Personal Note: Recent news and Storyworth

It’s been a number of months since I posted anything to The Memory Cache, as you may have noticed. “What happened to Wayne, anyway? He hasn’t posted anything recently!”

 

I’m still here, and I’m fine – it’s just been a very busy time this winter and spring, and a time of some transition and reflection in my life too.

 

In mid-March, we lost my father, Richard “Dick” Parker, who passed away peacefully at his home in Maryland at the age of 99 ½. My family and I were away from home off and on during his last couple of months this winter, helping him as best we could, and then going through the aftermath of celebrating his life, mourning him and helping put his affairs to rest.

 

Needless to say, these moments in the life of a person and a family require much of our time, attention and emotional resources while they’re happening, and for a while afterward too. I haven’t had much energy or focus left over for this blog so far this year, or for my music, while we were going through all this. But I believe most of that period is now behind me, and I’m looking forward to getting back to some of my creative interests.

 

There is also an unexpected new writing project on my plate, as the result of a “gift” (ha!) I received last Christmas from my son and daughter-in-law. The present was a one-year subscription to an unusual online organization you may have heard about called “Storyworth”. 

 

Storyworth is a service that provides a way for a person (like myself) to be asked a series of questions, roughly one per week for a year, as a catalyst for writing stories about one’s life, thoughts and personal history. The questions can come from whoever gave you the gift (such as your children), or can be picked off a huge list that the service provides, or even selected or made up by the writer.   

 

The idea is to spend a year answering 50 questions or so, and at the end, Storyworth will then produce a book out of it, for circulation to those among your family and friends who are interested. It’s sort of an “autobiography in a box” concept, where the structure is more or less provided for you, and it's conversational, rather than the usual chronological narrative we would expect in an autobiography. There are other nice options too, like the ability to add photographs to supplement the articles you’ve written.

 

I thought this would be relatively easy, but it turns out to be more time-consuming and challenging than I would have thought. For one thing, it’s easy to fall behind, and for another, giving good, well-structured and interesting written answers, even three or four pages per question, is surprisingly hard work!  But on the other hand, I’m finding it very enjoyable, and it has triggered a fascinating process of introspection, one that provides a reason for me to go back and revisit the details of many memories and different phases of my life. 

 

I don’t expect to be publishing or sharing this Storyworth body of work with the public – it’s really intended for a small audience of my close family and friends. But I take it seriously just the same, and hope to do it well. So that’s one writing project already taking time away from the blog, and from my music, at least for the next year or so.

 

By the way, if that sounds interesting, and you think you or someone in your family or life might enjoy trying to write a Storyworth book too, you can find out more about it at https://www.storyworth.com . I heard an ad for it on NPR last week, and I’ve been seeing ads for it on Instagram too, so apparently it’s becoming a thing. Check it out!  It’s fun, and it could be a treasure for your family that might be valued by later generations, as well as a paper-based contribution to the archives and history of our  times. 

 

Despite the demands of my Storyworth project, I do want to resume my writing for this blog. I have been saving a list of a number of things I’ve read and watched during the past half year that I’m very excited to share with you, so there will be new posts coming soon, as quickly as I can get my thoughts together and start putting them in readable form. I am also hoping to resume my musical and video projects at some point in the near future.

 

One of the things I’ve learned over the past four  years, since I started this “life of the artist” after I retired, is that art and creativity don’t always need to happen on a predictable or consistent schedule, and indeed, probably often can’t. They happen instead more in sync with the rhythms and seasons of the artist’s life and moods.

 

It’s taken me a while, after a long professional career where everything was always planned and on a tight production schedule, to realize I have the freedom now (as a retired person) to do as much or as little as I can, and to do it only when I desire or find the inspiration. But I’m getting more comfortable with that idea. 

 

I will have my next review post up soon. Thanks for sticking with me, and with The Memory Cache.

Smartphone App Review: PaperKarma (for Android and iOS phones)

Hello, and Happy 2024! It’s been a while since I posted – with the holidays, travel and other projects, I haven’t been focused on writing posts for The Memory Cache lately. But I’m still here, still reading books and watching shows, and hoping to share more reviews about the best of these soon.

In the meantime, today I’m doing something a little different. I’m posting a review of a simple but inspirational smartphone app I discovered recently, while browsing an article online about how to reduce the constant flow of paper junk mail that arrives in our mailboxes each day. 

For a long time, I’ve wondered how I could simply tell the vast majority of commercial and charitable organizations that mail me their paper ad materials through the U.S. Mail to please stop! and make that stick. But it always seemed like a hydra-headed monster, since most of these organizations don’t provide any easy method of getting off their lists, and also end up quickly reselling their mailing lists to other companies too.

I couldn’t imagine how I could ever get ahead of this problem. It’s a headache for many of us, as we waste minutes every day sorting through the pile of paper we brought in from the mailbox, and then immediately throw most of it in the trash or recycle can, which we then have to carry back out to the sidewalk for pickup.  Over many years, that daily time and effort really adds up, not to mention the constant aggravation of how pointless it all is.

This pernicious and still-large portion of the advertising industry relies on obsolete technology developed in the 1980s to try to grab our attention and dollars. It devours untold trees and forests every year to make the paper for the fancy glossy brochures that go immediately into the trash, and it pours toxic chemicals into the environment as part of the paper-making process. 

And what about the fuel burned by the US Postal Service, delivering all this trash we don’t want, and by our trash and recycle trucks when they haul it away?

I have tried the “do not mail” registries. They may slow the flow a little bit, but they’re not a real solution, since many companies appear to ignore them, or don’t check to see if you’re on them before putting you on their mailing lists. And every time you buy a new product or service, or make a new contribution, a new wave of paper junk mail inevitably will follow.

PaperKarma provides a different, more active approach. It’s a simple phone app you can download and install from the Apple Store or Google Play, like any of the hundreds of other apps you already have on your phone. You then create a free account to begin, although it is a paid service, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Once installed, all you do is take a picture in the app of the logo on each piece of junk mail you receive, and see if PaperKarma recognizes it. In many cases, it does right away. In other cases, you may have to choose from a list it offers (its best guesses), or if that too fails, start typing in a search for the mailer’s name. After several weeks of daily use, it hasn’t yet failed to identify the sender for me through one of these three methods.

Once you’ve identified the sender, you click the “Unsubscribe” button. PaperKarma sends a message through its proprietary interface to the advertiser, making your unsubscribe request for you. In many cases, you’ll get an immediate “success” message, indicating they completed the request to the sender to get you off the mailing list.  In other cases, the request may be “pending” for some period, but almost all of the requests will eventually resolve to “success”. PaperKarma also maintains a log or list for you of each of your requests and the ultimate status of it.

PaperKarma claims about a 90% success rate in processing these requests for you. What could be simpler? And it’s even fun, and very satisfying – it’s like hearing a “zap!” or shouting “got you!” every time you hit the “Unsubscribe” button, and know some other entity you never want to hear from again will be forced to stop bothering you.

The subscription model is interesting. You can choose a $3.99 monthly fee (which can be set up as recurring), but if you’re going to use it for a while, they offer six-month and annual terms as well that are more expensive, but progressively cheaper per month. Then they have a “lifetime” subscription for $59.99.

I began with the monthly subscription, just to try it, but after two weeks, it became clear to me that this is a great app not only for you or me, but also for our society. If its use went viral across our population, it could potentially dismantle the paper-based advertising industry in a short period of time, or at least make it a shadow of its former self. On that basis, both to always have this valuable tool at the best price (for my own benefit), and more importantly to support the company behind this app right now, I have converted my monthly subscription to a lifetime one.

I have had some interesting reflections on this app, and the possible foreseeable consequences of its success. With 330 million of us in this country alone, if Paper Karma’s user base went from hundreds of thousands to many millions (i.e. if we can help the app go viral through word of mouth), it could perhaps achieve what it hopes to do – help protect the environment from the industry’s  paper-based junk mail activities, while ridding us of this antiquated and pointless annoyance in our daily lives.

If that happened, though, there would be social and financial costs. PaperKarma’s own business model is brilliant for short-term gains, as millions may sign up for subscriptions for a product and service that are probably not that labor intensive or expensive to support. 

But if they’re completely successful, in the longer run their users will eliminate the problem which their app solves, and with it the need for people to keep paying for subscriptions. I would imagine this is a long-term risk and a problem that the company is well aware of, and willing to accept, given the potential near term benefits to their company and the environment.

Other potential costs would be to the employment of many of the people currently involved in the entire life-cycle of all this paper trash: from the lumber industry workers who cut down and process the trees, to the paper manufacturing plant workers, the ad agencies, the graphic artists and designers, the printing company staff, the postal service sorting and delivery people, and the trash hauling and recycling workers. If most of this trash goes away, so will many of their jobs.

I’m sympathetic to that, but to me the answer is to find more socially valuable and productive activities for those people than continuing to do what they’re doing. Most of us would probably agree that paper-based advertising mail is a wasteful, ecologically unsupportable industry that few people like or want in their lives. I sympathize with all the people who work as telemarketers too, as a way of surviving, but I don’t want them to keep doing those jobs either. 

This is essentially the same kind of situation as with telemarketing, of a largely unnecessary and irritating major business sector with an even more environmentally compelling justification for its demise, which if it occurred would require that its work force find other employment. 

A negative impact on employment is not avoidable if everyone is able to opt out of junk mail easily. It is important at least to acknowledge that job loss would be a likely consequence of an app as potentially powerful as PaperKarma could be (if its use became widespread) in eliminating one of the main ways businesses and charitable groups currently try to compete for our attention.

By the way, for anyone who is curious: this review is not paid for, and I derive no financial benefit from it. I think this app is an unusually creative and powerful little solution to a frustrating individual problem many of us have put up with for most of our lives, with potential important social and environmental benefits from its widespread use as well. That's why I'm writing this -- I love the concept of the app, and the implementation seems excellent too.

The app is called PaperKarma. It’s fun, it’s easy to use, and you’ll be helping to rid the planet of the plague of junk mail, while drastically reducing the flow of any advertising mail you don’t want into your own mailbox. It’s for both Apple and Android smartphones. Check it out, and if you like it, pass the word on to others. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Bitch: On the Female of the Species. Lucy Cooke (2023).

One of my favorite reads in late 2023 was Bitch, Lucy Cooke’s marvelous exploration of sex and gender in evolution and the natural world.  

 

The author is a young academic biologist, who entered the field already discouraged by the story that both science and society had to tell about her sex, the female one.  Her perception had always been that being born a female was to be a “loser” – smaller, less interesting and more passive than the much more exciting and empowered males of the world.

 

Fortunately, though, as she began to enter the world of science and research, she made a number of discoveries that dramatically changed her outlook on the scientific establishment, its history, and its stories about sex and gender. These discoveries included a myriad of counter-examples to the “facts” that were believed to be universal about sex differences in humans and many other species. The author takes us along for a funny and surprising tour of what she has learned.

 

Of course, we humans have always been fascinated with sex, the differences between the sexes, and we all have our own opinions about the relationships between the two sexes. More recently, modern society has also become particularly curious about a more fluid gender spectrum, and how certain traits may overlap in male and female populations. 

 

Religion traditionally has had much to say about these issues too, but Cooke begins by taking a look at how the biological sciences, particularly since the time of Charles Darwin in the mid-19^th century, have been dominated by a blindered view that generally reflected the Victorian social morals, self-interest and ignorance of the small group of mostly-English, mostly-white men who were developing the “scientific” understanding and assumptions in the new fields of biology and evolution almost from inception.

 

She explains all this with a light touch, using examples and giving explanations drawn from major studies and research approaches that have characterized the field. She shares specific historical examples of how and when major male figures in the biological sciences over the past two centuries appeared to incorporate their own insular personal beliefs about human sex roles and differences into broader “scientific” conclusions that all females in nature (of whatever species) tended to be smaller and weaker than males, more passive, invariably focused on child-rearing and nurturing, usually monogamous, and generally looking like their idealized version of an upper-class Victorian woman in their patriarchal society.

 

Having set out her hypothesis, the author then takes us on a tour of many different species, and shows how time and again, the predominantly male investigators who studied them either overlooked or explained away obvious cases that contradicted the orthodox view of sex differences and sex selection, and also neglected to even devote any attention to studying female anatomies, behaviors and social roles in the species they studied, on the assumption that the females were unimportant compared to the males.

 

For example, Cooke is able to demonstrate that since the 19^th century, the mostly male biologists in the field have exhaustively studied and documented the male reproductive organs of many species, but until recently there was very little research done on the corresponding female organs. She provides humorous anecdotes of how male biologists totally misunderstood the significance of unusual penis configurations, sizes and sexual functionality in different creatures, because they had never bothered to look at the vaginas and clitorises of the females.

 

In the course of this book, you will learn many strange and wonderful things about how evolution has led to an almost endless variety of different sex roles, relationships between the sexes, and bizarre sex-linked characteristics in the natural world. In her words, few species (including humans and our mammalian cousins) are the same as others, or conform to the simplistic male-dominant assumptions with which we have all grown up. And in understanding this, we get a much more consistent and predictably complex view of how evolution works with respect to sex differences and characteristics.

 

Cooke also introduces us to a few of her intriguing and determined older female colleagues in the field of biology, and shares stories of some of their groundbreaking work, which first began to challenge the Darwinian/male consensus on sex differences and sex selection in the field.

 

Incidentally, another book also released in late 2023, Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove Over 200 Million Years of Evolution, appears from the description to cover similar topics and issues. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my 2024 reading list. 

 

For anyone who loves to think about sex and gender, sex differences (and similarities), and/or to argue about them, Bitch will provide you with a great deal to think about, and plenty of ammunition for future conversations and debates. It may be controversial to some people, but it’s also often humorous, while posing serious and well-reasoned challenges to our current scientific understanding and perspectives on these matters, as well as how they impact our human societies, norms and beliefs. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (2023).

This week, with all the sensational news of corporate upheaval and intrigue at OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, we’re all suddenly taking note of this strange new chapter in the history of human technological innovation. Indeed, ever since the release of ChatGPT last year, with its astounding capabilities to generate text and write software, it’s become an unavoidable new topic of conversation and thought, as we try to figure out what it portends for the future of work, society and even the human race itself.

 

It was in this context that I noticed and picked up a copy of The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at my local library.  I’m so glad I did, because it’s a truly excellent book, combining a poignant personal account of the author’s life as a young Chinese immigrant girl, along with her parents, as they try to build a better life in America, with an insider’s look at how the quest for AI has developed over the past two decades inside our major universities and corporations.

 

If you dive into the details of AI and its history in the various news stories now appearing almost daily in the media, you will quickly find not only Dr. Li’s name and story, but also those of many of the other influential players with whom she has worked and who she names and describes in her book, who are now leading the industry and its ongoing research and development. 

 

Li’s most notable contribution to the field flowed from her decision as a young professor to try to build a huge database (called Image Net) holding digitized, labelled images of all the physical objects in our world. She succeeded, despite the seemingly overwhelming size of the project, and the discouragement of some older eminent scientists in the field, who saw it as both a hopeless and pointless undertaking. Her account of the process by which she led a small group of young scientists to overcome every obstacle in their way is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientists and engineers at work in our own era.

 

But her success in creating Image Net had unexpected consequences that accelerated the larger AI project. After sponsoring a contest to have other researchers use her database to train algorithms for computerized visual recognition of objects over several years, it suddenly turned out that neural networks – an AI architecture that had been tried in the past but had been in academic disfavor for several decades – proved to be massively more effective than more recent techniques, once it had been trained with a sufficiently large database.

 

From this major achievement, Dr. Li became one of the top experts in computer vision in the world. She was sought after as a scientist, researcher and teacher, and ended up moving from Princeton to Stanford, and then ultimately to a top position in AI at Google, where she found a very different culture than that of academia, with different priorities, and a far larger budget for her fast-growing research department.

    

At the same time she was leading this world-changing AI research, though, she was also living a human life we would all recognize. For example, her mother has suffered for many years with a chronic, life-threatening health condition, which led Dr. Li to think about new uses to which AI could and should be put in serving the needs of humanity.

 

As a result of her mother’s challenge to use her research to help others, she became involved in an effort to apply computer vision to problems of patient care in hospitals. But when she encountered unexpected resistance from those she thought she was helping (the nurses and medical staff), she was forced to begin considering more closely the negative side of the AI equation, and to think more deeply about the ethical and moral implications of her life’s work.

 

In the course of this life she recounts, she has also been a wife, a mother, a friend and mentor to many colleagues, and a loving daughter to both her parents, and she nicely weaves many of those important personal relationships and how they influenced her work into the larger story of her brilliant career.

 

So much of how we reached this technological moment, and what it portends for our futures, has taken place behind the closed doors of university laboratories and in corporate board rooms.  This outstanding and compassionate personal account by a leading scientist in AI explains how we got here, what it felt like to be one of the key contributors in such a dramatic process of human discovery and innovation, and also how both the perils and potential rewards of this technology have come into sharper focus at each step forward. Very highly recommended.