Sprezzatura

I received a review copy of Virginia Postrel's latest book, The Power of Glamour and read it in one sitting.  At first, I didn't know what to make of it.  But, over a matter of days, I found myself going back and rereading sections, Googling some of her references, and then cogitating about it some more.

Her central thesis is that glamour is a form of visual rhetoric and should be treated as a subject as worthy of deeper analysis as verbal rhetoric.  Then she gives a historical tour of glamour through the ages beginning with the origin of the word (a spell cast on onlookers).  The rest of the book analyzes glamour by enumerating and illustrating the elements necessary to cast that spell.

Glamour is a lie.  Glamour projects a feeling of ease that is completely antithetical to the difficulty or impossibility of what it depicts.  Yet, the strident tones of Jezebel taking down depictions of glamour don't move the discussion forward.

Glamour is a difficult subject to tackle and this book is several years overdue because of it.  The organization of this book looks like parts of it were shuffled and reshuffled.  I found some terms used .before. they were defined.  But, like any serious work of scholarship, the book includes an useful index containing all the unfamiliar terms.  The page where each term is defined is italicized for easy look up.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photos to illustrate the author's points.  I learned a lot more than I expected from the book and expect to read and reread it.

In the end, Postrel concludes that glamour can be a positive force if it compels us to take action toward a desirable goal.  That is, glamour photos of models and actresses starved to near death or photoshopped to change their proportions are bad if I take them literally and take up an extreme diet.  But, if they prod me to take a smaller piece of cake and to hit the gym more often, then they have produced a positive effect.  This book gives you the tools to decode glamour and use it positively in your own life.

The next time Iris says something that could have come straight out of Jezebel, I plan to give her this book so she can read a more thorough and balanced study of visual rhetoric.  I would be interested in further books on the subject from other viewpoints.

The book also introduced me to the word, sprezzatura, which I learned from Wikipedia means "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".

Of course, real life isn't like that. We have to practice, practice and practice some more before we can make anything look easy. By coincidence, Elizabeth Perry posted her TEDx talk about the importance of practicing things you are bad at the same week that I read Virginia Postrel's book. The talk and the book should be enjoyed in tandem and with your children.



At first, I was going to review the book and give it away to readers of this blog. But, after I read it, I decided to keep it and you will have to buy your own copy. I received no payment for this review other than the review copy.  BTW, Virginia's TEDx talk about glamour is old and does not reflect her current views on the subject and what she described in the book.

Genderbending and the real privacy problem

Blogger/Google rolled out some new statistical inference software and I was ROTFL when I saw these eye-popping statistics.  Judging by the comments and blogger meet-ups IRL, I thought this blog's readers were mainly women roughly my age working in STEM and a few men who either teach or work in STEM.

Either I am severely mistaken, or there is something wrong with Google's machine learning inference software.  You are either much younger, or young at heart.

And you are of ambiguous gender, too.  ;-)

The reason for this classification?  Because you spend time reading about technology.  And everyone knows that men, not women, read about technology, right?

On a more serious note, please take the time to read Evgeny Morozov's The Real Privacy Problem.  Here are a couple of juicy paragraphs to whet your appetite, but you should read the whole thing.

In case after case, Simitis argued, we stood to lose. Instead of getting more context for decisions, we would get less; instead of seeing the logic driving our bureaucratic systems and making that logic more accurate and less Kafkaesque, we would get more confusion because decision making was becoming automated and no one knew how exactly the algorithms worked. We would perceive a murkier picture of what makes our social institutions work; despite the promise of greater personalization and empowerment, the interactive systems would provide only an illusion of more participation. As a result, “interactive systems … suggest individual activity where in fact no more than stereotyped reactions occur.”

If you think Simitis was describing a future that never came to pass, consider a recent paper on the transparency of automated prediction systems by Tal Zarsky, one of the world’s leading experts on the politics and ethics of data mining. He notes that “data mining might point to individuals and events, indicating elevated risk, without telling us why they were selected.” As it happens, the degree of interpretability is one of the most consequential policy decisions to be made in designing data-mining systems. Zarsky sees vast implications for democracy here:

A non-interpretable process might follow from a data-mining analysis which is not explainable in human language. Here, the software makes its selection decisions based upon multiple variables (even thousands) … It would be difficult for the government to provide a detailed response when asked why an individual was singled out to receive differentiated treatment by an automated recommendation system. The most the government could say is that this is what the algorithm found based on previous cases.

Someone asked when I was going to post the backlog of sewing and knitting projects. Stay tuned, because I do have some stuff to share for our girly sides. But first, I want to take a statistical detour about how my local public middle school, a school that is above average on an absolute scale and compared to schools with similar demographics, was labeled a "failing" school by NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

We are in "Program Improvement" status for the second year in a row because of what Bad Dad calls a statistical fluke. Actually, it is not a fluke. It is an entirely predictable misclassification by a bad statistical algorithm. I would like the lawmakers who passed NCLB to take a statistics test and publicly post their scores on their congressional websites.  Would that be too much to ask for in the name of democracy?

Could someone come up with a blog badge for blogs of indeterminate gender?

Escape from the technology graveyard

Iris and her friend came up with an improvement on the original plan.

Note the eyes shaped like electronic on/off switches.  Go, little pumpkin, go!  Run like the wind!

Speaking of wind, Pennamite and I met for coffee before picking up our CSA produce for the week.  She sewed and crocheted her costume with materials almost entirely thrifted, much of it sourced from Trash for Teaching.

Rain, hail, graupel...

...and a rainbow.