First Full Moon of the Third Decade of the 21st Century, 29 December 2020
(Some, in error, might call it the last full moon of the second decade.)
Regardless… however you want to call it… it’s Beautiful!
Somewhere in my slides I have a pic of this full moon north of the Arctic Circle. Since, in December, it is directly opposite the sun, it ‘bookends’ the polar June sun, bearing a resemblance of sorts to the famous mid-summer midnight sun.
Video: A pure celebration of joy compliments of funk band Scary Pockets, led by Ryan Lerman and Jack Conte. This version of “I Say A Little Prayer” features a fantastic fey performance by Kenton Chen.
I cannot imagine a life without music and the ability to hear it.
Listening to Aretha Franklin’s ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ (written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Dionne Warwick, 1966) always creates more than a little frisson in my love for life. It is difficult for me to think of a song more perfectly crafted – and then delivered, by one of the stellar voices in the history of humankind (despite the song being a bigger hit for Warwick.)
“While combing my hair, now,And wondering what dress to wear, now”
What’s more it was written for the war of my generation: lyricist Hal David wrote it about a “woman’s concern for her man who’s serving in the Vietnam War”, portraying how someone you love can be an intense part of the fabric of your everyday routine with thoughts bought forth by even the smallest things we do. One of the great hooks of the song is that “you are always made to feel as if you’re either about to be loved or about to be left.” (“Burt Bacharach Song by Song” by Serene Dominic)
“I run for the bus, dear,While riding I think of us, dear.”
In February 1987, ‘New Musical Express’, a UK music weekly, published its critics’ top 150 singles of all time, with Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer” ranked at No. 1, but the song slipped and did not appear in their in-house critics’ top 100 singles poll in November 2002. Still, for many of us it remains
“Forever, and ever, / (You’ll stay in my heart and I will love you)”
The song became Franklin’s (March 25, 1942 – August 16, 2018) ninth and last consecutive Top 10 Atlantic label hit on the Hot 100 chart. Her version – may I say, THE version of this tune, makes a listener truly believe she is solo dancing around the house singing to her beloved, though we outsiders can be privy to her intense emotions of care, love and longing.
“My darling, believe me / For me there is no one but you / Please love me too”
‘I Say a Little Prayer’ moves from reverie to rousing joy and possesses elements of soul, gospel call & response, rock, jazz, balladry, you name it – but it’s sections of driving beat lends itself to multiple interpretations, even electronica and, dare I write it – The Ray Coniff Singers, whose version also sets a frisson in motion in me but of fear – lordy, lordy don’t subject me to listening to their whole rendition (perhaps rendition of another kind would bring the same feelings.) There is even a not-bad version with an accordion by Mary Black.
Burt Bachrach has said, “It’s [Aretha’s] a better record than the record we made… It’s just more natural,…We were talking about our changes and time changes on the chorus of ‘forever and forever, you stay in my heart, and I will’ — you know, that’s going 4-4, 3-4, 4-4, 3-4. Then regard the way it was treated by Aretha, because Aretha just makes it seamless, the transition going from one change to another change. You never notice it.”
“Mmhmm. We did, yeah. And we did a great record, but she topped it,” Hal David added during a joint Bachrach-David interview in 2010 with Terry Gross on her Philadelphia Fresh Air Public Radio program. (For my money I think Terry is the best interviewer of all time, by the by, and am sorry I never said as much when I used to run into her in the City of Brotherly Love).
But it is the clear-as-a-bell soul quality of Aretha’s voice that sends me and I’ve been fortunate to see the song performed by Aretha as well as the jazz horn player Rahsaan Roland Kirk (August 7, 1935 – December 5, 1977).
“My darling, believe me / For me there is no one but you / Please love me too / Answer my prayer / Answer my prayer now babe / Say you love me too / Answer it right now babe / Answer my prayer”
Video: A pure celebration of joy compliments of funk band Scary Pockets, led by Ryan Lerman and Jack Conte. This version of “I Say A Little Prayer” features a fantastic fey performance by Kenton Chen.
DO NOT FORGET to go out tonight, Winter Solstice evening Monday the 21st, and see the much-talked-about conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. They have not been in this alignment (that is visible to us Earthlings) for 800 years! This treat will be visible in the Southwest for a couple hours after sunset. It might take a little time identify these two with the naked eye as they will be very close together and may look like ONE star instead of two close together planets! Binoculars will be a big help.
In my photos from the previous two nights Jupiter is on the bottom of its pairing but will switch positions with Saturn after tonight.
Jupiter’s four largest moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, in order of distance from Jupiter. They are faintly visible in my top photo stretching out from the 11:00 o’clock position (Io and Europa are almost on top of each other.) At latest count Jupiter has 67 moons but the big four were discovered by Galileo in 1610 and are called, fittingly, the Galilean moons.
The world has recently learned of the sophisticated supply-chain attack on FireEye by inserting malicious code in a software update for a tool called SolarWinds Orion. The operation may have started as early as mid-2020. The Orion system is used by the U.S. Treasury Department, Commerce Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the Navy and many others. And, even as I type this post, Tuesday evening December 15, the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence reports, “SolarWinds still has not removed the compromised Orion software updates from its distribution server.”
DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) purchased $45,000-worth of licenses for Solarwinds tools in 2019 while the U.S. Cyber Command spent over $12,000.
Solarwinds, in a legal filing yesterday, Monday, December 14, says malicious code was pushed to nearly 18,000 customers (that does not mean I am one customer and you are another. It means Microsoft Office 365, for example, is ONE customer.)
We can look to Microsoft to soon get an idea who, and how many, SolarWinds customers were really affected as Microsoft (according to a quick look at the Internet’s “Whois”) has taken control of the Domain (registered and managed by Go Daddy in Arizona) used to control the infected systems.
“Vinoth Kumar, a cybersecurity “bug hunter” who has earned cash bounties and recognition from multiple companies for reporting security flaws in their products and services, posted on Twitter that he notified SolarWinds in November 2019 that the company’s software download website was protected by a simple password that was published in the clear on SolarWinds’ code repository at Github.” – Krebson Security.
I must say that I am shocked… SCHOCKED that the (purportedly) Russian hackers were able to get through the sophisticated systems in place at Solarwinds, a company so advanced I have heard they did not even see the need for an internal chief of cybersecurity. I mean who at the Russian FSB, even tho they have some of the best cyber-hackers on the planet, would ever have thought to build code-busting software to break the heavy-duty security at Solarwinds?
Oh… wait a minute! The password was published amongst the public repository of Solarwinds files at Github. It was a masterful password most of us would have had to write on the back of our hands to remember: solarwinds123
I. could. not. make. this. s—. up.
A Letter from Mary Robinette Kowal, President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America:
Have you written anything for Disney or its subsidiaries and stopped receiving royalties? SFWA has become aware of several members in this position.
Last year, Alan Dean Foster came to SFWA’s Grievance Committee because he had written novels and was not being paid the royalties that were specified in his contract. With his permission, we have made this dispute public because the core of it affects more than just Mr. Foster.
It has the potential to affect every writer. Disney made the argument that they had purchased the rights but not the obligations of his contract. In other words, they believe they have the right to publish work, but are not obligated to pay the writer no matter what the contract says.
If we let this stand, it could set precedent to fundamentally alter the way copyright and contracts operate in the United States. All a publisher would have to do to break a contract would be to sell it to a sibling company.
We are currently in talks with Disney about Mr. Foster’s royalties and are looking forward to a speedy resolution. They have told us that they want to talk to any writers who have a belief that they are owed money.
Disney seems to believe that he is a unique example. We know that he is not. We have heard from enough authors to see a pattern.
If you are a writer experiencing non-payment of royalties, or missing royalty statements, with Disney or its subsidiaries, please report your circumstances to us via this form. We guarantee your anonymity.
If you are not directly affected but wish to help, please use the hashtag #DisneyMustPay to discuss the value of writers and the problems with their position on contracts. You may also donate to SFWA’s legal fund, which helps authors with legal fees in situations like this.
We are committed to continuing conversations with Disney until these contractual issues are satisfactorily resolved.
Mary Robinette Kowal, President, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
[Wilbur – The National Writer’s Union]
(Or, why surveillance capitalism is bad for you and the world)
Part 1 of 3
“Social media, once an enabler, is now the destroyer, building division—‘us against them’ thinking— into the design of their platforms…. It’s time to end the whack-a-mole approach of the technology platforms to fix what they have broken,” – Rappler CEO Maria Ressa
“The past years have offered a wake-up call for those who needed it….Without explicit and enforceable safeguards, the technologies promised to advance democracy will prove to be the ones that undermine it. It is now vital that democracy is made more resilient,” – Marietje Schaake. former EU parliamentarian
Most people, historically, have been alarmed by intrusions of government and its spying into the lives of ordinary citizens. But, while our attentions have been fixated on this, we ‘dropped the ball’ on the far more invasive mining and use of personal data by the large companies we, all of us, have connections to, however deep and pervasive or fleeting and sporadic.
In 2014, based upon the rising amount of captured data large companies, led by “social media” companies, were beginning to harvest and utilize, Shoshana Zubroff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe this mountain of personal data accumulating in staggering quantity each year. It is a business model predicated on harvesting the online user experience and then manipulating human behavior for monetization, that is, a basic move from processing internal to mining external data, a handy and lucrative convergence of enterprise and consumer IT. Now, many of these mega-companies generate more revenue and exercise more power that all but a handful of the world’s nations.
In 2016 the World Economic Forum (the group that meets in Davos every year) reported that of the world’s top 100 global economic entities, (measuring revenue, not GDP) 69 were corporations – meaning only 31 were countries. Here, in order, were the top 10 entries:
This list might strike the sobering thought that economic powerhouses like South Korea, Russia, Switzerland and others were, in fact, further down the list. The trend continues so that by 2018 157 of the top 200 world economic entities by revenue were corporations, not countries.
Here were the top 10 companies in 2016 with their world economic ranking by revenue in parenthesis:
Now, for a 2020 country update, using International Monetary Fund data: USA and China are still top dogs, Japan and Germany switched positions, India made an appearance at spot #5, UK and France swapped lanes, followed by the same three, Italy, Brazil Canada, as in 2016. Rounding out the next ten countries – but not revenue generation when companies are tossed into the mix, are Russia, South Korea, Spain, Australia, Mexico, Indonesia, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Switzerland.
Showing it is difficult to break into the top 20 countries is the fact that 17 of these top 20 were also on the list in 1980, that is, 40 years ago.
For a 2020 update on companies (from Fortune 500 data) we have:
So why are these figures important? Ah… I am pleased you asked.
For one, it means that many sovereign nations cannot rein in companies engaging in bad behaviour within their borders – even if and when they have the desire. Chevron in the Peruvian Amazon comes to mind. Oil exploration is a dirty business and when little recoverable amounts are found there is still a mess to clean up – or not. In a place like the Amazon who is going to see the contamination other than indigenous locals?
But the issues I am getting to here are more about the so-called ‘social media’ giants, companies we used to think of as having a clean footprint.
In the early years of the internet revolution early adopters of the technology bought into services billed as connecting/informing us at the speed of the electron, prepping us for our lives in the 21st century. These services were, in the main, offered for free as companies, including newsrooms, tried to figure out how to monetize their products. The few ads we would see were bothersome but easy to ignore, especially as they lacked personal focus and sophisticated tracking technology. It reminds me of the early hype of the energy companies with their mascot Ready Kilowatt and the 1954 statement of Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, with his alluring, sloganeering promise to the National Association of Science Writers: “electrical energy too cheap to meter!” – a good example of what we now know as “overpromising & underdelivering.”
In less than twenty years internet coding wizards have made stratospheric leaps and small startups have combined, morphed and advanced into extremely sophisticated entities. At the same time we have come to recognize there is a dark underbelly bolstering the magical kingdom of all-connection, all-the-time. A 24/7 existence, like so much of life’s general intrusions, is a two-edged sword.
I think of surveillance capitalism as a natural outgrowth of a technology and life forewarned in 1956 by the brilliant, if troubled, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In his novella (made famous by the Spielberg movie) “The Minority Report” three mutants foresee a person’s propensity for committing a ‘future crime’. Their prescience determines the future and freedom, or lack thereof, of ordinary citizen’s based upon criminal actions before they happen. In the same way, surveillance capitalism attempts to predict our future voting, movie-going, book-reading, food shopping, sexual preference… well… all behavior and, subsequently, influence that behavior in a semi-predictable manner, that is, move us toward a specific purchase.
If not a purchase exactly, then other economic considerations come into play. A good example is the selling of ‘spit’ data from the genealogical work performed by the company 23 & Me, a noted seller of DNA info to ‘third parties’. They caused a minor tremor in 2018 when they announced the sharing of consumers’ anonymized genetic data with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Sharing is, of course, a euphemism for ‘selling’; in this case GSK shared $300-million. While it is hopeful that people with inheritable genetic diseases may well benefit from this deal in the form of future medicines, data security is never distant from my mind, especially as data security is, it appears, never in all ways, secure all the time. Do you really want your health insurance company (who has always been a gatherer of data that could be used in health/mortality actuarial practice) rescinding your coverage because you have a 35% chance of getting motor neuron disease or some other ailment?
Two years ago I was sitting with a friend talking about his new Maserati. An hour later an ad for Maserati popped up on my mobile phone browser during a search for something totally unrelated to cars. That is when I discovered that Google has a division with a huge number of employees developing, listening in and then tweaking their speech and voice components for their algorithms. Turn off your microphones! Siri and Alexa are you listening? (Being highly open to suggestion, I inquired as to whether Google was assisting with monthly car payments but received no answer.)
So, how is all this related to Democracy and Social Justice?
Commercial connections have forever had tentacles entwined with, and embedded into, governmental components. While governments are often slow on the uptake of the new (and, to grant and uphold citizen rights) their bureaucratic nature and love of big data do eventually move the organs of governance to utilize the lessons of commerce. This learning often first makes an appearance to ‘improve’ focus on the big picture of where ‘trouble’ among the rank and file may begin, never mind the trouble may only be citizens engaging in their constitutionally guaranteed rights of assembly and protest.
But, before we go into more detail here let’s sidestep and read a little about the
Big Picture & Big Data
That big picture is assisted by ‘big data‘, a term coined in a 1997 scientific paper by NASA. ‘Big data’ is, by definition, unwieldy. It is defined by Wikipedia (even before the Oxford English Dictionary added it to their list) as “an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand data management tools or traditional data processing applications.”
There is a pervasive belief that it is true the more data one accumulates the more answers one has available; that is, quantity is in itself a necessary and sufficient parameter for accurate research. But AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, one of the leading lights in data and its management, writes that, “We want students and consumers of our research to understand that volume isn’t sufficient to getting good answers… [the] School challenges students in the online Master of Information and Data Science program to approach data with intentionality, beginning with the way they talk about data. They learn to dig deeper by asking basic questions: Where does the data come from? How was it collected and was the process ethical? What kinds of questions can this data set answer, and which can it not?… We run the risk of forgetting why we collect data in the first place: to make our world better through granular details,… The way we talk about data matters, because it shapes the way we think about data. And the ways we apply, fund, and support data today will shape the future of our society.”
The school says this process is part of ‘data science’. A more useful shorthand than big data, the words imply a rigorous approach to analytics and data mining. This view espouses that, “a data set is not so much a painting to be admired but a window to be utilized; scientists use data to see the world and our society’s problems more clearly.”
Another definition of big data, from the McKinsey Global Institute, is “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.” This has been tackled in the past two decades by trimming big data down to size. Data scientists have created new tools for collecting, storing, and analyzing these vast amounts of information. “In some sense, the ‘big’ part has become less compelling,” according to Berkeley’s Saxenian.
A Quick Lesson in Data Volumes: The volume of data in a single file or file system can be described by a unit called a byte. However, data volumes can become very large when dealing with, say, Earth satellite data. Below is a table to explain data volume units (credit Roy Williams, Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology).
We will return to this later in a discussion of social media algorithms.
Governments have always been nervous about protest of any kind. The validity of such jitters was brought home with the ability of mass movements’ non-violent action in bringing down governments of Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union itself, felling them like phantom dominoes in Southeast Asia. Similar events shook the Islamic countries with the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings.
Governments like using a scattershot approach to try and corral the proverbial needle in a haystack. Certainly we all want the authorities to catch terrorists seeking to do our country harm. But, is a record of all the telephone calls in the country, in real time, going to assist that endeavor? The ubiquitous use of cellular communications lends itself to lax control even for bad actors. So, as listening to U.S. citizen’s phone calls without a judge’s warrant is illegal, perhaps simply getting a list of all the outgoing and incoming numbers being called by people in the U.S., and the duration of the calls, might be helpful? It is that word ‘might’ that bothers me. I’ve no problem with law enforcement requesting and receiving records after an arrest, or the request for a wiretap with probable cause, but the uncontrolled amassing of the 3Vs (volume, variety, velocity – see graph, below) is troubling. A few years ago I was happy to read that when the administration wanted to monitor the mobile phone records of everyone in the United States all the big companies, except for my carrier, T-Mobile, rolled over without requiring probable cause warrants or even administrative subpoenas.
END of Part 1.
Part 2 tomorrow!
Less than an hour ago I ended one of the most informative and entertaining Zoom sessions I have ever had: Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward speaking as part of the ending ceremony of our 2020 ‘Journalism Under Fire’ conference in Santa Fe.
The president would not talk to Woodward for his book titled “Fear” released in 2018. After publication White House staff told the president the information in the book was basically true and accurate, so he agreed to talk to Woodward for the latest book “Rage”.
Woodward observed that one way of getting an interview is just to show up. Many today use email or telephones or texts to conduct interviews but do not go that extra mile to show up in person. Covid-19 put a stop to most in-person interviews so he and Trump talked by phone, usually at night which suited Woodward because of an adage he holds dear: “Lies in the Day, Truth at Night.”
During the nine months they talked on the phone President Trump did not let anyone at the White House know he was talking with Woodward and, upon publication, lashed out at the book but has since said he read the book and is pleased that he got many of his points out there in its pages.
A topic of current interest was touched upon in our Zoom meeting: presidential pardons. In 1998 Woodward interview Gerald Ford and asked him why he never pressed Nixon for an admission of guilt. Ford pulled out his wallet. He went thru the wallet and found a small, folded old newspaper clipping and showed it to Woodward. It had an article about a US Supreme Court decision from 1915 reading, in part, “Acceptance, as well as delivery, of a pardon is essential to its validity”, that is, an acceptance of a pardon is admission of guilt. [Note: The case was Burdick v. United States, 236 U.S. 79. Quaere – whether the President of the United States may exercise the pardoning power before conviction. “The facts, which involve the effect of a pardon of the President of the United States tendered to one who has not been convicted of a crime nor admitted the commission thereof, and also the necessity of acceptance of a pardon in order to make it effective, are stated in the opinion.”]
Woodward ended our Zoom with a story he has told before. After Nixon resigned Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham sent a note she had written on a yellow legal pad to Woodward & Bernstein. On it she had written a statement mentioning that their work had been important in bringing down a president and ending with a warning that all of us may take to heart: “Beware the demon pomposity”.
Rosa Parks sits in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the city’s segregation on the bus system illegal. Behind her is Nicholas C. Chriss, a UPI reporter covering the event.
It’s the 1st of December 1955, late afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama. A seamstress, going home after a long day of labor, takes a seat toward the front of the bus’s ‘Colored Section’. The bus begins to fill with passengers as it moves along its route. Eventually, the driver, James F. Blake, tells the seamstress to move further to the rear so a white man can take her seat. His demand is just one of the many, ‘ordinary’ actions Black Americans have had to endure throughout most of American history.
But on this day the seamstress, 42-year-old Rosa Parks (who was also the Secretary of the local NAACP), decides she is fed up, or, as she put is, “was tired of giving in.”
You know the type of day I’m writing about: it’s just one of those days when you simply don’t give a f—. Whatever happens, as a result of your obstinacy, happens. ‘Bring it on!’
On this day, 1 December 1955, 65 years ago, Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat. The police are called. Rosa is arrested. Mrs. Rosa Parks is convicted of disorderly conduct four days later and pays a fine.
We know the rest of the story but, as a refresher:
A 26-year-old Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), spearheaded a Black American, 381-day boycott of Montgomery’s bus system. Workers made do with makeshift transport scraped together using peoples’ cars as taxis to get to and from their workplaces. Rev. King had only recently moved to Montgomery and it was this that led him to being picked to lead the MIA: he was too new and unknown to have any enemies in the city.
Finally, in the autumn of 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a district court’s ruling that segregation on Alabama’s public transport deprived Blacks of equal protection under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and was, therefore, illegal. But, that was only for Alabama. It was not until 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson, a son of the South, signed the Civil Rights Act that ALL public transportation in The United States was desegregated.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) lived a full life and took a step requiring the utmost in bravery (somewhat difficult for us to recognize now with the superior legal protections many – tho not all, of us enjoy.)
She was honored by the U.S. Congress: her coffin was placed on view in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, DC. While Mrs. Parks was the 30th person to lie in state there, she was the first woman! Her coffin was placed on the same catafalque (the decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state) that was built for Abraham Lincoln.