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Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Safety, Secrecy, Standards. No Comments on Silence is Golden – So Shut Up     

This is about the City of London Council, whose members’ behaviour and policies often irritates me deeply. In this case it has made a decision that is reflective of a much wider problem in 21st century government – the culture of Shut Up Already.

Susan Stevenson is the 1st-term city councillor representing the Ward that contains Old East Village in London, the area that has seen the most serious depredations by lawless individuals. Last time I was there was with friends going to a bar, and we walked down its main street Dundas to get there, having to pass at one point a ‘Mission’ outside of which some 20 people were injecting drugs, nodding off, presumably from having just injected drugs, and generally lying about on the sidewalk. It was what I would term a shit show.

A group of OEV merchants showed up at a recent Council meeting at which was discussed issues related to homeless encampments. The merchants made it clear they were fed up with what was being allowed to happen in their part of the city, that it was hurting their business and their lives.

Ms Stevenson’s job is to represent those people, and the City Council has just voted to dock her 30 days pay (just over $5,000) for the way she has done that. This is not the first time she has run afoul of the Council, as  she was previously taken to task (but not fined) for posting photos on social media of the sort of scene I described above from her Ward.

Her sin this time is that she put up a post featuring quotes from a city bureaucrat about homeless encampments. The charges against her adopted favoured 21st century words – ‘bullying’, ‘targeting’ and ‘harassment’ of this staff person. The step of docking her pay was recommended in – get this – a ‘report from Principles Integrity, the firm hired by the city to act as its integrity commissioner’, according to a London Free Press story.

Those terms for Stevenson’s behavior also come from that report. Council then voted to carry out the recommendation of 30 days loss of pay, after a debate, in an 8-6 vote.

I think this paragraph from the same LFP story is key:

“The report found Stevenson editorialized the quote with “provocative emojis,” unnecessarily identified Dickins, and appeared to suggest he was responsible for homeless encampments in the city, leaving him vulnerable to attacks from the public.”

I cannot read that without getting angry.

As I noted, I have walked through the shit show on Dundas East that is the very direct result of City Council policies, and more than once. People who live and work in OEV must do this on a daily basis, and that is by no means the only part of the Ward where such shit-shows reign.

I will also say that I did not actually fear for my physical safety on said walk, as I think the people starring in those shit shows are pathetic rather than dangerous. That walk is highly unpleasant, and it makes me despair for my city.

But this ‘Integrity Commissioner’ thinks that this city bureaucrat should not be subjected to ‘provocative emojis’ on a social media post. And, Stevenson ‘appeared to suggest’ something? What does that even mean? I read the guilty post, I saw no such suggestion in it, and I don’t know if a case could be made. But the more basic question is: why should Stevenson not suggest he is responsible for the situation if she believes that to be the case? Because he might be subject to ‘attacks from the public’? Why should he not be attacked by the public if they think he is responsible? If you are in a job in city government and you go out and get yourself quoted about city issues, then why on earth should you not be called to account for what you say by councillors and/or the public?

This is the utter disconnect of our current governmental bodies. Nothing wrong with people shooting drugs on a city street in broad daylight, no councillor should have their pay docked for that happening, but suggest that a highly paid city staffer’s quote is problematic and a $5k fine is the result. And, of course, 8 fellow councillors voted for Stevenson to be penalized.

City politicians and bureaucrats should never be made to feel ‘unsafe’, no matter how silly the supposed reason for that feeling – provocative emojis, indeed. But London residents – you’re on your own, folks.

Yea, it enrages me every time I read about it.

The Freeps and CBC London stories on this – there are many – include many quotes from Stevenson and her council colleagues. I’ll discuss those in a separate post, so stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AI and the End of Thinking

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Language, Popular attitudes, Standards. 1 Comment on AI and the End of Thinking

I hypothesize that the topic that comes in second after the US election in the news is AI. So, this post is about me….cuz in most fonts, Al and AI are indistinguishable.

This was prompted by a long article in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail Opinion section, titled

The Automation of Writing is Almost Here

Followed by the tag line:

‘But what will happen to us, Michael Harris asks, if we cede our written language to AI?’

It is a long article, and Harris makes a number of points, all of which I basically agree with.

As to what is wrong with AI writing, he says “There is the shape of meaning and yet nothing solid.”

I would only add that this can also be said about most bureaucratic writing from universities, government, corporations. Indeed, AI makes all writing sound bureaucratic – only the shape of meaning.

He typifies the coming of AI as the third great revolution in communication, the first being writing itself, the second the invention of the printing press.

Another quote: “Passing around pre-fabricated blocks of text is efficient, to be sure, but it also makes a mockery of the word ‘communicate’….”

Again, I cannot disagree, except perhaps to wonder at what ‘efficient’ means in that context. It is easy, yes, but efficient?

As someone who taught a lot of what my employer deigned to call ‘Essay courses’ (simply meaning student grades were determined by my evaluation of a minimum number of their written words), I said to those students often that ‘writing is thinking’. I meant it, even though most of them didn’t like what that implied. Thinking is hard, so writing well is also hard. Students….no, humans….are pretty ingenious at avoiding things that are hard. That’s not necessarily a moral failing. Well, it is when it gets people hurt or killed, but it is also probably part of our evolutionary heritage. Struggling along on the savannah, smaller. slower and weaker than most of what we wanted to eat, our ancestors absolutely had to conserve their energy in any way they could, so as to have a hope of winning a battle against a tougher, stronger and faster opposing animal.

The instinct to conserve energy seems to have survived, the need to best superior predators, not so much.

There is another vein of thought about AI and language that I have read about but which Harris ignores. So far as I understand it, it is that AI generated language is destined to turn into meaningless mush, eventually. It has something to do with the fact that AI will increasingly find itself training itself on a mountain of verbiage out there on the web which it has increasingly generated itself, and this process is inherently unstable. Here’s two sentences from the Abstract of a paper about this, titled ‘The Curse of Recursion’

“What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear.”

It doesn’t say what those ‘irreversible defects’ are but some simple examples in the paper suggest that as a LLM (Large Language Model) is trained successively on text that it generated itself, the output it produces becomes what we would now call gibberish.

Given what I write below, I would call that good news.

My own concern with these LLMs follows from what I see their owners selling them for already. It is an extension of the same concern I had the few times students used AI for their writing in the last years of my career. I came upon these recent AI sales pitches because I watch sports online, and the commercials are mostly those that are broadcast on US TV. The ones I am going to talk about below are all, so far as I can remember, from Apple Intelligence, the cleverly named AI wing of Apple.

I recall three such TV ads.

  1. A guy enters a business meeting, sits down, and quickly realizes he has no idea what is going on. He quietly scoots his wheeled chair out the door, checks on his phone for what I assume was the original emailed materials for the meeting, and hits the ‘AI’ button on his program. The algorithm immediately gives him a ‘summary’ of said material. He smiles, slides himself slowly back into the meeting, and says ‘OK, let’s get into the prospectus’.

Lesson: You don’t have to prepare for anything, and you certainly don’t have to study. AI will prepare you in seconds.

  1. A guy is sitting at his desk, thinking out loud about something that is never clearly described. He speaks some garbled thoughts into his phone, hits the AI button, and his gibberish is turned into a paragraph of clear prose, which he sends to someone (his boss, it appears). Boss reads it, looks up and says something like ‘This is from Gibberish-guy?’.

Lesson: You don’t have to write or even think clearly, just say something, anything, and AI will make it brilliant.

  1. A guy (natch) is incensed about someone stealing his pudding cup from the office fridge, and he is writing an inflammatory email to the entire office, castigating whoever was asshole enough to steal it, and promising dire consequences if it is not returned. Before hitting Send he looks at the Teddy Bear sitting across the office from him (No, there were no teddy bears in the office when I worked, either) and hits the ‘Kindness’ button on his AI program. The email is duly transformed, he sends it, and a young lady walks over to his desk, says ‘Such beautiful words.’ and returns his stolen pudding cup.

Lesson: You don’t have to emotionally regulate or understand proportionality, AI will make you seem like a nice (and articulate) person.

If AI is going to self-referentially crash some day, I say bravo. I fear however that the message to most of my fellow humans prior to that is that it will eliminate the need for them to think, be articulate, prepared, or an adult, and that will be too attractive to resist. However, I will have to interact with those people in situations in which they cannot rely on AI. In line at the grocery store, out for a walk, sitting at the bar. Doing so will be extremely unpleasant, because without their AI they will be ignorant, inarticulate and angry.  Unless they let their phone do their talking for them.

That’ll be great.

 

 

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.

 

Just Don’t Say It

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language. No Comments on Just Don’t Say It

I read a story in the Sept 27 print segment of the National Post that comes inserted into my London FreePress that had an odd headline. Well, it was odd if you think it was supposed to be a news story.

“Survivors….deserve to heal.”

The first sentence of the story:

“An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.”

The bill is C-413, a private members bill, and the article goes on to note that such bills ‘rarely pass’ but does not specify what ‘rarely’ means, numerically. Not ‘never’, I would guess.

The article goes on to note that  ‘…several years earlier the Liberal government passed an amendment to its 2022 budget implementation bill that added a criminal provision against making public statements that promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust’.”

That got me thinking, and remembering, and that got me digging, which is why this post is just being put on the blog now.

I remember Trudeau’s government doing that, and remember thinking at the time that it was a terrible idea, and I also remember that more than one Jewish organization lobbied against including that in the budget bill at the time. (Other Jewish organizations supported it, to be sure.)

My reasons for being distressed back then at this clearly non-budgetary matter being passed into law is precisely captured by this recent private member’s bill. Once you establish the precedent of passing laws criminalizing what people say or write about any public matter, there is no going back. It just becomes a matter of what things people say might catch the disapproving notice of some MP or – more alarmingly – some government.

Since I don’t trust 21st century media to report facts accurately, I went to the Parliamentary website to find the exact text of this bill.

That text includes the following:

2.2) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it

(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

The bill also states what can be a defense against this charge. It states:

Defences — subsection (2.2)

(3.2) No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2.2)

(a) if they establish that the statements communicated were true;

(b) if, in good faith, they expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text;

(c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true; or

(d) if, in good faith, they intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of hatred toward Indigenous peoples.

Confining myself to (a), note that this states that ‘truth’ is a defense against being convicted of this new crime, but it also is written to say that ‘they’ – the person charged with the offence – has to establish that the statements communicated were true. So, I will start by noting that this shifts the burden of proof from where it usually resides – with the prosecution – to the defendant.

Beyond that not-small matter, let me offer a hypothetical example of how a case brought under this new criminal statute, were it to be enacted, could go. Suppose I write to a First Nations leader, or a member of parliament, and ask the following question – or I just post this question on my blog:

“In how many of the claimed residential school gravesites have verified human remains actually been found?”

I have no doubt that my doing this would generate outrage in many circles. The question is, would it subject me to arrest and prosecution if this bill were to pass?

Note that I have asked a question in this scenario, but a question which might be interpreted by some as an attempt at ‘downplaying the Indian residential school system in Canada’.

And there is no statement whose truth could be verified so as to defend myself if I were arrested. I would be asking a question. Questions are not true or false, they are….questions.

Suppose I wrote in my blog that ‘Surely the residential school system benefited many of the children in it in many ways. Nothing is all bad or all good.’

Again, no facts to be verified, just a statement about how the world generally seems to me to work. Am I subject to prosecution, and if I am prosecuted, how might my lawyers defend me?

There are other reasons for being worried about this ‘truth as a defense’ aspect of the bill.

You can read a related story here on the Vancouver is Awesome website. I confess to being unaware of this site until recently, and I deplore the fact that it does not put actual dates on its stories (‘one day ago’ is not a date).

However, it chronicles an argument at the annual meeting of the Law Society of BC about the language to be used in a training program. Two members of the society put forward a motion questioning the language used because to date no human remains had been found at the Kamloops Residential School site. All that had been established was the existence of ground radar ‘anomalies’, a fact which the First Nation had acknowledged by changing the word ‘remains’ to ‘anomalies’ on its own website.

Other lawyers argued passionately against changing the language in the training course. One of them, described as ‘family lawyer Andrea Glen’, is quoted as follows:

“So in light of this significant body of evidence across the country, to quibble over the language of whether something is a burial site at a particular location, or a possible burial site or a probable burial site, obviously completely misses the point, and it’s just so hurtful to quibble over the language used for one particular area when we have a huge body of evidence that this happened across the country,” said Glen.

So, would lawyer Glen then say that, since there is ‘a significant body of evidence that non-indigenous individuals murder indigenous people across the country’ one should not in a particular trial be able to question whether non-indigenous person John Brown actually murdered indigenous person Joseph Alsop, as stipulated in the indictment?

Another lawyer and Society member, Adrienne Smith, is quoted as follows:

Smith added that Heller and Berry’s resolution is “part of a distressing trend in courts to try to inappropriately put a referendum about the needs of equity-denied groups improperly before courts and tribunals.”

Given the chance, I would say to Ms Smith that the resolution seems to me to be an attempt to put a question about certain facts before your society. It is not about anybody’s needs. But this is part of my concern. The law is increasingly concerned with what certain groups ‘deserve’, to quote the article’s headline, or what they ‘need’, as Ms Smith puts it. Not facts, not truth.

Given that, I am exceedingly dubious regarding the idea that Canadian lawyers, a group which, keep in mind, includes Canadian judges, all of whom are lawyers, will give any serious consideration to the question of ‘truth’ in any trial that arises from Bill C-413 if it becomes law. Why would it not be, as 21st century language often puts it, the ‘lived truth of Indigenous Peoples’, or at least the court’s interpretation of that truth, which would rule the day in most Canadian courtrooms in which a case brought under Bill C-413 was brought? It is increasingly common today to assert that everyone has their own truth. If my truth about residential schools in Canada conflicts with the truth of some Indigenous person, whose ‘truth’ will the court use in determining whether I have a valid defense against a charge of violating the terms of Bill C-413?

To put it simply, I doubt that the ‘truth’ defense will actually be any defense at all.  And, if truth is not a defense, Bill C-413 becomes a device for shutting certain people up, and thereby for stopping any meaningful discussion of residential schools. The law of the land should never serve that purpose in a free society. Never.

I see other issues here. The bill includes the qualification ‘other than in private conversation’. So, if I say something like ‘the residential schools weren’t all bad’  while talking to a friend in a pub, and someone overhears me – is that private conversation? Could a constable who overheard me say that, or a constable who took a sworn statement from someone that I did say that, arrest me for violating C-413?

I would bet they can, by the same legal logic that allows governments at all levels to pass laws that regulate so much of what happens in that pub.

It is by such devices that we get closer to the old Soviet dictum – ‘You can think anything you want, just don’t say it.’

‘Slippery slopes’ are not taken seriously these days, I know. However, Bill C-413 seems to me like a second step on such a slope, following on the first step that was included in the Liberal budget implementation bill of 2022. Bill C-413 will almost certainly not end up as law, if for no other reason than that the Liberal government is on its last legs. But some day, not too far off, I do fear that some government will take step two, about whatever statements it finds objectionable. Then, inevitably, the steps get closer together once you get moving along the slippery slope.

 

A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Government, Language, Standards. 1 Comment on A Tip of My Hat to Jagmeet Singh

Canadians will know that Jagmeet Singh is the leader of the Federal New Democratic Party, and they can probably guess that I have nothing good to say about any of the policies espoused by him or his party.

However, I want to here and now give him a public tip of my hat for something I saw him do in a video on the CBC website, which you can also view here (you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page for the ‘Featured Videos’, and I don’t know how long it will stay posted).

Singh is walking near Parliament with a staffer when two dudes come up behind him, filming him with their phones, and Dude 1 says out loud ‘Would you vote a non-confidence today if it came up?”

Singh ignores him and keeps walking.

Then Dude 1 can easily be heard to say “Corrupted bastard.”

At that Singh turns around and walks back toward Dude 1, saying “Wanna say something?”

Dude 1: “What?”

Singh: “Wanna say something to me?”

Dude 1: “I didn’t say nothing.”

And it goes on like that, with Dude 1, in the manner of confronted cowards everywhere, denying that he said anything, while his buddy, Dude 2, continues to film.

Security officers were right there the whole time, but I here tip my hat to Mr Singh for turning around and calling out the asshole who was only willing to insult him while Singh’s back was turned. Bravo, Mr Singh. Had Singh smacked the guy up side the head, no jury of real people would convict him of anything. The asshole asked for it.

 

Nonsense

Written by Al Slivinski on . Posted in Education, Language. 1 Comment on Nonsense

There are certain phrases one hears over and over again, and that are never challenged, despite the fact that they are clearly nonsense.

A minor instance of this is the expression: ‘That’s the exception that proves the rule.’ To say that an exception to a rule proves the validity or truth of that rule is just nonsense. If there is an exception to a rule, then it is not a rule. It is a rule with exceptions – i.e., it ain’t really a rule. Now, I have read that in fact the original statement of this was ‘That’s the exception that preuves the rule.’ The word preuves (a word I have not seen elsewhere) means ‘tests’. I have no idea if that was indeed the original statement, but that an exception might test a rule is at least not nonsense.

However the phrase of this sort that has set my teeth on edge for eons is of arguably more import in the contemporary world. I read it most recently in the following quote from an opinion piece in The Harvard Crimson by Lawrence Bobo, Harvard’s Dean of Social Science.

“The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”

That is simply wrong. That you cannot escape sanction for shouting fire in a crowded theatre is only true if in fact there is no fire. If there is a fire, you damn well better shout it, and pull the alarm while you’re at it. This is a sanction against lying, or causing needless panic. It has nothing to do with free speech or limits on it.

I suppose it is too much to expect the Dean of Social Science at Harvard to understand this.

 

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.”