The Kangaroo Problem

The test fleet had been taken to Australia the previous week
My colleagues, two cubes over, were all aflutter, I asked, "What gives?"
It was the kangaroo problem, I was told. I was rather bemused
For it seems that the autonomous vehicles were rather confused

You see, they had come across some of those long eared creatures
Beasts of burden, sporting those unmistakable features
But they were a new breed in their eyes, the term of art, unknown objects
Simply put, the recognition engine wasn't able to easily detect
Something about the gait and motion of the kangaroos they encountered
The road less traveled, in other words, had left the cars flustered

So now the data scientists were looking for more training data
In a bid to augment the intelligence of the onboard sensors
Scouring National Geographic and YouTube
  to update their detection algorithms
Loading up hours of videos of marsupials
  to finetune the classification schemes

Why did the chicken cross the road?
 Are you blind? It was a kangaroo
Consider, if you will, when a large object starts moving towards you
It seemed to me that the nature of the calculation was rather clear
That it shouldn't matter whether it was a kangaroo or a drunken deer

That any human driver out of caution would seek to avoid collision
Evasive action was clearly called for in this kind of situation
No matter how loping its gait, I'd hope, or how eccentric its motion
Avoid impact and ask questions later, was surely the solution

In this fraught scenario of exigency
 there'd be no time for semantics
Boffins, instead, were bent on reducing things
  down to matters of semiotics
When ontologies raise their specter,
 I rather fear you might be losing the plot
Meanwhile, over their shoulders,
  I saw the visualizations, the bounding boxes
True, they spoke at some length about the determinants
 of stopping distance
At the back of my mind, I recalled the wisdom
 of buying collision insurance

As to the tangible limitations of this artificial intelligence
How to teach the ghost in the machine to learn how to sense
To move beyond the basics of calculating velocity and acceleration
Plotting feasible trajectories while being mindful of sensor calibration
Lessons in obstacle avoidance, the perils of synthesized perception
A panoply of newfangled electronic equipment: cameras, radar, lidar
A catalog of known objects: car, truck, pedestrian, guardrail or barrier
Even in this hostile environment, prudence, protect the least of us
Rodent or marsupial was beside the point, let alone a desert fox
Surely a safety policy would be that you shouldn't hit the bus

The real world is highly unstructured,
  one can hardly play fast and loose
Object identity is rather academic,
 whether horse, camel, donkey or moose
On a grand tour of Mongolia,
 you might run into a herd of cashmere goats
The prime imperative of driving on the road:
  active safety foremost

The state of the art, then, of machine learning is no great panacea
Expect the unexpected, deal gracefully with chaos and disorder
What with near misses or close encounters in Peru with errant llama
Let alone the outrageous daily scenes you meet on an African street
Routine maintenance, force majeure, life is a veritable bestiary
A human marketplace replete with vibrant textures and shapes
The kangaroo problem was the tip of an iceberg of category mistakes

...


Activity, aflutter, what strange creature is this?
Elliptical motion, elusive, proudly prominent proboscis
Apt to be misconstrued, roaming, bounding without effort
Near collision, operator intervention, he filed the incident report
In the aftermath, then, the root cause analysis
Prompting among the boffins an identity crisis

Kangaroo Problem, a playlist

A autonomous soundtrack for this note. Drive safely. (spotify version)

• Can't you see me? by Roy Ayers
• He miss road by Fela
• You don't see me by Amel Larrieux
• Make the road by walking by Menahan Street Band
• Drive by The Cars
• Road Safety by Tony Allen
• (I'm a) Road Runner by Junior Walker
• Sensitivity by Ralph Tresvant
• Drive my car by The Beatles
• Chicken trying to cross the road by Buddhafunk
• Road runner by Bo Diddley

...

This entry on failure modes is part of the Toli Technology Series

...

Cultural Sensitivity in Technology is my perennial theme; everything is local and sensor calibration is paramount...

File under: humour, technology, culture, observation, perception, classification, robocars, software, algorithms, sensitivity, best practices, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log. Concept March 2018. December 14, 2022

The Synthetic Shadows of Marvin Huxley

Apropos simulations and simulacra... I am catnip for the blues and, for the past few weeks, have been simmering in a thick stew of female blues singers - because, well, that's what one can do these days... Which leads me to the curious case of Marvin Huxley.

Or should I italicize "Marvin Huxley", a music producer who, like me, is enamored of 1930's Delta style blues and has now, at length (and perhaps controversially augmented with AI), delivered an album-length blues fascinator, Shadows of the South

Branded as an "Independent Lo-fi Blues and Jazz Funk Music producer" from Adelaide, Australia, I see and hear what gets him off, it's an aesthetic I am deeply sympathetic with. It's also an aesthetic just out of an uncanny valley, leaving me deeply conflicted.

My introduction to Marvin Huxley was Suits Stitched in Shadows and Lies, which was somehow recommended by YouTube after I'd exhausted my go-to playlists of Etta James, Big Mama Thornton and Memphis Minnie. And, well, listen for yourself.

(Putting aside the visuals - which were a later discovery and par for the course in this our generative timeline), I didn't know where to start with the music, I was confounded.

Then, one click later, there was A Dollar's Worth of Skin, which was similarly disconcerting to the ear. Synthesis, compression, homage at once, and fruit of a strange alchemy.

Then, there were also the earlier experiments, say Goodbye America Blues, which is more evidently artificial with its vocal sampling of an unknown singer and filtered guitar. Still, I kept listening, eventually casting the effort as a blues fascinator despite the synthetic content.

Sidenote: The Sister-in-law has written at length about the real thing. We should all listen to them. The emotional labor and the craft:
Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage (Refiguring American Music) #CiteBlackWomen

In any case, here is an album that is soaked in this aesthetic, devoted even. A studio creation, perhaps, but it is a creation nevertheless. A high-tech creation of lo-fi blues.

Or more precisely, it is a recreation from someone "who loves trying to recreate those old sounds using vintage style instruments, samples, compressors and effects". Homage and chimera, then.

When I read "The guitar recording was degraded to evoke the brittle warmth of a 1930s field recording", I couldn't help but think of Pete Rock or DJ Shadow crate-digging and similarly jacking for beats.

Or say Q-Tip on the needle drop.

There's a racial angle perhaps (or a cultural appropriation take, some might say), but I won't venture in that direction, only the music matters to me.

Still, who gets to write "a love letter to the lost ghosts of American blues music"? Not for nothing do many bluesmen sing that Blues is a Feeling. (see Lightnin' Hopkins, for example)

And in a year where the movie Sinners has dominated the cultural zeitgeist, it is worth asking whether you can have a Delta blues revival, with full-on lyrics, gritty vocals and all, that is synthetic rather than authentic.

(Sidenote: to that point, Buddy Guy's new album Ain't done with the blues is also out)

Still, the music nerd in me wants to deconstruct the work. Where do the voices in Shadows of the South come from? What studio trickery was used? What equipment? Or, perhaps more tellingly, what prompts were crafted, if some of it is indeed AI-infused?

But then, stepping back, I also want to ask: who made the field recordings that we all venerate? Who was documenting the blues back then? Who was promoting it? And who now basks in the sounds of earthy blues?

But that's me. I can listen to a blues mama merely humming for hours on end. Further, the stakes are low. To add or not to add to the playlist, that is the question.

It seems to me that the visuals highlight the artifice and perhaps even detract from the music they are intended to support. At the same time, they do underscore the mood and point to the story of the clever lyrics. Also: they are great conversation pieces.

(A reminder that my favorite video accompanying a Funkadelic song is a juxtaposition with a Russ Meyer film, You Scared the Lovin' Outta Me by Funkadelic)

But I wonder what Marvin Huxley would come up with, with say a Lizz Wright in the flesh, after hours in the recording booth. Or maybe, to push the racial angle, what would a project with Alice Russell on vocals sound like in comparison?

In the same vein, one wonders if people want to listen to the blues or if blues-adjacent or blues-influenced will suffice. Certainly in these streaming days, there are many for which the simulacra will suffice as background music. Reserving the experience of the real thing for live settings. One wonders...

Anyway, the album is not all fetishized retro action. The rest features more modern beats, albeit still blues-inflected on the surface, even when veering into trip-hop territory. That growl in the vocals is a constant, and those guitar licks. Sounds of nostalgia.

I can see the twinkle in the eye as the album was released. But who knows how it will be received? I do know that this listener was left chasing shadows tying to decipher this conversation piece. Let me know what you think.

Shadows of the South by Marvin Huxley

The album on YouTube (spotify version) and a few highlights. For the first three, I suggest a blind listen before venturing to the videos.

• Suits Stitched in Shadows and Lies
• A Dollar's Worth of Skin
• Goodbye America Blues
• Sunday Prayes and Monday Chains
• Silver spoons and broken backs
• Shadows of the south
  The title track sounds more modern than the rest of the album.

P.S. Hey Marvin, tell me more about the makings of this album.

P.P.S. Pardon the title of this piece, I'm a sucker for such things.

This note is part of a series, One Track Mind. See previously:

Sensor Calibration

The problem is often couched as one of recognition
The difficulty, as it were, of sensor calibration
For if you can't measure a signal as a matter of first principle
If you can't detect accurately, you might as well be invisible

The auto-focus systems in cameras that can't detect those darker than blue
The pulse oximeters giving false hope - the all clear, to those with a darker hue
Training data, darker skin tones - unusual, light exposure
Biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprint sensors

Architectures of participation and control
Resigned to playing the tenuous outsider role
In this rigged game of life (and death) with ever changing rules
Arbitrary boundaries, when lines are drawn, borders can be cruel

For those excluded from the system, then, a matter of quiet advocacy
A liberation struggle of sorts, forever teaching others how to see
File under the banner of cultural sensitivity in technology
Sensor calibration and relief from the burden of invisibility

Sensor Calibration, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, fodder for sensitive souls (spotify version)

• Sensitivity by Ralph Tresvant
• You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure by Clarence Carter
• My Sensitivity (Gets in the Way) by Luther Vandross
• You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure by Funkadelic
• We People Who are Darker than Blue by Curtis Mayfield
• Skin I'm In by Cameo
• Choice of Colors by The Impressions

See previously Cultural Sensitivity in Technology and Empire State of Mind

File under: technology, culture, observation, perception, history, race, localization, photography, health, design, software, hardware, sensors, best practices, exclusion, participation, poetry, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log: September 21, 2022

Default Deny

Default deny is a very simple policy
Easily defended on grounds of complexity
What with the ease of implementation, even if cruel
With the golden excuse, we were just following the rules

Insurance companies often take refuge in it, it's a frequent addiction
Imposing on their customers by default, as it were, this untoward friction
Cynical, in their time of loss when they need rapid compensation
They instead offer up the burden of these inconvenient fictions

In the full knowledge that many won't bother and simply drop it
Their bean counters salivating in the back office thinking: profit
Mind you they're quick to pretend that the end result was not intended
And that it is perfectly normal to shy away from services rendered

Even if the sheer outrage is hard to countenance
It speaks to the perils of living with your fellow man
It's the injustice of it, all those years you duly paid those premiums due
Then it turns out that, all along, they were taking you for a bloody fool

Hence the importance of norms, rules and regulations and enforcement
But also the stick of tort, laws, oversight and, ultimately, punishment
The constant need to redress the wrong and put them on notice
To do the right thing by default and resist the temptation

And shame too has been known to work its charm
Applying the fear of god to prevent such harm
Brand damage remains a powerful tool for compliance
Eternal vigilance being the price of soul insurance

II. Coda

Default deny is also well known in networking technology
Firewalls, those gatekeepers, often turn to this strategy
Out of the box it gets you up and running very quickly
It's the low hanging fruit, good enough, the poor man's security
Protection from without but, sadly, it doesn't cover every layer
'Tis quite the pity, you still need to guard against bad actors
The real world is complicated, it's merely the start of a fight
Trust in Allah, goes the proverb, but always tie up your camel at night

Default Deny, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• You Can't Deny It by Lisa Stansfield
• Turned Away by Chuckii Booker
• Strategy by Archie Bell & the Drells
• You Can't Turn Me Away by Sylvia Striplin

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: humour, strategy, culture, observation, policy, insurance, economics, friction, regulation, law, standards, capitalism, incentives, outrage, networks, technology, security, poetry, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log: September 18, 2022

The Occasional Regret

Sometimes technology gets in the way,
There are ghosts in the machine, it seems
Or perhaps gremlins are the proper genus of the species
For when, in your haste to wish your interlocutor
Simple encouragements and the best of luck,
Your typed message got garbled by the darned computer
Transformed into choice obscenity before you could react
And now you wish that the whole interaction was something you could retract
Flush with mounting embarrassment
  And awkwardness that you're unable to deflect
All that is left is to bemoan it:
  The occasional regret of auto-correct

...

Sometimes when you're confronted with a choice,
You decide to take the easy way out
Unwilling, as you are, to listen to other voices
Or even entertain a scintilla of a doubt
You find yourself beefing up and promoting a patent scoundrel
Marshaling fraudulent arguments on the basis that he's a lesser evil
And now, without shame, he's hellbent on crudely screwing the pooch
The bodies are piled up high,
Unmitigated disasters while he cheerfully loots
  The uncouth rascal,
The hatchet jobs write themselves for even middling pundits
But now you have to stay silent as you were well and truly complicit
Call it buyer's remorse:
  The occasional regret of claiming to know what's best

...

Sometimes you decide to invade a smaller country
Might makes right and it will serve all your cronies
Fictitious claims, weapons of mass destruction
Vague but imminent threats and human rights violations
Ignoring, in your rush, all evidence to the contrary
Riding roughshod over any attempts at diplomacy
Wars of choice never lead to mission accomplished
After this catastrophic war on the wrong target, you are fully tarnished
Beyond the blood and lost valor,
  Your nation now entirely lacks credibility
Hell, even Putin can rightly accuse you of being part of an axis of hypocrisy
While badging his aggrandizing crimes with the same patina of manifest destiny
Oops, a cautionary tale:
  The occasional regret of the self-righteous mindset

Sometimes, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Sometimes by Bilal
• Sometimes by Erykah Badu
• Sometimes by Brand New Heavies
• Sometimes I Cry by Les McCann
• Sometimes (Mix #9) by Erykah Badu
• Sometimes I Cry by Eric Benet
• Sometimes by Mint Condition

See also Regret, a playlist

See previously: The Writing's on the Wall and Regret is all

File under: humour, life, technology, culture, observation, hatchet job, rogues, failure, politics, war, Iraq, USA, Bush, England, media, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, humour, poetry, toli

Writing log. June 4, 2022

High Tech Luddite

High tech Luddite, you might well say
Finally fed up, it was was my then-fiancée
Who got me my first mobile phone that Independence Day
Tired as she was, frankly, about my anti-social ways
She put me on the Friends-and-Family plan and said "Say no more"
Reader, I married her, months later, and carried her across the door

I work with cutting edge software but continue to be a late adopter
Friends often remark about my puzzling inertia
Looks of concern and wonder, as if I were allergic
To all those shiny gadgets, must-haves, and flashy widgets
Those social networks, elite apps, and newfangled platforms
I'm always out of the loop and unaware of the latest norms
I guess that I'm altogether immune to the fear of missing out
And trust that when I do move they'll have finally worked out the bugs

Vinyl and hefty speakers, my sound system dates from a bygone era
When veritable dinosaurs roamed the land along with other chimera
The kids joke that I write in my dusty notebooks with ancient quills
Preferring manual over automatic as I do, an aesthetic of low frills
This studied indifference has served me well but sometimes beggars can't be choosers
Sixteen years later, I finally got the courage to ask to be an authorized user
For, with a cracked screen and sharp spikes that make it a danger zone,
Apparently I still need permission in order to upgrade my vintage phone

Old School, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Old school by Lucky Mensah
• Obsolete by Mc Solaar
• A bit old-fashioned by Babyface
• Rock me tonight (for old times's sake) by Freddie Jackson
• Old fashioned by Cee-Lo
• I'm old fashioned by John Coltrane
• Flavour of the old school by Beverly Knight
• Old school by CunninLynguists
• Old school feeling by Rebelution
• Old school by Burning Spear

File under: humour, technology, adoption, culture, life, observation, perception, poetry, toli

Writing log. May 15, 2022

The Body Wash Situation

Now it's come to this, an inglorious chapter
Did they really have to go this far, I wonder?
Some things in life are just so disconcerting
Now I'm facing the body wash situation

You see, somebody's been messing with my shower
The signs were unpromising just a few weeks earlier
I'd noticed on the bottle that ominous portent of terror
Yes indeed, brightly highlighted, it read: New Formula

Uh oh, I thought, I wonder how this will go over
The Wife, you see - bless her, is a delicate flower
Woe is me, her nose for scents is simply without equal
Would this new formula repeat the earlier debacle?

Twenty years was a good run for a product, it's indubitable
I guess the new formula striking once again was inevitable
Back then, I’d being forced into exile with the demise of Oil of Olay
Their "new and improved" body wash was a clear fail - plain as day

I'd investigated, and found that they'd changed their formula
   Because of the price of soybeans
Call it a supply chain adjustment,
   Late stage capitalism messing with my shower routine

At length, I'd then settled on Aveeno
"Unscented and fragrance free"
And what's this they're now touting?
The new formula is "Sulfate free"

I suppose I should rejoice, going by their advertising material
Their chemists have plainly gone to great lengths for this sequel
So I tried the new bottle out....
   It's okay on the skin but clearly different
But, as you know, we live in community, I'm not the only constituent...

Yep, it only took a week for The Wife to start to complain
"There's a new smell in the house, it's giving me a migraine"
The writing was on the wall, marital strife beckoned, what a disaster
And now I'm creeping, scouring pharmacies, searching for the old formula

You can see where I'm going with this, the roots of my dilemma
They messed with a good thing and came up with the new formula
Now I'm stuck with bar soap. The Wife made me cancel my subscription!
Until I find an acceptable replacement, I'm facing the body wash situation

— Figure 1: old formula (left), new formula (right)

II.

Now I played it for laughs, but this situation is deadly serious
I'm also an organic chemist at heart and hence quite curious
Can't a man have a shower in peace? Such is my predicament
I resolved to get to the bottom of things and check out the ingredients

From a visual inspection, I couldn't detect a change in color
The change is in the olfactory realm, something about the odor
To the touch, the cream feels just a little bit thicker
And perhaps, I'd hazard, it lingers on the skin longer

Turns out, from the label, that the old formula was "Made in Canada"
Hmm, how damnable, the new formula is "Made in America"
I don't know, I think I prefer the work of the Canucks
Because this American formulation, quite frankly, sucks

I see what they did there: they took the more expensive seeds out
And tried to mask the change by claiming they're taking sulfates out
I've been down this road before, I almost want to scream and shout
I'm not inclined, at this stage, to give them the benefit of the doubt

Gone are the citric acid, coriander fruit, and cardamomum seed oil
Replaced by, who's ever heard of, Pelargonium Graveolens Flower Oil
Stick to core competency, I mean talk about missing ingredients
Bean counters and boffins inflicting on us this kind of deviance

They've now turned to the hard sell. On this, the evidence bears me out:
"91% agreed this product gently cleansed their skin without drying it out"
Are they imposing a global formula change using leftovers and by-products?
Or, Dear Reader, do I need to move to Canada to find my beloved product?

What gives? What's wrong with a little sodium laureth sulfate?
Why do I need to switch to, of all things, ethylene brassylate?
Is there nothing sacred anymore? Call it buyer's remorse
I mean The Wife is now actively contemplating divorce

Some things should be sacrosanct but they'd rather whitewash
For god's sake, why are they messing with a man's body wash?
I'm rather minded to call it The Aveeno Debacle
Frankly Johnson & Johnson, this is unacceptable

And so I leave you stewing, with a mix of anger and frustration
Driving around town with the kids in search of the old formulation
"The customer is always right" is the quintessential American fiction
Steel yourself and gird your loins for when you face your own body wash situation

— Figure 2: list of differences in the ingredients.
old formula (left), new formula (right)

The Body Wash Situation, a playlist

A contentious soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Why you get funky on me? by Today
  The album is called The New Formula; essential swingbeat that asks the existential question about body wash

  Why you get funky on me?
  Tell me why?

• Don't mess up a good thing by Joe Louis Walker
  I'm singing the bar soap blues these days
• A little bit of soap by Garnett Mimms
  I know it's one of the greatest inventions, but I preferred body wash.
• Body wash by Roberto Horns
  Ominously, the album is titled I think I have to break up with my girlfriend
• You've changed by Billie Holiday
  Lady in Satin said it best.
• Bean counter by Nocturnal Emissions
• Don't mess up a good thing by Booker T & the MGs
• You've changed by Dexter Gordon
  Dexter's tone on saxophone is impeccable as always, a devastating ballad
• Don't mess up this good thing by Janet Jackson
  Janet was in the bubblegum zone when this came out
• I got the feeling by Today
  That's something's going wrong
• You've changed by Ella Fitzgerald
  Sad to say, you've changed for the new formula

Bonus beats: You've turned my whold world around by Barry White

— Figure 3: ingredient list and marketing hard sell
old formula (left), new formula (right)

Please bring back the old formula Aveeno Johnson & Johnson
With this unseemly change, I'm unmanned, I really can't cope
It no longer passes the wife test, this is a desperate call to action
Please bring back the old formula... and save me from bar soap

...

[Update]

Six weeks later and things are no better, I really can't cope
The Wife threw out the various substitutes I tried out, she said nope
Even the brand that bore her middle name, sensitive skin and all was a no go
Leaving me to bask in that time-tested but low frills efficiency: bar soap


More beats in this time of mourning: I can't go for that by Hall & Oates and Come Back by Keith Sweat

...

See previously on this curio of late stage capitalism:

• The New Formula
• New and Improved
• Juicing the books

And for more on the domestic front,

• The Dishwasher Situation
• The Plight of the Soccer Widow
• Dilemmas
• Frisson de Folksonomie

Needless to say, I dissent.

(Oh, look at the date. Ducks)

File under: humour, economics, marketing, whimsy, technology, New Formula, Hard Sell, backlash, hatchet job, life, culture, observation, perception, capitalism, Small Things, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, poetry, toli

Writing log: February 16, 2024

Root Cause Analysis

Time for the post mortem, as you know, some take it seriously
The need to revisit, the urge to explain what happened previously
For an ounce of prevention is said to be worth a pound of cure
Let's get to the bottom of things and figure out the root cause

Oftentimes it's a simple mistake, a moment of inattention
Or sometimes it's really just idle exploration
One minute you wonder, what does this button do?
Then the thing happens that you can't recant
Oops, you realize you just shut down the power plant

Human fallibility tends to be the root cause

Ah right, power. It's quite fitting in this era of modernity
That one can't sing too highly of the virtues of Electricity
So essential, we almost always overlook this august substance
We only rue its wonder when confronted by its absence
And now we've lost power and everything must stop
Oops, lights out. In Ghana we call it dumsor

Power failures are prime candidates for the root cause

The next affliction, sadly, is all too common
Like ants, human beings just like to burrow
When in a mad rush to lay down some pipes, it's nigh inevitable
So busy that we never checked to see what could be an obstacle
Dig: bureaucracy got in the way, they were moving too slow
Oops, the contractor cut the critical cable with his backhoe

All too often, cable cuts tend to be the root cause

Things fall apart, they say,
   equipment sputters, machines fail
They blow hot and cold, or crack when used,
   there's wear and tear
Material scientists make a roaring trade
   as do structural engineers
That, sadly, alchemists never overcame nature's challenge
   is the lesson learned
Oops, the widget broke,
   a reminder that no condition is permanent

In this industrial age, hardware failures are a likely root cause

Sometimes you're just too popular,
   so crowded no one can get in or breathe
Congestion is the operative word,
   in matters of scale, a crowd changes things
Your service is the flavor of the month,
   and now you've become essential
Oops, you're completely unprepared for when you go viral

Woe is me, lack of capacity is frequently the root cause

And then we come to the bad actors,
   forever on the attack
Always probing for an opening,
   for vulnerabilities in your stack
And that's even before we consider
   the gremlins and parasites
Iconoclastic beasts with distinctive manners
   and singular appetites
Every complex ecosystem in history
   has had to deal with grifters
Oops, your hospital is held to ransom
   by a band of sneaky hackers

Always protect yourself, a lapse in security is invariably the root cause

There's more in this vein,
   mankind has never built a system without error
From the Tower of Babel to that fancy car,
   or even that blasted word processor
The raw materials of life,
   whether it's the design or the initial conception
Imposing one's will,
   it might be a flaw in the ultimate implementation

You probably have your own experience and area of expertise
Your own rules of thumb about these puzzling mysteries
Let me tell you something
   from my profession of software engineer
If you only knew,
   to defend a system in depth is an exercise in fear
How close we come to catastrophe,
   partial or complete, every day
Trust me, you really don't want to see how the sausage is made

Now one could argue about the order
   of this short list of failure modes
It is only in retrospect that one is truly able to diagnose
The human burden is to keep moving
   in the face of systemic error
To mitigate the worst,
   to build the fail-safes and systematic procedures

Spare a thought for the moron in a hurry,
   for one day it could be you
That, through omission or commision,
   will be blamed for the miscue
We haven't scratched the surface
   of how much the human factor has an impact
Fall back to folk wisdom,
   suffice to say that curiosity killed the cat

And what of the wider world,
   say failed love affairs, or even wars?
It's only human to search for simple answers
   and the root cause
Our prophets and philosophers have long emphasized
   moral suasion and the golden rule
You could do hardly do worse than social living
   and the mosquito principle

Focus on best practices, usability, and layers of protection
Try to put a process in place and make it official!
Make sure that it takes many, many big red buttons
   to launch that nuclear missile
If there's any moral to this tall tale of root cause analysis
Take heed, and wherever possible, make use of the checklists

After

• How Complex Systems Fail (Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety) by Richard I. Cook
• a quip about network outages from Sean Donelan

Root Cause, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Oops (Oh My) by Tweet ft. Missy Elliot
• My Mistake (was to love you) by Marvin Gaye
• Reasons by Earth, Wind & Fire
• Mistake by Fela Kuti
• Knockin' at the Wrong Door by The Rollers
• A Few Reasons by Dwele
• Who Can We Blame by Mica Paris
• Lessons by Eric Roberson

See also: The Dining Philosophers Problem, Resilience and Adaptability, and Version Hell Revisited

This belated entry on failure modes is part of the Toli Technology Series

File under: failure, systems, resilience, best practices, human factors, networks, operations, error, technology, software, hardware, culture, observation, perception, design, humour, strategy, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: April 3, 2022

Ghost Transcripts

Brief messages left behind by the dearly departed
Ephemera in times past, letters and scraps of paper
Of late, these new artifacts of the digital era
Faint traces, bylines, icons and avatars
Photos and videos, the color of memory
But also emails, logs, and chat transcripts
Voice mails that we remind ourselves to never delete

No, I want to hear that voice periodically
My brother imploring me to return his call
The chuckle, the slight hesitation
As if pondering the best approach
Before jumping in with the juicy morsel
That would whet your curiosity and impel you to respond
Then, without fail, the obligatory closing joke,
The lesson we learned early, always leave them wanting more

The voice is what I hold on to, its teasing inflection
And so I save the message every sixty days
And so I stay with this phone company
Despite the gaps in their coverage, and usurious rates
That customer satisfaction survey didn't have the option
For me to enter the real reason for my brand loyalty
Contra the telecom operator's retention policy
The textures of a life underwritten
The comfort of the ghost transcripts

Soundtrack for this note

Mostly the Voice by Gang Starr

See also: The Laws of Grief

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time.

File under: memory, voice, culture, observation, perception, technology, personal, grief, poetry, covidious, toli

Writing log. December 18, 2021

Coinage Capitalism

Hottakes galore, call it coinage capitalism
Reification of the zeitgeist, the books proliferated
Bearing weighty tomes laden with keen, academic discourse
Along came the bright observers and the futurists

Cassandras calling, heady charges were duly leveled
Observe well the rhetoric of these social synthesizers
But scratch the gleaming surface of their mooted frameworks
And behold a fundamental misdiagnosis of the economics of networks

Such edifices they erected
   as they bemoaned the newfangled platforms
Perverse incentives touted by the lawyers among them,
   stern demands for reform
Bullet points on their charge sheets,
   not your garden variety contrarianism
A veritable rush to be the first to pinpoint the original sin

They extolled the perils of the day,
   but it was a new age of puffery
Their research probed the fatted calf
   or, at least, its dark underbelly
These pundits, badged with brows of concern and alacrity
Were minting think pieces full of shrink-wrapped profundity

Talking to themselves,
   the commentariat selling policy prescriptions
Data is the new oil, and other slogans that belied their fictions
But to take them at their word would be a crying shame
For, at the end of it all, they were merely playing a shell game

Tell us something new, there's no such thing as a free lunch
Captain Obvious, if you aren't paying, you are the product
Dark patterns applied as you skipped over the fine print
Taken hostage, the convenience of the Faustian pact in one click

Blinders on, the profit imperative,
   next they'll be fleecing you
Slouching wide awake, you customer,
   as they extract surplus value
Still, was there really anything novel
   in this dark empire of fear?
Methinks their sole invention
   was a new way of saying buyer beware

Cheap Talk, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Cheap Talk by Loose Ends
• Talkin' Loud and Saying Nothing by James Brown
• Talkin' all that Jazz by Stetsasonic
• Talkin' out the Side of your Neck by Cameo
• Sound and Fury by John Brown's Body
• Talkin' Loud and Saying Nothing by James Brown and the J.B.s

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: hatchet job, culture, observation, perception, technology, Buyer's Remorse, shell game, Observers are worried, poetry, language, rhetoric, toli

Writing log. Concept: January 29 2019. November 21 2021

Interstitial

The little glass fondleslabs
Were not the first to rob us of the interstices
But they were, truth be told,
Leaps and bounds, the most effective

While you waited in line, it was all too tempting
To whip it out of your pocket and, into its warm glow, plunge in
Better, during the commute, to plug in the headphones and listen
To scan the headlines or pursue whatever was the latest distraction

Versatile too, the mobile package, if charged,
Could supply essentially unlimited attractions
But this was not new, a thick broadsheet unfolded carefully
Could divert you to yesterday's news just as easily

But the convenience was the difference,
Oh so unobtrusive and frictionless,
Deployed in a single motion from one's pocket,
One handed operation supported
One click and you were transported

A paradox of modernity, no more idle chat while you wait for the bus
It's enough to make you wonder, what paradise have we lost?
And so I, for one, bemoan the loss of friction
The interstitial is on the brink of extinction

Interstitial, a playlist

As is my custom, a soundtrack for this note. (spotify version)

• Dodgin' Your Phone by Dwele
  Although ostensibly about dodging phone calls, I'll repurpose Dwele and David Banner's collaboration to be about eschewing the phone entirely, but then I'm a Luddite.
• I Don't Mind The Waiting by Omar
  Waiting Game was originally intended for this playlist but the deep cuts from the This in Not a Love Song album aren't available online. 'Tis quite the pity
• Idle Moments by Grant Green
  Any excuse to hear some Grant Green. Spread the word.
• Sitting And Waiting by Dave Barker & The Upsetters
  Lee "Scratch" Perry was on a roll
• What Am I Waiting for? by The O'Jays
  Survival is the name of the game.
• I'm still waiting by Courtney Pine
  There's a sweetness and sense of ease that runs through the Closer to Home album.

See previously

• Idleness Outlawed
• What Paradise Have We Lost?
• Waiting for Godot (Khayelitsha)

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: life, technology, attention, social, culture, phone, perception, communication, adoption, poetry, norms, whimsy, observation, covidious, Observers are worried, Social Living, toli

Writing log: May 1, 2021

The Dining Philosophers Problem

The dining philosophers problem is well known in computer science
Dealing with matters of access, it has analogues in our headlines
Humanity's curriculum involves many rituals and traditions
Perhaps, then, it's worth explaining the problem's formulation

The diners that are gathered here today are five in number
Imagine, if you will, your favorite group of philosophers
They are initially presented in a state of silence at the venue
Around a round table, hungry they are, for spaghetti is on the menu

The central conceit is that each philosopher must alternately think and eat
Implicit also is that they are vegetarians or vegans, for there is no meat
The rules of the social game adds the constraint of manners as the main course
That they can only dig into their spaghetti if they have both left and right forks

After a philosopher finishes eating, but before launching into thought,
They must put down both forks to make them available for others.
Forks, in this arrangement, can only be held by one philosopher at a time.
The problem's construction teaches that sharing is caring at mealtime

To add realism to the scenario, we can assume there is an unlimited supply of food
And that our philosophers can eat long past the point that would normally be good
With these core ingredients: philosophers, spaghetti, forks (but no knives)
The problem is meant to illustrate the challenges of living parallel lives

An utter conundrum, this problem when it was presented to me at university
That, while I could discern that it had applications in the study of concurrency,
The problem was going from this set of instructions to designing an architecture
Full disclosure, I damn near failed this course on algorithms and data structures

The enduring challenge, if you think about it, is how to avoid deadlock
The fear is of resource starvation such that the actors find themselves stuck
We want a world in which no philosopher will starve and continue forever
To eat and think deep thoughts; a metaphor, this immortal philosopher

Timing is everything in the choreography of actors
Finding a strategy to manage this human infrastructure
The fundamental issue at hand, the term of art, is mutual exclusion
A stark concept, therein lies the difficulty with the algorithm

The conventional solution involves a resource hierarchy
I found it quite unfair because it clearly lacks neutrality
But it can be proven to work, if one heeds the instructions and laws
It applies an ordering to the distribution of shared resources

Another strategy that has been advanced is arbitration
This one I tried out, as I'm a firm believer in conversation
Once you designate a mediator, and open yourself up to abide by their resolution,
As the song goes, it takes behavior to get along, diplomacy can be the solution

The philosophical issues are many with middlemen, think of Caesar's tax collectors
And of the oligarchs and monopolists who insert themselves as toll collectors
Who are the designers of these systems in humanity's curriculum?
Who gets to make the rules? And who pays soul insurance premiums?

Game theory can come into play, think of the prisoner's dilemma
The shortest path to success might be to seize resources - state capture
Write the ruler's rules, and steal power like a conqueror
Rehearse a coup drill following the lead of many a dictator

I found that the problem had all the makings of a cautionary fable
Earlier, you might recall, I held my fire at that philosopher's table
Where rage, and its contemporary uses, were the bone of contention
'Twas decidedly, I'd explained, a case of normalcy prohibition

I had been thinking about this modernity of parallel lives
Where some have the great privilege of their insatiable appetites
A state of the world in which no progress is possible
We would do well to study the Mosquito Principle

See previously:

• Normalcy Prohibition
• Masks of Civility
• The Traveling Salesman
• The Skeptic's Credo
• The Last Philosophers

The Dining Philosophers Problem, a playlist

A soundtrack for this treatise, bookended by the great divas (spotify version)

• Dinner with Gershwin by Brenda Russell
• Competition by New Edition
• Insatiable by Omar (ft. Natasha Watts)
• Sharing by Bugge Wesseltoft's New Conception of Jazz
• Dinner with Gershwin by Donna Summer
• Insatiable by Prince
• Share my World by Mary J. Blige
• No Competition by Eric B & Rakim
• Share Your Love With Me by Aretha Franklin

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: humour, folktale, software, algorithms, philosophy, competition, design, best practices, culture, observation, perception, social, technology, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: March 28, 2021

Empire State of Mind

A memory. An open day at the Electrical Engineering department at Imperial College for accepted candidates, the professors wanted to demonstrate their new face recognition software to the group. I demurred (shyness), but they insisted that I be the volunteer.

So I sat and watched for 15 minutes as nothing worked. "Smile", asked the graduate students. "Frown", asked the professors. Same result: no detection. Others were summoned. Invisible man.

It's a minor point, but I can't forget the sheepish grins. As I told the professors and their harried students: "You probably didn't train your algorithms much with many faces like mine."

Cultural sensitivity in technology is one of my perennial themes. And it's hard work even if you acknowledge your blind spots. The anecdotal failures continue to pile up. What was true back in 1991 is much the same in 2021, software and hardware are far more sophisticated and performant but face the same blindspots (provenance of training data, applicability to real world scenarios, ethical framing etc.)

The challenge for software engineering - which is still a craft, is to move beyond curve-fitting phrenology (and Deadwood) into its industrial revolution.

Sidenote: recruiters these days are all "big data, machine learning, cloud yada yada". Buzzword fatigue is an occupational hazard.

I miss the great mass amateurization and view source ethic of early web development and yet the developer tools and frameworks these days almost feel like a golden age is within grasp.

Obligatory citations:

• Planning the Software Industrial Revolution by Brad Cox
• Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
• Commodifying AI, or, Some Half-baked Thinking on Services As Middle-men by Coté

Incidentally, Imperial College was the venue of my worst interviewing experience (and there have been many) - the low point of which was walking past the open door as I left the interview, and walking straight into the wall. This was after having flubbed almost every question I'd been asked.

The laughs and looks exchanged by the professor and the secretary as I turned around, shuffled back muttering an apology (why?) as I rubbed my sore head and headed out the door. Even English reserve and politeness could not deal with my Buster Keaton imitation.

I was admitted to Imperial College a week later.

I occasionally regret not having gone to Imperial or Cambridge for university. Without a doubt, I would be a stronger engineer and yet I suspect the eclectic toli monger you see before you would be repressed.

Imperial Visions, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version).

• You Don't See Me by Amel Larrieux
• Invisible by Alison Moyet
• Empire Ants by Gorillaz featuring Little Dragon
• Sensitivity by Ralph Tresvant

I've been neglecting the Toli Technology Series for years now, albeit I occasionally make a few gnomic pronouncements on Twitter, consider this some throat clearing to prompt a reboot.

File under: culture, technology, algorithms, software, race, sensitivity, toli, life, best practices, design, data

Mixed Metaphors

The COVID-19 risk guidelines in Austin, Texas present a design dilemma and a case of the blues (and more on that anon, see if you can spot what I mean). They also started with a political handicap when they were unveiled a few months ago. These are local city and county guidelines, drawn up by the Austin Public Health department, that were always likely to be ignored and run roughshod over by Texas's governor who was early in hailing The Grand Reopening of Texas, and has steadfastly proclaimed Positivity in the face of all contrary evidence.

The earlier color-coded threat level Homeland Security Advisory System in the US has also been handicapped since its inception. While some critics focus on its bureaucratic unwieldiness, what irks me most is a catastrophic user interface and design failure. The failure, as you'll note, continues into the present.

The reason is that, in order to have green be the colour for the "all-clear" threat level, the natural spectrum of light, as normally seen in rainbows, has been altered in the Homeland Security scheme. Thus ice cool blue has been promoted to "guarded" whereas tropical green has been demoted to "low".

A bureaucrat or marketing person's intelligent design is at odds with evolution, physics and reality. Blame Osama bin Laden perhaps, but any number of people in the US government signed off on this mishap. Further, we are still living in this era of Recent Non-Specific General Threats almost two decades later.

The messaging and visual branding in the covid guidelines suffers from the very same flaw with the inversion of the colors of the rainbow spectrum. You can almost hear the designer's brain ticking: let's start with a traffic light metaphor, Red-Yellow-Green. But wait, they want 5 levels, let's add in orange and blue. Oh no, what about green? Argh, I give up, let's just invert green and blue. Mixed metaphor much?

Everytime I look at these charts, I suffer cognitive dissonance, there's something not quite right. I don't have to be color blind to be confused; I get a case of the misplaced blues. Could it be so hard, I ask myself? When I bought some paint to go after Tom Sawyer, things seemed easy, I ordered my 5 cans of paint and got a nice rainbow spectrum:

When I looked at my bookshelf at my stack of Unesco General History of Africa books, I noticed that there was a similar confusion if you organized things chronologically. I suspect the editors of that wonderful series weren't visually inclined but, in mitigation, they weren't dealing with a global pandemic and coming up with an urgent public health intervention. Still, the learning exhibited in that series stands the test of time. Even if later scholars have access to more material these days, those historical tomes were a real benefit for humanity. It was certainly wise to have the red volume be Africa under Colonial Domination. The blood of colonial era lingers on the ground. Alfred Adu-Boahen's opus of historical scholarship stared with clarity at the heart of darkness and eschewed Africans as scenery in the race to Fashoda.

But back to our covidious guidelines and rules and regulation... Once you move beyond the blue in green, as it were, a further problem is with naming and comprehension. If you use numbers for different phases, you have to consider the order. Do increasing numbers mean an easing of restrictions or an intensification of the lockdown? Are you considering opening or closing? In Austin, it looks as if Stage 1 is the all clear whereas Stage 5 is the fullblown lockdown stage, but I could see the reverse making sense too. Leaving aside the blues, where do epidemiologists stand on endianness and indeed on numerology?

Mind you, an interesting thing to note is that the misplaced blues is not a universal design failure. The Texas Medical Association coronavirus risk assessment of activities is at least in line with the rainbow spectrum. Different designers, most likely working down the hall from each other, came up with different solutions. No wonder humanity is afflicted with version hell and the Tower and Babel.

The designers behind Harvard Global Health Institute's Global Epidemics site went with the Rule of Four instead, with the graphics for their Key Metrics for Covid Suppression. There is still the notion of the rainbow, but to avoid the case of the misplaced blues while fitting in with the traffic light metaphor, they added orange but decided that the blues could wait.

The British government in April was considering The traffic light exit strategy to free the UK from lockdown. A new economics paper suggested "a red-amber-green solution to safely ease us out of coronavirus restriction". That would be The traffic-light route to ending the economic lockdown by Gerard Lyons and Paul Ormerod (April 5 2020). It was noted at the time that this academic had sway in the past with Dominic Cummings so Mister Johnson was likely to pick up on this metaphor.

A few weeks later would read Coronavirus: 'Traffic light' system to lift lockdown in Wales

Ending lockdown could be in phases,"like a traffic light in reverse". There would be a move from red - some "careful and controlled" relaxation - to green, which would be "much more like the lives we had before the crisis hit". The amber zone would see more restrictions lifted and, if the virus is not re-emerging, Wales could then move to the green zone.

The UK would unveil its covid alert system in June rollowing the traffic light metaphor - the blues of the worst excess mortality were seeping in

By July we were reading Coronavirus: Quarantine scrapped for arrivals from 'low risk' countries to England, a constrained reopening was in prospect

Last weekend the government said a traffic light system would be introduced, with countries classified as green, amber or red, depending on the prevalence of coronavirus... the Join Biosecurity Centre – which was set up to coordinate the government’s response to the pandemic – will be categorizing countries with a “traffic light” system.

Each country will be rated green, amber, or red. This will depend on the prevalence of coronavirus, the trajectory of the disease, and the center’s assessment of the data’s reliability. The quarantine will only apply to those countries rated red.

The UK Government Traffic-Light Quarantine System was said to be red amber and green.

Chile launched its five step coronavirus prevention program to gradually reopen the country. They didn't bring in color to the mix, it was steps and numbers.

Seven Santiago neighbourhoods will transfer to Step 2 — they will be allowed to leave their houses freely on weekdays, with local shops allowed to reopen. The quarantine remains in place on weekends and holidays, along with a nighttime curfew every day.

La Araucanía joins fellow southern regions Los Ríos and Aysén in Step 4 of the prevention program. Here, rates of infection are significantly lower than other parts of the country. Restaurants, cafés, shops and cinemas can reopen with up to 25% capacity, while bars, clubs and gyms remain shut and the curfew stays in place.

If you were lucky enough to take advantage of lower interest rates caused by the downturn and attempt to refinance your mortgage, you would have faced the hard sell and the kind of mixed messages that ensue whenever traffic light meets rainbow, we always seem to get a case of the misplaced blues.

California's governor Gavin Newsom is hip to this game

The governor said that the new four tier color-coded system would match a color to each of the four tiers with purple representing the highest “widespread” risk level for a county with more than seven new cases per 100,000 residents and more than 8 percent positivity rate. Red will represent “substantial” risk, while orange represents “moderate” risk and yellow the lowest level, “minimal” risk, with those lower levels being determined by reduced numbers in case and positivity rates.

“We don’t put up green because we don’t believe that there’s a green light that says just go back to the way things were or back to the pre-pandemic mindset”

The shiny Silicon Valley solution eschews the misplaced blues using purple instead, deftly forgoes green to flee the traffic light metaphor, and embraces the rule of four in pointing to simplicity for its color-coded county guidelines

Througout this pandemic, there has been a lot of mixed signals and confusion in the messages that the public has been inundated with. This inconsistent messaging goes against the best practices of public health messaging. The public is necessarily conflicted: stay home except when you shouldn't, wear a mask although you don't need to says the governor or the sherrif. Bleach and disinfectant is first presidentially recommended, and then immediately reviled and universaly ridiculed. This is the stuff of confusion, and I won't get into the stranger turns of hydroxychloroquine, or indeed the numerous cases of drinking of hand sanitizer - that last was a bridge too far for me, to mix my metaphors.

Colors abound in the discourse, yet the only consistent message is that red is bad, the hot zone or the torrid zone of infection. Heat is also at work; hot is bad, cool is good. And if some states go with colors, some with phases, some with steps, and yet others go with levels or stages. And when it comes to numbers, some go with high numbers while others prefer low numbers as the warning. Numbers are probably better than colors but again everyting is up for debate. Is higher better or worse?

One interesting thing is that we don't hear about black much in the messaging. We don't get black or white. The implied binary choices are too stark. Life or death, Stop or go. Perhaps it is because binary choices have an immediacy that force us to reflect on mortality. Three or more states is best, there are shades of gray in this business - these shades imply some degree of human flexibility and agency. Designers reached with intent into their toolkit and came up with traffic lights, with the rule of four, and always remember, as a best practice, if five or more states are needed, we should heed the actual rainbow.

Graphic designers are having a tough time achieving clarity during this coronavirus pandemic. There's no easy living when you have mixed metaphors in a covidious time.

Mixed Metaphors

Traffic lights
Full circle rainbows
Prevention steps
Priority zones
Stage guidelines
Lockdown levels
Threat areas
Risk tiers
Confused warnings
The misplaced blues

Mixed Metaphors, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, here's hoping we can find the blues or some black gold of the sun somewhere over the rainbow. (spotify version)

• Over the Rainbow by Patti Labelle & The Bluebelles
  Each performance of this song brought the house down, Patti's fierce voice, back with Nona Hendrix. The version here, introduced by Otis Redding, is a treat but any later performance broadened the spectrum with diva histrionics and emotion.
• The Blues by Tony! Toni! Toné!
  Spending all my time pleasing you (Doctor Fauci)
  All you ever give me is the blues
• Rainbow by Shinehead
• Mixed Signals by Ruth B.
• Blue in Green by Miles Davis
• Over The Rainbow by Ben Webster
  The versions on the See You at the Fair and the Live at the Jazzhaus albums are excellent and full of mixed emotions.
• Mixed Messages by The Bangles
  Manic Monday musings.
• The Rainbow Children by Prince
• Weird Fishes/Arpeggi by Radiohead
  In Rainbows was my soundtrack for a few years.
• Soundtrack to Confusion by Black Thought
  Our premier lyricist has been on a roll of late
• Blues After All by Jimmy Smith
  This is a soul jazz thing.
• Blues Grinder by Ronny Jordan
• Mixed-Up Confusion by Bob Dylan
• Chasing Rainbows by Blue Magic
• I Can Sing A Rainbow (Love is Blue) by The Dells
  Having Blue Magic and The Dells back-to-back is pure falsetto magic
• World of Confusion by Michael Prophet
  Roots reggae never sounded so good.
• Look To the Rainbow by Al Jarreau
  Jarreau was a unique artist, that voice is eternal.
• Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Ray Charles
• Blue in Green by Bill Evans Trio
• So Much Confusion by Morgan Heritage
• Over the Rainbow by Dave Brubeck
• Confusion by Fela Kuti

A ball of confusion is perhaps a good description for the novel coronavirus

See also: Colors, a playlist (spotify version)

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time.

File under: visualization, metaphor, marketing, design, confusion, policy, comprehension, color, abstraction, technology, usability, culture, observation, perception, coronavirus, pandemic, public health, human factors, covidious, toli