COB-17: honoring Petrov
This month at the Carnival of the Bureaucrats we honor a true bureaucratic hero, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. The comically rational blog Overcoming Bias described well what Mr. Petrov did:
On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch. Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error.
Then the system reported another US missile launch.
And another, and another, and another.
What had actually happened, investigators later determined, was sunlight on high-altitude clouds aligning with the satellite view on a US missile base.
In the command post there were beeping signals, flashing lights, and officers screaming at people to remain calm. According to several accounts I've read, there was a large flashing screen from the automated computer system saying simply "START" (presumably in Russian). Afterward, when investigators asked Petrov why he hadn't written everything down in the logbook, Petrov replied,"Because I had a phone in one hand and the intercom in the other, and I don't have a third hand."
The policy of the Soviet Union called for launch on warning. The Soviet Union's land radar could not detect missiles over the horizon, and waiting for positive identification would limit the response time to minutes. Petrov's report would be relayed to his military superiors, who would decide whether to start a nuclear war.
Petrov decided that, all else being equal, he would prefer not to destroy the world. He sent messages declaring the launch detection a false alarm, based solely on his personal belief that the US did not seem likely to start an attack using only five missiles.
In words that epitomize bureaucratic greatness, Petrov later stated:
I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that's all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. 'So what did you do?' she asked me. I did nothing.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was not a political leader. He was not a general. He was a low-level military administrative functionary. In short, he was an ordinary bureaucrat. Every person who lives on planet earth should be grateful to this bureaucrat. He saved the world from nuclear war.
Unquestionably the strongest bureaucracies in the world of those of military departments such as those of the Soviet Union and the United States. Military bureaucracies date to the beginning of modern nations and are likely to sustain themselves cooperatively forever. Military bureaucracies typically have an exquisitely articulated command hierarchy, large collections of acronyms, and enormously powerful capabilities to produce and revise documents. Military bureaucracies, like most bureaucracies, perform functions that persons outside the organization seldom appreciate except in extraordinary circumstances.
In all ranks of bureaucracies, from the largest and most powerful to the smallest and most fleeting, the world needs a huge number of bureaucrats like Petrov. All bureaucrats should honor and emulate Petrov. A person who meets a bureaucrat should meet a Petrov.
Dr. Helen has attempted to educate officialdom at the Tennessee Department of Health. A commenter assessed the chances that the Department of Health will recognize actual facts:
They'll probably ask Slim Pickens and former Senator Sam Nunn to advise them. And those are the chances, Slim and Nunn.
Read Dr. Helen's post and then check out the "Scope of the Problem" on page 6 of this "educational material" on the Tennessee Department of Health website. An army of Petrov's is needed to stop this anti-male bigotry from causing major human harm.
Anna Farmery at the Engaging Brand Blog offers "A thought on life....and branding." She observes, "There is no perfection in humans...." The obvious implication of this submission to the Carnival of Bureaucrats is that perfection can be found only in bureaucracy. We fully agree.
Charles H. Green at Trust Matters discusses terrorists and convenience stores. He insightfully analyzes why everyone is treated like a terrorist. But he suggests, "the biggest reason of all may be a tendency to rely on systems rather than people." We disagree. A good bureaucratic system would treat everyone as a number, not as a terrorist. If you had a good number, you wouldn't be treated like a terrorist.
The Topiary Cow discusses how to excel in interior decorating. She applauds piles of paperwork and observes, "When Topiary walks into a home, if there are no books, no writing, no computers, no projects, nothing to indicate any mental activity, she has a sinking feeling." Topiary appreciates a bureaucratic environment. So should everyone.
Phil for Humanity discusses the dangers of scheduling with your boss. He observes, "I’ve discovered that the best schedule is not the best case scenario, but rather a realistic guess how long the task should take with an extra padding of time to work out any issues that may arise." But a better way to address scheduling questions is to set up a meeting to discuss them.
Blake Williams at "What I hear you saying..." discusses branding the river of conversation. He recalls a small local news site reporting, "Every time a contentious local issue was covered on the site, the station received nasty-grams and phone calls from half the town to remove the comments they were hosting." Perhaps this site could get a job consulting to Mashables about how to improve its Troll Week.
That concludes this month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our Carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the Carnival index page.
3 Commentsconcern about superficiality and stagnation in academia
An accounting professor has recently produced an insightful paper entitled "Constituting the Academic Performer: The Spectre of Superficiality and Stagnation in Academia." While the paper focuses on academic research in accounting from a North American perspective, it suggests that its argument can be extended geographically and to other social science disciplines:
The present paper should therefore not be conceived of as an idiosyncratic problematization of a single area of research [accounting]; it has broader implications as institutionalized logics and practices in a given area do not develop in a vacuum (Foucault, 1966).[Gendron, p. 2]
The paper identifies the fundamental problem of pressure to perform:
Various writers have argued that we live in an era in which expectations of self and others to perform, and provide public demonstrations of performance, are considerable (e.g., Lyotard, 1979; Porter, 1995). In particular, Lyotard (1979) develops the notion of performativity and notes its growing influence on society. Performativity can be defined as a set of ideas and practices which stress the search for technological optimality via the most efficient input/output ratio.[id. p. 3-4]
Academic literature indicates that pressure to perform is particularly acute in academia because of declines in public funding, increased corporate funding, and increased use of performance measures in promoting academics.[id. p. 11] An ordinary person can easily recognize, through considering even just style, diction, characteristic invocations of authority, that disciplinary processes in academia can enforce superficiality and conformity:
Foucaultian studies, which are now commonly used in the qualitative paradigm of accounting research (Gendron and Baker, 2005), make us aware that representations of identity can gain in influence and spread in a community via disciplinary and self-disciplinary processes as deployed on individuals. ...Through normalization and the detection of "deviants," individuals may be pressured to alter their self in a way that is consistent with a given representation of identity, as conveyed via some discourse(s) in their surrounding environment. [id. pp. 9, 10]
The pressure on deviants in academia does not occur only through pressure to publish in prestigious journals that deeply entrenched academic interests control. Obsession with using knowledge as an instrument of power is pervasive in academic. Academics feel it in their bones. In other words, power-knowledge obsession creates a discursive system of surveillance and real citation gaze that disciplines bodies just like mamma did:
Lyon (2001) argues that surveillance practices have significantly developed throughout society and now pervade all spheres of social life; these practices are not operated by some central watchtower but instead by a heterogeneous and unstable network of agencies. Academia is no exception as the spread of performance measurement, in particular, renders researchers subject to the gaze of a variety of surveillance systems (Wilmott, 1995). ....Operating across a variety of ways which often may seem innocuous or trivial in the context of day-to-day life, performance measurement as a discursive technology has colonized vast segments of academia and increasingly regulates the conduct of researchers. [id. pp. 28, 29]
The result is stagnation in academia and astonishingly superficial work:
While [academic] research articles undeniably have content (which, as noted above, may have decreased to some extent over time in terms of originality), the key point is that they are often considered superficial by audiences which are increasingly stimulated and provided with means to bypass the reading of articles. [id. p. 31]
According to this academic researcher, Internet-based mechanism for sharing intellectual work and discussing ideas and applications offers no escape from pressure to produce boring, worthless, and intellectually pathetic work:
It is worth noting that the logic of performance measurements even extends to the world of non-published papers. ... SSRN [a large, open database of intellectual work] therefore contributes to the construction of researchers and institutions as performers -- but a construction which is close to the domain of hyper-reality (Baudrillard, 1981) in that most of the papers displayed on SSRN are unpublished, working papers. An author can therefore develop a reputation as a high-performer even though the key traditional feature upon which is predicated knowledge production systems (i.e., publication) is not met. [id. pp. 24-5]
The author suggests that association journals should support more "epistemological and methodological diversity" and should publish more articles with even less obvious impact than articles currently being published. The author also advocates that academic researchers spend more time discussing journal publication standards and processes. [id. p. 33] To me, these proposals point to a weak, unimaginative reform agenda. Much more radical change is necessary to save the world from tedium and intellectual collapse.
Reference:
Gendron, Yves, "Constituting the Academic Performer: The Spectre of Superficiality and Stagnation in Academia". European Accounting Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1003797
Tags: academia, intellectual life, performance measures, research, sigma?, Six Sigma, total quality control
familiarity is a resource for making sense of presence
Most person-to-person communication occurs between persons who know each other well (family and close friends). A recent study of a large number of mobile phone voice calls found that in an 18-week period, about two-thirds of mobile phone users engaged in mutual calling with only two other persons. The mean number of partners for mutual calling in that period was three.[1] Mutual calling partners with more mutual calling partners in common spent on average more time in calls with each other.[2] Mutual calling appears to have increasing returns in personal familiarity.
Recent neuroscience research points to neural functioning that supports this macro-behavioral pattern. The suppression of a certain brain wave pattern (mu activity) is associated with sub-conscious processing of the present activity of another person. Premotor neurons that perform such sub-conscious processing have been called mirror neurons. Mu activity, and by implication mirror neuron activity, depends on familiarity with the other person:
mu activity was suppressed most when subjects watched videos of themselves, indicating the greatest mirror neuron activity. For both groups [autistic and non-autistic children], the measurements showed a slightly lower level of suppression when subjects watched familiar people in the video and the least when watching strangers.[3]
Recognition of another is typically considered to be a high-level neural function. Familiarity with another, however, appears to associated with (downloaded) resources for sub-conscious processing of another's actions.
Persons highly value in communication making sense of presence. The relation of mu activity to personal familiarity is consistent with personal familiarity being a resource for making sense of presence. Presence as a value, and familiarity as a resource, provide a structure for increasing returns in mutual calling.
[1] See Analysis of a large-scale weighted network of one-to-one human communication, Jukka-Pekka Onnela et al 2007 New J. Phys. 9 179 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/9/6/179, Fig. 4 and Table 1.
[2] See Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks, J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramäki, J. Hyvönen, G. Szabó, D. Lazer, K. Kaski, J. Kertész, and A.-L. Barabási, PNAS 104, 7332-7336 (2007), preprint, pp. 4-5. Overview of this paper here.
[3] From "Mirror, Mirror In The Brain: Decoding Patterns Reflecting Understanding Of Self, Others May Further Autism Therapies," Society for Neuroscience News Release, 11/04/07, summarizing L. M. Oberman, V. S. Ramachandran, J. A. Pineda, "Mirror Neuron Activity Modulated by Actor Familiarity in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: an EEG Study," 2007 Neuroscience Meeting Planner. San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, 2007, abstract on EBDblog. The sentence following the above quoted excerpt states, "This indicates that normal mirror neuron activity was evoked when children with autism watched family members, but not strangers." The abstract states, "Both neurotypical participants and those with ASD [autism spectrum disorder] showed greater suppression to familiar individuals compared to the stranger." These and the above descriptions appear to be inconsistent, but that is not relevant to the point here.
Tags: call your lover, communication, neuroeconomicsFCC volunteer army paints call boxes
This past Monday, Veterans' Day in the U.S., an FCC volunteer army painted call boxes in the FCC's neighborhood. Army of one!
making rules
From the NFHS Basketball Preseason Guide 2007-08:
"In the past, a common interpretation has been that any touching of a dribble by a defender ended the dribble," said Mary Struckhoff, NFHS assistant director and editor of the NFHS rules book. "However, the language in our rules implied that the touching had to be by the hand and had to be intentional. The change in language [of the official rule] provides consistency with the current enforcement of the rule."
Participants in rapidly evolving regulated industries would be wise to ponder the above statement.
Tags: basketball, dynamics, practice, regulation
making multisensory evidence
Digital multimedia presentations can powerfully affect legal trials. Consider the Skakel trial:
During the Connecticut District Attorney's closing argument in the trial of Michael Skakel for the murder, twenty-seven years before, of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley, jurors heard and read Skakel's own words [which appeared] on the screen before them. And in the instant that Skakel admitted to feeling a sense of "panic" when he saw Martha Moxley's mother on the morning after the killing, there on the very same screen appeared the image of Martha Moxley's lifeless body, just as it was found at the scene of the murder. ... The picture of Martha's battered lifeless form immediately explains the implicit meaning of his words. The viewer instantly makes the connection: immediately upon being reminded that morning of the night before, Skakel must have recalled with horror what he had done.[1]
Digital technology and the human body work together to combine words and images. The result in this case was probably a strong physiological reaction involving both neurons and hormones: muscle tension, brain activity constructing a casual sequence, increased heart rate, and other bodily effects typically associated with horror.
Digital technology and the human body together annihilated time. The image was recorded in 1975, on the day after the murder. Skakel's words were recorded in 1997, while Skakel was speaking to a ghostwriter in an early stage of producing a book. The words and the image were combined in 2002, in a digital presentation shown for the first time in the prosecution's closing rebuttal statement.
Associating Skakel's words with different images might have produced a rather different sense. Skakel recalled in 1997 that, in 1975, on the night before Moxley was murdered, he had been drinking alcohol, and that he had decided to get a kiss from Martha, who he said liked him. The closing multimedia presentation included Skakel, who was then 15 years old, saying, "I woke up to [Mrs.] Moxley saying, "Michael, have, have you seen Martha?" It also included Skakel subsequently saying, "I was like, 'Oh my God, did they see me last night? And I'm like, 'I don't know,' I'm like, and I remember just having a feeling of panic." [2] If these words had been combined with images of underage drinking, drunken sleep, and being wakened by a mother's fearful face, rather than images of an alive and smiling girl and then her freshly murdered body, the jury might have had some reasonable doubt that Skakel's recollection of panic meant guilt of her murder.[3]
A prosecutor's fundamental public responsibility is to work to serve justice. When a prosecutor believes that a jury acting justly under law could find a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the prosecutor's responsibility is to make, as convincingly as she can, the case of guilt to the jury. The prosecutor's job is not to make the defense's case.
A prosecutor, however, should not introduce, and should not be allowed to introduce, new evidence during closing statements. The images that prosecutor presented in his closing rebuttal statement were in evidence, as was the audio of Skakel's words. The technological combination of words and images that the prosecutor deployed in his closing rebuttal had not been introduced in evidence. Lawyers have always been permitted to arrange freely in verbal closing statements evidence introduced in the trial. Are technological combinations of words and images new evidence?
In a feature article in Criminal Justice magazine, the president of the consulting firm that designed the presentation and a law professor stated that the use of the multimedia presentation was "completely fair and appropriate." These authors stated:
While the crime scene images may very well have increased jurors' sympathy toward the Moxleys and their resentment toward Skakel, and while those images, precisely timed with Skakel's words, probably increased their conviction that Skakel was guilty of murder, using this kind of visual rhetoric, instead of words alone, to help the jurors understand the evidence is legally appropriate.[4]
According to these authors, the multimedia presentation merely provided better technology for an authorized form of closing rebuttal statement:
Indeed, Jonathan Benedict [the prosecutor] unquestionably could have played the same portions of the audiotape during closing and held up before the jury the same photographs of the murder victim, even enlarged and mounted on posterboard, that he used in the multimedia display. The only difference is that the interactive multimedia system allowed Benedict to juxtapose words and images more smoothly, preventing the jurors from being distracted from the content of his argument: that Michael Skakel was guilty of murdering Martha Moxley.[5]
More precise timing of image-word co-occurrence, in this view, is merely an external technology for furthering jurors' understanding.
New digital technologies used in trials can create bodily effects that might be best judged as new evidence that juries must seek to understand. The human body combines words and images from pre-conscious neural processing to high-level processing. For example, recent evidence indicates that multisensory processing occurs very early in the main auditory pathway. Recent work in neuroscience indicates:
low-level multisensory interactions are characterized by a high degree of temporal precision. For example, during audiovisual vocalization processing in auditory cortex, the sign of the integration appeared to be dependent on the timing between the initial mouth movement and the onset of the auditory component of the vocal signal. The longer the time interval between the initial mouth movement and the onset of the voice, the greater the likelihood of observing response suppression. By contrast, a short time interval leads to enhanced responses. [6]
Digital technology that precisely times the co-occurrence of words and images produces meaningfully different neural processing than does older technology that much less precisely combines words and images. Eliminating jurors' bodily activities other than processing in prefrontal cortex ("rational deliberation") is not physiologically realistic. Respect for physiological realism suggests that technology that produces significant, new subjective effects should be considered within the evidentiary portion of the trial.
"Subliminal messaging" does not provide a scientifically reasonable concept for judging the use of visual persuasion technology in court. Stimulating sub-conscious processing of highly prejudicial, case-irrelevant material clearly is an unfair legal tactic. However, sensory processing below the level of consciousness occurs normally and continually in a living human body. Subliminal messaging implicitly conveys a false model of how the human sensory system works.[7]
New visual persuasion technologies can produce powerful effects at low-levels of sensory processing. Opposing parties at trial need to have the opportunity to prompt jurors to bring these low-level effects to high-level processing. Such a requirement would give reasonable meaning to full and fair deliberation that includes new multisensory presentations.
Notes:
[1] Sherwin, Richard K. (2007), "A Manifesto for Visual Legal Realism", p. 10; also published in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 40, 2007. The presentation occurred in the prosecution's closing rebuttal. Note the discrepancy in the textual description of the presentation timing. In the quoted text, the second sentence indicates that the image cut occurred when Skakel acknowledged panic. The fourth sentence suggest that the image cut occurred with reference to "last night". Consider as well Carney, Brian and Neal Feigenson (2004), "Visual Persuasion in the Michael Skakel Trial: Enhancing Advocacy through Interactive Media Presentations," Criminal Justice, v. 19 n. 1. Carney at the time of publication was the president of the firm that created the interactive media presentation for the Skakel trial. That article offers the following textual description:
[Screen 2] "I was like 'Oh my God, did they see me last night?' And I'm like 'I don't know,' I'm like, and I remember just having a feeling of panic." [Photograph #2 of the corpse of Martha Moxley is shown]
That description is not sufficient to identify precisely when the image cut occurred. The text of the opinion of Supreme Court of Connecticut, ruling on appeal, suggests that the image cut occurred after the audio of Skakel's sentence ending in the word "panic." See State of Connecticut v. Michael Skakel (2006) (SC 16844), p. 73. It seems to me that the effect would have been largest if the cut occurred on the initial sound of the word "panic". Perhaps the text of Supreme Court ruling did not attempt to describe the presentation to that timing resolution. However, as noted above, precisely specified image timing is an important distinguishing feature of a digital multimedia presentation. For more information about the Skakel case, see considerable original analysis at TalkLeft.
[2] The quotes are as reported in State v. Skakel (2006) p. 89, ft. 105. The first quote differs slightly and insignificantly from that given in Carney and Feigenson (2004).
[3] The Supreme Court appellate opinion, State v. Skakel (2006) p. 89 ft. 105, states: "The defendant claims that when he stated ‘‘Oh my God, did they see me last night?’’ he was referring to whether they had seen him masturbating." The defendant did not testify at the trial. The defense's brief noted the prosecution's audiovisual presentation omitted a section of Skakel's words relating to masturbation. See Brief of the Defendant-Appellant, pp 78-9, ft. 80. The transcript section that the defense cited does not clearly indicate that a new perception that someone had seen him masturbating was the cause of Skakel's panic. The full transcript is consistent with the reasons for panic described above. They would also probably make a more effective defense-counsel visual presentation than one of Skakel masturbating.
Insightful voices in the blogsphere (Simple Justice, Norm Pattis, a public defender) suggest that Skakel had ineffective assistance of council. Perhaps the above is additional evidence of poor representation.
[4] From Carney and Feigenson (2004). Criminal Justice is a magazine that the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association publishes. The quoted phrase "completely fair and appropriate" comes from this source, which stated: "Because Benedict's presentation was directly and closely connected to the evidence, his visual argument was completely fair and appropriate."
[5] From Carney and Feigenson (2004).
[6] Ghazanfar, Asif A. and Charles E. Schroeder, "Is neocortex essentially multisensory?" Trends in Cognitive Sciences, v. 10, n. 6 (June 2006) p. 284; the quoted text omits endnote and figure references.
[7] In State v. Skakel, Brief of the Defendant-Appellant, p. 79 accused the prosecution of conveying subliminal messages to the jury with its multimedia presentation in its closing rebuttal statement. Carney and Feigenson (2004) assert in contrast:
No subliminal content was concealed in the Skakel prosecution team's audiovisual presentation. All of the images, audio, and text that the prosecution put before the jurors in closing argument were properly admitted into evidence. ... The multimedia system allowed prosecutors to present images and audio already in evidence so clearly and so memorably that their impact on the jurors was profound.
These arguments show no appreciation for how human sensory processing actually works.
Tags: admissibility, evidence, media, permissibility, technology, trialvoicelessness
While I was looking at the O Project installed at the Arlington Arts Center, a bird crapped on me. Wet, dark brown mush hit the top of my glasses and dripped down the left side of my nose. Once someone told me that this sort of indignity is auspicious. That's merely a comforting rationalization. I feel I will die from this bird-dropping, along with everyone else on earth.
