Month: July 2013

Further to the post on the Korean 777 flown into the ground at SFO, here an A380 landing from the cockpit.

Also at SFO, an inaugural Lufthansa landing, this time with two experienced pilots clearly working as a team, as opposed to the “training” situation in the 777 case. (Hat-tip to Smiffy on FB, as Nick commented, that 777 CFIT really should not be possible.) I say “training” but really no different. Experienced pilots in both cases, and in fact in the Lufthansa case it was the first A380 landing at SFO for both pilots, not just one of them.

Noticeable in this A380 example that the pilot audibly / visibly / consciously / physically takes over manual control of the throttles (@5.05) a couple of minutes before the autopilot is actually disengaged (unlike the 777 case where the pilot appears to involuntarily / unconsciously / erroneously override the auto-throttle simply by resting his hand on the throttles).

Lots of other interesting points: Self-checking when hearing unexpected and potentially confusing messages – like the 28L ILS confusion over the instruction to approach 28R (some mention of that in the 777 event too?), like the two aircraft cleared for take-off, and seen taking-off together on 10L and R crossing their runway; the ATC planning courses for approaching aircraft to avoid turbulent wakes of larger aircraft; the “sporty performance” crack as they key in (and the aircraft follows) the ATC instructions to twist and turn onto the approach glide-path; the pilots talking to each other in German whilst communicating in ATC English; the SFO tower taking over from NorCal ATC, and welcoming them in German; the pilots responding in English, and cracking a joke about Monday being wash-day in Germany, as the airport lays on the fire-hose welcome for their inaugural landing; using the outboard engine to swing the beast into its parking bay. Lots of points for the plane-spotting geek.

Fills you with confidence as an air-traveller that the magic choreography generally does work, when the systems allow professionals to do their jobs – you feel they were in command and would know what to do, and be able to do it,  if the unexpected arose.

[Post Note – thanks to Smiffy again – here another 777 coming in too low at SFO, picked-up by ATC / Tower. Seems the ongoing ILS maintenance on 28L is indeed causing some confusion for those approaching 28L and 28R – also mentioned in both the A380 and the 777 CFIT cases – but as the commenters note, this is no excuse for the inability of the aircraft, pilots and systems to fly safely. Those in control simply need to be aware which systems are or are not in play.]

Interesting post from Dave Pollard (hat tip to Euan Semple) on the illusory nature of all those coherent structures that enable life, the universe and everything to tick along as if “business as usual”.

Those coherent structures cover everything from politico-economic structures of mutual governance, down to apparently fundamental physical and cosmological models – and necessarily all the complex, compound, global eco-systems of systems in between. The point is that such things are not (identical with) what they appear, but as of now, they’re the best we have. Denying or rejecting them as not being “real” isn’t necessarily better – nihilist or anarchist – than evolving them to something better.

Obviously however, being too attached to the appearance of coherence as reality is a barrier to that evolution, so it’s healthy to spread the understanding.

“Abstraction is the enemy of clarity” from the Guardian on euphemistic management language hat tip to Johnny Moore, via FB … and modelling abstraction, taken to the generic limit … hat tip to Margaret Warren also on FB, from Geek and Poke:

The Guardian piece is actually pretty good, balanced. Metaphors do die, the best ones always do eventually, but they remain valuable if the visual image remains meaningful. That’s quite different from such metaphors becoming clichés through frequent use in ever less relevant circumstances, or part of an abstraction to say less specifically about the particular circumstance – the latter often associated with the accurate (generically true) but less specifically helpful, often politically-correct, bet-hedging, minimum-committal, euphemistic use of management terminology.

The title is neat too. “The figure of speech isn’t dead.” A figure of speech Quine.

Never seen it formalised before, though I’ve expressed it so many times. Posted as David Gurteen’s quote of the day with the source identified by @BrianSJ.

When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure.

The basic reason why MBO is doomed; the antidote to “if you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. And it’s really an alternative expression of Douglas Bader’s adage “Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the enslavement of fools”. (In economics, a variation on Campbell’s Law and Lucas Critique – follow the wikipedia links from here.)

In the latter form it is more obvious how this is game theory. Games have rules, if you introduce new benefits / sanctions associated with one of the rules – it’s a game changer. The “artificial” benefit / sanction becomes part of the game, no longer just a rule, but an object in its own right. If you treat people like juveniles, they’ll behave like juveniles. Careful what you objectify. Careful what you wish for. The underlying adage is probably as old as humanity and cod-psychology.

Governance. Object reification in game theory.

Here a case where it was literally applicable to a game, a sport, football. A Terry’ble Decision.

I’m an “anti-realist” in the sense that my world view (in the header by-line, the manifesto and anywhere else in the blog) is epistemological – about what we can know about the world, to the extent that what the world out there really is is NOT what really matters. That is I’m not concerned with correspondence between knowledge and the world out there being a fundamentally true, rather that it is both pragmatic and reasonable. As I noted quite recently, reasonable, of course, includes having a reasonable ontology of what exists in the world [not just a logical, mathematical theory of it], even if we accept that ontology is our deemed model of what exists rather than any absolute truth. [For substantial meaning, matter matters; neither epistemology nor ontology precedes or exists without the other.]

In Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, he points out

As a consequence of the two world schema [the epistemological and correspondence anti-realisms], the question of the object, of what substances are, is subtly transformed into the question of how and whether we know objects. The question of objects becomes the question of a particular relation between [subjects] and objects [….]

On the one hand we have the pro-science crowd that vigorously argues that science gives us the true representation of reality. It is not difficult to detect, lurking in the background, a protracted battle against the role that superstition and religion play in the political sphere. Society, at all costs, must be protected from the superstitious and religious irrationalities that threaten to plunge us back into the Dark Ages.

On the other hand, there are the social constructivists and antirealists vigorously arguing that our conceptions of society, the human, race, gender, and even reality are constructed. Their worry seems to be that any positive claim to knowledge risks becoming an exclusionary and oppressive force of domination, and they arrive at this conclusion not without good reason or historical precedent [….]

As always, the battles that swirl around epistemology are ultimately questions of ethics and politics. [….] Questions of knowledge are not innocent questions. Rather, they are questions intimately related to life, governance, and freedom. A person’s epistemology very much reflects their idea of what the social order ought to be, even if this is not immediately apparent in the arid speculations of epistemology.

That is even in our endeavour to avoid SOMism, a subject-object relationalism, even where the relational quality is radically empirical, it is nevertheless useful, necessary to have an ontology of objects, things that exist and participate in the world – static patterns of value in Pirsigian terms – patterns within and across evolved physico-bio-socio-intellectual-cultural levels of complexity. Having a reasonable ontology of objects, is  NOT mandating a mereology where all such objects are composed of some fundamental monist substance in any essentially hierarchical or causally reductive way. Objects (patterns) of all scales and complexity participate democratically and that participation is about processes and structures of governance – systems engineering in the broadest sense or literally cybernetics. What Levi proposes is an onticology:

Drawing on the work of the systems theorists and cyberneticians, Bryant argues that objects are dynamic systems that relate to the world under conditions of operational closure. [….] to integrate the most vital discoveries of the anti-realists within a realist ontology that does justice to both the material and cultural. Onticology proposes a flat ontology where objects of all sorts and at different scales equally exist without being reducible to other objects and where there are no transcendent entities such as eternal essences outside of dynamic interactions among objects.

Bryant’s book is available on-line / electronically at the link above. I’ve also bought the paperback to enable a more flexible leisurely read. Hat tip again to David Morey for bringing new material to our attention. Very interesting.

Victoria Park, Hackney – 35 years on.

Why “Haters” are Important.

As it says on the value of a robust comments section :

Negative comments aren’t all poison, by nature.

Sure, but negative comments, even poisonous ones on topic, don’t need to hate the person.

 

Dennis Farina (RIP), speaking of his switch in his 40’s from a Chicago detective to being a professional actor.

“… everybody was extremely nice to me.
If the people were rude
and didn’t treat me right,
things could have gone the other way.”

So true, reminds me of the Neil Hannon (Divine Comedy) lyric.

Fate doesn’t hang,
on a wrong or right choice.
Fortune depends,
on the tone of your voice.

So sing while you have time ….

And as if to reinforce the point further in the New Yorker today: “Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly?” Answer :

 … people talking to people is still the way …

… change happens, not the logic in the change or the decision itself. (Hat Tip to David Gurteen for the link.)