Spinning Yarns

One of the joys of travel is getting to go to new places and see new things, and if you are lucky, to meet up with old friends who have been cursed with the misfortune of living somewhere warm and sunny while you languish in the remnants of a New England winter. That is what I spent the past week doing. Oh, I’d had some pretty noble aspirations of getting work done while I was gone, but it probably comes as no surprised that those aspirations completely failed to be realized. I guess in retrospect I shouldn’t be surprised — I’m certainly not particularly ashamed. I’ll just have to make up for it now that I’m back — and I was going to have to work hard anyway, I’m not repentant. In fact, you’d need a damned fine micrometer to measure what little shreds of remorse I have, if any.

If a hyper-intelligent group of space aliens came to Earth one day, spent some time touring the world, and then went back home and built an enormous “Museum of Earth”, they would probably wind up with something quite similar in form and spirit to greater Los Angeles. Lots of different types of people are represented there, along with their cultures, languages, and traditions — but each exhibit is ever so slightly wrong in some fundamental way, just as you might expect from a museum created by hyper-intelligent space aliens. You come away from it all with a strange feeling of odd inconsistency, or maybe that is just the smog. Don’t get me wrong, however; I had a really good time, and the oddity of it all was signficantly less this time — my second time visiting the LA area — than it was the first time I went to visit. And ultimately, the point was to see the people I love, not to get caught up in social analysis, so I classify the trip as an unqualified success.

Being a pale-faced northeastern boy, it was probably no surprise that I got a little too much sun and wound up slightly red-faced by the end of it all, but fortunately, I wasn’t burned too badly, and I found it amusing to be able to wander around outside in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of March, without dying of exposure. Just to underscore the point, Mother Nature dumped a hefty load of winter snow all over New England the very afternoon I departed. As you might expect, the people I told (upon arriving home) about sweltering in the 85 degree sunny weather out West, were less than sympathetic. But then, I like the cold, so I think they’re weird anyway.

Now that I’m back, I can get over my jet-lag by working some double overtime to get myself prepared for the Spring term, which begins this coming Monday. I’m definitely glad I had some time away; I feel I have regained energy and purpose, and I’m a lot more excited about this coming term than I was when the last one ended. Without going into too many particulars, let’s just say that sometimes the pedantic details of teaching are a lot less fun than the overall process. But, the break has given me some renewed perspective on the whole matter, and I feel pretty good about how the winter term went. A damned sight better than the summer and fall before!

It’s nice to see the world spinning smoothly upon its axis again.

Filed by Michael at 16:43 under Personal
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Over the past several months, a great many of my friends and associates have been swept up into the morass of online self-journalism known as web-logs, or, more colloquially, blogs. For a variety of reasons, I have mixed feelings about this trend. On the one hand, I can hardly criticize, since that’s more or less exactly what I’m doing myself, with my so-called “News and Thoughts” page. On the other hand, there’s a fine line between telling your friends what is going on in your life, and airing out your laundry basket for all the world to see, and that line sometimes gets crossed rather aggressively. Some people know how to walk the line; others really do not. It can be painfully embarrassing to watch people you know and like make total asses of themselves on what amounts to a public bulletin board. On the other hand, some of them write really well, and I love to read their thoughts and insights. So, I’m torn about the whole blog thing.

For a couple of years after the world-wide web first took off in the early 1990’s, I resisted the self-indulgent allure of the personal web page. But when I realized I was spending more time and energy explaining to my network-savvy friends and allies why I didn’t have a home page, than it would have taken to just make one, I finally caved in and wrote one. It was simple enough to do, and I have to admit, it was kind of fun, muddling about with HTML for the first time. But once I had put up my name and my e-mail address (ahh, those carefree days before Cantor and Siegel and the birth of spam), I found it quite difficult to continue. What should I write next? I was trapped trying to find meaningful information at the intersection between two conflicting sets:

Sure, there are plenty of things people might want to know about me. And there are plenty of things I might be willing to tell people.* But generally speaking, I don’t like sharing personal information with random strangers, and the impersonal details of my life are not really all that interesting. (I actually think this is pretty normal: The things that make a person nifty and unique are usually what’s closest to the heart, not the mundane trivialities of a human existence). So there wasn’t much left for me to put on my home page — and apart from the table of favourite links that was au courant at the time, and a list of friends’ home pages, my page was pretty flat. Frankly, not much has changed; there are a few more graphics now, and cascading style sheets have made it a little prettier, but the basic structure of my page is much the same as it ever was. I cleaned up the HTML when I started teaching, on the principle that I should set a good example for my students, but otherwise I left it alone.

* Just ask anybody who’s given me a glass of sherry and set me off telling stories.

In 1995, a relatively small number of brave weblog pioneers were out there, getting a gray-green geek tan so the rest of us could share their lives and their opinions. Only a year or so later, Jennifer Ringley started her now-infamous “JenniCam”, which gave voyeurs the world over an up-to-the-moment low-res digital viewport on her life. Nowadays, of course, everybody and her brother has a web page, and webcams showing sleek young women lounging around with no clothes on are practically a growth industry,** but at the time, it was a cool new idea.

** Or so I’m told ;-)

Eventually, I caved in and started posting some of my own desultory ramblings on my home page. I don’t bother trying to post every day, as the really dedicated bloggers do, on sites like LiveJournal, Blog*Spot, and DeviantART, but I manage to find something to say frequently enough that my parents and friends know I still have a pulse. For a brief time, I even posted some of my more creative writings — poetry, song lyrics, and stories — but I quickly took them down, as I was madly embarrassed by just how much response they got from completely random strangers. Suffice it to say, I prefer to keep a slightly longer arm’s length between myself and people I’ve never met.

So, have I succumbed to the Cult of Blog after all? I like to tell myself that I haven’t, but somehow I suspect it’s simply a matter of where you draw the lines around your semantic categories. After all, I’m just as deluded as the rest of humanity. As a classmate of mine used to say, “everbody’s a sack of shit. It’s just a question of what kind of sack they are.” And who am I to argue?

Filed by Michael at 16:47 under Personal, Philosophical
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A recent article in The Financial Times reports about a team of researchers at USC who have been using some kind of machine learning technique, combined with an automated telephony system, to be able to tell when the human on the other end of the line, presumably a customer, is angry. The program uses things like signal energy and rate of speech, as well as the presence of “swear words” to assign a probability that the caller is angry — and their current prototypes are supposed to be 80 to 85 percent accurate.

Being able to discern this sort of thing automatically is an interesting puzzle, but the primary practical application proposed by its inventors is that businesses which use automatic phone systems could increase customer loyalty by detecting when the customer on the other end is ticked off, and send them immediately to a human customer service operative. Great idea, right?

No, actually. A terrible idea.

Leaving aside the obvious technical problem — that it is fairly easy for a human to fake the symptoms of anger and cause the system to tag a false positive (The machine says “this customer is angry” when they’re really not) — such a system reinforces an incredibly negative social lesson, namely, that being loud, angry, and rude is more likely to get you good service than being calm, patient, and helpful. A company who used this system would essentially be saying to its customers: “We don’t think you’re worth our time and effort unless you’re mad enough to convince a computer you are about to kill somebody.” It’s not bad enough that we have to deal with a poorly-organized aural menu system with ill-defined choices and an interface that makes programming a VCR look like fun? Now I have to be an asshole to a computer, in order to get ahead?

Of course, a cynic would say that this is nothing new. Our culture is full of this lesson. “Nice guys finish last,” the saying goes. “It’s the squeaky wheel as gets the grease.” And I’m not saying that being shy, meek, and retiring ought to be rewarded, either. But it should be possible for a person to succeed by being aggressive, persistent, and polite. If nothing else, it would make all those lies our primary-school teachers taught us about being nice and playing fair a little bit more relevant to our lives. But, more importantly, by the time you do get through the telephone maze and reach a real customer service rep., you probably don’t want to be talking to someone who’s had nothing but angry swearing clients all day long. As someone who has worked phone support, I can assure you this tends to cloud the outlook.

Shrikanth Narayanan, the professor who is developing the automated anger detector, says his software is at least two years away from the marketplace. But to any companies out there who might consider adding such a program to the already-demeaning automatic phone menu you claim passes for customer service, I have only this to say:

“Fuck your goddamned machines. I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

Filed by Michael at 16:41 under Diatribe, Social
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