Freefall ...

In Newtonian physics, free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. In the context of general relativity, where gravitation is reduced to a space-time curvature, a body in free fall has no force acting on it.

Definition ...

free fall

noun

1

: the condition of unrestrained motion in a gravitational field

: the part of a parachute jump before the parachute opens

b

: a rapid and continuing drop or decline

a free fall in stock prices

Or ...

A rapid and continuing drop or decline of Elon Musk

To whit ...

We’re witnessing the brain death of Twitter

An analysis of Musk’s tweets shows him at the center of conversations once kept on the fringes of Twitter.

People don’t die in an instant. Death is, instead, a process of shutting down. You stop breathing; your organs stop working, bit by bit. Your brain ceases to function. Brain death is permanent, but your heart can still keep beating on its own for a time.

The state of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover feels like this sort of brain death: the processes that keep it online are somehow still beating, but what Twitter was before Musk is never coming back.

On Monday, December 12, Twitter dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, a wide-ranging group of global civil rights advocates, academics, and experts who have advised the company since 2016. Meanwhile, Musk has welcomed back previously banned high-profile extremists like the white nationalist Patrick Casey. According to data compiled by researcher Travis Brown, others reinstated include Meninist, a “men’s rights” account with more than a million followers; Peter McCullough, a cardiologist who gained a large audience for advocating discredited covid-19 treatments and arguing against receiving the vaccine; and Tim Gionet, a far-right media personality who livestreamed his participation in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Musk’s enthusiasm for eliminating jobs, cutting costs, and undoing Twitter's safety infrastructure has caused advertisers to leave in droves. At one point, the company reportedly lost the business of half its top 100 advertising clients, and it has missed weekly US ad revenue expectations by as much as 80%. Musk’s behavior now poses difficult questions for the brands that remain. The company has stopped enforcing its policy on covid-19 misinformation.

In essence ...

MIT Technology Review ran an analysis in Hoaxy, a tool created by Indiana University to show how information spreads on Twitter by looking at both keyword frequency and interactions between individual accounts. The results hint at Musk’s new role in this network: as effectively a hall monitor for the far right.

For profit ...

Illustration by Mel Haasch; Photographs by Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

It's all about the money/rev XX. This time it's "non-profit" hospitals and the bottom line as you gotta make money, right? When reading the excellent NYTimes piece titled How a Sprawling Hospital Chain Ignited Its Own Staffing Crisis, one sees how the profit nexus compromises not only patients but also doctors and nursers in the endless pursuit of money. Ask any doc or nurse this question. Do you like the system you work under? The answer, overwhelmingly, is no, spiced with appropriate epithets as insurance and the profit motive runs HC with disastrous consequences unless you're lucky and have access to competent HC along with a good insurance policy. If not, death becomes a viable option due to the fact the US lacks a universal healthcare environment along the lines of France, Germany, Canada and Japan.

To whit

At a hospital in a Chicago suburb last winter, there were so few nurses that psychiatric patients with Covid were left waiting a full day for beds, and a single aide was on hand to assist with 32 infected patients. Nurses were so distraught about the inadequate staffing that they banded together to file formal complaints every day for more than a month.

About 300 miles away, at a hospital outside Flint, Mich., similar scenes were unfolding. Chronic understaffing meant that patients languished in dried feces, while robots replaced nursing assistants who would normally sit with mentally impaired patients.

Both hospitals are owned by one of the country’s largest health systems, Ascension. It spent years reducing its staffing levels in an effort to improve profitability, even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion of cash reserves.

But a New York Times investigation has found that hospitals helped lay the groundwork for the labor crisis long before the arrival of the coronavirus. Looking to bolster their bottom lines, hospitals sought to wring more work out of fewer employees. When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.

For profit ... rules.

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Aleatory

a·le·a·to·ry adjective | depending on the throw of a dice or on chance; random. or ...

channeling Cage, Zappa or the vagaries of Quantum, take your pick. :)

Mr. Harrigan's Phone

Mr. Harrigan's Phone, a slow-moving but subtle take on the transformative power of the iPhone, introduced by Apple in 2007, as the device that changed everything, becomes the start point of an unusual friendship between Craig, a young man reading 3 days a week to an old and ruthless billionaire, played with exquisite touch by Donald Sutherland, an actor for the ages. For yours truly, the essence of the film rests not on the supernatural nature of the undead Harrigan communicating with Craig but rather on the old man's eerily accurate prediction of how the net would impact the world. 

It's worth watching IMHO. :)

For now ...

He's not Billy Cobbam or Buddy Rich but wait a year or two just for fun ...

One of the best qualities of talented drummers is to be able to show all their dexterity by staying in the metronome beats. Xiaomi should be aware of this because the humanoid bot it produces is on its way to becoming a rock star.

Chinese consumer electronics company Xiaomi introduced CyberOne in August and shared a fresh video of it playing drums. Slow for now, but it can stay on the beat.

For now ...

A Faustian bargin ...

When thinking about AI, enticement as inducement to go all the way in all things related to digital brings up Faust and his insatiable sense of need ...

Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend based on the historical Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–1540).The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.

Dr. Fausto by Jean-Paul Laurens

Channeling Faust and his endless quest to attain knowledge without working for it relates to how AI, the open-ended tech, enables virtually everyone, with or without talent, to become "artists" without the need to become competent in said discipline. This is not a diatribe against AI as talented artists are collaborating with tech with amazing results but rather as cautionary tale as AI is not only evolving at speeds beyond the kin of man but also is no longer controlled by us rubes given the fact real-time analysis of incoming data requires software able to update itself in real-time, something that cannot be done by humans in any way, shape or fashion.

In essence, we know not how this tech works, this is why the implications of AI expanding into virtually every aspect of civilization is disquieting as the skill sets needed to run society are slowly being taken over by code. 

To whit ...

This is John. He doesn't exist. But AI can easily put a photo of him in any situation we want. And the same process can apply to real people with just a few real photos pulled from social media.

Think about this, I have.

“An Addams Family Holiday.”

“An Addams Family Holiday.” Photograph courtesy Look Magazine Photograph Collection/Library of Congress

Yours truly has laughed for many years with The Addams Family, a close knit klan with a delicious connect to the macabre. It seems we see Addams' work everywhere from print to video as his sense of dark humor and often unseen sense of kindness and loyalty pervade his work no matter what media in which it resides. :)

In a side foyer of a Pennsylvania State University library, behind glass, hangs a painting that often goes unnoticed by students on their way to the stacks. Even some faculty members who have taught at Penn State for decades don’t know it’s there. And it’s a masterpiece.

In 1952, Charles Addams, at the height of his skills as a cartoonist, painted a lush, monochromatic mural on canvas for a bar at the Dune Deck, a hotel in the Hamptons. (The work is nearly fourteen feet long and more than four feet high.) When the hotel changed hands, the new owners—one of them a Penn State alumnus—donated the painting to the university’s Palmer Museum of Art. A few years later, it was transferred to the library, where it hung in the Lending Services area, until it was relegated to its current location, in 2000. Somewhere along the way, it picked up the name “An Addams Family Holiday.”

The way it's displayed obscures the fact that this painting is both a great work by a major artist and a gag that would have fit right into The New Yorker of 1952. The mural, rendered in gray tones—from dense black to the white of the sand—looks just like a printed cartoon, only much larger.

The family members, who first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, in 1938, were not properly christened with individual names until the début of the “Addams Family” TV show, in 1964. Nonetheless, here they all are: Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and their butler, Lurch, at the beach.

Laughter is good for the soul is it not? :)

Getting away with it ...

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Getting away with it, an art form practiced by the well heeled and connected, has been around since the beginning of time. With the net, we are now seeing just how pervasive it truly is but if you're a small business or not of the well heeled, the rules of the game differ without question.

Example 1.

If you live in New York State and lie to that government about your income to reduce your taxes, you go to prison. If you’re criminally convicted of 17 counts of such lies — such tax fraud — you could spend a long time in prison.

But The Trump Organization, a New York corporation that was just convicted of 17 criminal counts of tax fraud, not only won’t “go to jail” but also won’t even be dissolved for its crimes.

Instead, it’ll pay a maximum $1.6 million fine that represents less money than just one of Trump’s several-criminally-implicated employees and relatives made off with by the company committing their fraud for the past 15 years.

Example 2

When the senior executives of California’s private for-profit power utility PG&E made the very intentional decision to move cash into their own pockets through bonuses and dividends instead of making their power lines resilient enough to withstand severe winds, they also made the decision to let people die.

And, sure enough, PG&E pleaded guilty to those 84 killings for the 2018 Camp Fire caused by the failure of those very high-tension lines. The judge forced the CEO, Bill Johnson, to come to court to enter his company’s guilty plea to those deaths and say, “Guilty, your honor” 84 times. But neither he nor any executives at the company spent a single day in jail. Instead, the multi-billion-dollar company paid $3.5 million in fines.

The 3rd rail applies ... for the little guy

There’s a lot of talk about “two standards of justice in America, one for the rich and another for everybody else.” But there’s a third standard of justice for corporations and their senior executives that commit crimes.

In the 1880s, conservatives on the Supreme Court bizarrely identified corporations as “persons” with human rights defined by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In a 1978 decision written by Lewis “Memo” Powell, the Court ruled that when corporations purchase the loyalty of politicians, the money used for those purchases was to no longer be called “bribes” but, instead, is “free speech” protected by the First Amendment. The doctrine was radically expanded in 2010 with Citizens United.

Neither corporate immunities apply, however, to the small businesses that make up more than 99% of all corporations and LLCs in America. It’s notoriously easy to “pierce the corporate veil” of a business with revenues not measured in the millions and directly go after what is typically the company’s sole stockholder.

So the “corporate crime” problem is limited to the handful of large corporations and their senior executives who regularly make decisions that destroy Americans’ lives.

And our federal government doesn’t even keep a database of them and their crimes, even though they cost Americans as much as $800 billion a year and hundreds of thousands of lost lives.

Getting away with it as art form lives ..., if you're rich or well connected. Just read Citizens United to see why.

The tool becoming the master ...

 

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Yours truly has written many articles about AI whether it be takes on the dangers of autonomous weapons or AI becoming a Shakespeare in waiting as the open-ended tech is now everywhere, impacting virtually every endeavor requiring thought including the dreaded college essay, the bane of every student wishing to get into college.

The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph:

The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here.) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.

The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing, plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

In Convergence, the BRT end statement regarding AI, in terms of art, reads like this. 

AI is but a tool, the issue now becomes, does the tool become the master?

A good question to ask is it not?

Becoming too reliant on any tech is most dangerous, something readily seen when one cannot read and write cursive, thanks to the computer, as the ability to truly understand the past through the lens of cursive becomes tenuous at best.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell/1984

Any questions?