The New York Times article talking up torture, cited here earlier, seems to be an example of the media's collusion with the interests of the administration. The mechanism for the coordination of news stories beneficial to the White House is completely opaque to the public, but is doubtless more subtle than a press release marked "Confidential" with instructions on what to say. The publication of Judith Miller's stories about Saddam's purported weapons of mess destruction helped sell the war in Iraq, but later turned out to be devoid of truth. Relying on anonymous sources of dubious merit, the public was misled, throwing the editorial judgment of the Times into question.
The appearance of the "everybody's thinking about torture" article(s), followed by the awful and momentous decision by the administration to redefine the meaning of "humane treatment" in the Geneva Conventions does not prove there is a connection between the two. However, I feel Occam himself would think it more probable that there was a connection than not, given that the appearance of such an article in the Times would certainly be noticed by administration players that had something to do with setting up torture on a "business-as-usual" basis. This is not a bolt-out-of-blue conspiracy theory; given the degree that administration officials had been able to cloud the Times' judgment with Judith Miller's handiwork it is as likely to have acceded to informal suggestions or pressure to talk up torture.
I have no proof of a back channel between the Times and the administration, so must be careful not to declare that this was so. I think, however, that since news coverage so mysteriously helped the war effort along and that this was a dreadful disservice to everyone involved, suspicions of any sort of collusion should be vigorously investigated.
Yet, who is to do this? Perhaps it is the job of a credible institution connected with news, such as the Columbia School of Journalism. Or, perhaps there should be a Fourth Estate Ethical Board, funded by members of the media, to act as a clearinghouse for the meta-information about news that is now utterly missing.
For instance, about six weeks ago, the Times had a few headlines about "Al Quaeda (in Iraq)" that raised a big question in my mind, namely: Where these stories simply rewritten press releases from the White House? The reason I thought so was that one of the most pernicious and false pieces of disinformation leading up to the war was that Al Quaeda was somehow allied with Saddam Hussain, an assertion based more on wishful thinking than evidence. So, why was the Times willing to sully it's "objective" stance and start plugging the administration line? My guess was that it was simply laziness or editorial inattention, and rewrites of press releases.
Although the Times fields questions of this sort through its Ombudsman, his arrangement is not very satisfactory, because there is no assurance that the Ombudsman will find your issue as pressing as someone else's, so many issues go unanswered. Rather, as I mentioned in the piece about quality assurance, the best way of assuring quality is to document every stage of a process in a form that can be reviewed. In retrospect, the correlation of stories that were gung-ho about going to war and "unnamed administration sources" might flag such stories as being just a form of propaganda.
At first thought, subjecting news outlets to an ISO 9000 regime might seem completely undoable and a violation of the independence of the press. Secondly, it might seem impossible to have a system for disclosing how the news was gathered in an environment of commercial entities in competition. I don't think that either of these objections would be insuperable: The real question is whether news sources can continue to work with self-defined checks on their own objectivity ("editorial judgment"). The egregious failure (or cooption?) of the press leading up to the Iraq war, when lies were repackaged as truths by a compliant media, means that news outlets should be held to task to document their news gathering efforts to help verify the truth of what is reported.
About Me
- Nicholas
- Variously, a film/video editor, programmer, author, teacher, musician, artist, wage slave
01 September 2007
30 August 2007
UK News Outlet Shoots Self in Head
An article in the Guardian may portend the end of TV news as we know it, at least for viewers of the UK outlet Channel Five. Apparently "TV fakery" (an oxymoron?) has apparently become an issue there recently. (Here is a bit more about that.) Truthfulness and accuracy in news reporting is an ongoing issue, but the problems and list of remedies mentioned in the article about Channel Five are utter nonsense, as shown below.
NB: The full story about the BBC apparently showing a clip of the Queen being asked to remove her crown, is clouded at best. Here is one account. This follows on an earlier story about problems with a phone-in show. The result is a full-fledged crisis of confidence and heads are already rolling. My interest in this remains the Channel Five response.
They include: the ban of reaction shots--gratuitous shots of the reporter listening (or "listening")--whose function is to bridge what would otherwise be jarring jump cuts.
Another: "Contrived" walking shots in which people are filmed strolling towards the camera are also out. "These are ghastly," Kermode said. "They are artificial, so we should ban them."
"Cut-aways", shots that include content being talked about, again to avoid jump cuts, will be banned, along with post-facto shots of reporters asking questions, deemed to "rarely look genuine".
The article concludes by asserting that these changes "can help restore trust in our medium and make our programmes more creative too."
Both the objections cited in the article--to "untrue" material in news reports--and the proposed corrections miss being relevant by a wide margin. That is, "TV fakery" in newscasts has, paradoxically, little to do with the "truth" of individual shots, or even whether they appear staged, so the "corrections" proposed, and, even whether there was a problem to begin with, are clouded with simplistic thinking. The truth of the matter is much more interesting.
First off, the dichotomy between visual narrative and "the truth" has been around for well over a century, even if not at the forefront of the public's concerns. It became clear early on that while single photographs and film shots have a demonstrable, one-to-one correspondence with "reality", when they are combined into a series, suddenly a new and unexpected element appears. This new element is the "reality" created and experienced in the viewer's mind from the narrative inferred from the juxtaposed shots. This implied reality, the reality experienced by the viewer of a series of shots, is not simply the summed "meaning" of the constituent shots considered in isolation. Rather, this "narrative reality" is a near-continuous series of inductive leaps, an evolving interpretation of "what's happening" as shots clash, one with the next. This continuous "jumping to conclusions" to make sense of each shot transition results in a new experience, a narrative flow, what is experienced when watching a series of shots.
The Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Podovkin, inflamed with revolutionary zeal and open mind, investigated the emergent meanings generated by shot juxtaposition. The fact that his seemed to be a perfect illustration of the Hegelian Dialectic didn't hurt in the fervid atmosphere of 1920s revolutionary socialism. Recall that the Hegalian Dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx to describe history as a sequence of proposition, antithesis, and synthesis, each transforming into the next, compelling headlong change. It is not hard to see these steps being retraced in the magic of shot 1 being juxtaposed with shot 2 resulting in an idea, the synthesis.
Podovkin reduced this to a simple experiment: He took a shot of an impassive actor and then cut it together with a bowl of soup, a sick child and other shots of what the actor was "looking at". Viewers felt that in the first case, the soup, the actor had done a good job of conveying his hunger. In the second case they felt the actor had projected sympathy, and similarly for the other shots. Now, in each case, the shot of the actor was identical, not just similar, so the synthesis, the attribution of "hunger" or "sympathy" was an artifact in the viewer's mind.
Eisenstein also gave a nod to Hegel, but gave some academic underpinnings for this theory of montage. He showed that many compound characters in Chinese illustrate the same principle. For instance, the characters for "sun" and "moon", when combined, result in a new concept, "brightness". Emboldened by this new take on how the mind works, Eisenstein put theory into practice with the multiple juxtapositions of the forces of tyranny against the people in his memorable Odessa Steps sequence, wherein the hopes of a crushed people finds expression in the awful decent of a baby carriage down endless steps to the sea.
These lessons in how to see were taken to heart by the world's movie going public, which over the years has become immeasurably more sophisticated and adept at interpreting the visual information presented them. Recall that when movies were first shown, a shot of a train approaching was enough to cause people to run away in panic for fear of being run over and early films were shot full-figure because of the gnawing feeling audiences had that the actors were "cut off" by the frame in closer shots. Viewer sophistication has grown immeasurably in the subsequent century.The vocabulary of conventions available to television news is a very limited subset of theatrical film, determined largely by the constraints of shooting news, but the same skills are used to watch both media, as must be self-evident to anyone who has seen movies and TV.
Given the ubiquity of what might be called standard practice for TV news production, it is difficult to understand the flap about reaction shots, "nodding" shots and the rest. I give my thoughts on them, point by point.
Reaction shots: By dint of being restricted to one camera, any efforts to improve the visual flow and remove jump cuts will have to be done with shots that have been shot out of the time sequence of the interview. Yes, the reporter is not "reacting" to anything in particular, but such a "reaction" is understood to be a neutral place keeper to enable the substance of the (edited) statement to be absorbed more easily by avoiding obtrusive jump cuts. (Reaction shots are even used when not strictly necessary, as a form of visual relief, because the eye craves variety.)
Reactions shots "work" for a variety of reasons.
Given the mysterious workings of visual perception, a shot of A, followed by B, a shot of someone looking, is understood as "B is looking at A". Although A and B may have been separated by thousands of miles and more than a lifetime in the real world, the perceived visual narrative is still simply "B is looking at A", ceteris paribus [all things being equal]. How effective this illusion is depends on how well the shots match, the direction speaker and reactor are facing and whatnot, but the illusion of "B is looking at A" seems to reflect how people are wired to interpret a flow of imagery. Think: If this impression were not created in viewers, visual narratives would have to take a very different form.
Another function of reaction shots is to give the viewer a "role" in the presentation, albeit indirectly. If the viewer observes an interview or speech "in person", s/he would naturally look around to gauge how the speaker's ideas are being received, and, how your impression about how others feel compares with the way you feel [and, thus, whether you are in the middle of a friendly or hostile crowd]. Since everyone does this, seeing anyone react is in some way equivalent to seeing oneself react.
Another convention is to implicitly use the reporter as a representative or avatar for the viewer. The reporter is understood as being allied with the viewer or all viewers, so the reporter's reaction is read by the viewer as being a stand-in for his own reaction. This and the previous are similar, but different.
Reaction shots are a formalism but they are also consistent with the way the visual systems works, not as a continuous stream, as with mechanical movies or TV, but as a stuttering series of rapid starts and stops of the eyes, called saccades, effectively "cuts" from one "shot" to another, for nearly everything we see. This is another physiological basis for visual narrative, and probably explains why we so readily accept that "B is looking at A", simply because this sort of inference is drawn countless times every day with regular visual perception.
So, reactions shots are all but inevitable: The final question is whether they are "false" when not the literal reaction of reporter to interviewee. I think this is not important, as the apparent and actual differences between a "fake" reaction shot and the one "real" one at that point in the interview (from a certain viewpoint, etc) are devoid of meaningful difference. So, in my opinion, "true" reaction shots are rarely needed and it makes no real difference whether they are "faked". On the other hand, using an appropriate reaction can give several positive benefits even when the shot is "fake" (though it does have to be appropriate).
Flagging every edit within an interview, which might well be intolerably tendentious and confused without such edits, becomes very burdensome to viewers who wish to simply comprehend the issues the story raises, rather than engage in an epistemological study of representations by the television medium. Stripping interviews of reaction shots and reasonable illustrative material ("cut-ins") only emphasizes the gaps, making it more difficult to follow the sense of the story. Quotations in print solved the need to selectively extract portions of an interview long ago. Given the imperatives of visual narrative, TV news practice is equivalent, with relevant filler material covering bothersome jumps.
However, if "truth in reporting" is a big issue, there are innumerable effects, such as a short flash, than can be used to mark edits in an interview in a way that does not call attention to itself the way jump-cuts do. Such techniques might be useful in situations where unflagged edits would be otherwise said to change the meaning of an interview. I would hesitate to present every interview this way simply because it would be overkill.
The "contrived" walking shots complained about are generally introduced to give some dynamism to what would otherwise be simply a series of talking heads. Yes, they may be contrived or arbitrary, but I think their wholesale removal would be even worse. And, besides, what would replace them?
How banning reactions, cut-aways, and out-of-sequence questions would restore trust is anyone's guess, and it certainly would not make programs "more creative". Better would be to apply all these techniques to make the viewer's experience more pleasant with good judgment and sensitivity while being true to the spirit of reporting the truth rather than being slavishly literal about conventions that are understood to be conventions.
NB: The full story about the BBC apparently showing a clip of the Queen being asked to remove her crown, is clouded at best. Here is one account. This follows on an earlier story about problems with a phone-in show. The result is a full-fledged crisis of confidence and heads are already rolling. My interest in this remains the Channel Five response.
They include: the ban of reaction shots--gratuitous shots of the reporter listening (or "listening")--whose function is to bridge what would otherwise be jarring jump cuts.
Another: "Contrived" walking shots in which people are filmed strolling towards the camera are also out. "These are ghastly," Kermode said. "They are artificial, so we should ban them."
"Cut-aways", shots that include content being talked about, again to avoid jump cuts, will be banned, along with post-facto shots of reporters asking questions, deemed to "rarely look genuine".
The article concludes by asserting that these changes "can help restore trust in our medium and make our programmes more creative too."
Both the objections cited in the article--to "untrue" material in news reports--and the proposed corrections miss being relevant by a wide margin. That is, "TV fakery" in newscasts has, paradoxically, little to do with the "truth" of individual shots, or even whether they appear staged, so the "corrections" proposed, and, even whether there was a problem to begin with, are clouded with simplistic thinking. The truth of the matter is much more interesting.
First off, the dichotomy between visual narrative and "the truth" has been around for well over a century, even if not at the forefront of the public's concerns. It became clear early on that while single photographs and film shots have a demonstrable, one-to-one correspondence with "reality", when they are combined into a series, suddenly a new and unexpected element appears. This new element is the "reality" created and experienced in the viewer's mind from the narrative inferred from the juxtaposed shots. This implied reality, the reality experienced by the viewer of a series of shots, is not simply the summed "meaning" of the constituent shots considered in isolation. Rather, this "narrative reality" is a near-continuous series of inductive leaps, an evolving interpretation of "what's happening" as shots clash, one with the next. This continuous "jumping to conclusions" to make sense of each shot transition results in a new experience, a narrative flow, what is experienced when watching a series of shots.
The Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Podovkin, inflamed with revolutionary zeal and open mind, investigated the emergent meanings generated by shot juxtaposition. The fact that his seemed to be a perfect illustration of the Hegelian Dialectic didn't hurt in the fervid atmosphere of 1920s revolutionary socialism. Recall that the Hegalian Dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx to describe history as a sequence of proposition, antithesis, and synthesis, each transforming into the next, compelling headlong change. It is not hard to see these steps being retraced in the magic of shot 1 being juxtaposed with shot 2 resulting in an idea, the synthesis.
Podovkin reduced this to a simple experiment: He took a shot of an impassive actor and then cut it together with a bowl of soup, a sick child and other shots of what the actor was "looking at". Viewers felt that in the first case, the soup, the actor had done a good job of conveying his hunger. In the second case they felt the actor had projected sympathy, and similarly for the other shots. Now, in each case, the shot of the actor was identical, not just similar, so the synthesis, the attribution of "hunger" or "sympathy" was an artifact in the viewer's mind.
Eisenstein also gave a nod to Hegel, but gave some academic underpinnings for this theory of montage. He showed that many compound characters in Chinese illustrate the same principle. For instance, the characters for "sun" and "moon", when combined, result in a new concept, "brightness". Emboldened by this new take on how the mind works, Eisenstein put theory into practice with the multiple juxtapositions of the forces of tyranny against the people in his memorable Odessa Steps sequence, wherein the hopes of a crushed people finds expression in the awful decent of a baby carriage down endless steps to the sea.
These lessons in how to see were taken to heart by the world's movie going public, which over the years has become immeasurably more sophisticated and adept at interpreting the visual information presented them. Recall that when movies were first shown, a shot of a train approaching was enough to cause people to run away in panic for fear of being run over and early films were shot full-figure because of the gnawing feeling audiences had that the actors were "cut off" by the frame in closer shots. Viewer sophistication has grown immeasurably in the subsequent century.The vocabulary of conventions available to television news is a very limited subset of theatrical film, determined largely by the constraints of shooting news, but the same skills are used to watch both media, as must be self-evident to anyone who has seen movies and TV.
Given the ubiquity of what might be called standard practice for TV news production, it is difficult to understand the flap about reaction shots, "nodding" shots and the rest. I give my thoughts on them, point by point.
Reaction shots: By dint of being restricted to one camera, any efforts to improve the visual flow and remove jump cuts will have to be done with shots that have been shot out of the time sequence of the interview. Yes, the reporter is not "reacting" to anything in particular, but such a "reaction" is understood to be a neutral place keeper to enable the substance of the (edited) statement to be absorbed more easily by avoiding obtrusive jump cuts. (Reaction shots are even used when not strictly necessary, as a form of visual relief, because the eye craves variety.)
Reactions shots "work" for a variety of reasons.
Given the mysterious workings of visual perception, a shot of A, followed by B, a shot of someone looking, is understood as "B is looking at A". Although A and B may have been separated by thousands of miles and more than a lifetime in the real world, the perceived visual narrative is still simply "B is looking at A", ceteris paribus [all things being equal]. How effective this illusion is depends on how well the shots match, the direction speaker and reactor are facing and whatnot, but the illusion of "B is looking at A" seems to reflect how people are wired to interpret a flow of imagery. Think: If this impression were not created in viewers, visual narratives would have to take a very different form.
Another function of reaction shots is to give the viewer a "role" in the presentation, albeit indirectly. If the viewer observes an interview or speech "in person", s/he would naturally look around to gauge how the speaker's ideas are being received, and, how your impression about how others feel compares with the way you feel [and, thus, whether you are in the middle of a friendly or hostile crowd]. Since everyone does this, seeing anyone react is in some way equivalent to seeing oneself react.
Another convention is to implicitly use the reporter as a representative or avatar for the viewer. The reporter is understood as being allied with the viewer or all viewers, so the reporter's reaction is read by the viewer as being a stand-in for his own reaction. This and the previous are similar, but different.
Reaction shots are a formalism but they are also consistent with the way the visual systems works, not as a continuous stream, as with mechanical movies or TV, but as a stuttering series of rapid starts and stops of the eyes, called saccades, effectively "cuts" from one "shot" to another, for nearly everything we see. This is another physiological basis for visual narrative, and probably explains why we so readily accept that "B is looking at A", simply because this sort of inference is drawn countless times every day with regular visual perception.
So, reactions shots are all but inevitable: The final question is whether they are "false" when not the literal reaction of reporter to interviewee. I think this is not important, as the apparent and actual differences between a "fake" reaction shot and the one "real" one at that point in the interview (from a certain viewpoint, etc) are devoid of meaningful difference. So, in my opinion, "true" reaction shots are rarely needed and it makes no real difference whether they are "faked". On the other hand, using an appropriate reaction can give several positive benefits even when the shot is "fake" (though it does have to be appropriate).
Flagging every edit within an interview, which might well be intolerably tendentious and confused without such edits, becomes very burdensome to viewers who wish to simply comprehend the issues the story raises, rather than engage in an epistemological study of representations by the television medium. Stripping interviews of reaction shots and reasonable illustrative material ("cut-ins") only emphasizes the gaps, making it more difficult to follow the sense of the story. Quotations in print solved the need to selectively extract portions of an interview long ago. Given the imperatives of visual narrative, TV news practice is equivalent, with relevant filler material covering bothersome jumps.
However, if "truth in reporting" is a big issue, there are innumerable effects, such as a short flash, than can be used to mark edits in an interview in a way that does not call attention to itself the way jump-cuts do. Such techniques might be useful in situations where unflagged edits would be otherwise said to change the meaning of an interview. I would hesitate to present every interview this way simply because it would be overkill.
The "contrived" walking shots complained about are generally introduced to give some dynamism to what would otherwise be simply a series of talking heads. Yes, they may be contrived or arbitrary, but I think their wholesale removal would be even worse. And, besides, what would replace them?
How banning reactions, cut-aways, and out-of-sequence questions would restore trust is anyone's guess, and it certainly would not make programs "more creative". Better would be to apply all these techniques to make the viewer's experience more pleasant with good judgment and sensitivity while being true to the spirit of reporting the truth rather than being slavishly literal about conventions that are understood to be conventions.
29 August 2007
The Great Quality Crisis
At the root of Mattel's problems with their suppliers, various contaminated food recalls and the like are explicit failures of quality assurance (QA). Why is this happening and what can be done about it?
QA has become one of the core competencies common to a whole range of processes, a common methodology and set of objectives that encompasses just about every aspect of manufacturing and even service industries. This approach was first widely applied during the first successes of Japanese industry in the 1960s. It was recognized that by honing to well-defined, and continuously-improving quality standards, the manufacturing process could be gradually tuned to drastically reduce component failure, improving everything from profits to consumer satisfaction with greatly-enhanced reliability. Soon, in self-defense, QA became a reforming battle-cry in American industries reeling under this new-fangled sort of competition.
Another series of events, in Europe, was to consolidate QA into the wide-reaching methodology it has become. NATO, in purchasing weaponry from member countries, found that the process of developing specifications had to go much further than the obvious requirements of detailed blueprints and the like. To avoid costly errors and redundancies, the specifications themselves had to be specified, so that the provenance of all processes and sub-specifications leading to a good or service was documented in a uniform manner. Publishing every aspect of manufacturing, through specific commitments and contractual obligations, has, for the companies embracing ISO 9000 and so-called Good Manufacturing Practices, resulted in much greater success rates than "business as usual" had previously.
Although ISO 9000 compliance has a hall-of-mirrors quality, it is simply the conclusion of a painstaking attempt to be honest and explicit, so much so that one can in theory proudly document every detail of your manufacturing/service process, and withstand audits and suggested changes from ones suppliers and customers. Although this may seem to put everyone in a position of being meddled with, the realities of manufacturing, say of the AirBus, make this sort of dovetailing far from optional.
Given that this intellectual leap has been made by high-tech manufacturers, pharmaceuticals and others, and ISO exists to certify compliance and there is a body of accepted practice, software support and so on, one might reasonable wonder why ISO or GMP has not become become all but universal.
One reason is cost. Initially, the concepts and scope of ISO are difficult to appreciate and a whole internal culture of ISO-informed wisdom has to be nurtured to take hold within companies, and this may seem to have scant payoff at the start. Industries without the need for highly-coordinated specifications may feel a lack of urgency to start rationalizing their QA process to the degree required by ISO.
My impression is that, sooner or later, companies that have adopted ISO or GMP will find themselves at a significant advantage. If Mattel employs ISO, it should be far less vague about the state of its subcontractors than has been let on in news reports. If the news reports are accurate, that somehow Mattel was so lax with its own manufacturing that it was satisfied making verifying checks only every three months (and on a regular basis rather than on a surprise, random basis), then it has every expectation of being rudely awoken with back-breaking recalls on an ever-frequent basis. Given the money involved, and the acutely important issues attending the wide distribution of potentially dangerous toys to countless children, it is all but incomprehensible that Mattel hasn't been on top of safety and compliance issues not matter who their suppliers are.
For this last reason, I feel that there is much less control of the manufacturing process at Mattel than one would suspect for a company making toys. Without a synoptic view of its own and suppliers' manufacturing and safety process, any company could be quickly brought to its knees and bankrupted by random fluctuations in supplier behavior. Ultimately, the supplier will not bear the ultimate burden of the company's failure to secure its QA: That will fall on the company, its customers and shareholders.
QA has become one of the core competencies common to a whole range of processes, a common methodology and set of objectives that encompasses just about every aspect of manufacturing and even service industries. This approach was first widely applied during the first successes of Japanese industry in the 1960s. It was recognized that by honing to well-defined, and continuously-improving quality standards, the manufacturing process could be gradually tuned to drastically reduce component failure, improving everything from profits to consumer satisfaction with greatly-enhanced reliability. Soon, in self-defense, QA became a reforming battle-cry in American industries reeling under this new-fangled sort of competition.
Another series of events, in Europe, was to consolidate QA into the wide-reaching methodology it has become. NATO, in purchasing weaponry from member countries, found that the process of developing specifications had to go much further than the obvious requirements of detailed blueprints and the like. To avoid costly errors and redundancies, the specifications themselves had to be specified, so that the provenance of all processes and sub-specifications leading to a good or service was documented in a uniform manner. Publishing every aspect of manufacturing, through specific commitments and contractual obligations, has, for the companies embracing ISO 9000 and so-called Good Manufacturing Practices, resulted in much greater success rates than "business as usual" had previously.
Although ISO 9000 compliance has a hall-of-mirrors quality, it is simply the conclusion of a painstaking attempt to be honest and explicit, so much so that one can in theory proudly document every detail of your manufacturing/service process, and withstand audits and suggested changes from ones suppliers and customers. Although this may seem to put everyone in a position of being meddled with, the realities of manufacturing, say of the AirBus, make this sort of dovetailing far from optional.
Given that this intellectual leap has been made by high-tech manufacturers, pharmaceuticals and others, and ISO exists to certify compliance and there is a body of accepted practice, software support and so on, one might reasonable wonder why ISO or GMP has not become become all but universal.
One reason is cost. Initially, the concepts and scope of ISO are difficult to appreciate and a whole internal culture of ISO-informed wisdom has to be nurtured to take hold within companies, and this may seem to have scant payoff at the start. Industries without the need for highly-coordinated specifications may feel a lack of urgency to start rationalizing their QA process to the degree required by ISO.
My impression is that, sooner or later, companies that have adopted ISO or GMP will find themselves at a significant advantage. If Mattel employs ISO, it should be far less vague about the state of its subcontractors than has been let on in news reports. If the news reports are accurate, that somehow Mattel was so lax with its own manufacturing that it was satisfied making verifying checks only every three months (and on a regular basis rather than on a surprise, random basis), then it has every expectation of being rudely awoken with back-breaking recalls on an ever-frequent basis. Given the money involved, and the acutely important issues attending the wide distribution of potentially dangerous toys to countless children, it is all but incomprehensible that Mattel hasn't been on top of safety and compliance issues not matter who their suppliers are.
For this last reason, I feel that there is much less control of the manufacturing process at Mattel than one would suspect for a company making toys. Without a synoptic view of its own and suppliers' manufacturing and safety process, any company could be quickly brought to its knees and bankrupted by random fluctuations in supplier behavior. Ultimately, the supplier will not bear the ultimate burden of the company's failure to secure its QA: That will fall on the company, its customers and shareholders.
Oxymoron: Fixed Prices
Anyone who has been exposed to even the least bit of the dismal science, has been confronted with the core truth of economics, the supply and demand curve. This hoary abstraction lies close to the root of modern economic theory, as first explicated in the 18th century by Adam Smith and others. Note that a supply and demand curve is not a plot of some dataset, say, years of education versus lifetime income. Rather, it is a graphic depiction of qualitative relations between the quantity, price, and demand for commodities.
The statement "the supply of a commodity, the amount that is offered for sale, generally increases as the price increases" ends up on a supply and demand curve as a diagonal line trending upwards from the origin, called the supply curve. The statement "demand for a commodity generally decrease as prices increase" is depicted by a diagonal line trending down to the right, known as the demand curve. The point where supply and demand curves cross defines the price for a particular supply of a commodity.
None of these curves depict particular values or even particular relations between values. Rather, they express qualitative relations between sets of statements about supply, demand and prices. That is, supply and demand curves may seem a lot more rigorous than they really are, wrapping rather feeble assertions in the trappings of mathematics and then using these to make extrapolations that are logically questionable and even unsupportable.
But, this breathless, back-of-the-napkin approach seems to command a lot of respect in economic circles, allied as it is with business, political opportunism and Nobel-seeking academics. Economics, as a "science" seems to inhabit an alternative universe from the usual sciences, hard or soft, and its practitioners have been accorded a respect disproportionate to their real contributions, usually for self-serving, political reasons.
This hardly scratches the surface. Economics and economists should be high on everyone's list of professions to be skeptical of and I'll return to this theme again.
Now, however, I'd like to investigate the all-but-ubiquitous practice of giving products fixed prices. This is so firmly ingrained as to seem a non-issue but, both from a theoretical and practical point of view, prices should not and can not be fixed without being to the continual disadvantage of consumers. Why? The instantaneous price of a commodity is a moving target defined by instantaneous supply and demand. This is illustrated at any moment by the moving prices for stocks, bonds, commodities, futures, etc. on the world's financial markets, wherein computer-assisted trading helps extract the maximum benefit of transactions for both buyers and sellers by allowing them to settle on a mutually-agreeable price.
The world of consumer products and goods is, by comparison, sub-optimal. Prices are set by decree by the seller, and as such will always be higher than if they were directly bid on by consumers. As it is, the only recourse consumers have is is the rather course-grained and inefficient approach of simply not buying or shopping around for prices that are less sub-optimal (cheaper). In both cases, the seller and the buyer would be better off if the sale had simply gone through at a mutually-agreeable price in a timely way. So, why doesn't this happen?
In a market where seller is king, prices can be set arbitrarily high, up to a point. If the seller can afford to absorb costs of stocking and display, he is in a position, with a population of compliant buyers, to skim off the easiest sales, and simply allow less compliant consumers to move on to retailers willing to sell at a smaller margin. This lazy approach may be fine for upscale stores catering to a clientele always willing to pay more than necessary, but such stores would rapidly find themselves on hard times if such customers became more demanding or hard-pressed to make ends meet. It seems altogether more prudent, for both consumers and retailers, to hone closer to prices that would result from haggling between buyers and sellers.
Buyers needn't feel guilty for offering a lower price than marked for items, because the difference in profit can and often is offset by other savings that may accrue to the seller, such as the opportunity costs of having capital tied up on aging inventory, etc. In any case, it is hardly the buyer's role to try to second-guess the best interests of the retailer. Indeed, sometimes it is hard enough to figure out his own interests.
The buyer should not be intimidated by the self-serving "prohibition" on haggling or bargaining to a price often put up by retailers to forestall their having to revise their (always-higher-than-optimal) prices. The main problem facing retailers is that most have crippled themselves with staff without knowledge or competence to enter a meaningful price negotiation. Generally, however, store managers are so empowered and, when approached discretely, will respond to sensible offers, though they are often chary of doing so if it seems that this would trigger a stampede of haggling customers, a nightmare that would surely have grave effects on their career prospects. Usually, offers on cosmetically hurt products are not refused, even offers that are less than a markdown, because such items are compromised and could result in much larger losses if never sold.
Prices, without the active participation of buyer and seller, are a fiction, laughably confused further with the "value" of commodities. One must understand that neither buyer nor seller alone is competent to judge what an appropriate price may be: a certain price may indeed be too low to justify the seller's parting with an item, as it involves more factors than simply the wholesale price and a "reasonable" markup. The buyer's options are not known to any seller, either, so a price offer can be a source of real-world feedback in the face of statistical guesswork.
The key is to not be shy in standing up for your interests as a consumer. It is your role in the marketplace, pure and simple, and doing so can only increase the efficiency of retail transactions and your own satisfaction.
The statement "the supply of a commodity, the amount that is offered for sale, generally increases as the price increases" ends up on a supply and demand curve as a diagonal line trending upwards from the origin, called the supply curve. The statement "demand for a commodity generally decrease as prices increase" is depicted by a diagonal line trending down to the right, known as the demand curve. The point where supply and demand curves cross defines the price for a particular supply of a commodity.
None of these curves depict particular values or even particular relations between values. Rather, they express qualitative relations between sets of statements about supply, demand and prices. That is, supply and demand curves may seem a lot more rigorous than they really are, wrapping rather feeble assertions in the trappings of mathematics and then using these to make extrapolations that are logically questionable and even unsupportable.
But, this breathless, back-of-the-napkin approach seems to command a lot of respect in economic circles, allied as it is with business, political opportunism and Nobel-seeking academics. Economics, as a "science" seems to inhabit an alternative universe from the usual sciences, hard or soft, and its practitioners have been accorded a respect disproportionate to their real contributions, usually for self-serving, political reasons.
This hardly scratches the surface. Economics and economists should be high on everyone's list of professions to be skeptical of and I'll return to this theme again.
Now, however, I'd like to investigate the all-but-ubiquitous practice of giving products fixed prices. This is so firmly ingrained as to seem a non-issue but, both from a theoretical and practical point of view, prices should not and can not be fixed without being to the continual disadvantage of consumers. Why? The instantaneous price of a commodity is a moving target defined by instantaneous supply and demand. This is illustrated at any moment by the moving prices for stocks, bonds, commodities, futures, etc. on the world's financial markets, wherein computer-assisted trading helps extract the maximum benefit of transactions for both buyers and sellers by allowing them to settle on a mutually-agreeable price.
The world of consumer products and goods is, by comparison, sub-optimal. Prices are set by decree by the seller, and as such will always be higher than if they were directly bid on by consumers. As it is, the only recourse consumers have is is the rather course-grained and inefficient approach of simply not buying or shopping around for prices that are less sub-optimal (cheaper). In both cases, the seller and the buyer would be better off if the sale had simply gone through at a mutually-agreeable price in a timely way. So, why doesn't this happen?
In a market where seller is king, prices can be set arbitrarily high, up to a point. If the seller can afford to absorb costs of stocking and display, he is in a position, with a population of compliant buyers, to skim off the easiest sales, and simply allow less compliant consumers to move on to retailers willing to sell at a smaller margin. This lazy approach may be fine for upscale stores catering to a clientele always willing to pay more than necessary, but such stores would rapidly find themselves on hard times if such customers became more demanding or hard-pressed to make ends meet. It seems altogether more prudent, for both consumers and retailers, to hone closer to prices that would result from haggling between buyers and sellers.
Buyers needn't feel guilty for offering a lower price than marked for items, because the difference in profit can and often is offset by other savings that may accrue to the seller, such as the opportunity costs of having capital tied up on aging inventory, etc. In any case, it is hardly the buyer's role to try to second-guess the best interests of the retailer. Indeed, sometimes it is hard enough to figure out his own interests.
The buyer should not be intimidated by the self-serving "prohibition" on haggling or bargaining to a price often put up by retailers to forestall their having to revise their (always-higher-than-optimal) prices. The main problem facing retailers is that most have crippled themselves with staff without knowledge or competence to enter a meaningful price negotiation. Generally, however, store managers are so empowered and, when approached discretely, will respond to sensible offers, though they are often chary of doing so if it seems that this would trigger a stampede of haggling customers, a nightmare that would surely have grave effects on their career prospects. Usually, offers on cosmetically hurt products are not refused, even offers that are less than a markdown, because such items are compromised and could result in much larger losses if never sold.
Prices, without the active participation of buyer and seller, are a fiction, laughably confused further with the "value" of commodities. One must understand that neither buyer nor seller alone is competent to judge what an appropriate price may be: a certain price may indeed be too low to justify the seller's parting with an item, as it involves more factors than simply the wholesale price and a "reasonable" markup. The buyer's options are not known to any seller, either, so a price offer can be a source of real-world feedback in the face of statistical guesswork.
The key is to not be shy in standing up for your interests as a consumer. It is your role in the marketplace, pure and simple, and doing so can only increase the efficiency of retail transactions and your own satisfaction.
28 August 2007
Sympathy for the Devil?
Earlier, I mentioned the "cutting-edge economic approach" trotted out by the Pentagon in late July 2003, for a few hours as it turned out. This was the Policy Analysis Market (and here), a futures exchange developed under the auspices of DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to try to amplify the information about events concerning the War on Terrorism.
Briefly, the idea of a "prediction market" is that motivated actors, buyers and sellers, can develop more accurate predictions about events than, say, opinion polls or other means. Presumably, this has been proven true in some circumstances to some people's satisfaction. In any case, it is an appealing idea on the face of it: get together a group of guileless, highly-motivated (greedy) buyers and sellers in a structured marketplace and you are bound to reap the reward of preternaturally aroused senses sniffing out accurate predictions. Intense self interest brings out the very best in people, after all.
The appeal is there, particularly if you are a believer in the magic of the marketplace. Such people, I believe, are so blinkered by their own Bear and Bull reality that the world is itself, beneath it all, an arena of vast opportunities for the bold but prudent investor. The obvious bias, akin to the Anthropic Principle, of making pronouncements about the General Goodness of Capitalism from the improbable perspective of the Last Man Standing seems never to occur to happy capitalists, as they continue to sow their faulty wisdom among lesser, and substantially poorer, economic beings. [This is never a digression in a world of dreadful inequities of wealth.]
However, I felt an itty-bitty, ever-so-tiny degree of sympathy for Poindexter because, impossible as it may seem, the forces that arrayed against him, particularly Senators Dorgan and Wyden, at least through their statements, seemed utterly opportunistic and moralizing and seemed to seek political brownie points by depicting a research program in cartoon-like terms (see links).
Not that the program was flawless, mind you. Poindexter, who graduated number one in his class at Annapolis and worked with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Mossbauer while getting a PhD, is certainly no idiot. His career took him to the heights of National Security Adviser under Reagen and the Iran-Contra affair resulted in multiple felony convictions in 1990, later reversed on a technicality. So, it seems that Poindexter, like many others, was fooled by issues of ethics and loyalty, making further government service uncertain at best.
Under Bush, loyalty per se seems to be a sufficient qualification, so, Poindexter, even allowing for his high-profile meltdown, must have seemed unusually qualified (particularly when compared with platoons of high-level appointees with absolutely no evident qualifications except a fanatical devotion). The Policy Analysis Market was certainly controversial, simply by dint of its being an unusual idea, but if such futures markets generate expert knowledge from the aggregate decisions of buyers and sellers, as claimed, one cannot fault DARPA for trying to implement it in some fashion. That the controversial details and Poindexter both were needlessly associated with the PAM represents a failure on the Pentagon's part, that may (if the assertions about it are to be believed) have needlessly crippled efforts to garner hard-to-come-by information.
So, the Pentagon should not be vilified for trying an unconventional technique to gain a predictive advantage. It is idiotic to blind oneself because it seems more decorous to do so. (This seems to be the argument of the Senators.)
But, given the way the PAM was introduced and Poindexter being involved with it, the public can be forgiven for rejecting it. However, considering the large number of secret programs, renditions, illegal detentions, torture, surveillance and the rest that have made their way into the twilight of public consciousness, the PAM seems rather tame, or even quaint, by comparison.
Briefly, the idea of a "prediction market" is that motivated actors, buyers and sellers, can develop more accurate predictions about events than, say, opinion polls or other means. Presumably, this has been proven true in some circumstances to some people's satisfaction. In any case, it is an appealing idea on the face of it: get together a group of guileless, highly-motivated (greedy) buyers and sellers in a structured marketplace and you are bound to reap the reward of preternaturally aroused senses sniffing out accurate predictions. Intense self interest brings out the very best in people, after all.
The appeal is there, particularly if you are a believer in the magic of the marketplace. Such people, I believe, are so blinkered by their own Bear and Bull reality that the world is itself, beneath it all, an arena of vast opportunities for the bold but prudent investor. The obvious bias, akin to the Anthropic Principle, of making pronouncements about the General Goodness of Capitalism from the improbable perspective of the Last Man Standing seems never to occur to happy capitalists, as they continue to sow their faulty wisdom among lesser, and substantially poorer, economic beings. [This is never a digression in a world of dreadful inequities of wealth.]
However, I felt an itty-bitty, ever-so-tiny degree of sympathy for Poindexter because, impossible as it may seem, the forces that arrayed against him, particularly Senators Dorgan and Wyden, at least through their statements, seemed utterly opportunistic and moralizing and seemed to seek political brownie points by depicting a research program in cartoon-like terms (see links).
Not that the program was flawless, mind you. Poindexter, who graduated number one in his class at Annapolis and worked with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Mossbauer while getting a PhD, is certainly no idiot. His career took him to the heights of National Security Adviser under Reagen and the Iran-Contra affair resulted in multiple felony convictions in 1990, later reversed on a technicality. So, it seems that Poindexter, like many others, was fooled by issues of ethics and loyalty, making further government service uncertain at best.
Under Bush, loyalty per se seems to be a sufficient qualification, so, Poindexter, even allowing for his high-profile meltdown, must have seemed unusually qualified (particularly when compared with platoons of high-level appointees with absolutely no evident qualifications except a fanatical devotion). The Policy Analysis Market was certainly controversial, simply by dint of its being an unusual idea, but if such futures markets generate expert knowledge from the aggregate decisions of buyers and sellers, as claimed, one cannot fault DARPA for trying to implement it in some fashion. That the controversial details and Poindexter both were needlessly associated with the PAM represents a failure on the Pentagon's part, that may (if the assertions about it are to be believed) have needlessly crippled efforts to garner hard-to-come-by information.
So, the Pentagon should not be vilified for trying an unconventional technique to gain a predictive advantage. It is idiotic to blind oneself because it seems more decorous to do so. (This seems to be the argument of the Senators.)
But, given the way the PAM was introduced and Poindexter being involved with it, the public can be forgiven for rejecting it. However, considering the large number of secret programs, renditions, illegal detentions, torture, surveillance and the rest that have made their way into the twilight of public consciousness, the PAM seems rather tame, or even quaint, by comparison.
26 August 2007
Random Likes and Dislikes
It's hardly time, given the lack of track record here at Time's Arrow, to expect that anyone might be interested in what I think about other "information-providers", as it hasn't been proven that I am one myself. So, instead of being interested because I believe some reporters and commentators are good, turn it around and judge me by the company I attempt to pay attention to.
It is difficult to think of a better reporter than Robert Fisk of The Independent. I have made no special research into his career, but understand from his dispatches that he usually lives in Beirut, the erstwhile Paris of the Levant. This recent article gives a good view of his appeal. Every article I've read by him has contained valuable revelations, born of his gentle and informed perspective from many decades of reporting and a fluent knowledge of Arabic.
Another favorite of mine is Greg Palast, an American independent journalist who has found popularity on the BBC. He first became known to me by breaking the story about Kathleen Harris' bogus list of felons, constructed from various sources, to invalidate some 60,000+ black voters in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. More recently, he has investigated the wretched failures and malfeasance of the administration in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. And, unlike most, he already has his eye's peeled for further GOP plans to try to throw the 2008 election.
America lost a real friend when Molly Ivins died on 31 Jan 2007, mere weeks after writing her last articles. Even Shrub had nice things to say about her. What else could he do? She was one of his most stalwart critics from back in his days as governor of Texas, and spared no effort to get at the truth. We would all do well to follow her example.
I have to confess I'm a long-time New Yorker fan. In fact, my parents had subscribed to the New Yorker since long before I was born (today, as fate would have it, many decades ago), and we had many stacks of neatly bundled issues to show for it. However, aside from the cartoons, it took Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", John McPhee's factual essays and some Donald Barthelme to get me started reading the longer articles some years after I was in college, and I've never stopped. It is amazing to me that the circulation of the New Yorker is only something like 940,000, for there are certainly many times that number who would enjoy its political observations and timely articles. It may no longer be the Parnassus of Harold Ross or William Shawn, and far too many of the old-timers have passed on, but what remains, helped with new talent, still has few peers.
On a different plane, the Columbia Journalism Review and Editor & Publisher are both well worth reading for a professional perspective on the performance of newspapers and other news sources. Many who proffer their opinions on the web are not trained journalists. Although we may decry the multiple lapses of the main stream media in wrongly aiding Bush by acts of commission or omission, this is better understood as an institutional failure due to media consolidation and business interests rather than a crisis in journalistic standards, per se. So, amatuer journalists have much to learn from their professional peers even if we think they haven't been performing as well as we would have liked.
It's hard not to be impressed with Canadian writer Naomi Klein, whose newest book The Shock Doctrine is coming out Sep 2007. She has written extensively on economic globalization issues, the Iraq war and corporate brands in the battle for consumer mind-share.
Sidney Blumenthal, whose work appears all over the place and often in The Guardian, is always an entertaining and informative read.
Pierre Tristram's essays on Candide's Notebooks are always worth keeping your eye on, as they cover a wide range of topics with passion and honesty. Refreshingly, Tristram writes about and features music and drama of note, aspiring, one suspects, to be something of a one-man New Yorker.
It is difficult to think of a better reporter than Robert Fisk of The Independent. I have made no special research into his career, but understand from his dispatches that he usually lives in Beirut, the erstwhile Paris of the Levant. This recent article gives a good view of his appeal. Every article I've read by him has contained valuable revelations, born of his gentle and informed perspective from many decades of reporting and a fluent knowledge of Arabic.
Another favorite of mine is Greg Palast, an American independent journalist who has found popularity on the BBC. He first became known to me by breaking the story about Kathleen Harris' bogus list of felons, constructed from various sources, to invalidate some 60,000+ black voters in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. More recently, he has investigated the wretched failures and malfeasance of the administration in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. And, unlike most, he already has his eye's peeled for further GOP plans to try to throw the 2008 election.
America lost a real friend when Molly Ivins died on 31 Jan 2007, mere weeks after writing her last articles. Even Shrub had nice things to say about her. What else could he do? She was one of his most stalwart critics from back in his days as governor of Texas, and spared no effort to get at the truth. We would all do well to follow her example.
I have to confess I'm a long-time New Yorker fan. In fact, my parents had subscribed to the New Yorker since long before I was born (today, as fate would have it, many decades ago), and we had many stacks of neatly bundled issues to show for it. However, aside from the cartoons, it took Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", John McPhee's factual essays and some Donald Barthelme to get me started reading the longer articles some years after I was in college, and I've never stopped. It is amazing to me that the circulation of the New Yorker is only something like 940,000, for there are certainly many times that number who would enjoy its political observations and timely articles. It may no longer be the Parnassus of Harold Ross or William Shawn, and far too many of the old-timers have passed on, but what remains, helped with new talent, still has few peers.
On a different plane, the Columbia Journalism Review and Editor & Publisher are both well worth reading for a professional perspective on the performance of newspapers and other news sources. Many who proffer their opinions on the web are not trained journalists. Although we may decry the multiple lapses of the main stream media in wrongly aiding Bush by acts of commission or omission, this is better understood as an institutional failure due to media consolidation and business interests rather than a crisis in journalistic standards, per se. So, amatuer journalists have much to learn from their professional peers even if we think they haven't been performing as well as we would have liked.
It's hard not to be impressed with Canadian writer Naomi Klein, whose newest book The Shock Doctrine is coming out Sep 2007. She has written extensively on economic globalization issues, the Iraq war and corporate brands in the battle for consumer mind-share.
Sidney Blumenthal, whose work appears all over the place and often in The Guardian, is always an entertaining and informative read.
Pierre Tristram's essays on Candide's Notebooks are always worth keeping your eye on, as they cover a wide range of topics with passion and honesty. Refreshingly, Tristram writes about and features music and drama of note, aspiring, one suspects, to be something of a one-man New Yorker.
True Virtual Torture III
And now, the moment all you virtual readers have been waiting for: What would virtual torture, as implemented by the Pentagon, be like? Would it be legal? Would it work?
The imagination boggles, at least at first.
Prisoners and redacted people of all stripes, the "New Disappeared", as it were, would have to be inculcated with a sense of the near-supernatural possibilities of Virtual Torture as part of the orientation process during matriculation at [redacted]. This might include bogus Popular Science articles strategically placed in the numerous waiting rooms that every bureaucracy has to prepare clients, giving them a number, etc. But this would be mere stage dressing, for the real work of convincing clients would be to plant carefully designed clues, half-heard conversations of earlier inductees' inability to resist the awful, and strangely wonderful, power of virtual torture.
Having been suitably softened, the prisoner would be in near panic as the virtual reality goggles and other instruments of obfuscation are arrayed about his body. Then, unexpectedly, perhaps within a multimedia diorama constructed with the help of memory fragments dislodged by earlier interviews, the prisoner finds himself observing himself at a distance, surrounded by trappings worthy of the Arabian Nights. Fear begins to melt away after a time, as the prisoner struggles to reassemble his perceptions within this concocted reality.
This treatment, crafted carefully by highly-paid consultants working under legal immunity in a work-for-freedom program of their own, continues for a predetermined period in this vein. Gradually, the untoward circumstances of their apprehension and detention is allowed to fade away, perhaps discretely helped along with advanced pharmaceuticals. Soon, the prisoner finds himself looking forward to these periods of wish-fulfillment with an earnest fervor.
Unbeknown to prisoner and jailer alike, the whole operation is documented by well-hidden cameras and combined into an entertaining stream for none other than President George W. Bush, for whom the whole operation is a mixture of ultimate miniature railroad and reality TV show. One can imagine our Dubya, bored by the mundane business of state, slipping into the study off the Oval Office at the White House, perhaps fondling the late Saddam's pistol, and avidly watching the activities of his very own prisoners.
Now, if Dubya doesn't like what he sees, he throws the interrogation process into high gear with a call from the highest level. Emerging from behind one of the diaphanous veils at the virtual harem is Tom DeLay, wielding a not-so-metaphorical hammer, virtually striking the helpless prisoner where it counts most, instantly redistricting his brain and rendering further resistance futile. Dubya finds this irresistibly amusing as he turns away, shaking his head and smiling broadly.
Now, unlike the bad old days of stress positions, water boarding, sleep deprivation and the rest, our prisoner has been untouched, except by the gentle hands of laboratory assistants, who may not even know he was a high-value information source. It cannot be demonstrated that the prisoner even experienced pain, even though his will-power has been shattered along with his virtual body-parts.
The remaining problems are simply technical: How is data actually to be mined from the jelly that the prisoner's brain has become? Some hints appear in a recent series in the LA Times, called Chasing Memory. Although Gary Lynch at UC Irvine is still working on microtomed slices of rat brains, one can safely project that it's only a matter of time until non-invasive methods are perfected.
Hopefully, even if it's decades into the War on Terror, mind-bending techniques will have been developed to imprint upon the emptied brains of former maniacal terrorists a completely new identity, so they could be returned to civilian life and become productive wage slaves to really pay their debt to society. A fascinating corollary of malleable-brain work is that any, any personality could be impressed upon cleansed brains, so our former terrorist could be released as a happy-go-lucky but pious kibbutzim, sure to harm no one.
The imagination boggles, at least at first.
Prisoners and redacted people of all stripes, the "New Disappeared", as it were, would have to be inculcated with a sense of the near-supernatural possibilities of Virtual Torture as part of the orientation process during matriculation at [redacted]. This might include bogus Popular Science articles strategically placed in the numerous waiting rooms that every bureaucracy has to prepare clients, giving them a number, etc. But this would be mere stage dressing, for the real work of convincing clients would be to plant carefully designed clues, half-heard conversations of earlier inductees' inability to resist the awful, and strangely wonderful, power of virtual torture.
Having been suitably softened, the prisoner would be in near panic as the virtual reality goggles and other instruments of obfuscation are arrayed about his body. Then, unexpectedly, perhaps within a multimedia diorama constructed with the help of memory fragments dislodged by earlier interviews, the prisoner finds himself observing himself at a distance, surrounded by trappings worthy of the Arabian Nights. Fear begins to melt away after a time, as the prisoner struggles to reassemble his perceptions within this concocted reality.
This treatment, crafted carefully by highly-paid consultants working under legal immunity in a work-for-freedom program of their own, continues for a predetermined period in this vein. Gradually, the untoward circumstances of their apprehension and detention is allowed to fade away, perhaps discretely helped along with advanced pharmaceuticals. Soon, the prisoner finds himself looking forward to these periods of wish-fulfillment with an earnest fervor.
Unbeknown to prisoner and jailer alike, the whole operation is documented by well-hidden cameras and combined into an entertaining stream for none other than President George W. Bush, for whom the whole operation is a mixture of ultimate miniature railroad and reality TV show. One can imagine our Dubya, bored by the mundane business of state, slipping into the study off the Oval Office at the White House, perhaps fondling the late Saddam's pistol, and avidly watching the activities of his very own prisoners.
Now, if Dubya doesn't like what he sees, he throws the interrogation process into high gear with a call from the highest level. Emerging from behind one of the diaphanous veils at the virtual harem is Tom DeLay, wielding a not-so-metaphorical hammer, virtually striking the helpless prisoner where it counts most, instantly redistricting his brain and rendering further resistance futile. Dubya finds this irresistibly amusing as he turns away, shaking his head and smiling broadly.
Now, unlike the bad old days of stress positions, water boarding, sleep deprivation and the rest, our prisoner has been untouched, except by the gentle hands of laboratory assistants, who may not even know he was a high-value information source. It cannot be demonstrated that the prisoner even experienced pain, even though his will-power has been shattered along with his virtual body-parts.
The remaining problems are simply technical: How is data actually to be mined from the jelly that the prisoner's brain has become? Some hints appear in a recent series in the LA Times, called Chasing Memory. Although Gary Lynch at UC Irvine is still working on microtomed slices of rat brains, one can safely project that it's only a matter of time until non-invasive methods are perfected.
Hopefully, even if it's decades into the War on Terror, mind-bending techniques will have been developed to imprint upon the emptied brains of former maniacal terrorists a completely new identity, so they could be returned to civilian life and become productive wage slaves to really pay their debt to society. A fascinating corollary of malleable-brain work is that any, any personality could be impressed upon cleansed brains, so our former terrorist could be released as a happy-go-lucky but pious kibbutzim, sure to harm no one.
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