2023. According to her LinkedIn profile, she now works with LIV Golf, the professional golf league underwritten by Saudi Arabia.”

Yea, I know. Ms Heinerscheid is in no danger of starving. Do you suppose Saudi-backed LIV Golf has a DIE department? I’m gonna have one of my interns look into that.

The Band is Dead – Long Live The Band    

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture. No Comments on The Band is Dead – Long Live The Band    

No doubt you all heard the news this morning that Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, one of the most influential and admired (if you ask me) bands of the last 50 years, has died at age 87.

He is generally described as being a resident of the same city as me, but his birthplace appears to have been Windsor, Ontario. He was born in 1937, before the outbreak of WWII, so is genuinely of an earlier generation than myself.

Anyway, if The Band had done nothing more than write, record and release The Weight, one of the all-time great songs of the 20th century, we would all be greatly in their debt. In fact, they did much more than that, releasing a slew of songs that still induce me to lean over and turn up the volume when they come on my Geezer Rock Satellite Radio Station in the car. Chest Fever, The Shape I’m In, Up On Cripple Creek, Ophelia, The Night They Drove Ol Dixie Down, Stage Fright and Life is a Carnival (and ain’t it, tho…..), just to name the obvious ones.

They started a genre that had no name at the time, but probably now would be called roots rock, or, strangest of all for a band made up of four Canadians and the sweetest voice this side of Arkansas – Americana.

“Out of nine lives, I spent seven; How the hell you sposeta get to heaven?”

 

Over and above their own music, they backed up Dylan for a time, after backing up Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins in bars across Ontario for years, and, like all good rock bands of the era, they did drugs and fought. I saw them, sortof, do a benefit concert for The Stratford Festival, when they were touring without Robertson in the 80s. Helm (and maybe the others) had decided they had not been given sufficient credit for their co-authorship of all those great songs. I don’t pretend to know what was the truth of all that, but even in that circumstance, and without Robbie, it was exhilarating to hear them play live. (It was nigh 40 years ago, and I don’t actually remember if they performed The Weight, the writing credit for which is apparently solely Robertson’s.)

They influenced a lot of other music and musicians, but we shall not hear their like again. Praise god for those great recordings.

My Stock       

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education. 1 Comment on My Stock       

After I posted my Learning Like Shakespeare article a regular reader asked what was in my stock, meaning what are the books I have read. Hmmmm….

This got me thinking about that, so at the risk of boring some of you, here is Al’s History of Reading, in so far as Al (you have to remember that I’m old) can remember.

I was an avid reader from the time I could read at all, walking regularly to the local public library to take out several books at a time. My grandaughter has been the same way all her life, my grandson not so much – I have no idea how that happens, people are just different. The first books I can remember reading were in a series called Cowboy Sam, and after that I graduated to a lot of sports hero stories. Warren Spahn, Roy Campanella, Johnny Unitas all come to mind, but there were others.

I also read comic books by the ton. DC comics to start, because they came first, then Marvel when it came along, and Mad Magazine. The guys I grew up with loved Mad, and this brings me to my reading in school. I was reading a copy of Mad as an elementary student, during an appropriate free reading time, and one of the nuns took it away from me and said I should have my parents come see her. She asked my parents if they knew the kind of garbage I was reading, to which my Dad said he responded – ‘He’s reading, I think that’s what’s important’.

I don’t know if Dad knew how right he was, as Mad was a great way to learn about the adult world, not to mention to learn skepticism about it.

Then came high school, and while everything else about those four years is fuzzy, I was lucky enough to have a first-rate sophomore English teacher – Mary Smith. I know, probably an alias. She had us read Shakespeare, and then do readings of the plays, each student assigned a part. Same with Twelve Angry Men. And, we had to write, write reviews of what we read, write a lot. I remember clearly being given one particular writing assignment, thinking ‘ah, that’s easy, I can knock that off in an evening’ and then getting it back with an F on it. An F!! I didn’t get Fs, dammit. That was an eye-opener, garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t actually remember if it was Ms Smith who assigned this stuff, but I remember reading Austen, Twain, Willa Cather, The Good Earth, Thoreau, others. Not entire books, necessarily, but essays, short stories and excerpts.

Once I went off to University I was no longer required to take literature, but I had gotten interested in sci-fi so I read a lot of that, and took a bird course in that type of literature, where we were required to read Frank Herbert’s Dune. I still think that’s a great book, and I wrote a short story for that class that was published in some student journal. My only foray into writing fiction. I also read a lot of Hermann Hesse then; Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game. My romantic period. Still have those books, but they don’t stand up well when I open them back up.

In grad school I remember reading nothing, although I probably did, and somewhere along the way through adulthood I became very interested in reading two things: history and Robertson Davies. I have by now read every one of Davies’ 11 novels, and a few other things by him, and my shelves are full of books on history. A lot of military history (a lot of that by John Keegan, the best of the best if you ask me) but a lot of other history, too. Catherine the Great, the Victorian era of the British Empire, a history of the Arab-Zionist conflict (eye-opening), Churchill’s memoirs, the Roman empire, a history of Prohibition, the Ottoman Empire, and two or three histories of Canada. Military history, particularly in the hands of a master like Keegan (and to some extent, Churchill) is about so much more than battles and generals and weapons. One of Keegan’s overriding ideas is that the way nations go to war, the way they train their soldiers, the weapons they use, are determined by their culture. And, the military is the ultimate LBO; I have learned much about individual and organizational behavior from military history.

I do read fiction, too, including all three of Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels, and the most beautifully written novel I’ve read in years was A Soldier in The Great War by Mark Helprin. He writes better than Davies, even, and trust me that it is about so much more than war. I was in a book club – co-led it, actually – for a number of years, where we read a variety of things, including a lot of contemporary fiction: All the Light We Cannot See and Bel Canto come to mind

But coming back to the original impetus for this essay, what is in my stock? Precious little Great Literature, at least since high school. I have copies of Fielding’s Tom Jones (said to be the first English novel), Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dickens’ Great Expectations on my many bookshelves here at home. I have started in reading all four of those more than once. I never seem able to stick with them for long. I did read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus through, but his Magic Mountain sits on a shelf with a bookmark half way in.

I also have a large stock of books claiming to explain modern physics to lay people. Can never get far into those, either.

So, I think perhaps Scott Newstok would be disappointed in me. Never mind ol’ Will himself. On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Thinking – And Learning – Like Shakespeare  

I’ve just finished reading a book titled ‘How to Think Like Shakespeare’, which I first learned of on Gelman’s statistics blog, of all places. Having mentioned it to my sweetheart, she kindly gave me a copy as a Christmas gift. It’s very interesting, not long at 170 pages, but also very dense. Lots of quotations, from ol’ Will and many others, and a lot to think about. I will surely read it at least one more time in an attempt to do it justice.

What it is really, as its author Scott Newstok writes, is an argument for adopting many of the principles that underlie the Renaissance education that Shakespeare would have received into our contemporary educational system. On the face of it, this is nuts, as Newstok admits. Up at 7am to translate Latin for 12 hours, corporal punishment, exclusion of girls – really?

Well, no, not that, but he argues that there was much in the way youngsters were educated back then that would be highly valuable to contemporary students facing a world of information overload and the looming spectre of AI. A sub-text is that these practices would be valuable to all of us.

As I note above, I cannot claim to have digested all the book’s claims and arguments, but a couple of things seem immediately very worthwhile to me. Needless to say, they are not compatible with what Newstok calls ‘…our own student-centered, present-focused, STEM-driven schools’.

Idea 1.

He notes that in Erasmus’s Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is recommended an exercise of writing out the thought ‘Your letter has pleased me greatly’ in 15 different ways.

So –

Your letter mightily pleased me.

Your affectionate letter brought me great joy.

Your brief note refreshed my spirits

My heart was gladdened by your kind note.

And so on…..

The point Erasmus is making is that to have an abundant style, one which is both precise and a pleasure to read, it is necessary to not use the same words and phrases over and over. To avoid doing that, one must practice. The value of ‘practicing’ runs throughout the book, in fact.

The ignorance of this principle of the value in variety is an aspect of contemporary journalism which causes me no end of despair. Every so-called journalist describes things using the same ‘correct’ words and phrases. It might as well all be written by the same person (and with the advent of AI, perhaps it soon will be, sans the ‘person’).

For example, it is not currently possible for any journalist to write about anyone famous without using some form of the word ‘icon’. Jimmy Carter, Beyonce, Leadbelly and Susan Sarandon – all ‘icons’, and the things they did were ‘iconic’.

People no longer criticize or object or excoriate or castigate – they ‘call out’.

No one tells or says or declares or states or claims, they ‘share’, or if in public, ‘speak out’.

Do copy editors shut down attempts by journalists to use different phraseology, or do said journalist simply not know of any way to write beyond the most common? Either way, it is a sad situation.

Idea 2.

In all student essay writing, whatever point the essayist wishes to make, half the essay must be devoted to arguing against that same point.

Revolutionary, but the idea is not simply to induce students to see that issues always have (at least) two sides, but also to help them develop empathy. In the non-Shakespearean phrase, to ‘walk a mile in another man’s moccasins’. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view is fundamental to functioning in society. And, Newstok argues, the ability to inhabit, and to get playgoers to inhabit, the lives of other people, was Shakespeare’s greatest talent.

This development of empathy lies behind another recommendation that pervades the book. That is, that students – not to mention the rest of us – must read. Read widely, and especially read what was written by authors of the past. What they wrote is the ‘stock’ society must use to move forward, and one cannot contribute to improving that stock unless one understands what is already in it.

As I said, much to think about in this book. I’m quite sure I don’t buy everything Newstok says – ‘twould be shocking if I did. But there seems to me much of value in it. Not that anyone in the contemporary educational establishment will have any sympathy with it. I can just imagine what the so-called Teaching and Learning Centre at my former employer would think about having university students read Erasmus or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or write an essay that includes arguments against immigration, the adoption of indigenous ways of knowing or democracy or any other current piety. Acts of oppression, I expect.

On Sin

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Education, Health Care, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on On Sin

I recently did a post about disability accommodations at Canadian Universities, in which ADHD diagnoses played a prominent role. ADHD is far from the only non-physical disability whose presence in universities has increased greatly, but it is up there. After writing that, I was reading a post in a blog which I have come to find very interesting, called On the Contrary, written by a fellow named Simon Sobo. He bills himself as ‘81 year old unheralded, frustrated, but serious writer’.

The particular post I read was titled ‘ADHD and Other Sins of Our Children, Part 2’, and you can read it here. Free. (There is a Part 1, which I have not yet read, and which opens with the remark that Part 2 has been read five times as often as Part 1. Hmmm…..)

The post is quite long, and the first section of it is sub-titled A Memory. It’s an interesting account of how his Jewish parents raised him, and his attempts to behave as they wished him to, especially during a long sermon by the Rabbi in his synagogue. My own Catholic upbringing was not dissimilar. The penultimate section of the article is subtitled ‘Sin and ADHD’ and starts with this sentence:

“First a few interesting statistics about adults diagnosed with ADHD and their sense of moral responsibility.”

It makes for fascinating reading, although the academic in me wishes Sobo had done a better job of providing citations for those stats. (There is a set of serious references at the end of the article, which I intend to pursue).

Anyway, I found it thought-provoking, and think you might, also.

Dammit, This is Important!

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, News Media, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Dammit, This is Important!

This is going to be a rant – unusual for me, I know – but a short one. I am working on a much longer rant for the coming days, so you’ve been warned.

I refer you to The London Free Press, November 21, Letters to the Editor. One letter is headed Timing Offensive.

The author is offended that the Freeps published an article headlined ‘We don’t want to know about abused men’ on Nov 9. I quote from the outraged letter:

“You have 11 other months of the year to publish that article, and yet you chose to run it in the one month dedicated to the Shine The Light on Women Abuse campaign.

Are the editor and editor-in-chief that insensitive, or worse, misogynistic?”

Misogynistic, clearly. I mean, it’s obvious, right?

I surmise that it was the publishing of an article about abuse of males during a month when someone decreed that we should focus on abuse of females that drew the writer’s ire. Would an article about the Movember prostate cancer thing have been equally offensive? I surmise not, as I suspect there were articles in the Freeps about Movember that did not outrage the letter-writer. No, I haven’t looked…..

More fundamentally, what is the actual nature of the offense, here? As far as one can tell from the letter, most of which I have reproduced above, as it was not long, the offense is thinking about, writing about, and publishing an article about, other types of abuse. So, our attention must not stray from the abuse of women during November, not even for the length of time it takes to read that offensive article.  And apparently, if the Freeps had published the article on Dec 1 the author would not have been upset, December presumably falling under the ’11 other months’ designation.

However, it is also true that someone somewhere, I know not who or how, did designate November as a month to support/discuss/sympathize with (I really don’t know what we’re supposed to do beyond growing a moustache) men who have prostate cancer. Should I then be offended if the Freeps publishes an article on breast cancer this month? What about skin cancer? I won’t be, but is that lack of outrage a moral failing on my part?

Sadly, this is pretty much how many people see things. They have a cause. The war in Gaza, misogyny, racism, cruelty to animals. This then becomes the most important thing there is to think and talk about, not just for oneself, but for everyone.  One then patrols their chosen territory assiduously, outraged by any and all perceived actions by anyone anywhere that might suggest that one’s favourite issue is not supremely important. (There are also people for whom this is a job description. They’re called ‘advocates’, they get tons of media attention, and are a topic for another post someday.)

Students camp out on the concrete beach (ok, how many were actually UWO students is not clear) and harass passersby and graduates because nothing is more important than their stand on the war in Gaza. Not your fellow students, not the ability of other people to live their lives without being shouted at, and never mind that your silly encampment and juvenile harassment has zero chance of having any impact on what happens in Gaza. This issue is important to me, to the exclusion of all else – including going to class or earning a living – and so it must be equally important to all right-thinking people. Any person who does not see the paramount importance of my issue, well – they must be a, a, a….misogynist.

So it is with this offended letter writer. It does not occur to her that if the appearance of that story in the Freeps (of all places) actually had any detrimental impact on the Shine the Light campaign, maybe said campaign is doomed.

 

Young and Rogan, Again

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, London, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Young and Rogan, Again

London, Ontario has a number of outdoor musical events each summer, one of which is known as Rock the Park. When the line-up for this festival was announced a long time ago, it was regarded as quite the coup to have scored Neil Young and Crazy Horse as a headline performer. I’m not sure booking any 78-year-old rocker should be regarded as a major coup, but what brought this all to mind was the very recent announcement, just weeks before the event is to occur, that Young and the band have cancelled their appearance.

I wrote a post awhile back about Neil Young’s recent return to Spotify, thereby abandoning his principled position that what was being said on Joe Rogan’s podcast (streamed on Spotify) was false and harmful.

My focus there was on the fact that Young had shown, in my view, a meaningful commitment to a principle by taking an income hit as a result of pulling his music from Spotify, but that he had, in the light of Rogan’s new, wider streaming contract decided that he would not pay an even higher price by pulling his music from other platforms.

There is another, separate issue this raises, which I want to write about here. Why did Young do what he did back in 2022, rather than other things he could have done in response to what he saw as Rogan’s spread of false information? As I noted in my previous post, pulling his music from Spotify was undoubtedly costly to Young, but it seems likely it cost Spotify very little, if anything. I just don’t imagine that many people dropped their Spotify subscriptions in response to Young’s 2022 departure. But even if a significant number did, why do that?

One could imagine that Young anticipated that his departure from Spotify would indeed lead to the cancellation of many Spotify subscriptions, and that, seeing this, Spotify would in turn terminate their contract with Rogan. I really don’t believe Young anticipated that, but suppose he did. That would mean that Young’s purpose was to eliminate Rogan’s platform for disseminating ideas that Young disliked – that, to quote him, “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines—potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them.” (I’m taking this quote from the original WSJ article, so am assuming it is accurate.)

This seems to me a very 21st century instinct. If someone is saying/writing things to which one objects, one should do what one can to shut them up. Stop them from saying those objectionable things. Now, the Young quote goes on to assert that if people hear these objectionable things and believe them, they could potentially die.

Certainly, preventing people from dying is a noble goal, but that is not what Young’s move would have done, had it been successful in getting Rogan off Spotify. It would have stopped people from hearing what was said there (ignoring for the moment possible other platforms), but I don’t see how one can really assert that would have saved lives. That only follows if one views exposure to what is said on Rogan’s podcasts as a disease itself, which kills people. In fact, what happens, is that people listen to it, they think about it – or not – then they take what they heard, along with all the other things they have ever heard that they think might be relevant, and they go on with their lives. They make decisions, including, presumably, whether or not to get vaccinated. Even if someone who goes through all this decides not to get vaccinated, it does not follow even probabilistically that they will die.

This is not an unusual line of thinking, however. A similar perspective leads most auto commercials these days to have written in fine print on the bottom of the TV screen the words “Trained driver on a closed course. Do not try this yourself.” Just seeing a driver put his Nisan Rogue into a four wheel drift on TV is like a drug, and viewers who are exposed to this commercial will thus be induced to drive to a spot where they can do the same, if they are not warned away from this.

What seems odd about this to me, even on its own terms, is the belief that people are not clever enough to realize that putting their Rogue into a high-risk manoeuvre might get them hurt, but that they are clever enough to pay attention to the warning in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen not to do that. What fundamentally lies underneath this is a view that people will do foolish things unless they are instructed appropriately – by, you know, us smart folks. Or Neil Young. [I am also well aware that this is to some extent driven by lawyers, trying to prevent their employers from getting sued successfully.]

The attitude is that people who roll their Nissan Rogue over doing four-wheel drifts and get injured or die have been inescapably driven to do that by seeing a commercial, just as people who listen to Rogan’s podcasts are driven to not get vaccinated and thus will die.

It’s a very 21st century perspective on human behavior, and I have no use for it. People have, and deserve to be given, agency. They gotta decide how to live their lives, and if they decide to go out and roll their Rogue over, that’s on them.

Here’s a different thing Young could have done. He could have mounted an info campaign to counter the ‘fake information’ that he felt Rogan was disseminating, in an effort to keep people from being swayed by it. His quote suggests he is quite confident that said information is ‘fake’ so he is presumably in a good position to explain to listeners what is fake about it, and, as the WSJ article says, he had 2.4 million followers on Spotify in ’22 before he left. That’s a decent audience. Of course, Young might well think his followers were not the audience that needed to have Rogan’s info countered, but as a famous rocker with plenty of resources (i.e., wealth), Young could surely have come up with many other ways of reaching people. Hell, tell Rogan you want to come on his podcast and have it out with him and his dangerous views. I suspect Rogan would have jumped at that opportunity if Young had offered it.

So, if it was true that Young was hoping to get Spotify to drop Rogan, then my point is that seems childish to me. Stand up and confront the guy if he’s so dangerous. That’s a response to perceived misinformation I could support.

That all being said, I don’t really believe that was Young’s motivation. According to the WSJ article

“Rogan’s show has been Spotify’s most listened to podcast for the last four years, according to the company.”

Young’s no fool, he didn’t expect to get Rogan’s podcast terminated, but if not that, what? What was Young trying to do?

People in the 21st century often talk of ‘taking a stand’, which I take to mean stating in public that they find something odious…or admirable, as the case may be. An overwhelming example of this can be found in all the demonstrations going on regularly around Canada about the Israel-Hamas war. The people who are engaged in these on both sides do not, I hope, think for a minute that their shouting and carrying signs around in Canada will have any impact on the decisions being made by the leaders of Hamas or Israel. And, if they think they can influence the government of Canada to change its position on the conflict in some way, then I again hope they don’t think any change in Canada’s official position on the war will influence anyone in Gaza or Tel-Aviv.

But, they clearly think it important to ‘make their voices heard’, to ‘call out____’ or ‘show their support/outrage’. Such declarations are another 21st-century fixation, one I suspect is facilitated by the existence in wealthy societies like those of Canada and the US of too many people with too much time on their hands. I mean, do the people in the UWO campground really believe they have moved forward some good cause by chanting in the face of a class of Ivy grads? Really? People like that could do some actual good in the world. London is chock full of people who are struggling, with poverty, addiction, poor health. If any of those campers were to sign up to work for Meals on Wheels, or volunteer to drive seniors who live alone to their medical and other appointments, they would make the world – locally – a better place in a clear and concrete way. But no, they find it a more valuable use of their time and energy to camp out and chant slogans about something that is happening thousands of miles away.

Coming back to Young, whichever of these two motivations might have lay behind Young’s 2022 move, neither seems one an adult should follow. If he thought to shut Joe up, I find that an admission of contempt for one’s fellow humans’ thinking. If you think Joe is full of shit, do something to convince folks of that. If, on the other hand Young just wanted to ‘call out Joe (or Spotify)’, to say ‘That is wrong’, then ok, I guess. It’s your time and energy (and money) to use as you like, Neil, but I can in turn think of no reason to change what I think about anything because you did that. As I said in my first post on this, the fact that Young took a financial and artistic hit to make that statement does convince me that he is sincere about it. And so what? Many people have sincere beliefs about many things.

Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Culture, Language, Standards. No Comments on Streaming service warnings, or…..huh?

A pervasive feature of the 21st century in North America is the deterioration in the quality of written language. Words with a quite precise meanings, like ‘phone’, ‘mail’, ‘email’ and ‘text’ get replaced with the coverall ‘reach out’.

I have access to exactly one internet streaming service, and it provides one of the more amusing examples of language abuse in the warnings it attaches to the previews of the films that one can watch on it.

Now, some of these warnings are easily understandable: Nudity, Sex, Violence – the Classics. Attaching any of these to the preview of a film is particularly useful to any teens or pre-teens who live in the household. I have experience from an earlier era. In my pre-teen years my good Polish Catholic parents subscribed to The Catholic Chronicle, a weekly paper put out by the local diocese. This featured a lot of boring stuff I never read, but it also provided ratings of all the movies that would be shown that week on the 5 or 6 TV stations available in our town. Those ratings told me which channel to put on when I stayed up past my parents’ bedtime on Friday or Saturday night. I was most grateful to the Bishop for this service, even though nothing on TV in that era was actually all that scandalous. It doesn’t really take much to get a 12-year-old boy excited.

However, contemporary warning words beyond that Big Three are rather more mysterious to me.

One warning is Language. Not Profanity, not Cussin’, not even Bad Language, just – Language. That seems to suggest that the characters in the film are going to talk, but there is also another warning of Pervasive Language. I suppose it is useful for some people to know there will be a lot of talking, so they should pause the stream if they have to go to the bathroom.

There is also a warning for Smoking, which I presume is due to our enlightened age realizing that all it takes is for some young’n to see someone smoking in a film to provoke them to go out and steal some smokes and try it themselves.

However, there is also a distinct warning about Historical Smoking. Clearly this would be attached to a film set in the past in which people smoke. What is not clear to me is whether the distinction is made because seeing past smoking is more or less harmful than seeing current smoking. Whichever way it is, why is there not then a warning about Historical Nudity (Adam and Eve?) or Historical Violence (Conan the Barbarian?) or, really – Historical Sex; you know, before people knew how to do it right like we do.

Undoubtedly, the biggest mystery to me is when a film preview comes with this warning:

Some Thematic Elements

Whatever in the hell does that mean? I can’t even make a joke about it.

One might think that, whatever the environment, posting a warning whose meaning is unclear would be a terrible idea. Do we want Environment Canada putting out Alerts that say Something Might be Coming? [I admit, EnvCan’s Special Weather Statements are pretty close to that.]

However, here in the 21st century, when offence lurks around every corner, it may be that posting a warning on a film the meaning of which no one understands has value.

Consider this scenario – a subscriber phones up or texts the customer service dept of the service.

Subscriber: “Hey that movie had a blonde-haired woman chasing a blue aardvark around with a flyswatter, that was appalling, I had no idea me and the kids  would be exposed to that. What is wrong with you people?”

Customer Service: “Ah, but Madam, we did make it clear the movie contained Some Thematic Elements.”

Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

Written by Editorial Team on . Posted in Culture, News Media. No Comments on Uses and Abuses of Statistics – MLB Edition

If you watch a lot of sports as I do, you cannot fail to be aware of the so-called ‘Analytics Revolution’, a phenomenon that has wormed its way into sports broadcasting. Whatever professional teams may be doing with the reams of game and performance data they now collect, one cannot miss how much sportscasters talk about it, before, during and after each broadcast. 

As someone whose happiness would greatly increase if said sportscasters would just shut up, I cannot say all this statistic-centric chattering is welcome, but sometimes it is interesting. A frequent use of stats in a broadcast is when one of the commentators cites a statistic that they think is directly relevant to what is happening in the game. For example –  

Hockey team x scores the first goal of the game, and the commentator says ‘The team that scores first wins the game z% of the time.’

Baseball team y goes into the 6th inning trailing by 2 runs and the commentator says ‘Teams that trail by 2 or more runs in the second half of a game have only a Z% chance of winning.’

Now, there is no mystery as to where these statements come from. For the first one, you just look at the last 10 years (say) of all NHL games and see which team scored first and which team won. The percentage of the games in which it is the same team gives you z in the statement. 

A particular example of this occurred during the second round of last season’s MLB playoffs, when two teams were playing the third game of a best-of-five series, tied at one win each. The commentator said ‘The team that wins the third game in this situation goes on to win the series 70% of the time.’

Once again, it’s clear this statement comes from looking back at previous MLB best-of-five series in which the teams split the first two games, but in this case I had an immediate reaction to this stat: that seems too low. 

My immediate no-pencil-and-paper reaction was not that he was quoting a mistaken actual statistic, but rather that I thought the 3rd-game-winning-team would win the series more  often than that. I got out my pad and pen, and here is what I came up with. 

What would simple probability calculations predict for the probability in question? Imagine team A has won the third game against team B, so it is leading the series 2 to 1 with two possible games to go. Assume also, just as a starting point, that because this is the playoffs, these are two evenly matched teams. Thus, absent any specific information about each team in each game (who is pitching, injuries, weather, etc) one would expect the probability that either team wins is ½. 

Given that, you can calculate the probability of team A going on to win the series (having won game three) by noting that the series after game three can go only one of three ways:

  1. A wins game four and the series
  2. A loses game four but wins game five and the series
  3. A loses both games four and five and loses the series. 

This is the whole universe of possibilities, and it is easy to calculate the probability of each one.

  1. The probability is ½ under our assumption that 1/2 is the probability A wins any single game
  2. The probability A loses game four is ½ and the probability A wins game five is also ½, so the probability of those two events happening is ½ times ½ which is ¼. (The probability-aware out there will note that I have assumed that the probability of winning in each game is independent of what happens in the other game. I will come back to that below.)
  3. The probability A loses each game is again ½, so again the probability it loses both is ¼. 

Note that these three probabilities do add up to 1, so we have covered everything, but we have also found that the probability that either i or ii happens – the two cases in which A wins the series – add up to ¾, or 75%. 

So, on this account, my instincts were right, 70% is lower than 75%. 

However, when a calculation comes out differently than an actual number from the world, it is the calculation that must be re-thought. My first thought along those lines was the following: if A wins game three, then it has won two of three games against B, and although that is a small sample, it does point to the possibility that maybe team A is somewhat better than B, and that should be taken into account. 

For example, maybe in this scenario the probability A wins either of games four or five should be 0.55 and the probability B wins only 0.45. 

This is not helpful in reconciling the data with the calculations, however, as if one re-does the calculations for the probability of each of the three outcomes above, one now gets:

  1. 0.55
  2. 0.45 x 0.55 = 0.2475
  3. 0.45 x 0.45 = 0.2025

and the predicted probability of A winning the series is now up to 79.75%, even further away from the empirical 70%. 

Huh. 

So, one has to look at something else, and my preferred culprit would be the assumption built into all these calculations that the outcome of each game is independent of what happened in previous games. In particular, I suspect that a team that has won two of the three first games takes it a little easy in the fourth game. Not just that Team A’s players might ‘relax’ a bit, but also that team A’s manager might save his best pitcher for game five if he is needed, hoping that if they win game four his ace will be available for game one of the next round. In that scenario, the probability team A wins game four is less than 0.5, not more. You all can probably think of other explanations. 

In any case, it was clear that what the sportscaster who said this last autumn wanted us fans to think is ‘whoa, winning game three is really important’, when in fact there is something more interesting to be said: why don’t winners of game three do better than they do in a five-game series?