The Random Nature of It All

Hat tip (again) to Barry Ritholtz who as a "financial guy" (actually schooled in law) has a logical way of looking at the inexplicable. He puts his spotlight on the recent gyrations of the stock market and the blather of the financial channels --  all constructing a "story" to "explain" sudden up or down moves in what, short term, is really a guessing game.  Media noise --  a  form of cognitive dissonance, contradictory "explanations" some of which appeal to investors and therefore feed the furnace of their convictions.  Which begets even more gyrations. As Ritholtz so accurately puts it: "people create a happy little bubble of delusion."  His article "What's Your Stock Market Story?" is well worth reading and keeping in mind when making one's next trade.

Speaking of the inexplicable, how do we mere mortals understand the consequences of a term that suddenly surfaced on the waters of our online lives: Heartbleed?  Perhaps a binary Loch Ness Monster?  How vulnerable is any online financial transaction or, for that matter, routine things like writing emails or even posting this innocuous blog?  And all of this the result "of a two-year-old programming error?"  Two years and we've all been lulled into a "happy little bubble of delusion" that all those "Secure Sockets Layer" web sites to which we've committed sign-ons, passwords, credit cards, etc. might have all been vulnerable and no one seems to have a full understanding of the consequence.  No consequences?  Armageddon? Somewhere between? A random programming error -- or an intentional one  -- that could have been silently exploited for two years?  Talk about a potential Black Swan. Here's Scientific American's take on it.

On to the random nature of one's career.  Looking back from the so called "golden years" how many can say that his/her career and how it unfolded was one of unsullied choice?  Choices do have to be made, but those are ones circumstances concoct, almost like one's DNA randomly assigned at birth.  I could have ended up as a photographer, a librarian, or even in the insurance business -- there were paths in front of me to each of the foregoing, but I choose publishing, my first job being the result of a chance interview.  From there, I was able to make choices over the next 35 years, but, even then, I was given a random set of options.  Do I choose from behind door #1, #2 or #3?

Once I was running a publishing company, one of the choices I made was to pursue international opportunities.  Japan became one of our largest overseas markets and so I occasionally made trips to Japan, sometimes alone, sometimes with Ann and eventually both of us with our son, Jonathan.  The Japanese culture had a profound impact on us all. 

Fast forward to last night.  All those random choices.  No wonder when our gourmet club was deciding on the next "theme" -- one that was to be held at our home -- we suggested Japanese.  What a feast it was.  Our friend Lois made 3 platters of sushi: delicious fish, tuna, grouper and salmon.  We served a very good chilled saké with that and during dinner which everyone drank and  enjoyed.  Then Susan made authentic Miso soup along with tasty shrimp gyoza.  Gail brought short ribs with a Japanese barbecue sauce and a very refreshing side of cucumber salad. 

Ann made one of my favorites -- a genuine yaki udon dish with a homemade yakisoba sauce, tender pieces of chicken, red pepper, onion, bean sprouts, broccoli, shiitake mushrooms and scallions and of course udon noodles!  She also made traditional sticky rice (enough for twenty people!) along with glazed chicken drumsticks, serving it with a very nice Green Tea in beautiful tea cups that Susan brought.  For dessert, Ann served sweet pineapple and John made Green Tea Ice Cream that was out of this world.  Ann was in her authentic Japanese Happy Coat while our son, Jonathan, had given me some traditional bamboo flute music to play in the background, greatly adding to the evening's atmosphere.

Arigatou!

Flag Day and the Electronic World

Flag Day. A time to reflect on the adoption of the flag we honor, and what it symbolizes.  In the world of 1776, it is a nation committed to freedom in its purist form.  Oceans separated us from the rest of the world, difficult for an invading army to breach that defense. 

The Second Amendment, giving us the right to bear arms, was passed in 1791, a means of maintaining a civilian militia. ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.")  At the time the flintlock musket was the standard weapon. Count on being able to fire it maybe 2-3 times a minute. Arms have evolved to the point where a deranged individual can hoard a surfeit of automatic weapons, making that one person a veritable army.

And communications used to be dependent on the mail, then the telegraph, the telephone, and now electronic everything, marrying all methods of communication from the printed word to video.  The Internet has given rise to threats that could not even be imagined by the framers of the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment.

Maybe it is time for a public debate on the issue, but the data mining being done by the National Security Agency cannot be a surprise to anyone.  Edward Snowden's so called whistle blowing merely politicizes what most suspected. 

If anyone asked us the day after 9/11 whether the government should make use of private electronic communications with the sole objective of preventing any such future event, we would have merely said, where do we sign on?  How short everyone's memory is.  It is ironic that a liberal constitutional law professor -- Barack Obama -- now, as President, is carrying forth the NSA program which had been condoned by his predecessor.

The brave new electronic world exponentially enhances the weapons of guerrilla warfare, the preferred tactic of terrorist adversaries.  One does not fight this with the tactics of warfare when the Constitution was written, soldiers standing in straight lines right out in the open.  Clandestine electronic communications are fodder for equally clandestine data mining.  So, let the "debate" begin in Washington, but if it is anything like exchanges over the budget, it is liable to do more harm than good, unless there can be some consensus on an oversight mechanism that still preserves the intent of the program.

In this regard, I can't help but think of Aaron Sorkin's brilliant movie, A Few Good Men.  When Col. Nathan R. Jessup faces Lt. Daniel Kaffee on the stand, we are all rooting for Kaffee, recognizing the menace that Jessup represents.  But that was 1992.  With a little editing (my apologies to Mr. Sorkin), I can imagine how this might go today...

NSA to Snowden: Son, we live in a world of electronic communications, ones terrorists routinely use, and we have to be guarded by high tech surveillance. Who's gonna do it? You, Mr. Snowden? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your loss of freedoms and you curse the NSA. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know, that some loss of privacy, while tragic, probably saved lives. And our existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want us data mining. You need us on that job. We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the security that we provide, and then questions the manner in which we provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way.

Two Cultures Redux

C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures reflected upon the great divide between science and the humanities, and criticized educational systems for rewarding the study of the humanities at the expense of science.  This was the late 1950's and in the Sputnik era it widely resonated.  Fast forward to today.  Could Snow have imagined cars that drive themselves, and tiny, powerful computers that also serve as phones, cameras, GPS systems, radar enhanced weather reports, and Facebook, Twitter and email on the go?

More significant than this amazing hardware and software, is we've become a culture of scientism and algorithms, sliding down the slippery slope of relinquishing our actions and moral judgments.   Two recent articles address these issues, well worth reading, and pondering. The first by Leon Wieseltier, "Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture" A Defense of the Humanities, is actually the commencement address to Brandeis University graduates.  Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic and he addressed the graduates as "fellow humanists." He makes so many interesting points; here are just some of the salient ones:

      The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep

     And the devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives also in other ways: for example, they generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists,  in which the ordeals of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control. 

    Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles  certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic

Steven Poole's Slaves to the Algorithm in Aeon Magazine addresses the question of whether there is still a place for human judgment as computers make choices on our behalf.  He paints a dystopian picture of where things are going, culture itself being impacted as "we erect algorithms as our ultimate judges and arbiters."

     What lies behind our current rush to automate everything we can imagine? Perhaps it is an idea that has leaked out into the general culture from cognitive science and psychology over the past half-century — that our brains are imperfect computers. If so, surely replacing them with actual computers can have nothing but benefits. Yet even in fields where the algorithm’s job is a relatively pure exercise in number- crunching, things can go alarmingly wrong.

Brave New World of Medical Technology

Lucky me, I have a pacemaker.  Actually, very lucky as when I was fifty four I was running around the office one day, feeling a little dizzy, but going about my business, preparing to get on an overseas flight to the Frankfurt Bookfair, and my wise wife forced me to see my doctor before we departed (she was going with me). My doctor took an EKG and looked startled, saying that my heart was beating at only 30 BPM.  I should have passed out long ago and he wondered how I was able to get through the day.  So I said, isn't there a pill I can take, I have to be in Frankfurt tomorrow. He replied, the only place you're going is to the ER.  Had I gotten on that plane, ignoring the symptom, I was told I would have died.  So, lucky me, indeed.

After ER, I was admitted to the cardiac unit and they thought I had an advanced form of Lyme Disease, which can attack the heart's electrical conduction system. I was put on heavy duty antibiotics and meanwhile they warned me that if my heartbeat dropped below 30, I'd have to have a temporary pacemaker wired through my neck.  That evening a team of medical personal came bursting into my room, monitors beeping, indicating my heartbeat had dropped to 28-29.  Look, I said, I'm conscious.  Please don't put a temporary pacemaker in unless it drops further.  So they watched me that night and I was at least stable.

After almost a week of medical treatment, and no improvement of my condition, a cardiologist informed me they would be prepping me for a permanent pacemaker the following day.  They had no idea why, at my age, my electrical system was failing.  Lousy genes they speculated (a favorite explanation offered by medical personal when they have no clue). So, into the operating theater I was wheeled and was told I'd be sedated but hazily conscious as the surgeon would have to ask me questions as he placed the leads into the heart.  A representative of the pacemaker manufacturer was present and I remember he and the surgeon joking during the procedure.  The surgeon said this is a piece of cake as he's relatively young and in good shape so I piped up, I ought to qualify for a discount then!  Fat chance he replied.

In any case, I have lived with a pacemaker, now, for sixteen years.  Actually, I'm now on my third such device as when the battery runs low, it's not like replacing a couple of double A's.  A new pacemaker has to be inserted in my chest. 

I know, it's an awful looking picture, but that's what my chest looked like five days after getting the last one.  It actually looks worse than it felt.

My third generation pacemaker is high tech.  The older devices needed monitoring, usually in the cardiologist's office.  But now the monitoring is done remotely, as the pacemaker transmits the information wirelessly to a receiver that sits by our bed, one that is plugged into our phone system, and it dials out the data as I sleep.  Every three months if does a "pacemaker interrogation" the same one I had in the office and transmits the data (it will also send data immediately if it detects any serious irregularity such as a ventricular tachycardia).  Our phone system is now digital, so the information goes out via our cable company's broadband.

But wait, more high tech.  Our telephone answering service is provided by the cable company as well; not only are messages recorded, they are transcribed using voice recognition, and then sent to me via email.

And yesterday I received the following email:

From: Voice Services@-------.com

Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2013 1:04 PM

Subject: You have a new Voicemail

    "Hello this is your implanted cardiac device clinic calling to let you know we received your follow up data and it looks normal. We look forward to your next appointment. Thank you and goodbye."

Thus, from an implanted pacemaker with a computer chip transmitting on a proprietary band, to a receiver that dials out via broadband to a computer that analyzes the data and, if normal, then places an automated call which is recorded and then transcribed via voice recognition, finally being emailed back to me.  A full circle without human interaction!

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.....Arthur C. Clarke

But there are serious issues with all this technology, both positive and negative.  My pacemaker is transmitting at all times.  Anyone within 10 feet knowing the frequency and having the right equipment, in a public place, can have access to the data which raises privacy issues.  I have no problem with that but it also means that same person would have the ability to reset or even disable the pacemaker.  Pacemaker (and implantable cardioverter-defibrillator) manufactures say that is nearly impossible, but it seems to me that almost any "techno-magic" is feasible today.

Thinking more macro-medical technology, we have the ability to build a national database of medical information, at least for Medicare recipients, that would obviate the endless duplication of medical record keeping for the same patient at multiple health care facilities and doctors' offices.  Again, privacy issues have been a stumbling block, but imagine the significant cost savings (and improvement of data accuracy).  I have less concern about the privacy issues than I do about rising health costs and the burden it puts on taxpayers.  Surely there is a techno-magic means of satisfactorily addressing the matter.