Information vs Disinformation

The book by Dover, The Information Revolution in EarlyModern Europe, is an interesting look at the development of what he defines as “information” from about 1400 through 1600. The author spends time describing what “information” means, both to him in the context of the book as well as in the context of the period addressed.

Fundamentally he covers the aspects of paper, printing, communications, politics, and the changing societal and religious elements that impacted the “revolution” in the field of “information”.

First, his definition of information is at best descriptive. One must remember that what we see today as “information” may not have been the case held a millennia ago. The author begins by trying to place a definition to information. The complexity here is fundamental. Namely what we may define information as today may not at all be what it was perceived of in the time frame of interest. Moreover, the very word may most likely have had a dramatically varied meaning. Thus, do we use our current understanding applied backwards or vice versa. The author notes:

 Today, we are accustomed to speaking of “information” in a detached, antiseptic fashion, treating it as a bland, featureless substance. It is quantifiable, transferable, and shorn of any of the subjective specificities of its content. We speak of information in the abstract, as a “thing” that can be disassociated from the social and cultural circumstances of its creation.

 At the same time, we speak of “pieces” of information, discrete packets that can exist independent of the undifferentiated mass.

 The Web, for example, is a fathomless reservoir of information, but we also wade into it “looking for information,” specific items consonant with our needs and required for the establishment of knowledge.

 In early modern language, the term “information” rarely had this double connotation – while it might be employed to describe discrete packets of information, it did not describe information in the abstract. While the story of early modern information involved progressive levels of abstraction, as we shall see, information remained associated with tangible things: books, letters, notebooks, files, registers, accounts, as well as speeches, sermons, and pronouncements.

 The word informatio was typically employed to describe a process of shaping or forming, and often carried didactic connotations, in the sense that it involved “in-forming” (or teaching) someone something that they did not already know. It was something gathered, collated, and then “informed” for the recipient: the delivery of information served to help knowledge take “form” within the recipient.

 We still capture some of this connotation when we declare that we share something, “for your information,” with a specific communicative intent to impart on the recipient or listener.

 In the late Middle Ages, legal and inquisitorial bodies referred to informatio in relation to the discovery and collection of information for their cases. The word was employed to characterize the empirical facts discovered and introduced in the proceedings, which could then be processed, stored, and referenced subsequently, regardless of the outcome of the case.[i]

 Frankly we are left somewhat in the dark as to just what information is now and then. One can think perhaps of a job called Information Specialist. This is an on-line version of a Librarian. One may be looking for something regarding a topic and one seeks the assistance of an Information Specialist. It may be some chemical process, a disease, a legal precedent, a financial matter. Information then is something that someone uses or seeks for some purpose. It is generally purpose drive collection of facts as presented by third parties.

 Thus one can ask; do newspaper provider information? The answer generally is that they are purveyors of selected facts and opinions generally reflective of the management of the paper and this managements world views. In effect, it is filtered information at best and propaganda at worst. The classic example would be the plethora of newspapers in New York in the 1950s. Each had a specific political bent and a corresponding target market. Was there information provides? Yes, but highly filterd and crafted to support an underlying political position. Think Hearst.

 The author provides and excellent overview from his perspective. Specifically:

 1. Paper: The essential element in providing “information” at this time was the near universal introduction of paper. Velum was used for more important documents but paper was used for recording of various things, and ultimately for the use in printing.

 2. The use of printing for political speech and in turn motivating various revolutions. In a sense the printing allowed Luther to promulgate his new ideas of grace and predestination and thus overthrow the Rome

3. The recording of nature, its natural events and ultimately the change in the way the universe itself could be perceived. Although not mentioned by the author is full detail are medical discoveries. The author ntes:

 The authority of Galen (130–210 CE), whose writings on anatomy were rediscovered (and published in a Greek edition by Aldus Manutius) only in 1525, stood in equipoise with personal observation. As early as 1522, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (1460–ca. 1530), in his Isagoge Breves Prelucide ac Uberime in Anatomiam Humani Corporis, was declaring that observation was the sole route to anatomical truth. While Galenic texts framed many of the medical questions, the emphasis on observation undermined Galen’s authority. Doctors and empirics were committed observers and recorders of the particulars of case studies, and they regularly shared and compared case records to assemble knowledge and acquire insight.12 In a 1579 medical text, Thomas Muffet (1553–1604) exhorted his readers: “Nor is it ever too late to change to better ways: even in this old age of yours, sell your estates, take to the sea, go abroad, build laboratories, study chemistry, cultivate the new medicine that does not float about on a sea of opinion but is established by the evidence of the senses.”[ii]

 Unfortunately, the assault to Galen was commenced in the 1350s at Bologna with the introductions of autopsies of executed prisoners. Many of the Galenic assertions were rebutted by actual examination. Students took note on paper and the results slowly moved to Montpelier, Paris, and Oxford.

 4. Writing of Others is discussed. However one could argue it was in the 14^th century with Boccacio and Chaucer, using the vernacular, we see writings of self through others. Boccacio relates the people of his times of the 1348 plague which in effect reflect his own experiences while Chaucer relates his understanding of people and his relationship thereto in the late 14^th century.

 5. Finally the author attempts to bring information to the current time. As if something may have changed, from paper to computers. Yet in my writing of this review I started with the physical bok and then used the electronic version. I would gather a benefit for both Amazon and the author. But the point is that I consumed the physical book, it is filled with notes and my commentaries, whereas I was facilitatd in this review with use of the electronic version. Both were useful and necessary. Physical books from my perspective have a lasting legacy. Ironically my medical books are good for about 5 years while my mathermatics boos aare everlasting. This shows that information has a fungibility depending on what it is used for.

 The author notes about McLuhan and his understanding of media. I would counter his view with the following as stated by the author.[iii]:

 The medium may not be the message, as suggested by Marshall McLuhan, but the medium of print shaped methods of presentation, distribution, and recombination of information in early modern Europe. It also compelled Europeans to undertake new and different efforts at managing the information issuing forth from the presses…. A different revolution, then. But a revolution nonetheless. It is far too reductive to insist, as McLuhan would have us do, that the “medium is the message.” Nor did the colossus of McLuhan’s “typographic man” sweep all before him. But the medium did matter, and its use did have substantial repercussions for the course of European history. Looked at from the perspective of information, the assimilation of the printing press into European society was a profound agent of change…[iv]

 As I had noted in an earlier document, McLuhan meant that as one changes the medium for sending what we see as information, what we then believe to be information is changed. Morover I noted[v]:

 As a second perspective of the impact of technology as a dominant driver, we can refer to McLuhan and his development of the concept of media. Drucker has referred to the presentation of

  McLuhan's doctoral thesis and McLuhan is quoted as follows (See Drucker, p. 250):

 "Movable type, rather than Petrarch, Copernicus, or Columbus was the creator of the modern world view. "Did I hear you right," asked one of the professors as McLuhan had finished reading, "that you think printing influenced the courses the universities taught and the role of the university, altogether?" "No, sir, " said McLuhan, "it did not influence; printing determined both, indeed, printing determined henceforth what was going to be considered knowledge."

 This concept later evolved into the medium being the message. In our context it is the fact that both Kuhn and McLuhan recognized, albeit in differing fields and in differing ways, that fundamental changes in technology and technique, call it paradigm or the medium, will change the world view, also the message. It is the importance of understanding the change in the technology, its function and evaluate the possible change that this will have in the world view.

 As such, McLuhan’s observation that the medium changes what we see as knowledge, facts, information, changes dramatically as we change the medium for recording and transmission. I would argue that for example, police body cameras and smart phone have dramatically changed the way we perceive police encounters. Not that the new perception is perfect or complete but that the presentation of what is obtained by that media changes our understanding of what happened, thus changes our knowledge.

 Now to address another issue presented by the author. In a study of the transition from Aristotelean thinking to more modern thought the author notes:

 The hero of the piece for Wright is the English polymath Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who abandoned the art of memory in which he had been trained in favor of an empiricism that rested on observation and inductive reasoning. Bacon recognized the continued importance of memory, but also emphasized practical tools, such as commonplacing, for the retrieval of particulars gleaned through systematic study and observation. These observed phenomena and “facts” were the essential building blocks of knowledge, rather than the forms and categories inherited from the Middle Ages and largely shaped by Aristotle’s speciation[vi].

 In reality it was Ockham some two hundered years earlier in his construct of nominalism that led to the abandonment of Aristotelian thought. Moreover it can be argued that Ockham took up his fellow Franscians ideas, namely Roger Bacon, of using facts as observed as a necessary adjunct to logic as applied. Namely for Roger Bacon, in a careful manner, facts preceded logic, and logic resulted in information. Ockhams nominalism eliminated the abstract structure positied by Aristotle. Thus a rose is not abstract, but it is this rose or that rose. That nominalism concept then led to individualism, namely everyone is distinct but equal. This then led Ockham to question hereditary rulers and papl authority, for himauthority descended from the consent of the individuals. A fist for this period.

 On almost every page the educated reader may readily comment; “however you forgot about …”

 As such this book is a valuable work stimulating the thinking of information qua facts or propaganda. This is especially true in regards to attempts to define disinformation, an au courant ministration of politicos and social platform controllers. If information is an amalgam of provable and verifiable facts, linked in some logical framework, then by its very nature it can be subject to the very verifiability that underlies it.

 

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[i] Dover, Paul M. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 27-28). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition

 

[ii] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 382). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[iii] Dover, Paul M. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 299). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[iv] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 349). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[v] McGarty, Alternative Networking Architectures, Pricing, Policy and Competition, Harvard Kennedy School, November 1990.

 

[vi] Dover, Paul M.. The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New Approaches to European History) (p. 25). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

NJ 2022 04 30

 Now well into year 3 we see another increase. It should be remembered that we have more than 95% vaccinated and well over 25% already infected. The death rates are low, if not zero, people are dying of other things.

Let's begin. I will let the slides speak for themselves.:

It is starting to peak up again.

Student Debt

 I am reminded what the author Matthew wrote in the parable of the workers. Specifically:

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About the third hour he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. ‘You also go into my vineyard,’ he said, ‘and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour and did the same thing. About the eleventh hour he went out and found still others standing around. ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ he asked. Because no one has hired us,’ they answered.So he told them, ‘You also go into my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, starting with the last ones hired and moving on to the first.’ The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when the original workers came, they assumed they would receive more. But each of them also received a denarius. On receiving their pay, they began to grumble against the landowner. These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Did you not agree with me on one denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give this last man the same as I gave you. Do I not have the right to do as I please with what is mine? Or are you envious because I am generous?’So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Now one can view the last line as operative. But I would argue that the sentences before that, namely one can do with what is one's is the operative phrase. Thus tax dollars are NOT the Governments to disburse as was done with the workers. But the money is the peoples, and respect for that source must be mandated above mere political interests.

Municipal Morons?

 Well here we go again. Without notice the local municipal water company shut off the water supply without notice. Perhaps they forgot the mail. It works, sometimes.

So what happens. If perhaps you are in the middle of a bath or shower, gone. Cleaning clothes, stop. Toilets, let's just say we get the point. I guess the Government employees just feel they can do what they want when they want! DEFUND the Water Department! Better yet get a commercial operator. At least you can sue them!

Oops, I forgot, it is Putin's fault.

An Observation

 I don't have an opinion on this January 6 Congressional hearing, albeit it appears as an endless process, but what amazes me is the gross stupidity of all concerned. 

Back in the old days, spies were told three rules to survive:

1. Trust no one

2. Never put anything in writing

3. Always make certain there is a second exit

Now these are simple rules to live and survive by. Now applying them to the 21st century is simple:

1. Trust no one! Nothing changes

2. Never put in a text, social media, voice mail, encrypted message etc

3. Always make certain there is a second exit

It seems all these pols get caught on all 3 steps!

Words Mean Something, Sometimes

 Congress has the habit of passing laws often written by lobbyists, and then edited by staff, to meet the needs of campaign financiers. Welcome to politics. What all too often happens in the mix is that words are used which are at best ambiguous and at worst wrong.

Add to this the Chevron ruling by the Supreme Court. Simply it states that no matter how incomprehensible a law may be the Administrative agency may at its sole discretion decide what it means. Furthermore this same Agency may from time to time change the meaning, at will. This was the basis for the power of Administrative Law. Instead of sending it back to Congress for clarity, Chevron allowed un-elected Government employees to decide what they think it should be, the voters be damned.

Now take the recent ruling on masks. Congress mad a sloppy law. The CDC then took the sloppy law and used it to make Administrative policy despite the fact that they did so improperly. Two mistakes, but wait, the CDC relied on science, which in the case of masks really does not exist. Fundamentally we still do not really know how the virus is transmitted. Really. We really do not know but we have lots of academics with demos of how it could work. NOT

Now along comes the NY Times in its classic manner and states:

Should the federal government have the power to address broad public health emergencies?

Last week, a federal judge effectively answered no.

The judge, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who serves on a Federal District Court in Florida and was appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued a nationwide injunction blocking the government’s mask mandate for planes, trains, buses and other forms of public transportation. No matter how you feel now about masks, you should be alarmed by her decision. Judge Mizelle’s ruling could prevent the federal government from effectively and nimbly responding to future pandemics. And long after this pandemic has faded, her approach and rationale could undermine the federal government’s authority to confront other big problems, from occupational health and safety to climate change.

The necessary reference to Trump or Fox News immediately lets the reader know this is pure political palaver. The Judge has a very valid point. I argued this 30 years ago against several FCC rulings. The FCC took actions for which the law was at best vague. This problem occurs again and again. Thankfully this Judge deals with facts and reality and may prevent the hidden Government, namely Administrative Law, from prevailing.

Marketing and Distribution Channels

 Back in 1980 when I went to Warner Cable my boss, Gus Hauser, asked me to create a two way interactive marketing and distribution channel to enhance the QUBE service he had deployed. I took on the challenge with a collection of some of the most creative people I have ever worked with. One of them, Glenn Shapiro, had an MBA and JD from NYU and had a brilliant insight into marketing and sales. I had Richard Vieth who created single-handedly the software and communications on what was then rather rudimentary hardware and software. The team was in my opinion the best one could ever imagine. Shapiro saw us creating an electronic shopping mall, a place where existing stores could advertise, promote and sell their wares on line using our video on demand capability.

I had to think through the alternatives. At the time the simple model was one where we tried to connect supplier (namely the primary service or product provider) with the customer or buyer (or end user). We had before us several models.

1. End to end provider: Namely our system would buy from providers and then do everything in between to sell to the customer. We would view the system as having no intermediary and no wholesale entity. We rejected that due to the cost and complexity. At the time it was akin to a Sear.

2. Bazaar: This model was one where we just provided a platform with no assurances that anyone using it was a quality supplier and the customer purchased at their own risk. All we did was own the infrastructure, in this case the electronic distribution system.

3. Shopping Mall: In this case we would select sellers with some brand recognition and facilitate their access to the medium. It would be akin to a shopping mall agreement; quality and traffic.

There could be a multiplicity of other models. In 1980 we chose the shopping mall.

There is a piece in the NY Times where someone appears to have rediscovered our paradigms after 42 years.  They note:

By the mid-2000s, Amazon was recruiting third-party sellers. If you owned, say, a chain of shoe stores, a representative might contact you and ask: Did you want to start listing shoes for sale? If you said yes, you would pay Amazon a fee. Amazon would send you the addresses of customers who had placed orders on the site all over the United States, and you would be responsible for sending them shoes. Periodically, Amazon would pay you, after taking its cut of what the customers had paid it. In 2006, a year after introducing its Prime membership for customers, Amazon created a service that would drastically expand the seller population. Fulfillment by Amazon, as it was called, enabled merchants to pay Amazon to warehouse and deliver their goods. By making sellers who used F.B.A. eligible for two-day Prime delivery, Amazon incentivized sellers to sign up. These third-party sellers deserve a lot of the credit for making Amazon the juggernaut it is. By competing with Amazon’s own retail division, they stocked the Amazon catalog, drove down its prices and subsidized the build-out of its infrastructure, both virtual and physical. It also meant that from the beginning, Amazon’s success was predicated on a degree of ignorance.

 Amazon became a Bazaar. Namely it facilitated unknown and inaccessible sellers to offer their products. For example, I bought batteries from Amazon, they came and they were all knockoffs from China. Poorly replicated at that. I also bought a software license only to find it unusable and the vendor refusing to reimburse. The list goes on. Trust in Amazon disappeared. Totally! The return process went awry and the quality was gone. One bought the proverbial pig in a poke.

Now this is just not Amazon. I have tried Walmart and in a sense they are worse. They use third parties with little if any remediation in my opinion and my experience. Worse, they unilaterally change your order without your consent. They just tell you what you ordered has been changed to what they think you should have! Amazon has not gotten that low, yet.

Will this careless set of actions resulting in loss of trust force us back to brick and mortar stores? For some things they have. One cannot trust an online purveyor of pharmaceutical or related products. They most likely are made in China and with ingredients that are risky at best. 

The solution is unfortunately FDA type regulation. In my opinion and in my experience this is something that Amazon is deficient in. Perhaps now is a time to get ahead of the bow wave.

NJ 2022 04 22

 Things are starting up again. First the town prevalence is up-ticking to where we were last August.

The county is really up-ticking. This is well above last summer.

Doubling times are collapsing.

Overall we see a return based on almost all break throughs. Now this is likely much worse since these are PSR tests and they may be at best 20% of the total. Deaths and hospitalizations are nominal.

Mathematics and Grade School

 

Back in the 1940s when I started to learn math the material was a combination of dense and rote. You started to know the integers, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and then the infamous word problems. I recall the 3rd grade with Mrs Hill and the horrible math book. It had thousands of examples to work through. I had gotten the concept but why do 100 divisions each night! I had other stuff to do. Math was like penance, saying 100 Hail Marys etc. I found out a way around it. Mrs. Hill just looked to see if you has written answers and she never checked to see if it was correct. Neatness counted. So I just neatly put in number that I thought looked close and got straight full credit. I learned how to smartly guess and give the teacher what she wanted.

 Now as math increased in complexity it suddenly burst out from behind the "numbers" to the concepts in my Junior year of High School. I rapidly left my class mates behind as I studied calculus, non-Euclidean Geometry, tensors and other new things that  intrigued me.

At no time did I have to consider the socio-political implications of 2+2. Along comes the article in the NY Times about First Grade texts in Florida. They note:

In most of the books, there was little that touched on race, never mind an academic framework like critical race theory.But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.The image below, from marketing materials provided by the company Big Ideas Learning — whose elementary textbooks Florida rejected — features one common way teachers are trained to think about social-emotional learning.

 So if I am asked what 9+5 is equal to, and all I know is 9+1, do I get credit, partial credit. Is it some different ethnic/racial/gender variant? So if 9+1 is 10, then 10+1 is 11 and so forth. That is an algorithmic way to get to the final answer. Is this the New New Math, that Venn diagram nonsense of the early to mid 70s? Or is it an excuse for poor learning.

There are many ways to solve a math problem, that frankly is the beauty of math. Yet there is always a right answer. Right in the context of using the rules. Namely mathematicians have the allowed rules or techniques so that others can validate a proof. One can assemble them in a variety of ways and still have a valid proof. Yet in the above example we have a case that the student may never get to 9+5 because all he knows is 9+1. The student does not have the algorithm I proposed. In addition the concept of such an algorithm is so complex it would occur to only some brilliant young student.

Frankly the entire article is just a rehash of what Educational academics spend their time doing. Painful as it may be, memorizing the multiplication tables is essential. Knowing the Lebesque integral of a Markov process may not be but learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide are critical. Infusing these key constructs with current politico-academic nonsense just detracts from getting 9+12 correct!

Now this has become an international issue. The Socialist UK paper, The Guardian, notes:

In one example, a colored graph features levels of “racial prejudice” by age. Another example, under the heading “adding and subjecting polynomials”, begins with the words: “What? Me? Racist?” and uses the statistical results of a common survey about unconscious bias as an example for a set of mathematics problems....The other examples make references to “social and emotional learning” or “social awareness”, concepts that conservative education activists say are a gateway to leftwing ideology. “Those examples were given with no context and were not even elementary-level material,” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association that represents more than 150,000 educators, said. “So it seems like it’s more about smoke and mirrors of trying to accomplish a political agenda than really about what we are teaching our kids.” Florida’s banning of the books is widely seen by critics as an extension of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s “culture war” on the supposed indoctrination of children in schools.

Frankly, math books should be just that, math books. Cut out the color pictures, cut out the propaganda and mind bending, focus on the basic principles. Students should have the basic tools of arithmetic,  geometry, algebra. Today's world demands a modicum of capability in using a spread sheet, looking after one's IRA and the like. The fundamental problem is eventually the teachers. Teachers in the US must pass a mountain of certifying courses on such things as presentation methods. Namely what type of slides or projectors. If a math PhD from say MIT, back when they did real academics, not now of course where the same nonsense seems to effuse amongst the Commissar controlled faculty, that educated person would be prohibited from teaching in any Primary or Secondary school. But alas as now MIT has a Union perhaps we can get the same level on nonsense.

Slightly Pregnant?

 One is or is not. There is no in between, unless it is some new woke phenomenon. Now a tactical nuclear weapon is exactly the same. A tactical weapon is 1 to 10 KT, about the size of Hiroshima. Now if that means anything to a younger generation it should mean the total destruction of a city. Buildings demolished, life as we know it gone in a flash for several mile radius. 

A tactical weapon is just a nice renaming of the basic element, a total death machine. It not only demolishes things, living and otherwise, but sends out radioactive clouds that spread their death elements across the planet. 

Yes a 50 MT weapon would destroy New York, a few dozen would destroy the planet. That is why they were never used. Back in the 70s it became clear to both sides that they only way to win is not to play that game. Somehow Putin and his ilk are playing with fire and they must be both clueless and willing to lose everything.

It really demands that someone stand and describe the horrors of these weapons and why their only use is not to be used. That someone has yet to be found, either in Washington or Moscow.

Crossing the T

 In 1905 in the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese Fleet demolish the Russian fleet. In 1944 the US Fleet demolish the Japanese fleet in the same move in the battle of Surigao Straits. 

In the most recent event the Russian Cruiser was sunk by a low cost version of this tactic. 

It is worth examining this in the context of Naval warfare.

NJ 2022 04 08

 I thought I would continue with town and county. The state data is useless and the CDC is absurd. 

Here we go. The town prevalence is increasing. Now remember these are all positive PCR tests not home tests which just get lost in the mix. This is one of the continuing gross incompetence steps of the CDC. They should have developed some reporting mechanism. But alas, it is Atlanta.

This is also a troubling chart. The doubling times become critical as they approach 200 days. The town is down to 250. Some are already below 200.

This is the incidence averaged. It is rising again. Is it a new variant or just more break through cases. No clue.

The town doubling by date shows a concern.

Now the following is truly amazing! This is the incidence per PoP. Washington has almost half the population infected! There are five towns over 25%. Almost all are above 15%. This tells us a great deal that they are break through.

This virus will be around for a long while.

The End of MIT

 Thanks to all you Marxists! You have achieved what you set out to do. Now let us see what will happen.

According to The Tech at MIT:

MIT graduate students voted to unionize with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of  America (UE), Chancellor Melissa Nobles and Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz announced in an email to the MIT community April 6. 75% of 3,823 eligible graduate students voted, with 1,785 students (66%) voting in favor of unionization and 912 students (34%) voting against, according to results announced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Elections were held on April 4–5 in Walker Memorial’s Morss Hall. The MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU), the primary campaign organizers behind the path to unionization, also announced the win on Twitter. They noted that the “historic victory for student-workers at MIT” was by a “landslide margin” and officially renamed themselves as “MIT GSU-UE.” The GSU attached a photo of their first meeting four years ago where “a dozen students in an MIT classroom” were “discussing the needs of graduate workers.” 

Read carefully the last quoted words. You are now "workers", not students, not researchers, not whatever! You are now both watched by the Dean Commissars and controlled by the Committee of Soviets! You have lost your individuality, a construct dating back to 1328 and William of Ockham and personified in the founding of the United States. 

One should remember the phrase: "workers of the world unite". Well a union for MIT Grad students has created a common group of workers. Beware, you will reap what you have sown.

"What we’ve got here is failure to communicate"

 Back in the per-Divestiture days, say mid 1970s, the Bell System has copper wires and black telephones. The wire supported up to 4 KHz of bandwidth and the repeaters were of the highest quality as were the speakers and microphones on the boat anchor phones. Voice quality was a sine qua non. You could whisper on the phone and the other person could hear unabated.

Along came several new "inventions". The first was speech compression. Namely we were using digital for signal;ling especially on the new cellular networks and we wanted to consume as little capacity as possible. Thus we lost the 4KHz analog to 1.6 Kbps compressed voice, I called it Donald Duck in a can. 

Second along came IP, Internet Protocol, namely we used that for networking and ultimately for direct communications to the end user. IP is great for data but not so great for voice. You see packets traverse at different times and speed. Donald Duck starts to stumble.

Third, the small cell/mobile hone ad horrible microphones and speakers. In addition people would walk and hold them at a distance. In addition Customer Service people had these otherworldly headsets and microphones. mumbling across a compressed IP network.

Now we have to have a conversation where every other word is "what did you say?" or worse, the other person just rambles on incoherently.

So try this in a service where you add a language barrier. You see those codex compression devices were made for standard American English, no Brooklyn English and not Dominican Spanish. 

Thus finally we have speech recognition, a true misnomer. Not only is the speech not recognized but even if recognized the system is not prepared to deal with the answer the caller provides.

I guess the old copper stuff was really good!

Oh yes, then finally add the mask thing!

Inflation!

 Just a note for folks out there. My cable bill just went up 15% per annum! Altice, one of the most incompetent cable companies, in my opinion and my experience, has been upping the bills and reducing the service since they took over from Dolans. In addition as a shareholder I lost 50%+ of share value. They seem to keep ahead of inflation while delivering negative shareholder value. Pity, guess that is what happens when out of country folks control the key infrastructure element.

Diabetes: Crisis or Cause?

 The NY Times notes:

After older people and nursing home residents, no group perhaps has been harder hit by the pandemic than people with diabetes. Experts hope policymakers will take notice, and finally get serious about tackling the nation’s diabetes crisis.

 Type 2 diabetes is a disease most often self induced by obesity. It is akin to cirrhosis of the liver, induced by the excess consumption of alcohol. Obese and morbidly obese people initiate the processes which result in Type 2 diabetes. If such a person would get their BMI below 23 then the T2D goes away. No medicine, no hospital, no costs! Now there are certain cases where the pancreas just does not produce enough insulin no matter what but they are far and few between.

The person seen in the article is morbidly obese and self induced. He had a choice, cut down the calories and get well or continue as he was an just eventually die, after a long and costly illness. 

We examined this phenomenon almost fifteen years ago as new health care plans were being introduced. Yet in the period obesity has exploded. The Government cannot fix this. It is an individual's decision to become and remain obese and thus enter into a T2D state with all the negatives that accompany it.

The Times continues:

But many advancements have been unevenly distributed. The uninsured cannot afford the latest glucose monitoring or insulin delivery devices, and in economically disadvantaged communities with low digital literacy, experts say that doctors are less likely to offer new technologies and treatments to Black and Hispanic patients, even when they are covered by insurance.

The uninsured need look no further than the mirror or even better their waistline.  As we had an anti smoking campaign which over 50 years worked we need an anti obesity campaign. As we had rotting humans resulting from smoking we need the same for obese and morbidly obese people. The cure is free, stop eating so much, get the weight off.