“Her” – the Magic Pixie Dream OS

December 30, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Random thoughts after seeing “Her” (which I highly recommend), a film about the relation between a man and his computer operating system (OS).  Here’s the trailer, which, as usual, gives a better feel for the film than any description I might write.

1.    Futuristic, but not by much.  The next day, the front page of the Sunday Times had this headline (above the fold).

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head. . . . artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. [the full story is here]

    Samantha the OS doesn’t manipulate and control – well, just a little, and it’s for Theodore’s benefit – but she does the rest. And much more.

2.    External and internal, doing and understanding..  “Her” is about the blurring of boundaries between the technological and the human.  But one of the many trailers that preceded “Her” in the theater where I saw it was for another film based on this same human/technology melding – “Robocop.”

But the technology here seems to be all about accomplishing some external task, mostly the crime-fighting that we usually associate with cops. Will the good guys’ technology beat the bad guys’ technology?  (I should probably add that I find “Action” movies tedious, full of sound and fury – also full of special effects and CGI – signifying very little. I’d gladly trade a dozen chase-fight-explosion sequences for one honest conversation among robocops sitting around eating robo-donuts.)

In “Her,” the characters face no external challenge. Instead, they are struggling to understand the feelings, desires, and reactions of someone else and how these mesh with their own.  It’s about relationships, not winning.  Action movies exaggerate the physical at the expense of everything else (an emphasis they share with porn). “Her” is about the near absence of the physical.  The one attempt to make the relationship physical is a disaster.*

3.    Ideal and effortless. Samantha (the OS, voiced by Scarlett Johansson) is the perfect soul mate.  Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) can expose his entire life to her – she scans his entire hard drive in the first microsecond of her existence – yet we know she will never use the information in any way that hurts him. She is like a child’s imaginary friend, but better. The child must think up the actions and reactions of the imaginary friend. Samantha requires no such effort on the part of Theodore. And everything she does helps him. Siri as girlfriend and therapist.

4.  MPDG.  As Super-Siri, Samantha resembles the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  This phrase, coined in a 2005 movie review  by Nathan Rabin, refers to “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”** At the start of the film, Theo certainly qualifies as brooding and withdrawn.  “I can’t even prioritize between video games and Internet porn,” he says to his neighbor (Amy Adams), who says that she’d laugh at that line if she didn’t think it were true. It is. And true to her type, Samantha brings Theo back into the world just as a MPDG should. They even go to Catalina on a double date (with a two-human couple).

5.    Control and surprise.  The wonderful thing about imaginary friends is that we have total control over them.  The same goes for servants or slaves or prostitutes or others we pay who must relate to us exactly as we want them to. (Of course, it’s more fun when we pretend that they are doing so voluntarily.) The more we control our environment, the more we give up the rewards and delights of the unexpected.  The difficulties of relationships with real people make the illusion of control all the more attractive.  But, as in “Lars and the Real Girl,” a relationship with the mere extrusion of one’s own fantasies may work for people whose emotional repertoire is severely limited, but ultimately it proves to be thin and brittle. Control certainly has its benefits.  But why do we find it so much more gratifying to hear a favorite song unexpectedly on the radio than to select the same track out of our own hard drive and play it? It’s more pleasurable when you let go of control. You can’t tickle yourself. 

Pandora and other make-your-own-radio-station sites try to let us have it both ways – control with surprise. “Her” holds out the same seductive possibility but with something more important than music – a meaningful personal relationship.

“Her” is a wonderful film. I’ll be surprised if Spike Jonze doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. It’s funny and touching and thought-provoking. 

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* In a post a few days ago, I referred to the outline of American culture by sociologist Robin Williams.  The first element he notes as a dominant theme in American culture is “Active Mastery.”  The second is that American culture

tends to be interested in the external world of things and events, of the palpable and immediate, rather than in the inner experience of meaning and affect. Its genius is manipulative rather than contemplative. 

Maybe that’s why “Her” seems so unusual while the multiplexes teem with action movies.

**Natalie Portman in “Garden State” epitomizes this trope. For other examples, see the Wikipedia entry.

Fall Courses – Marked Down and Priced to Sell

December 28, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every semester when I make out the schedule (we do this several months in advance – I just finished Fall 2014) I have the same worry – making sure that each course attracts enough students so that we don’t have to cancel. Since the university pays teachers per course not per student, it wants high student-teacher ratios. Low-enrolled courses are economically inefficient; they get the axe.

For students here, the timing of a course is crucial. Montclair is predominantly a commuter school, and even the students who live in the dorms like to go home on the weekend, which begins Thursday in the early afternoon.  Most students also have jobs; afternoon and evening hours are for work, not school. If only I could schedule all our courses Monday to Thursday between the hours of ten and two, the enrollment problem would be solved. 

But every department would like to offer all its courses in prime time, and there are only so many classrooms. So the university forces each department to schedule some of its courses in unpopular days and times. Departments, unfortunately, cannot force students to take those courses. 

The solution is obvious once you frame the problem as an imbalance of supply (classrooms/courses) and student demand. In prime time, demand outruns the supply; for other times, demand falls short.  What’s missing is the variable that links supply and demand: price.  Regardless of a course’s desirability, the price is the same.  What we need is flexible pricing.  Let the price of a course reflect the demand. If students want a great course at 11:30, let them pay for it.

Of course, you can’t say that you’re charging more for some courses. Instead, you raise tuition across the board, say $300 a course. Then you give a $300 discount for those early morning courses and late afternoon courses or for courses that have a meeting on Friday. With the hefty discount, those times would suddenly become much more attractive.

We might extend the policy to teachers. Some teachers are very popular. Their courses always fill.  But less popular teachers run the risk of not drawing the minimum enrollment.  Here too, differential pricing can help equalize student demand.  Oh, a few egos might be bruised (“You mean I’m being marked down?”*), but  enrollments would improve.  And for the really popular teachers, we could charge a premium. Like l’Oreal, they’re worth it. 

The trouble with variable pricing – aside from the basic unfairness of extending yet another advantage to those who have more money –  is that it exposes a reality we would rather not notice.  We like to think that what students are buying with their tuition is education, and it is – especially at elite schools.  But farther from the upper tiers of higher education, students also think of the academic enterprise as the buying and selling of credits, credits that ultimately add up to a diploma.**  In deciding to take a course, students consider the educational quotient, but they also calculate the costs. Right now those costs consist mostly of the opportunity costs (would it mean giving up hours at work, would it reduce the weekend from three days to two?) and perhaps the cost of the amount of work the course requires. For these students, price would merely be one more non-educational variable in the calculation.

But for those who pretend that the university is engaged solely in some ideal of education, variable pricing threatens to give the game away. As Goffman says, for staff in institutions, a large part of life is dealing with the gap between “what we do” and “what we say we do.” But university administrators are already adept at portraying administrative conveniences in terms of educational ideals. No doubt they could come up with a similar idealistic rationale for market pricing.

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* That line is spoken by wealthy but insufferable character played by Bette Middler in “Ruthless People.” She is being held for ransom. The kidnappers tell her that her husband (Danny DeVito, who is glad to be rid of her) refused their original demand of $500,000, though he could afford it. He also refused their second demand of $50,000.
“So we’re lowering our price to $10,000.”
“Do I understand this correctly? I'm being marked down?” she asks angrily. Then she starts crying.  “I've been kidnapped by K-Mart!”

** This orientation becomes especially visible in the summer, when students comparison shop for their courses based on cost, convenience, and utility (does the course meet a requirement) rather than content and quality.  See my earlier post here.

The Wars On Christmas

December 25, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

“Hey, Buddy, don’t you know there’s a war on?”*

I would guess that most of us were unaware of the war on Christmas raging all around us until Bill O’Reilly started reporting from the front. He has since been joined by seasoned war reporters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. I get the sense that they don’t really take themselves very seriously on this one – their war cries often sound like self-parody – and I guess that this attitude gives them license to say much that is silly and incorrect. Which they do.

Still, these Christian warriors may be right about the general decline of Christian hegemony in American culture. What’s curious is how that decline seems out of sync with the historical trend in the war on Christmas. In fact, it looks like there was a similar war on Christmas 60-70 years ago, a war that went unnoticed.

O’Reilly’s war has two important battlegrounds – legal challenges to government-sponsored religious displays, and people saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”  He sets the start of the current war in the early years of this century.

“Everything was swell up until about 10 years ago when creeping secularism and pressure from groups like the ACLU began attacking the Christmas holiday. They demanded the word Christmas be removed from advertising and public displays.”

Many people caved in to their demands, creating what O’Reilly has dubbed as the “Happy Holidays” syndrome.  [From Fox News Insider]

If pushed, O’Reilly might trace the origins of the war back further than that – to the 1960s.  That’s when the secularists and liberals started fighting their long war, at least according to the view from the right.  It was in the 1960s that liberals started winning victories and when the world as we knew it started falling apart. In the decades before that, we took it for granted that America was a White Christian nation. We all pulled together in World War II without questioning that dominance. And our national religion continued to hold sway in the peaceful and prosperous 1950s. We even added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. And of course, we all celebrated Christmas and said, “Merry Christmas,” no questions asked.

But then came drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll, protests against an American war, and “God is Dead” on the cover of Time. Worse yet, in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled that the establishment clause of the First Amendment meant that public schools (i.e., government-run schools) could not impose explicitly sectarian rituals on children. No Bible reading, no Christmas pageants.  

The trouble is that even if this history is accurate, it doesn’t have much to do with the War on Christmas, especially “the Happy Holidays syndrome.”  I checked these two phrases at Google Ngrams – a corpus of eight million books.**

The first big rise in “Happy Holidays” comes just after the end of World War II. 

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

From about 1946 to 1954, it increases sixfold. It goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in, and even in the supposedly secular 1960s, “Happy Holidays” rarely turned up (at least in the books scanned by Google).  The next rise does not begin until the late 1970s and continues through the Reagan and Clinton years. 

But just when O’Reilly says the War started, “Happy Holidays” starts to  decline.

And what about “Merry Christmas”?  According to the War reporters, the new secularism of the last ten years has been driving it underground.  But Ngrams tells a different story.

If there was a time when “Happy Holidays” was replacing “Merry Christmas,” it was in the Greatest Generation era of the 1940s. Since the late 1970s, when “Happy Holidays” was rising, so was “Merry Christmas.” Apparently, there was just a lot more seasonal spirit to go around. 

Perhaps the best way to see the relative presence of the two phrases is to look at the ratio of “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays.” 

In 1937, there were 260 of the religious greeting for every one of the secular.  In the 1940s the ratio plummeted; by the late 1950s it had fallen to about 40 to one.  In the Sixties, “Merry Christmas” makes a slight comeback, then declines again. 

By the turn of the century, the forces of “Merry Christmas” are ahead by a ratio of “only” about 18 to one.  Since then – i.e., during the period O’Reilly identifies as war time – the ratio has increased slightly in favor of “Merry Christmas.”

O’Reilly may be right that at least in public greetings – by store clerks, by public officials, and by television networks (even O’Reilly’s Fox) – the secular “Happy Holidays” is displacing the sectarian “Merry Christmas.”  But that still doesn’t explain a similar shift over a half-century ago, another war on Christmas that nobody seemed to notice.

And of course, MERRY CHRISTMAS to all SocioBlog readers.

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* The phrase is from the home front in World War II.

** It’s possible that trends of a phrase in books do not match up with the trend in spoken language.  There may be a corpus of spoken English that has historical capabilities similar to those of Ngrams and is similarly simple to use, but I don’t know of any.

The Wisdom of Crowds Finally Wins One

December 23, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

In several posts over the years, this blog has questioned the “wisdom of crowds,” at least when it comes to sports betting.  (This 2009 post has links to even earlier wisdom-of-crowds posts.) The Wisdom of Crowds says that when it comes to guessing – the weight of an ox, the location of lost ships, the right answer on “Millionaire,” the outcome of football games – you’re better off crowdsourcing than getting the advice of a single expert. None of us is as smart as all of us.*

In sports betting, if you want to know where the crowd is going, follow the money. And you can usually tell where the money is going by watching the point spread.  The spread is like a price – the greater the demand for a side, the more points you have to give up.  When the line moves – if a 4-point favorite becomes a 5-point favorite – chances are that bettors are demanding that side. 

Yesterday, the crowd cleaned up. In three games, so much money came in on the underdogs, that the bookies, in attempt to get action on the other side, made them the favorites.  On Saturday, the Dolphins were 3-point favorites over the Bills. Money kept coming in on the Bills. The books lowered the points Bills bettors were getting. By game time, if you wanted to bet the Bills, you’d have to give one or one-and-a-half points.

A change in the line of even of a half-point in the few hours before game time is often noteworthy; a change of a full point is significant.** A change of four points is extremely rare and indicates important action on the Bills.  As it turned out, the Bills won handily, 19-0. 

That was one of five games with large swings in the point spread. 

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The crowd was indeed wise this time around, winning four of the five.  The books took a bath. Yesterday was unusual in the number and magnitude of the changes.  Of course, over the course of the season, you could have made money by watching for crowdsourced line shifts and fading the public wisdom.

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* This line, popular in management circles, is usually attributed to a Japanese proverb.  That sourcing fits with notions about East-West differences. For Americans, with our strong value on individualism and our belief in lone entrepreneurial heroes, “none of us is as smart as all of us” is a dazzling revelation; for the Japanese it’s just common sense.

** Bookmakers are reluctant to move the line at all for fear of being “middled.”  Suppose a  bookie takes a lot of action on Team A getting 3½  points over Team B, so he lowers the line to 2½ to attract money on the favorite. Now bettors respond and bet Team B minus the 2½. If the final score is Team B 17, Team B 14, the point difference falls in the middle of the two lines, and the bookie loses both bets.  (This is an extreme case. More often the change is only a half-point, say from 7 to 7½, and the risk is not a middle but an “edge” – one bet is a push, the other a loss.