Radio Interference

I attended a focus group for WERS 88.9 FM a week ago on Boylston Street. The management invited 16 random listeners to weigh in on the play mix of this eclectic and sometimes meandering college station. Seventeen of us showed up and everyone told the facilitator the same thing: “Surprise me!”

The consensus among us 35-54 year-olds was for novelty. However, the facilitator was more interested in a comparison shopping of radio formats. Is it just me or is the format of the focus group itself as outdated as the goal of this facilitation? I say that because he kept trying to draw these forced linear parallels between the upstart powerhouse WERS and the balance of the remaining Boston-based FM rock choices. The whole point was to co-opt any style, manner, or focus smacking of the slightest originality from anywhere else.

I told the guy that WERS was in the unique position to build bridges between the contemporary alt bands that draw inspiration from the sounds us middle elders grooved to in our bigger-headed and delusional college days. Wouldn't it be cool to hear testimonials from the new regime rationalizing what's preservation-worthy and what deserves to be flushed from the clammy grip of passing hot flashes?

Ephemeral or perennial?

The facilitator was having none of it. He wasn't biting if it wasn't already being done somewhere else. This bummed me out, man.

Flash forward to a recent Friday afternoon ritual, a.k.a. "Friday afternoon musical challenge" where knowledge diva Sadalit "Sadie" Van Buren petitions an unpolished list of 95/128 hub-based miscreants and would-be session-hands. Each week Ms. Van Buren invites us to disrobe from our silicon-coated techie armor and into our secret musical selves. Sadie picks out a segue-conducive musical theme and then we strike our collective encore lighters for a jukebox jam. We pool the soul and body-piercing rhythms and melodies that line the standing room only sections of our most favored play lists and treasured performances.

Sadie tosses that spinning platter into the air and we lunge for those hidden stashes of inspiration we would never entrust to social media -- let alone the servers we prune and pamper to exasperation behind our rave-proof firewalls. The resulting pile-on is impressive -- sometimes the majority of list members join in. One collaborator who I divine some similar inspirations from asked the group how much of our constructions were supported by Google validations when fumbling for the misplaced reading glasses of our inner listening ears.

Q: (courtesy of Philip Edward Kret): How many of you in this group honestly think these things up on the spot and how many are in front of you (your whole collections to peruse!) on your iPods, and how many use tools like Google to cheat your aging memory. Lots of memory aids going on here methinks or maybe you just have a nice neat record collection and have all you need to know (lucky you!). Thoughts?

A: (courtesy of Adrian M. duCille): It’s mostly in my head – I’m bopping my head & singing on a daily basis (long commute)?

These Friday afternoon bolts of lightning remind me of what my first wife said many bumps in the road ago. She said that sanity itself rested on the presence of music. With it we have a chance to do great things. Without it we’re shattered, collectively and solo-wise. Everyone has a song inside them. Every collaboration is a variation on that theme -- a tireless novelty that enmeshes our thinking and our emotions.

In that spirit we all appreciate the conductivity powers of "our" Sadie -- a possessive coined by Lynda Moulton and seconded by her gallery of musical challengers.

Radio Interference

I attended a focus group for WERS 88.9 FM a week ago on Boylston Street. The management invited 16 random listeners to weigh in on the play mix of this eclectic and sometimes meandering college station. Seventeen of us showed up and everyone told the facilitator the same thing: “Surprise me!”

The consensus among us 35-54 year-olds was for novelty. However, the facilitator was more interested in a comparison shopping of radio formats. Is it just me or is the format of the focus group itself as outdated as the goal of this facilitation? I say that because he kept trying to draw these forced linear parallels between the upstart powerhouse WERS and the balance of the remaining Boston-based FM rock choices. The whole point was to co-opt any style, manner, or focus smacking of the slightest originality from anywhere else.

I told the guy that WERS was in the unique position to build bridges between the contemporary alt bands that draw inspiration from the sounds us middle elders grooved to in our bigger-headed and delusional college days. Wouldn't it be cool to hear testimonials from the new regime rationalizing what's preservation-worthy and what deserves to be flushed from the clammy grip of passing hot flashes?

Ephemeral or perennial?

The facilitator was having none of it. He wasn't biting if it wasn't already being done somewhere else. This bummed me out, man.

Flash forward to a recent Friday afternoon ritual, a.k.a. "Friday afternoon musical challenge" where knowledge diva Sadalit "Sadie" Van Buren petitions an unpolished list of 95/128 hub-based miscreants and would-be session-hands. Each week Ms. Van Buren invites us to disrobe from our silicon-coated techie armor and into our secret musical selves. Sadie picks out a segue-conducive musical theme and then we strike our collective encore lighters for a jukebox jam. We pool the soul and body-piercing rhythms and melodies that line the standing room only sections of our most favored play lists and treasured performances.

Sadie tosses that spinning platter into the air and we lunge for those hidden stashes of inspiration we would never entrust to social media -- let alone the servers we prune and pamper to exasperation behind our rave-proof firewalls. The resulting pile-on is impressive -- sometimes the majority of list members join in. One collaborator who I divine some similar inspirations from asked the group how much of our constructions were supported by Google validations when fumbling for the misplaced reading glasses of our inner listening ears.

Q: (courtesy of Philip Edward Kret): How many of you in this group honestly think these things up on the spot and how many are in front of you (your whole collections to peruse!) on your iPods, and how many use tools like Google to cheat your aging memory. Lots of memory aids going on here methinks or maybe you just have a nice neat record collection and have all you need to know (lucky you!). Thoughts?

A: (courtesy of Adrian M. duCille): It’s mostly in my head – I’m bopping my head & singing on a daily basis (long commute)?

These Friday afternoon bolts of lightning remind me of what my first wife said many bumps in the road ago. She said that sanity itself rested on the presence of music. With it we have a chance to do great things. Without it we’re shattered, collectively and solo-wise. Everyone has a song inside them. Every collaboration is a variation on that theme -- a tireless novelty that enmeshes our thinking and our emotions.

In that spirit we all appreciate the conductivity powers of "our" Sadie -- a possessive coined by Lynda Moulton and seconded by her gallery of musical challengers.

The Privatization of Privacy

In a recent Newsweek piece called Privacy is Dead, Jessica Rose Bennett peels back the post Face book packaging of personal background profiling to support her case. Using her own identify as the target she is pegged for a druggie because she once filed a story addressing pot production in the Golden State. I wonder what "state" that would find her employability score in if her undocumented preference for bourbon had also surfaced?

Whether the metric of interest is number-specific such as our number of network contacts or a hodgepodge of inputs that concoct abstractions like "aggressive demeanor" or "persistent complainer," only one thing matters. Those placeholders in the source data cannot go unpopulated. They must be filled even if it's with erroneous facts. Empty cells are neither "on" or "in" the table. The business case is not premised on accurate reporting but a rationale to freeze-out entire hiring pools of potential new hires with a blink of a single metric.

We are long past warning our kids not to sanctify their latest drinking game conquests as some post-worthy rite of passage. A simple flag can be raised without a single infraction.

The check box will be populated one way or another and it tips in favor of a demerit any time the target wants entrance into the increasingly exclusive club of gainfully employed Americans. That's because filtering out a ballooning number of applicants within some quantifiable range of conduct is now a done deal. And as our author as pothead example illustrates, questionable data can perform this function just as reliably as an accurate and verifiable fact base.

A profiling application has only one clearinghouse to hurdle -- none involving civil liberties,due process, or the quaint idea of privacy -- a notion that has as much to do with our 21st century citizenship status as the constitution has to do with affirmative action, bomb-sniffing dogs, unicorns, biblical verses, or holding onto our jobs and homes.

The only true barriers to subscription-based rating systems such as those described by Ms. Bennett is the ignorance of the subscriber and the discretion of the service provider. The chances we'd be cut into the loop of our own demise? Question time: when's the last time you got a full post interview accounting of why you never made the final cut?

It's that veil of closed-loop decision-making ensuring complete privacy is maintained ... for all employer-subscribers. Unlike a delinquent payment in a credit report there is no traceable course of events. Most of us don't even know how these scores are produced, let alone what they mean or that they even exist. Finally, there is no reportable consequence. Having your car repossessed is reality. Remaining out of work after you were invited back for the second round? That's a non-event. For falsely-accused professionals who can connect baseless accusations to the effect on their business? There's a service for that called Reputation Defender.

So there's no incentive for profiling customers to wise up or even own up to retaining such services. The only buyer motivation in terms of background screeners is to find the same thing for less. And that's the passive end of the profiling frontier.How about the blunter tools at the disposal of hackers? How about the malicious assaults now being plotted on tomorrow's Android devices?

There was a data glyph published in a recent issue of BusinessWeek that shows the ongoing price for the scattered pieces of our transactional identities. Email addresses and credit card numbers are available in bulk, an acknowledgment that deactivations are present in every batch. Some others command a far heftier per profile fee. In fact the price of a login credential increases with the balance on the account it's accessing. Pure genius. Quaint, this notion of privacy -- like a nod to the days when phone security was about dropped calls and lost phones.

Who said that all consumers were created equal? Certainly not in any termination contracts that include the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of other people's identities.

The Privatization of Privacy

In a recent Newsweek piece called Privacy is Dead, Jessica Rose Bennett peels back the post Face book packaging of personal background profiling to support her case. Using her own identify as the target she is pegged for a druggie because she once filed a story addressing pot production in the Golden State. I wonder what "state" that would find her employability score in if her undocumented preference for bourbon had also surfaced?

Whether the metric of interest is number-specific such as our number of network contacts or a hodgepodge of inputs that concoct abstractions like "aggressive demeanor" or "persistent complainer," only one thing matters. Those placeholders in the source data cannot go unpopulated. They must be filled even if it's with erroneous facts. Empty cells are neither "on" or "in" the table. The business case is not premised on accurate reporting but a rationale to freeze-out entire hiring pools of potential new hires with a blink of a single metric.

We are long past warning our kids not to sanctify their latest drinking game conquests as some post-worthy rite of passage. A simple flag can be raised without a single infraction.

The check box will be populated one way or another and it tips in favor of a demerit any time the target wants entrance into the increasingly exclusive club of gainfully employed Americans. That's because filtering out a ballooning number of applicants within some quantifiable range of conduct is now a done deal. And as our author as pothead example illustrates, questionable data can perform this function just as reliably as an accurate and verifiable fact base.

A profiling application has only one clearinghouse to hurdle -- none involving civil liberties,due process, or the quaint idea of privacy -- a notion that has as much to do with our 21st century citizenship status as the constitution has to do with affirmative action, bomb-sniffing dogs, unicorns, biblical verses, or holding onto our jobs and homes.

The only true barriers to subscription-based rating systems such as those described by Ms. Bennett is the ignorance of the subscriber and the discretion of the service provider. The chances we'd be cut into the loop of our own demise? Question time: when's the last time you got a full post interview accounting of why you never made the final cut?

It's that veil of closed-loop decision-making ensuring complete privacy is maintained ... for all employer-subscribers. Unlike a delinquent payment in a credit report there is no traceable course of events. Most of us don't even know how these scores are produced, let alone what they mean or that they even exist. Finally, there is no reportable consequence. Having your car repossessed is reality. Remaining out of work after you were invited back for the second round? That's a non-event. For falsely-accused professionals who can connect baseless accusations to the effect on their business? There's a service for that called Reputation Defender.

So there's no incentive for profiling customers to wise up or even own up to retaining such services. The only buyer motivation in terms of background screeners is to find the same thing for less. And that's the passive end of the profiling frontier.How about the blunter tools at the disposal of hackers? How about the malicious assaults now being plotted on tomorrow's Android devices?

There was a data glyph published in a recent issue of BusinessWeek that shows the ongoing price for the scattered pieces of our transactional identities. Email addresses and credit card numbers are available in bulk, an acknowledgment that deactivations are present in every batch. Some others command a far heftier per profile fee. In fact the price of a login credential increases with the balance on the account it's accessing. Pure genius. Quaint, this notion of privacy -- like a nod to the days when phone security was about dropped calls and lost phones.

Who said that all consumers were created equal? Certainly not in any termination contracts that include the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of other people's identities.

Wikipedia Has Intimacy Issues

"Romantic deception is the unrestrained misrepresentation of significant facts in the context of an intimate relationship."

- Sally Caldwell

My Wikipedia might not be your Wikipedia. So I am disclosing upfront that I'm reporting here in the second-person. No investment of mine has been helped or hurt by my pondering 15 immortalizing minutes in some future wiki entry. I have never lifted an editorial finger. I have won no prizes and I have entered no drawings.

But I have contemplated the definitive boundaries that pass for flag-planting on the territorial vapors of intellectual capital. All of us in our own way are traipsing soiled footprints across the ash heap of post copyright history.

Wikipedia is a self-selected guild of fact-selectors. Wikipedia is a tease. We fancy an all-volunteer brigade of scribes banding together to preserve text-based civilization against the backdrop of the cave paintings of a new millennium. In actuality those scribbles only pass for recordings after they've had all passion drained from their inspirations. A personality-blocker is the bouncer at the back door of the Wikoteque. All music must have stopped by the time those recordings hit the wiki stage. All secret handshakes have had their locks changed by the time the stench of impropriety is removed from the surface of the choppier editing channels.

As mentioned I have not stepped forward to claim, alter, deny, or crow about any contestable, explosive, or simmering interpretations referencible to my clouds and stars. I'm aroused around Wikipedia's merits as official scorekeeper of recorded history -- society's C drive of shared experience. But it's the misguided attempts at governance that lock in my fascination. "Do no self-promotion" is their Google mission-like equivalent to abstaining from evil. They are the counterpart to the wages of exposure. They are faceless book. And their book is far from open.

Do No Originality Unto Others

How does one exactly flunk their Wikipedia auditions? One wiki editor pulled rank on one of my college pals over the appearance of original research tucked within the recessed annals of Beatles history. Judging by the concentrations of the wiki Beatles history review board, me thinks Jimm would have had an easier time sneaking a 12 story litter box low rise past the NYC Landmarks Commission than footnoting a single moment in Lennon's life on Wikipedia.

The second instance involves a former student Darlene Adams who is now partnering with Sally Caldwell, a professor at the University of Texas, to publish a book and survival guide addressing Romantic Deception. She tried to post the definition and was promptly struck down by an administrator for "advertising." Despite a credible reference (to the book's first edition published in 1995), they dismissed the follow-up on the grounds it is self-published. Another non-no: only one attributable reference to the entry in question (not that this blogging entry counts as two...)

Man, talk about perpetuating the myth that publishing is the exclusive domain of standalone publishing houses. Just how big a house? According to Darlene they wanted an "encyclopedic reference." There's even a time stamp with an expiration date. That's the deletion-facing deadline for having your substantiations in the proper order. Translation: proof that an article is not "advertising for the book cited in the source."

Sounds like the cart before the horse but not the driver. Those wiki patrollers may say and truly believe that they're maintaining roads and bridges. But they're also the road agents. And the horses stand a greater chance of passing through than we do.

Wikipedia Has Intimacy Issues

"Romantic deception is the unrestrained misrepresentation of significant facts in the context of an intimate relationship."

- Sally Caldwell

My Wikipedia might not be your Wikipedia. So I am disclosing upfront that I'm reporting here in the second-person. No investment of mine has been helped or hurt by my pondering 15 immortalizing minutes in some future wiki entry. I have never lifted an editorial finger. I have won no prizes and I have entered no drawings.

But I have contemplated the definitive boundaries that pass for flag-planting on the territorial vapors of intellectual capital. All of us in our own way are traipsing soiled footprints across the ash heap of post copyright history.

Wikipedia is a self-selected guild of fact-selectors. Wikipedia is a tease. We fancy an all-volunteer brigade of scribes banding together to preserve text-based civilization against the backdrop of the cave paintings of a new millennium. In actuality those scribbles only pass for recordings after they've had all passion drained from their inspirations. A personality-blocker is the bouncer at the back door of the Wikoteque. All music must have stopped by the time those recordings hit the wiki stage. All secret handshakes have had their locks changed by the time the stench of impropriety is removed from the surface of the choppier editing channels.

As mentioned I have not stepped forward to claim, alter, deny, or crow about any contestable, explosive, or simmering interpretations referencible to my clouds and stars. I'm aroused around Wikipedia's merits as official scorekeeper of recorded history -- society's C drive of shared experience. But it's the misguided attempts at governance that lock in my fascination. "Do no self-promotion" is their Google mission-like equivalent to abstaining from evil. They are the counterpart to the wages of exposure. They are faceless book. And their book is far from open.

Do No Originality Unto Others

How does one exactly flunk their Wikipedia auditions? One wiki editor pulled rank on one of my college pals over the appearance of original research tucked within the recessed annals of Beatles history. Judging by the concentrations of the wiki Beatles history review board, me thinks Jimm would have had an easier time sneaking a 12 story litter box low rise past the NYC Landmarks Commission than footnoting a single moment in Lennon's life on Wikipedia.

The second instance involves a former student Darlene Adams who is now partnering with Sally Caldwell, a professor at the University of Texas, to publish a book and survival guide addressing Romantic Deception. She tried to post the definition and was promptly struck down by an administrator for "advertising." Despite a credible reference (to the book's first edition published in 1995), they dismissed the follow-up on the grounds it is self-published. Another non-no: only one attributable reference to the entry in question (not that this blogging entry counts as two...)

Man, talk about perpetuating the myth that publishing is the exclusive domain of standalone publishing houses. Just how big a house? According to Darlene they wanted an "encyclopedic reference." There's even a time stamp with an expiration date. That's the deletion-facing deadline for having your substantiations in the proper order. Translation: proof that an article is not "advertising for the book cited in the source."

Sounds like the cart before the horse but not the driver. Those wiki patrollers may say and truly believe that they're maintaining roads and bridges. But they're also the road agents. And the horses stand a greater chance of passing through than we do.