weighing in on united
United Airlines chucking a passenger is one of those "internet things everyone has an opinion on."
Two interesting responses. Socialist blogger Carl Beijer asks "Shouldn't capitalists be okay with the United incident?"
Techno-libertarian John Robb considers "How Algorithms and Authoritarianism Created a Corporate Nightmare at United."
The news reports I read weren't clear at all on what happened, particularly that "algorithmic decisionmaking" was at the bottom of this.
Robb explains how it worked:
United employees board a full flight from Chicago to Louisville. A United flight crew headed to Louisville arrives at the gate at the last moment. A corporate scheduling algorithm decides that the deadheading flight crew has priority over passenger fares and that it needs to remove four passengers to make room for them (the flight wasn't overbooked).
United asks for volunteers. A corporate financial algorithm authorizes gate employees to offer passengers up to $800 to take a later flight (offering a bigger incentive wasn't an option). No passenger takes them up on that offer.
United now shifts to removing passengers from the flight non-voluntarily. To determine who gets removed from the aircraft, United runs a customer value algorithm. This algorithm calculates the value of each passenger based on frequent flyer status, the price of the ticket, connecting flights, etc. The customers with the lowest value to United are flagged for removal from the flight (it wasn't a random selection).
elise ferguson print
Elise Ferguson
Double A
14" x 11", pigmented plaster on paper
Signed edition of 20
The edition was already sold by the time I looked at the press release. I might have shelled out!
According to the print dealer, Exhibition A, "to create Double A, Ferguson ... directly silkscreen[ed] pigmented plaster onto coldpress paper, the [same] process [used] when creating her larger body of work." It's a handsome image, jpeg-ishly speaking. I haven't seen Ferguson's work IRL in quite a few years but it was always materially tasty and historically smart. In this instance she looks back to Louis Kahn and "concrete as a primary medium," with her plaster standing in, symbolically, for the Kahn-crete.
concise summary of recent US politics
Due to the anti-Russian panic Trump surrendered to the neocons.* Suddenly the borg is lauding him for a senseless escalation. The neocons want chaos but chaos is not a plan. There seems to be no plan that will help any cause.
*Thanks, Hillary fans and/or HuffPo readers
The Moon of Alabama post is good except the part about Trump being smart.
drawing, from daniel albright memorial
Just learned that one of my favorite teachers, Daniel Albright, died a couple of years ago.
A memorial with readings, music, and reminiscences was posted: [YouTube]
The drawing comes from a series of pictures projected on the auditorium screen, interpreting a passage from one of Albright's books. (It reminds me a bit of Erika Somogyi's work)
I'll have more to say about him -- I just ordered a few of his tomes that I hadn't read yet. I've plugged him a few times on the blahg over the years.
Several of the reminiscers describe him as a genius and there's really no other word. When he lectured he held you spellbound -- you could feel your brain expanding.
In his younger years (when I had him as an undergrad advisor and my brain was still expanding) he primarily focused on English lit. He was in his mid-20s when he wrote a book on "Yeats' creative imagination in old age." That's one I ordered -- I've always been curious about it but never found it in a library or bookstore.
Gradually he broadened his criticism to include music and painting. At the end of his life his focus was interdisciplinary studies. His pursuits took him from Virginia to Rochester to (after 2003) Harvard, whether I gather his courses were popular.
I like his writing on poetry and music and modernist theory in general. I don't really care much about the interrelationships of the arts but appreciated that he would also take the flip side of the argument, explaining why and when it was good for a discipline to remain entrenched in its area of competence (to use a phrase of Greenberg's, a critic he admired but didn't agree with).
An astute Am*zon commenter said, regarding Albright's last book Putting Modernism Together: "A great project but this original and talented thinker is finally unable to let go of the canon." You could do a lot worse having someone to explain the canon to you, but the frustration isn't with Albright's conservatism so much as it is selfishly wanting to see that brilliant mind probing outside the established greats.