Archive for June 2018
“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it”…
The human body is a miraculous piece of machinery. Try as they might, scientists can’t always seem to understand its power — and susceptibility — to the strangest situations throughout history. What happens when a meteorite causes a mental health calamity? Or a laughing epidemic? From ye old French dancing fits [evoked above], to an entire village of ‘sleeping beauties’, the lesson we’ve learned from the majority of these epidemics is this: viruses are terrifying, but the mind is the most dangerous thing of all…
A curious (and captivating) collection of collective compulsion: “The Unexplained Dancing Plague & Other Epidemics of Yore.”
* Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
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As we muse on madness, we might spare a thought for Ernst Theodor Amadeus (“E.T.A.”) Hoffmann; he died on this date in 1822. A key figure in the German Romantic period, Hoffmann was an author of fantasy and horror– a phantasist and proto-surrealist– a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. While some of his compositions survive in the canon, he is probably better remembered for his stories: they form the basis of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann’s Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann’s character Johannes Kreisler.
Hoffmann also influenced 19th century musical opinion through his music criticism. His reviews of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (1808) and other important works set new literary standards for writing about music, and encouraged later writers to consider music as “the most Romantic of all the arts.”
“A firm’s income statement may be likened to a bikini- what it reveals is interesting but what it conceals is vital”*…
A recent (Roughly) Daily noted (by way of a quote from James Surowiecki) that “the challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.” A painful recent example was, the failure of credit ratings agencies honestly to assess the risk of derivatives being traded against home mortgages, which contributed mightily to the crash that occasioned The Great Recession.
But, as Richard Brooks argues, there’s a bigger and more pervasive problem still lurking: accountancy used to be boring – and safe. Today it’s neither. Have the ‘big four’ firms become too cosy with the system they’re supposed to be keeping in check? Are we in for Enron all over again, only this time on the financial system-wide basis?
The demise of sound accounting became a critical cause of the early 21st-century financial crisis. Auditing limited companies, made mandatory in Britain around a hundred years earlier, was intended as a check on the so-called “principal/agent problem” inherent in the corporate form of business. As Adam Smith once pointed out, “managers of other people’s money” could not be trusted to be as prudent with it as they were with their own. When late-20th-century bankers began gambling with eye-watering amounts of other people’s money, good accounting became more important than ever. But the bean counters now had more commercial priorities and – with limited liability of their own – less fear for the consequences of failure. “Negligence and profusion,” as Smith foretold, duly ensued.
After the fall of Lehman Brothers brought economies to their knees in 2008, it was apparent that Ernst & Young’s audits of that bank had been all but worthless. Similar failures on the other side of the Atlantic proved that balance sheets everywhere were full of dross signed off as gold. The chairman of HBOS, arguably Britain’s most dubious lender of the boom years, explained to a subsequent parliamentary enquiry: “I met alone with the auditors – the two main partners – at least once a year, and, in our meeting, they could air anything that they found difficult. Although we had interesting discussions – they were very helpful about the business – there were never any issues raised.”
This insouciance typified the state auditing had reached. Subsequent investigations showed that rank-and-file auditors at KPMG had indeed questioned how much the bank was setting aside for losses. But such unhelpful matters were not something for the senior partners to bother about when their firm was pocketing handsome consulting income – £45m on top of its £56m audit fees over about seven years – and the junior bean counters’ concerns were not followed up by their superiors.
Half a century earlier, economist JK Galbraith had ended his landmark history of the 1929 Great Crash by warning of the reluctance of “men of business” to speak up “if it means disturbance of orderly business and convenience in the present”. (In this, he thought, “at least equally with communism, lies the threat to capitalism”.) Galbraith could have been prophesying accountancy a few decades later, now led by men of business rather than watchdogs of business…
A chilling, but important report: “The financial scandal no one is talking about.”
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As we count beans, we might recall that it was on this date in 1873 that Samuel Clemens (the author known as Mark Twain) received a U.S. patent, his second, for a self-pasting scrapbook (No. 140,245). His creation used a dried adhesive on its pages so that users need only moisten a page in order to attach pictures.
In 1871, Clemens had scored his first patent, for “an Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments”–an adjustable strap that could be used to tighten shirts at the waist that was later used on women’s corsets, and is considered by many to be the precursor of the adjustable bra strap. He earned his third patent in 1875 for a history trivia game,“Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder Game.”
“There is always danger for those who are afraid”*…
Civil War hero Buffalo Bill Cody changed the face of entertainment when his Wild West show began touring the country in 1883. Buffalo Bill’s operation, which included mock bison hunts and Indian war reenactments, bronco riding and roping, and marksmanship competitions, went on to engender a number of other imitators, including Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show, and California Frank Hafley’s Wild West Attractions, which traveled the United States from 1905 to 1940.
While displays of masculinity were prominent in these shows, just as important was their showcasing of the skills necessary for “surviving” in the “Wild West,” abilities that women like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane had in spades. Hafley’s show heavily featured women in rodeo events like the sharpshooting comedy routine in which Lillian Smith, a former competitor of Annie Oakley’s and Hafley’s first wife, shot targets from the mouth or head of Mamie Francis, Hafley’s second wife.
Among the most popular performances at Wild West Attractions was a new sport with a dubious connection to the West: horse diving, an event in which a horse and its female rider jumped from a 50-foot tower into a small pool of water. It took more courage than all the other events combined, and only Mamie Francis had the gumption to do it. Between 1908 and 1914, Francis and her Arabian horse Babe completed 628 dives from five stories up a rickety wooden scaffolding…
Thrills and chills at “These women were the toughest performers in the Wild West.”
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we prepare to plummet, we might spare a thought for Titus Flavius Caesar Vespasianus Augustus (better known as Vespasian); he died on this date in 79 CE. Vespasian was crowned Emperor of Rome in 69 after a year of civil strife following the death of Nero; he served for six years and founded the Flavian Dynasty that ruled the Empire for another 20 years. Vespasian was judged (by Suetonius and others) to have been a witty and effective ruler, even as he had to govern through severe financial turmoil. Indeed, to this day urinals are known in Italian as vespasiano, a vestige of Vespasian’s tax on urine (which was valuable in his day for its ammoniac content).
Vespasian is also remembered for a series of large construction projects that he undertook during his reign– the largest of which was “The Flavian Amphitheater”… or as we now know it, the Roman Colosseum.
Roman aureus depicting Vespasian as Emperor; the reverse shows the goddess Fortuna.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”*…
More than 40 percent of the global population, more than 2 billion people, have a dust problem. Not “dust” meaning the grey puffs under the couch, but the dust of the Dust Bowl: microscopic soil particles, less than 0.05 millimeters across, so small that they get hoisted up into the wind and end up in people’s lungs.
We know that large amounts of dust are linked to premature death. However, climate change is expected to make the problem much worse in the next century, and scientists still don’t know how much. In the next century, the lethal range of dust is expected to proliferate. Between now and 2050, the many as 4 billion people, half the world’s population, are expected to live in drylands. It’s not because people are migrating there. Drylands are growing because of (you guessed it) climate change…
Dust is known to cause premature deaths, but climate change’s effect on how bad our dust problems will get remains notoriously understudied: “A global Dust Bowl is coming.”
* T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
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As we do our best to go green, we might send grateful birthday greetings to Arthur Hinton “Art” Rosenfeld; he was born on this date in 1926. A physicist at U.C Berkeley, he was moved by the oil embargo of 1973 to turn his attention to energy conservation, founding and leading the Center for Building Science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Over the next 37 years he developed new standards which helped improve energy efficiency in California and subsequently worldwide. His work helped lead to such breakthroughs as low-energy electric lights, such as compact fluorescent lamps, low-energy refrigerators, and windows that trap heat. In his fight against global warming, he saved Americans billions of dollars in electricity bills– and earned the nickname, “godfather of energy efficiency.”
Rosenfeld receiving the 2011 Medal for Technology and Innovation from President Obama
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge”*…
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity.
In 2007, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, asked that he not be given any information about his APOE gene, one allele of which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
Most people tell pollsters that, given the choice, they would prefer not to know the date of their own death—or even the future dates of happy events.
Each of these is an example of willful ignorance. Socrates may have made the case that the unexamined life is not worth living, and Hobbes may have argued that curiosity is mankind’s primary passion, but many of our oldest stories actually describe the dangers of knowing too much. From Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge to Prometheus stealing the secret of fire, they teach us that real-life decisions need to strike a delicate balance between choosing to know, and choosing not to.
But what if a technology came along that shifted this balance unpredictably, complicating how we make decisions about when to remain ignorant? That technology is here: It’s called artificial intelligence.
AI can find patterns and make inferences using relatively little data. Only a handful of Facebook likes are necessary to predict your personality, race, and gender, for example. Another computer algorithm claims it can distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual men with 81 percent accuracy, and homosexual and heterosexual women with 71 percent accuracy, based on their picture alone. An algorithm named COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) can predict criminal recidivism from data like juvenile arrests, criminal records in the family, education, social isolation, and leisure activities with 65 percent accuracy…
Knowledge can sometimes corrupt judgment, and we often choose to remain deliberately ignorant in response. But in an age of all-knowing algorithms, how do we choose not to know? Two scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development argue that “We Need to Save Ignorance From AI.”
* Daniel J. Boorstin
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As we consider closing our eyes, we might send discoverable birthday greetings to Tim Bray; he was born on this date in 1955. A seminal software developer and entrepreneur, he is probably best known as the co-author of the original specifications for the XML and XML namespace, open standards that fueled the growth of the internet (by setting down simple rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable), and as the co-founder of the Open Text Corporation, which released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web search engines.
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