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Bugs and the Quality-Deprived Society

Last modified on 2010-02-08 09:47:15 GMT. 1 comment. Top.

Even before the economic collapse, quality was very much an endangered species in corporate America and our culture at large. Poisoned food — both here and from abroad; dangerous and defective Chinese toys; made-up news and fake journalists (remember Jeff Gannon?); hideously broken software (Vista, anyone?); and now, of course, Toyota and its fatal accelerators.

I have worked in the field of software testing, and I know from experience — both observed and personal — that Quality Assurance, as it is called, is to the corporate as art & music are to public school budgets. When there are cuts to be made, QA is among the first to suffer. And when all is well and no cuts are necessary, still, QA can be trimmed. Product is never as important as profit; people never as meaningful as pretense.

Let me submit that if half the money currently put into image — advertising, marketing, P.R. — were redirected to QA, we would see such a renaissance of quality as would make liability attorneys tremble. But advertising is our entertainment, as big and important a part of yesterday evening’s super-event as the antics of the concussion-addled millionaires on the field. Image, as a famous sports star of another era once whispered to us, is everything.

I can only speak from my own experience: the best-tested, most rigorously challenged software emerges into a live release with bugs. The goal of QA is always: “zero bugs in production;” and always a few slip through anyway. But with the right processes, adequate resources, and competent leaders, critical bugs — “showstoppers,” as they are called in software testing — almost never infect a live product.

Here’s some plain common sense for you: preventing showstoppers — or, in Toyota’s case, life-stoppers — must become the central and highest priority of any organization that sells product to the public. Such a commitment would serve both the corporation’s profit and the public good. But the commitment must have substance, real meaning and intent. If you watched the football game and heard a company boasting in an ad of its product’s safety, I would make a note of not purchasing said product. Anyone who will spend tens or hundreds of millions on such pomposity has probably not paid for the necessary resources to give that image any substance.

Was there ever a time when product and people meant more than tomorrow’s stock price? Did corporations ever believe in quality? I don’t know; I can only say that it is time they started now. Profit can be made with a 30-second video bite; quality cannot.

Les Miserables: Hugo’s Star-Blind Vision of the 20th Century

Last modified on 2010-02-08 21:41:52 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

This morning, as I came to the end of my 3rd or 4th reading of Hugo’s Les Miserables (I was 16 when I first read it), I was reminded that great art is rarely pure in its greatness. That is, a great work contains discord, contradiction, error and even folly in its details; it is the whole that raises it and makes it shimmer. Les Miserables is riddled with flaws and foolishness; yet it is surpassingly, unspeakably beautiful.

Hugo has been ridiculed for his often saccharine romanticism (by his colleague and countryman Flaubert, among others), and for his glorification of armed revolt (in the edition I read, there is an 1862 review from the Atlantic Monthly, which openly attacks Hugo for his idealization of anarchy). A few of his characters — most notably and regrettably, Cosette herself — are dull, stereotyped, and two dimensional (though it is not true, as some critics have claimed, that he was incapable of portraying women — the depth given to Fantine and Eponine put the lie to that one). His florid political moralizing — often inspiring in a strangely Obamesque way — is frequently dissociative to an almost surreal degree. Consider this speech, simultaneously soaring and slippery, which follows the scene in which Jean Valjean arrives at the barricade. The speaker is the revolutionary leader Enjolras; note in particular the bizarre “predictions” for the 20th century.

From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right. This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society. This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns. Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. (from this online edition)

Granted, it would be a cool speech if it were presented as an exposure of revolutionary dogma: this man is speaking thus to a few dozen of his comrades who are all facing certain death within that day. But Hugo introduces his speaker as a man “full of interior sight, a kind of stifled fire.” As he begins his speech, Enjolras “raised his head, his fair hair waved backwards like that of the angel upon his somber car of stars; it was the mane of a startled lion flaming with a halo…”

Throughout the novel, there are these moments in which Hugo almost appears engaged in a bizarre kind of self-parody. So why is it great, then? What is it that makes Les Miserables a masterpiece, one of the heavy treasures of human art (well over 1,000 pages in an unabridged edition), that can be experienced with fresh wonder and learning, several times during one’s life?

Well, because it sings, even when the lyric contains a delusion. This is, admittedly, a simplistic answer. We could point to the story itself, which is a thing of both architectural and intimate beauty that continues to surpass any of its cinematic or musical adaptations (did you know, for example, that Javert does not chase Valjean through the sewers, but meets him only after he has left them?). The characters, too, mostly vibrate with life — the gamin Gavroche is arguably the most absorbing child character in all literature (you Dickens fans can post your disagreements to the comments); Javert is a deeply-layered embodiment of institutional evil; and Jean himself, who is really four or five distinct characters, is the greatest achievement of them all — a Christ-like figure of amazing complexity who shatters every stereotype connected to the pure and good man.

But it is the language, the song of Les Miserables, that reflects and proves it as the work of a genius at his creative zenith. Even in its most ridiculous moments, the novel has the impact of poetry (for example, the fact is that, now more than ever, competing religions are fighting “like bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite”). To write a single verse of true poetry worth the name is difficult (or perhaps, more accurately, serendipitous); to write a thousand pages of it in story is miraculous. As I read through it again, it occurred to me that one could create an entire book of poetry and aphorisms from this novel — even his political exegeses are couched in poetical language; consider his delineation and defense of socialism (required reading today for all right-wingers who pretend to know what socialism is and who its standard-bearers are). Even in translation, the poetic meter and structure of the following lines ring:

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

In all great art, familiarity inevitably overcomes awe. Size is more an issue for critics than for lovers. The Sistine ceiling has the intimacy of a locket ornament; the greatest architecture communicates perspective rather than power. In short, pretense projects and art reflects. In Jean Valean — his journey, his disguises, his torments, fears, and loves — we see ourselves. Hugo’s achievement was not in making something vast, dramatic, and forceful, even though Les Miserables is all of these things. His triumph was in creating something as familiar as it is grand — a song of poverty, politics, and redemption that speaks directly and uniquely to the life of each person who opens it, and himself.

Cleaning Up Our Cultural Chernobyl

Last modified on 2010-02-06 18:27:53 GMT. 2 comments. Top.

We live amid quite histrionic times, when taking a $9M bonus is seriously defined as an act of self-sacrifice; a culture in which news is a hyperventilating perpetual motion machine; rap singers are political pundits, and leading ladies are medical experts. As I mentioned last month, the principles of mature expression are usually buried under such an avalanche of infantilism. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop noticing it — especially when the neurobiology of the phenomenon (see below) makes it all the more urgent of redress.

One of the formative lessons every writer (and editor) learns is that the adjective is the uranium-235 of language. Adjectives are to be treated as highly radioactive material: when used correctly, they can light up a city; used with laze, stupidity, and excess, they can turn you and your work into the artistic equivalent of Chernobyl. The glowing green fallout of adjectival excess poisons the rest of the writer’s earth, and soon verbs, metaphors, similes, and all the other citizens of language have developed gross and obvious deformities. But the real danger is upon us now, because the deformities are now so common as to be nearly universally accepted as health.

Granted, virtually every writer, at some point in his development, forgets the core principles of his work and walks into the swamp of hyperbole. Having done it myself quite frequently, and having been a frightened witness to it as an editor of other writers, I can confirm that it is a common error. But most of us manage to pull ourselves out of the swamp, or are helped by another. Even the clearest and simplest lessons must be reinforced by experience; that is how we grow.

The problem gets really nasty, however, when hyperbole becomes the norm; when the swamp becomes the water supply to an entire industry. This is the problem we face today in our culture’s media in particular, and much of its writing besides. Watch Jon Stewart keelhaul this trend in a segment about the blogosphere’s reaction to his recent encounter with Bill-O.

But again, the blogosphere is only the visible and easily lampooned tip of the iceberg here. The problem permeates our media: books, blogs, newspapers, and especially, of course, television. Blaming the Internet is a facile, cheap way out: the problem has gone global. If it has been enabled by any single force, I would point toward corporate marketing. Consider another visual example, an ingeniously edited video of the Apple iPad launch event. It was a marketing event staged for an audience of, ahem, journalists, who sent copy back to their offices containing many of the same adjectives they were fed from the stage.

The neuro-psychology at work here is only beginning to be well understood. Read this story of a British science reporter who went to have the language area of his brain artificially shut down.

TMS studies are gradually overthrowing the textbook view and revealing that language involves a more complex network of activity. “Something like two thirds of the brain is involved in language processing. It’s a whole brain experience,” says Devlin….it demonstrates scientifically what great writers have instinctively known all along: that we don’t just understand words, we feel them.

The author of this piece goes on to point out how marketers already, as if instinctively, take advantage of this reality of language processing, in his discussion of “agent metaphors,” which essentially comprise hyperbole used to inspire identification or positive emotion toward products, corporations, or government. Greenwald touched on this toxic use of language just the other day — note his comparison between the metaphors used in the Salem witch hunt with those used in the Bush-ama terrorist hunts. It is indeed no coincidence that authoritarian language coincides with corporate marketing. Karl Rove was the quintessential corporate MBA; Rahm Emanuel plied similar skills in his careers as a mega-millionaire investment banker and in government.

But that is not the smoking barrel of disinformation’s gun: corrupt, authoritarian, and cynical politicians have long been a part of American life. The present danger is the result of writers, reporters, and editors who are all too ready to bury the core principles of their trades in exchange for money, fame, or insider status. Once again, this is not just about the Internet or the blogs: a shrill amateurism has become de rigeur throughout our media. It is also more than an ethical problem; my entire point here is that it goes much deeper than that. You can’t merely demand that these media corporations and their employees start being honest and telling the truth — most of them have forgotten how; even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know where to start.

Once again: these writers and reporters are spreading disinformation not out of greed, but from fear. They know, or feel, deep within themselves, that they have lost touch with the tools and core principles of their craft, and so they’re utterly disoriented. To merely demand honesty or accuracy of them now would be like giving a child a hammer and telling him to build you a house. A reporter or writer who has never learned to use language accurately and critically (especially self-critically) cannot possibly understand how to use it honestly or truthfully. In short, I am saying that these people need to go back to school.

I will now risk sounding like a stereotypical old man: in other times, “school” was not merely a college, university, or J-school. It went further and involved an apprenticeship, during which the cub reporter or budding writer was not merely thrown in front of a camera or behind a pundit’s keyboard to parrot a corporate script, but was taken through an active process of professional development, or mentoring. That process has broken down and the mentors vanished amid a corporate (and now broken) economy that values maximum, short-term profit over long-term quality of product.

A professional ethic and professional practice are not separate. They are chicken and egg; nut and bolt; yin and yang. A sound method supports and nourishes one’s ethics; a commitment to ethical principles delivers oxygen to the muscles of technique. For everyone involved in the transmission of information — writers, editors, reporters, publishers, producers — it all comes back to the continuing study of language. That radioactive water in the swamp of excess can be detoxified, clarified; but for it to happen, there must be a renewal of the mentoring model. Something tells me that most of those kids in front of the cameras at CNN, FOX, and the Big 3, and many of the fumbling hackers of newspaper punditry, do not want to spend their lives shouting marketing slogans and calling it news — I can sense their desperate need for guidance and growth amid their shrill complacency. In the end (and we are well along the way toward it), the only real evil is ignorance.

“We Don’t Need No More Trouble”

Last modified on 2010-02-06 04:30:49 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Since I was in undergrad school (it was a long time ago) and first heard Marley, the reggae sound has always inspired and amazed me. This shimmering music video for peace is a moving exploration of the reggae sound, featuring a fellow I think you’ll recognize.

Playing for change: War no more trouble
Uploaded by goodnesstv. – Watch more music videos, in HD!

In Remembrance of The Sewing Comic

Last modified on 2010-02-06 03:03:28 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Back in the early 80’s, I shared an apartment with my little brother here in Brooklyn. I can’t remember how we found this show, but once we did, we would regularly get everything ready (a six pack of beer and a bag of reefer) and sit down on the floor to watch George do his sewing thing. The reason we didn’t use chairs was that we knew that we’d soon wind up on the floor laughing anyway. This guy was one of the funniest people I’ve ever seen on TV. He died last month at age 93, and while I never learned to sew a damned button from him, he gave me more ROTFL moments than most professional comedians.

Brain Trauma and Deficit Panic

Last modified on 2010-02-05 20:30:11 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Two outstanding reads in today’s Times that, on very disparate topics, equally reveal the desolation in our culture’s information-processing system. We are all connected, wired, plugged-in; but few communicate, and even fewer understand.

First is Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, on the 80-year gap between medical findings of post-concussion syndrome and the NFL’s quasi-response three months ago. Textbook-quality journalism of the highest order here on a very topical, and for me, personal matter.*

Next up is a more familiar voice of the Times’ op-ed stable, Paul Krugman, on the vast disconnect (even at his own paper) between economic reality and media-spin on the deficit.
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*I suppose there is no harm in a personal disclosure here. In my younger years, I experienced multiple, mostly mild, concussions during grand-mal epileptic seizures (as they sometimes do in later life for epileptics, the seizures ceased for me about 18 years ago, and I’m not even on anti-convulsive medication anymore). At this point, there is no evidence of cognitive decline (I think) as a result; but for many years I’ve had obvious motor and coordination deficits that are, virtually without certainty, the result of these concussions. If you’ve ever met me, you have no doubt noticed these deficits. Now you know their probable cause.

Now I’ve never played football, and some might argue that my unprotected head-on collisions with concrete, gravel, marble, wood, and metal might qualify as somewhat more traumatic than the helmet-to-helmet blows of the NFL. (OTOH, my head’s acceleration would have been roughly the usual 9.8m/s² of gravitational fall, while an NFL linebacker would be moving at a considerably higher rate of impact acceleration. Also, of course, I didn’t always fall on my head — though it was often worse when I didn’t. One witness, a college buddy, described how I once came down between two metal milk crates stuffed with LP records and banged my head back and forth between them, “like a pebble in a gourd”). So I’m not here to debate the details of the matter; I am neither a scientist nor a doctor. All I can tell you — from personal experience and with near-absolute certainty — is that repeated and violent head trauma has inevitable consequences, and no talking head from the NFL is going to convince me otherwise.

Update: James Arthur Ray in Stir

Last modified on 2010-02-05 04:49:31 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

A brief follow-up on New Age murderer James Arthur Ray, of whom I have ranted here and here. He was arrested yesterday and will face trial for manslaughter (presumably involuntary manslaughter, a/k/a criminally negligent homicide).

Once again, the lesson that must penetrate from this incident to the entire self-development community is more important than any justice that is done to Ray. Physical pain and suffering are not natural or moral aspects of psychological treatment or spiritual development. The work of growth and healing is replete with challenges of its own, without the need for physical self-abasement. In almost all healing there is some pain; it needn’t be forced into the experience. Case closed, end of discussion. Whether it’s twisting your legs into knots to meditate; whipping, starving, sweating, or punishing yourself; subjecting yourself to extremes of heat, cold, or physical privation — all you’re doing is reinforcing the formative causes of the very illness that you seek to heal. Punishment of the body sends the signal that there is a hierarchy of power and privilege to Nature: the body is a corrupt vessel of inferiority that must be forced into subjection by and toward the mighty and godly superiority of the monarchical element of our natures. The king, in this infantile scenario, can be mind, soul, spirit, and even pure intellect. Often, the “large brain” itself is spun out as the superior brain, even by people utterly opposed to spiritualism. It seems an easy thing to forget that your “small brain” allows you to eat, breathe, maintain homeostasis, experience emotion, enjoy sex, and do most of the things that make life possible. To treat it and the body as indentured servants of a feudal lord is to enter the ranks of the walking dead, where James Arthur Ray currently resides.

Another lesson that must come out of this relates to the enablers of dangerous charlatans like Ray. Yes, Oprah, this means you. And you too, Sedona. The producers, marketers, and pitch-men for such organizations need to be forced out of their cocoons of wealth and privilege and made to show some humility and responsibility for a change. As I said before, this is not a situation of “one bad apple” — it’s about a system of profit and opportunism that makes the entire basket rot. If we in the self-development realm cannot reform ourselves and our ethics, then we may as well let Big Pharma take us over and shake Prozac instead of strawberries into our morning bowl of corn flakes. If profit, power, and punishment mean more to us than healing, then we are sleeping with the enemy — we are every bit the slaves and agents of evil as any politician in Washington sucking at the tit of K Street or any CEO ruling in the darkness of Wall Street.

There is one further possibility that makes this lesson all the more important: Ray is a multi-millionaire and no doubt has some skilled lawyers on his side. That is, he could get off in any of the disparate ways that our legal system offers to wealth — technicalities, a hung jury, contractual issues in the case, or a plea bargain with a reduced charge/sentence. That is, he could soon be made free to come out from under his rock, attract new followers, and commit fresh depredations. But if Oprah, Sedona, and the other big players in the system that enables predators such as Ray have cleared their decks of the complacency, falsehoods and cynicism that enable and empower such criminals, then there will be something better than bitterness left to the families of Ray’s victims; the corruption that spawned these dangers to clients of Sedona-like organizations will have been expelled; and it is entirely possible that these victims of James Arthur Ray will not have died in vain.

Geekday: Defensive Walking and More 21st Century Weirdness

Last modified on 2010-02-04 11:38:41 GMT. 4 comments. Top.

For geek day today, you will have to briefly endure something serious, and then there’s some funny and bizarro stuff for you. No cheating…

Every year across our great land, about 45,000 people die from auto accidents — that about fifteen 9/11’s each year. Far from seeing this as a tragically elevated death toll, the grim corporate reaper, whose skull-dark eyes are Profit and Marketing, desires to see this number rise. How else do you explain the introduction of Internet PCs into the driver compartment of the auto? Cell phones, iPods, now PCs: walking across the street is approaching the danger-order of a stroll along the Afghan-Paki border territories. The buzzword of my youth was “defensive driving;” now it’s defensive walking.

OK, now here are your fun and weird tech/science links for this week…

At least Clinton didn’t get anyone pregnant. This is the most bizarre pregnancy story I’ve ever read, including that old one in the Gospels.

Excuse me miss, your iPad is stinking up the room. Ten or a dozen of the worst things about Apple’s new Newton. We will soon find out just how smart the American consumer has become…

Kermit as sex toy: Damn, another Sesame St. character in a weird setting — this time, it’s kinky sex followed up by quantum theory.

Art and Personality: Your weekly quiz — a Jungian personality test with nice pictures. I scored high on the “cubist” scale.

Our geek video of the week features Feynman, one of the funnier scientists ever (I guess if your principle legacy is going to be The Bomb you’d better have a sense of humor), trying to explain magnetism. His book (yes, the whole thing) is here.

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The Good Geek Grammar Award: Only here will you find such an entry. In this case, we cite the Netvibes.com portal, which has the good sense to know that the word data is the plural of datum: thus, “your data are saved” is correct.

And when things get tough at work, just remember this precious piece of wisdom.

Brits Look Backward to Go Forward

Last modified on 2010-02-03 02:32:47 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

While military and political leaders here face the usual Congressional squall over what should be a common sense correction worth nothing more than a rubber stamp (will we ever grow up?); our former colonial masters from across the pond are concerned with somewhat more substantive matters of war than whether sexual orientation affects one’s ability to kill the enemy.

Declassified letters between Short and Blair released today show she believed that invading Iraq without a second UN resolution would be illegal and there was a significant risk of a humanitarian catastrophe.

She told the inquiry that she had a conversation with Blair in 2002. He told her that he was not planning for war against Iraq and that the evidence has since revealed that he was not telling the truth at that point, she said.

Yes, I know, Mr. President: they’re looking backward, not forward. Shame on them for worrying over something as trivial as the truth of a matter that led to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of needless deaths. Those silly Brits, why can’t they just do what they do best and make us some more rock bands and Monty Python episodes?

“The ministerial code said legal advice should be circulated and it wasn’t. We only had the answer to the parliamentary question [Goldsmith's short ruling]. There was a lot of misleading of parliament too by the prime minister of the day.

“The ministerial code is unsafe because it is enforced by the prime minister and if he’s in on the tricks then that’s it. When I found out what went into it I think we were misled.”

Ah, now something else appears in the waters of backward-think: these people are revealing flaws in their governmental process — critical, fatal flaws that, if corrected, may prevent them from leaping into a hideous alliance and a murderous national enterprise in the future. Let us then allow this wise Brit, Ms. Short, the final word here:

“There was no emergency. No one had attacked anyone. There wasn’t any new WMD. We could have taken the time and got it right. The forces weren’t ready to go in. They have said that themselves.”

Short ended her evidence by calling for a serious debate about the “special relationship” with the US, calling the current one “poodle-like”.