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In surveying artists' maps at the recent symposium "Mapping and its Discontents," Katherine Harmon celebrated how "creative cartographies" oriented viewers to a narrative about place. If most of the presentations made viewers re-think the nature of map making as an art and science, Harmon's attention to how the art of mapping create narratives about place at the symposium sponsored by UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design suggest the inadequacy of separating "cartography" and "art" by examining the map as an art of orientation–by how maps invite viewers relate lived space to the space that they create. In a symposium that raised questions about the seductiveness of the ability of how better-defined datasets can make maps that better capture processes we want to describe, it was refreshing to shift focus to how cartographical arts register an individual relation to place. Indeed, if several papers in the symposium struggled over how to bridge map and narrative–do we need to depend less on maps? to be seduced less by its promises of truth?–each artist returns to the dialogic relation map instill between viewers by orienting viewers to their content in ways that pose questions about the lack of personal detail in an undifferentiated record of space.
In a sense, the survey of artists' maps on which Harmon organized and explored exposed the artistic values in which all cartographical practices are embedded. But they also pointed up the narrative ends to which cartographical forms were so particularly suited as joint representations and explorations of space. All maps engage their readers' appetite for knowing a place, and even revise it, by creating a relation–a "map"–between personal knowledge and the residue of collective knowledge distributed in the design of their surface. The narrative possibilities for registering personal knowledge of space are particularly inviting in such an ostensibly objective framework of geographical denotation: Harmon called attention to the particularly eloquent transformation or adaptation of how the framework of mapping offers both a compelling and legible text by the forms of "deep mapping" that technology now allows–and the expressive form for deeply personal narratives they offer even as they threaten to lose specific details in the very process of generalizing a record of a uniform space.
In an age where we are deluged by maps in all sectors of life, the tracing of these artistic strategies of mapping seems a recuperation of maps as orienting tools and arts of orientation, and this post surveys some of the maps that she presented, some known from other works, as serving to orient viewers in a practice of mapping that is often too removed or alienated from individual experience. For the ways that cartography can serve as a practice for engaging our different understandings of space in particularly inventive ways maps both feed cognitive by orienting viewers to place in revisionary (and potentially liberating) ways–by engaging viewers n how they uncover meanings about spaces one already thought one knew or believed to have been recorded in existing maps, by creating dialogue about spatial relations as much as to generalize a record of space.
Harmon's presentation showed less interest in how to tell stories in a map than in using mapping to register personal familiarity with place, by orienting viewers to the multiple personal networks in a mapped social space. The "creative cartographies" recuperate the artistic basis of mapping as arts of individual and collective orientation that exploited the structure of synthesizing spatial knowledge in a combination of ways. The narratives each cartographer creatively located in maps exploit the innate curiosity maps invite by orienting viewers. Harmon distinguished the narratives that several maps create; the "creative cartographers" all draw connections between the specificity of individual narratives plotted in maps and their structural designs. If the "discontents" of mapping lay in the anonymity of the maps of public space that were universalized for their readers in many digitized mapping projects and by government planning agencies from Rio di Janiero to Beijing to Ho Chi Minh city to Zagreb to the Google Earth platform, creative cartographers exploit the inventiveness invitations of maps place oneself in space by the power of making meaningful cartographical spaces by balancing them with a personal reading of place.
Harmon invited the symposium to follow how creative maps buck the conceit of large data samples to inscribe maps with the personal meaning from a particular perspective–and in so doing, turn the abstracted nature of cartographical practice on its head, reminding us how such "scientific" practices are embedded in a discourse on the arts. Indeed, as they engaged scientific practices of cartography, they adopted the tools of mapping in as tools to chart a distinctively individual relation to a known space, rather than a universalized one–or, rather, they novelistically use the format of map-making to universalize the particular situated perception of space that maps rarely include or note.
Harmon emphasized in her own visually stunning and compelling presentation the narrative content in these creative maps as setting into space individual stories about space that pointedly contrast with the de-personalized map and emphasized their own personal knowledge. She showed a set of creative cartographies that exist in a dialogic relation to our own knowledge of a place, moreover, and, more deeply, out knowledge of objective–as well as subjective–renderings of it, making creative maps particularly neat ways of opening up new perspectives on a space that fence in interesting ways with our own. Indeed, maps have a unique power to illuminate the relation between our story and our surroundings, as much as to tell stories of their own about how we understand place.
The cognitive webs of connections that maps both embody and render visible and concrete have the effect of never seeing ourselves as isolated. They rather allow us to map our place in a set of other stories and narratives about place, in ways that are deeply social as well as rooted individual cognition. And perhaps the most problematic subject of mapping such an individual narrative–or restoring its centrality–is in as frequently a re-mappped event as the September 11 tragedy, whose multiple mapping has accreted more meaning on the event–as if it needed this injection–to erase its personal narratives, and imposed meanings on the event that have almost obliterated our memories of its occurrence, and our relation to its immense tragedy.
It is interesting how she began from 9/11–an event that illustrated the tyranny of the map in the public imagination, and a touchstone for how a local event effectively mapped a geopolitical relationship to the world, albeit a quite distorting one. The event is not only ripe for re-mapping, but demanded a resourcefulness in using mapping forms to forge new networks of meaning in an over-rehearsed geographic conceit. The artist Karin Shneider effectively re-mapped our cognitive understanding of events of 9/11–and the cognitive space of the twin towers–that re-framed memory of their destruction and the death of their unfortunate occupants in plate-glass maps inscribed with the commuter routes those who were tragically killed had taken on that morning as they arrived at work. The sounds of breaking plate-glass were inseparable for many observers of the twin towers' collapse on September 11. In Shneider's commemorative map, individualized etched glass plates restore both the fragility of their lives, and the integrity of each life that overlapped that day, providing a commemorative cognitive map of the event that viewers to consider how the event tied these lives together so tragically, tracing the routes each took to remind us of the voyages each performed that day. The set of maps commemorate the deaths of some 2,752 individuals by distilling the circumstances of their spatial intersection, giving specificity to that over-photographed and documented event by emphasizing their now unrecoverable perspectives with the evocation of personal letters or diary entries, so unlike the opacity we usually identify with maps, inviting us to see through their commutes to remember the loss of individual life. The map of approaches to a final intersection replaces the all too familiar rendering of collision courses of two airplanes on September 11.
Shneider's composite of overlapping maps remind us of the very difficulty of recuperating individual narratives in such an over-narrated event–mapping the mess of lives that intersected fortuitously that morning, and which will no longer be with us. They reframe an event too often framed as a war on "terrorism," "clash of civilizations," or a sign of barbarity and civilization in distorting and exploitative ways, moreover, giving transparence to the very surface of the map. The absence of a one narrative that unites these paths is, indeed, a great part of the effectiveness of capturing such multiple individual itineraries within one map.
The decided lack of spatial narrative–but a snapshot summary of the lives that intersected on that day in early September–is evident in a quite different map that, oddly, interestingly emphasized the international origins of those who lost lives that day, perhaps in an attempt to remove its violence from a narrative of opposition, and disturbingly cast the loss of lives in terms of the quite different-order abstraction of individual nations:
That map's argument is disquieting because of how it erases individuality.
Mapping can be a clarification of such tragedy, however. The far more delicate set of superimposed plate-glass maps Harmon described stands in contrast to the anonymity of this map, or the very disembodied and abstracted map of the routes that these hijacked planes took, by inscribing their paths at a complete remove from individual lives. Indeed, even the inscription of names of those killed in the event at the site itself on a granite plaque, evocative of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, oddly strips them of individuality–unlike how the reflecting stone surface of the Vietnam War Memorial designed by Maya Lin invites viewers to touch individual names on its surface, as if to try to map abruptly curtailed lives.
The inscription of the names of the dead of 9/11, unlike Maya Lin's monument, offers no attempt to embody the event–or to express the multiplicity of narratives that that event so tragically condensed.
At another extreme of mapping the 9/11 tragedy lies the grotesque dis-humanized blood-flecked map, so sensationally printed by the New York Post, allegedly based on a map fire-fighters compiled of human remains, as a broadside intended to vilify plans to construct a mosque nearby the site–a map so shockingly dispersive in its energies that rather than embodying the 2,752 deaths it seems to chart, aggressively alarms its viewer with an explosion of meaning impossible to process save by recoiling in horror from its tabulation of human remains near the scene of impact:
For if the violently voyeuristic map seeks to dignify the site's sanctity by delineating the violent loss of life, its superfluity of meaning is something of a recapitulation of violence, attempting to shock the viewer as does the inset photography, by providing some access to the history of the event.
Scheider's creative cartography also stands in eloquent counterpoint to the abstract cartography of that emptiest of maps, of PATH commuter routes, which she adopts as something of a basis to trace a palimpsest of commutes:
The problem of how maps evoke or shift a familiar narrative motivates the inventive ways itineraries are combined with maps to upend their abstraction, or the spatial oppositions that they create and reify. Daniel Zeller recuperated the itinerary as a unit of spatial knowledge in imagined maps linking two sites of worship in two different religions by imagining their proximity, and almost delineating an imagined route of pilgrimage that might link their footprints. Zeller used his deep study of topographic maps and satellite imagery to forge an imagined spatial tie between the Vatican and Masjid al-Haram, the mosque at Mecca, as if to bridge ties between two sites removed from one another in such popular and political discourse alike, by connecting them as if on an individual footpath. By tracing the footprint of each in graphite, and imagining a windy route of pilgrimage that might actually connect them in "Vatican/al Haram," using the extreme precision to actively embody and create real spatial ties–
–with attentiveness to precision evident in this detail of the links he creatively mapped between both houses of worship.
Departing from digital simulations that often create information overload, Zeller's craft-like remapping places with the symbolic continuity that maps create to all too improbably link two sites so often separately segregated in the global imagination.
Bridging divides through a pathway that itself unites or crosses cultures is the theme of Asma Ahmed Shikoh's beautiful acrylic "Van Wyck Boulevard," part of her project "Home." Shikoh's art maps her status as a Pakistani artist trained in Karachi who moved to New York: "Home" brilliantly reclaimed the craft traditions of mapping, recasting the NYC subway map as an Urdu manuscript and within a geometrical design borrowed from the Islamic Al Hambra, in Spain, to reexamine its functional status, and its role as an icon of urban belonging at the same time as mapping a Muslim diaspora–precisely by casting the map of the path of the MTA's "F" line that took her to her first home in the city. Shikoh reconfigured the map in a painted form of distinct coloration, engaging its form as well as using language as a tool to assert my identity and make the new place my own." The widely reproduced and iconic subway map served as a template to assert and recreate the familiar embodiment of the subway lines as a constellation of meaning invested with a narrative intent that the location of stations on this diagram rarely possesses: only by "transliterating every stop, was painstaking, repetitive, and yet therapeutic for a newcomer" that traced a narrative through a process of remapping and making the city her own– using the subway map to transcend the increasing construction of a dichotomous divide between East and West, and re-center her identity (and immigrant identity) in the mobile paths of New York City's subways.
Cross-generational mobility was mapped through the shifting degrees of access or familiarity with space across generations in a map of the town of Sheffield, Harmon noted, when Dr. William Bird traced i the limits of known space created across generations living on an aerial view of the city that redefines the mapping of "city limits." The chart of the boundaries of a "known world" where children were entitled to walk unaccompanied in Sheffield provides a far more general (and very poignant) map of a demographic group's relation to space, investing the map with particular narrative and expressive properties beyond that of a spatial register.
"How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations" (2007) employs the format of aerial photography to map the ambits at which children were allowed to walk on their own in the same neighborhood in one family. The result of comparing the increasingly restricted spaces parents tolerated wondering illustrates and documents the daramatic contraction of the consderable freedom eight year old George Thomas enjoyed in 1926 in Sheffield. His parents, not able to afford the tram's fare, let him to walk six miles to fish on his own. The erosion of the English commons is a trope of the enclosures of the early nineteenth century, and the lack of urban exploration a more contemporary concern for city-dwellers who find their children less adventurous in making the out of doors their own. But the more recent specificity of Bird's roaming map shows the harrowing circumscription of space up to the present: George's great-grandson Edward, on a tether of some 300 yards, and with few liberties to roam at will unsupervised, possessed less of a spatial narrative of his relation to the far more industrialized region of Sheffield today, as his mother's was far diminished from that of his Grandfather Jack or the wide range of space George was trusted to personally navigate. The narrative of a restricting relation of the person to space in mapped by the narrowing boundary lines in Sheffield:
As much as describe the changes in Sheffield's geography and the story of its expanding industrialization, the map presents a strikingly local microhistory which echoes and encapsulates frequently expressed concerns about the lack of exploring a safe urban space.
It was made in the capacity as health officer to Natural England, to substantiate a concern for Bird's belief in the benefits access to grassy areas, ponds, and trees brought to kid's behavior and school work, and question the healthiness of the narrowing relations of space from George, his son Jack, his daughter Vicki and the eight-year-old Ed. The creativity of these practices of cartography bucks basing maps on their synthesis of a large data sample, by questioning how maps can be creatively rooted in a narrative of individual experience, even in ways that preserve their value as a collective register of the experience of space–and how a Google Maps template might be distinctly personalized as a record of spatial knowledge.
Discontents with Google Earth maps lie precisely in the deeply problematic recuperation of a cartographical art that they perpetuate for their users. And so Jeff Sisson focussed on the spatial meanings and consequences of the threatened disappearance of the Bodega as an institution and anchor to urban communities in New York by crafting an interactive Bodega Map within the city's expanse. In charting the survival of a store central to communities across different neighborhoods, the map almost anticipated the recent turn against Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York that the recent De Blasio victory seems to portend. In tracing the footprint of the institution of the Bodega, Sisson selects stores pressed out of existence in the absence of rent control for shops in the city's expansive real estate market, and provide evidence of a vanishing urban culture of diversity.
Sisson's website invites all visitors to place Bodegas in local neighborhoods to elevate the individual discovery of a community store, in an exercise of collective crowd-sourced participatory mapping that displaces the archipelagic city's usual contour lines by rather trying to map the local meanings of these distinctive and useful stores within local communities, in ways that invite one to insert one's narrative connection to the colorful local Bodega so long an urban fixture situated at odd street-corners, combining such mapping resources as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Flickr snapshots of facades and marquees of individual family run stores.
The project "Mapping Bodegas" tracks processes of micro-urbanism, by marking sites of interaction and stages to which communities respond, to reflects on the danger of their erasure from the city's map and its neighborhoods, as well as to preserve meaningful "hot-spots" of collective memory within outlines of the specific neighborhoods they nourished. This infusion of narrative content is, to be sure, one reaction or response to the universalized abstraction of an anodynely marked places of interest in the space of Google maps, with something approaching a zero-degree of the denotative signs of registering affect or place. It is in reaction to this lack of narrative that Adam Bartholl staged his public sculpture "Map," creatively appropriated the blandly uniform "inverted tears" of a Google map push pins by placing these physical objects in the very center of Arles–on the hexadecimal longitude and latitude GoogleEarth uses to denote Arles.
The discontent with the abstraction of our knowledge of place in Google Earth led Adam Bartholl to remind us of the increased distance between iconic cartographical markers Google employs so blithely in its tiles and knowledge of places they denote. By the co-option or appropriation of the sign of place in geolocation practices in the public square of Arles, Harmon argued, Bartholl reminded us how the marker shapes (and fails to capture) our sense of place, as we use it to make our narratives of travel: by placing a larger than life physical embodiment of such a dayglo pushpin in the exact center of Arles' public square on the altitude and longitude where it occurs in Google Earth, Bartholl asked us to confront a physical embodiment of a sign we too often internalize without interrogating its affectless muteness as a sign as itself a denaturing of place.
Arles? It happened right here . . .
On a more political level of the silences concealed in many maps, and the environmental consequences of these silences, Harmon turned to the failures of mapping ecological disasters of Bonga oil spill and transformation of the Niger delta. What are the limits of Google maps in tracking the multiple levels of ecological disaster within the Delta, seat to a preserve of some 600 million barrels of recoverable oil mapped in 2001, but whose mapping silenced the complex narrative of regional toxic pollution that has spun out around those platforms and oil rigs.
The delta, an oil-rich area long plagued by irresponsible levels of annual oil spillage greater than in the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, is a site of widespread flares on rigs, and, as a very poor area where oil was found close to the surface, of dirty DIY oil refining and extraction have created deep-set ecological disasters through the Delta–over 7,000 spills from 1970 to 2000, some spewing at least 9 million barrels of crude into wetlands that sustain millions of local trades from fishing to agriculture, and where consistently poor clean-up of spills have eroded increasingly fragile local communities and economies in an image that, viewed from space, appears both ecologically fragile and remarkably pristine.
How to map the devastating ravages to the local environment, whose production the Nigerian government is economically dependent, is particularly problematic since the oil-rich delta is the source of 90% of the country's foreign earnings. Regular under-reporting of spills by NOSDRA–the Nigerian Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency–to keep in line with corporate claims led to a failure to register the escape of up to 60,000 barrels of oil in 2011 from one Floating Production Storage and Offloading Facility at the Niger delta's mouth by Shell oil (Nigeria's major client) in Bonga, or 1979 spill of 570,000 barrels of crude, also by Royal Shell–eroding the environment all up the Delta, by the devastating toxic effects of acid rain that are only starting to be mapped–from the ruin of coastal livelihoods and fisheries to deadening formerly plentiful fields of kola nuts.
How to map or embody the narrative of the destruction of an ecosystem? This time-lapse map seems as disembodied as Vassily Kandinsky's "Einige Krise," but charted decade-long oil flares in surrounding coastal waters spewing crude into the air, in color-coded fashion since the expansion of oil drilling in the Deepwater Bonga project since 1993–blue from 1995; green 2000; red 2006–as the outlines of an ecological disaster since deepwater drilling began–and whose mapping almost defies narrative:
If the agglomeration of colored dots in this time-lapse map suggests pattern, the distribution mirrors the division of the Delta and surrounding waters by prospecting leases for locally administered oil fields since 1993, but only starts to map the disastrous consequences for the environment of this massive release of crude into the ecosystem and its local economy:
While the slick produced at Deepwater was not at first mapped, it occurred on a 2011 Google Earth view charting oil slick on the ocean's surface:
This map provided one of the few media sources documenting the Bonga spill not provided by Royal Shell Oil itself. Indeed, it only starts to track the implications of the spills, fires, and leaks in the Delta that constitute the largest wetlands in all Africa rich with swamps, estuaries, rivers and streams, and can only suggest the extent to which forests and mangroves are being polluted by spills from a network of pipelines, acid rain, and water-borne or rain-borne oil slick–rain regularly returns drops of crude oil to formerly fertile region–where oil is relatively close to the surface has led to a distortion of the environmental perils of oil extraction–and over one thousand abandoned oil spill sites in the over-drilled Delta, with huge environmental consequences–often blamed on the ships that regularly illegally siphon crude from the pipelines that criss-cross the delta.
Google Earth views used by Sky Truth to map the 2011 Shell Deepwater spill barely chart the environmental devastation on the Delta rivers. The map that almost leaves one speechless in how the beauty of its sinuous detail chart the slicks of oil that have contaminated a once-healthy delta's agricultural wealth; this NOAA aerial photography created by the United States Navy rebut the oil multinational's silence as to the spill's scope or devastating consequences, whose silences have only recently been targets of international blame, and obscured some 474 spills in one area during 2012 alone. Perhaps the recent expansion of Nigerian crowd-sourced mapping projects may shift these cartographical silences, but the burden for mapping the disaster has not been met.
The narratives that these aerial image of considerable beauty recover present a counter-narrative to that of the corporations that distanced themselves from the Bonga spill, and perhaps a case of maps speaking truth to authority. These maps begin to tell a story of the transformation of the land–and the destruction of the environment they map. These maps foreground new narratives about the Google Earth format that invite a broader story to be told about the event, and to fill the silence of Shell's official narrative about the quantity or causes for the massive spill–and the blanket denial that any of the oil ever reached the coastline, and all barrels were successfully dispersed in the ocean waters, and seek "unconditional license to contain and disperse the Bonga oil spill" itself. Without these Google maps, Shell Oil would have retained a monopoly about the production of truth about the devastating Bonga spill.
Can a narrative emerge of this event from the perspective of those who dwell in the Delta, to capture the consequences of the toxic transformation of the land they live and work in, or those for its non-human inhabitants?
Some semantic possibilities of expanding the ecological narrative of place were suggested in the tracking of growth of Chesapeake Bay grasses, in a mapping project using data to track changes in the growth and density of grasses around the largest estuary in the United States particularly illustrative of the subtleties of overlaps to achieve the sort of deep mapping that Google Earth would not allow. The Stamen interactive map frames a unique narrative of the restoration of the estuary ecosystem incorporating data from over forty years across some forty years, redirecting data to create an image of where the estuary might later develop: the time-sensitive visualization of data about salinity, water-temperature and bathymetry with the restorations of bay grasses who are the subject of this narrative of ecological restoration, to offer a powerful–and positive–interactive map about the local recuperation of environmental health, by synthesizing a wide range of data from the EPA officials and local institutions about an area to reverse effects of chemical pollutants on wildlife and grasslands that viewers can read or virtually explore as unfolding over time, in ways that press against the technological boundaries of cartography as an art.
If this graphic visualization of the watershed appears a document only of the growth of grasses, as we unpack the map we realize the expanse of the effects of the possibly narratives of human interventions in the landscape that it presents–both on the ecosystem of the estuary and to possibilities of our future relation to that very dynamic environmental space–a space we better know through our more multi-leveled representations of it.
The art of registering knowledge of place has expanded to comprehend new personal individual narratives of fine grain by a GPS revision of the Google Map view of a city. Indeed, the maps of Christian Nolde and Ingrid Burrington both seek to recuperate the density of specific narratives of encounters in urban space that echo and engage the emerging forms of mapping by which Google seeks to plot points of interest for its users on the maps of cities that they visit, so that they might include selected points of interest, sites of beauty to visit, or local stores and commercial districts of interest judging by one's web history. Both Nolde and Burrington used GPS to create a synthesis of these individualized maps of the city in ways that anticipated the announcement of Google's plans.
Christian Nolde employed GPS technologies to register of feelings related to place in his emotional map of San Francisco (2007), created during a tenure at Northern Exposure. After collecting on data gathered by a galvanic skin response by which participants' physiological responses, he keyed them to places that he transposed to a GPS map of the city's locations, as if to trace itineraries in a city usually mapped by city blocks or along district lines. The maps seeks to register responses to a location or geographic environment on individual emotions, in a sort of counter-map synthesized individual responses into something like an encounter with places of specific individual resonance in the city, in a record "visualizing the emotional space of the city" by objectively tracing an alternate topography in 2007.
This map has a texture of accommodating the individual storyline or narrative that makes its reading an active part of its enjoyment, by engaging individual storylines in a dazzling if fragmentary novelistic detail, challenging the legibility of the map's surface of significant local depth for readers who can take the time to delve into the map to read the actions that its maker associated with a specific place, but which would be 'overlooked' by scanning the broader path of his itineraries across the city:
GPS was used, in other words, to contextualize multiple narrative fragments in a composite view of the emotional significance of urban space by tracing if a residue of collective emotions on its surface. The completed artifact combines multiple spaces of reading, augmenting the notions of position that he noted in GPS at specific way stations by his own transient or apparently ephemeral personal reaction to the city at a specific place–"beautiful street with lovely houses"; "went into my house and got my mail"; "This is where I had the bike accident"; "i was remembering a person I had a major relationship with whose parents lived here"–that foreground the personal in ways GPS cannot alone register.
The practice of GPS creates a synthesis of discrete meanings rarely associated with geospatial mapping, and puts a premium on emotional or associative precision, as much as the abstraction of terrestrial locations. A similar desire to base a map on personal narratives to record the city as an emotive space led Ingrid Burrington to take data from Craig's List "missed connections" as the data to reveal a hidden distribution of the desire for half-glimpsed connections in her "Loneliness Map" (2009-11), included in an earlier exhibit of personal maps Harmon earlier curated.
The map's unique pinpoint form focusses observers' attention on mini-moments of "missed connections" in the course of the day against a map of physical topography and street intersections, as if to present the variations among missed connections as an emotional terrain or urban psychogeography, creating a new sense of reading mapped data to register a notion first used by situationists such as Guy Debord.
Such collected 'mini-moments' trump the topography of the city, tracking personal attachment to selective moments in urban space as more meaningful than the mapping of the outlines of its streets that create a new experience of reading the map's surface. They recall the Mappiness (LSE) smartphone app, which disrupts the relative abstraction of space in a GPS framework by registering our own states of happiness on a map.
The map becomes a site to register individual travels through the city in a collective document, or a capacious holder of narratives, as tangible with resonance as any map might ever be. And the very tangibility of this record of encounter that maps allow, even with limited qualitative content, suggest the underlying basis of cartography as an art.


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Playlist: The Monolith Cocktail Social #27
February 10, 2017
Compiled by Dominic Valvona
Continuing in 2017 with the first of, we hope, many Monolith Cocktail Socials, Dominic Valvona presents another eclectic playlist. In case you don't know the drill, previously only ever shared via our Facebook profile and on Spotify, our regular Monolith Cocktail Social playlists will also be posted here on the blog itself. With no themes or demarcated reasoning we pick songs from across a wide spectrum of genres, and from all eras. #27 includes thoughtful post-country evocations from Bruce Langhorne; southern-drawled, Steppenwolf-esque, roadtrip musings from Circuit Rider; a rebooted live version (with friends) of I Have Known Love by Silver Apples; diaphanous soulful rays of Africa from post-punk outfit Family Fodder; a Malian jazz odyssey from Le Mystere Jazz de Tombouctou; desert rock yearnings from Mdou Moctar; exquisite balladry from Drakkar Nowhere; the sweetest of soul takes from the felonious The Edge Of Daybreak; and 23 other equally evocative, stirring, foot-shuffling and sublime tracks from across the decades.
Bruce Langhorne 'Opening'
Circuit Rider 'Forever Angels Proud'
Trance Farmers 'She's Made Of Rainbows'
Mistress Mary 'Dance Little Girl'
Elyse Weinberg 'Your Place Or Mine'
Sensations Fix 'Grow On You'
Silver Apples 'I Have Known Love'
Family Fodder/Vic Corringham 'Walls Of Ice'
Diane Coffee 'Never Lonely'
Black Peaches 'Chops On Tchoupitoulas'
Le Mystère Jazz de Tombouctou 'Leli'
Khiyo 'Amar Protibaader Bhasha'
T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo 'Finlin Ho'
Mdou Moctar 'Iblis Amghar'
Black Hippies 'Love'
The Beach Boys 'Here She Comes'
Dr. Lonnie Smith/George Benson/Ron Carter/Joe Lovano 'Apex'
Mongo Santamaria 'In The Mood'
Volta Jazz 'Air Volta'
The Frightnrs 'Trouble In Here'
The Olympians 'Sirens Of Jupiter'
King Tubby 'King Tubby's Special'
SOMA 'Deepa'
Moloch 'Dance Chaney Dance'
Takeshi Terauchi (Blue Jeans) 'Tsugaru Jongarabushi'
Los York's 'Facil Baby'
The Critters 'Blow My Mind'
Pierre Cavalli 'Cacador'
The Edge Of Daybreak 'Your Destiny'
Roy Wood 'Songs Of Praise'
Drakkar Nowhere 'Any Way'

subset: commoncrawl


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Sox bounce back
BOSTON — Big Papi almost looks as if he never missed all that time.
He had two hits and drove in a run , Stephen Drew hit a two-run triple, and the Boston Red Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 6-5 on Wednesday afternoon to take a three-game series.
"When you consider eight months down and I don't know how many at-bats he's had, 15 or so and you consider the number of hits he's compiled, it is impressive," Red Sox manager John Farrell said. "He's got such good plate coverage. Against lefties he goes the other way for a double and hits one through the hole.
"He's pretty amazing to watch and he's run the bases well. There's no issues as far as his intensity as well — as he's run with. He's really given us a lift in the middle of the order."
It was Boston's ninth win in 12 games and came after a 13-0 loss to Oakland a night earlier.
Ortiz is 8 for 16 since returning to the lineup on Saturday for the first time since last August. He missed 71 of the final 72 games last season and all of spring training's with an Achilles tendon injury.
But he doesn't feel that well yet.
"I'm not really concerned with getting injured," he said. "But there's still some concern because I'm not 100 percent yet."
Ortiz has multiple hits in three of his four games.
Chris Young had a three-run homer and a solo shot for the Athletics, who finished a six-game road trip 1-5. They were swept at the Tampa Bay Rays over the weekend.
Jon Lester (4-0) got the win despite walking a season-high six and lasting just 5ª innings. He allowed three runs on six hits, striking out five and walking two more than he had in his previous four starts.
Oakland was hurt by another rough start by Brett Anderson.
Anderson (1-4) was hit hard for the third straight start, giving up six runs on eight hits in four-plus innings. In the last three, he's been tagged for 17 runs in 10ª innings.
"It just seems like he's out of sync at times," manager Bob Melvin said.
Anderson just feels like he needs to do anything to change his luck.
"I've just got to go out there and maybe help a grandma cross a street or burn my locker or something like that," he said, "and get some better mojo going, because I'm a better pitcher than that."
Andrew Bailey struck out all three batters in the ninth for his fifth save. It was Lester's 89th career win, matching Babe Ruth for fifth in club history by left-handers.
The Red Sox broke a 3-all tie and chased Anderson with a three-run fifth. Jacoby Ellsbury opened the inning with an infield hit and scored on Shane Victorino's double. Dustin Pedroia reached on an infield hit and Ortiz followed with an RBI single. Chris Resop relieved and hit Mike Napoli with the first pitch before Daniel Nava had a pinch-hit single. After Will Middlebrooks flied out, Jerry Blevins entered and retired the final two batters, leaving the bases loaded. Lester was pulled with the bases loaded and in the sixth, but Junichi Tazawa got Coco Crisp to fly out.
Josh Donaldson's RBI single made it 6-4 and Young's second homer cut it to one in the eighth. The Athletics went ahead with three runs against Lester in the fourth on Young's homer that caromed off a billboard above the Green Monster seats, but Boston tied it with three in the bottom of the inning.
Ortiz, back in the lineup after getting Tuesday off, doubled leading off and scored on Napoli's double. Jonny Gomes walked and, one out later, Drew tripled into the right-field corner.
NOTES: The Red Sox optioned right-hander Alfredo Aceves to Triple-A Pawtucket. Boston made the move following Wednesday's game and one day after Aceves had a dismal outing in a 13-0 loss to the Athletics. Aceves allowed eight runs, seven earned, and seven hits in 3¤ innings. He walked four and committed a pair of balks before he was pulled. Aceves also made a throwing error after failing to cover first in time as the A's capitalized on Boston's blunders while the conditions deteriorated in a steady, blowing rain.
Houston Astros (Humber 0-4) at Red Sox (Buchholz 4-0), 6:35 p.m., NESN, WEEI Cape Cod (96.3), WEEI (850).


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California is known by many as the land of beautiful celebrities, packed freeways, and perpetual summer.
But the nation's third-largest state also has a huge variety of people with very distinct ways of speaking, from valley girl speak to surfer lingo to slang inspired by Bay Area hip hop.
The people of the Golden State speak a dialect distinct enough to warrant its own name: California English.
Inspired by Business Insider's recent roundups of expressions from the South, Midwest, and New England, we've come up with 12 sayings that only people who hail from the Golden State will understand.
1. "There's a Sigalert for the carpool lane on the 5 south."
Freeways are a huge part of Californians' daily existence, so of course there are plenty of slang terms associated with it. Californians may be the only people in the country to put "the" before the number of a freeway route (and they're never called highways), and the only people to call it the carpool lane instead of the HOV.
And if there's a Sigalert, take it as a hint to avoid the area completely. Sigalerts are messages issued by the California Highway Patrol when there's an accident or anything else blocking multiple lanes of traffic, meaning that notorious California traffic is even more horrendous than usual (see also: Carmageddon).
2. "It takes 20 minutes, depending on traffic."
People from California say this all the time to describe their location, and it's barely ever true. 30 minutes just sounds way too far, and 15 minutes is unrealistic.
We all know that 20 minutes away really means something closer to 40, and that light traffic is never something you can depend on.
3. "June Gloom."
Beginning in June (or even at the end of May if it's a particularly unlucky year), a wave of foggy weather invades coastal areas of California and ruins everyone's beach plans. June Gloom/Grey May/No-Sky July are southern Californian terms used to describe a weather pattern that brings low-lying clouds and mist during the early summer months.
Though people from out of town will try to convince you it's just air pollution, the fog that appears every morning usually clears up by mid-afternoon or so.
4. "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."
This San Francisco cliche is usually attributed to Mark Twain, though there's no evidence he ever actually said it. Contrary to what pop culture may have you have believe, summer in the Bay Area is pretty cold, and fog is a nearly constant presence.
The fog may be a nuisance to visitors touring the Bay Area, but San Franciscans embrace the fog as an essential part of what makes their city home.
5. "It's pretty gnarly out, bro. It's double overhead today!"
Surfer culture has had a huge influence on the way Californians speak. You may hear surfers, skaters, and snowboarders talking about "shredding the gnar," but even those who refrain from participating in extreme sports tend to use the word "gnarly" to describe things that are either extremely good or extremely bad.
You'll also hear words like "epic," and of course, "dude." Waves that are "double overhead" are not meant for the faint of heart.
6. "I'm stoked."
Though Merriam-Webster defines "stoke" as "to stir or add fuel to (something that is burning)" this expression has absolutely nothing to do with building a fire, at least in a literal sense. Californians are stoked when they're totally, completely exhilarated about something, whether it's a trip to the mountains or a huge swell coming just in time for the weekend.
Now a commonly used word in many regions, "stoked" became popular with "The Endless Summer," a classic surfing movie documentary by Bruce Brown in 1966.
7. "Hella."
Perhaps one of the most distinctive and divisive words on this list, the use of the word "hella" is an immediate indication that the speaker is from northern California. Derived from "hell of a" or "hell of a lot," the word is generally used in place of "really," "a lot," or "very."
Don't get caught using this word in the southern part of the state, however. You'll only hear people from the Bay Area say this, while people from elsewhere in California will probably find the term annoying.
8. "The industry."
Vague references to "the industry" might be a little confusing to people not from southern California. When someone says their husband works in "the industry," they don't mean he's an industrial worker, though he may belong to a different kind of labor union. Actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, art directors, film editors, and talent agents are just a few people who make up the huge entity that is "the industry."
Show business is so prominent, especially in Los Angeles, that Californians should automatically get the reference.
9. "This burger is bomb."
We've all heard people refer to things as "the bomb" since the late '90s. Californians often put their own spin on this outdated expression by taking out "the."
It's usually food items that are referred to as "bomb," though theoretically anything awesome could be referred to in this way.
10. "I'll take a number 2, animal style."
Californians are deeply proud of their In N' Out, a fast food burger chain that comes with its own jargon and a secret menu not advertised in stores. A burger served "animal style" has mustard fried into the patty and comes with extra spread and grilled onions.
You can also order your fries animal style, or if you're especially hungry, try a 3x3 burger, which comes with three beef patties, or even a 4x4.
11. "This burrito is dank."
"Dank" is a prime example of a term whose meaning has changed from negative to positive thanks to slang usage. Though Merriam-Webster defines it as meaning "wet and cold in a way that is unpleasant," as in a dank basement, the word was adopted by stoner culture to describe high-quality marijuana.
The word has since evolved to describe anything that is especially good, like an exceptionally tasty burrito.
12. Whatever you do, definitely don't say "Cali."
It seems that the only people who don't refer to California as "Cali" are the Golden State natives themselves. You will very, very rarely hear a Californian call their home state by this name, despite the fact that people from everywhere else love to call it that.
If you want to blend in, try not to use this shudder-inducing word in the presence of California natives.
Now Watch: People Can't Figure Out What This New England Saying About Kittens Means


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Advisors Shouldn't Exclusively Rely On Active Funds
FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisors.
Why Advisors Shouldn't Exclusively Use Active Funds (Vanguard)
Advisors that use active funds exclusively risk losing clients in volatile markets, according to Vanguard white paper that argues for combining active and practice strategies. And this risk can't really be offset by client referrals that come through when times are good. "That is, although the upside of outperformance may be a marginally greater share of wallet or referrals, underperformance can lead to a client's questioning of the strategy or withdrawing of assets—plus nonexistent referrals."
"Indexing can help alleviate this asymmetry by truncating the risk of unwise investor behavior and negative feedback loops for the advisor's practice. Moreover, adding a slice of passively managed funds or ETFs can help free up resources typically spent on manager research and oversight. These resources can then be redirected toward improving relationships with existing clients or attracting new clients." Vanguard is of course known for championing index funds — funds that are created to replicate an index.
Morgan Stanley Advisors Depart For Wells And Raymond James (The Wall Street Journal)
Stephen Besse has joined Raymond James from Morgan Stanley, with about $360 million in client assets and $1.35 million in annual fees and commissions. Meanwhile, a team of brokers that managed over $236 million in client assets departed Morgan Stanley Wealth Management for Wells Fargo Advisors.
Here's The Best Indicator Of The Start Of Bear Markets (LPL Financial)
While we've seen stock market volatility this year and can expect more, LPL Financial's Jeff Kleintop thinks a 2014 bear market is very unlikely. "A key basis for our high degree of confidence in this forecast is an indicator with a flawless track record over the past 50 years: the yield curve," he writes. While many are worried that the Fed will begin its rate hikes next year, Kleintop thinks "bull markets end and bear markets begin, as they did in 2000 and 2007, when the Fed pushes short-term rates above long-term rates. This is referred to as 'inverting the yield curve.'"
"Why does an inverted yield curve signal a major peak for the stock market? Because every recession over the past 50 years was preceded by the Fed hiking rates enough to invert the yield curve. That is seven out of seven times—a perfect forecasting track record. The yield curve inversion usually takes place about 12 months before the start of the recession, but the lead time ranges from about five to 16 months. The peak in the stock market comes around the time of the yield curve inversion, ahead of the recession and accompanying downturn in corporate profits."
Compliance Concerns Is Prompting Firms To Cut Their International Business (The Wall Street Journal)
Barclays' U.S. based financial advisors won't be able to service clients in Latin America in the second quarter of this year. Barclays is also curbing its international business, though it isn't the only one to do so. "There's been a big uptick in firms that have been restricting activities of these foreign accounts," Brian Hamburger, founder and CEO of MarketCounsel told Corrie Driebusch at the WSJ. These firms "are taking a much more conservative position than they ever have before." While firms aren't outright saying it, compliance is expected to be the biggest cause, and this has left many advisors with an international clientele scrambling.
More Assets Don't Make For More Diversification (Richard Bernstein Advisors)
Investors are focused on protecting against the downside risk in equities but "continue to confuse the number of asset classes with diversification," writes Richard Bernstein at Richard Bernstein Advisors. "Diversification isn't based on the number of asset classes, it's based on the correlation of returns among the asset classes."
The chart below shows that 1. "Very few asset classes have exhibited true downside protection." 2. "Only one asset class, long-term treasuries had negative correlation to stocks, i.e., negative upside and downside capture ratios;" 3. "Although we don't find gold attractive within the current market environment, gold was a reasonable diversifier over the past ten years;" 4. "Hedge funds are not a panacea. Note that hedge funds have historically offered about 70% of both the upside AND the downside;" 5. "Cash is generally a worthwhile diversifier. It exhibited minimal upside, but slightly negative downside."
See Also:
- 7 Ways To Get People To Take You Seriously
- Jay Z And Beyonce Show Up To Nets Game As Family-Drama Headlines Go Wild Online
- Donald Sterling Criticizes Black People, Rips Magic Johnson For Having HIV In Train-Wreck CNN Interview
- Did You Notice These 15 Companies Changed Their Logos This Year?
- The Huge Comma Mistake That Even Educated People Make


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The good news is I'm sticking to my New Year's resolution to alternate my fiction reading between women and men writers; the bad news is that since I finished my reading for the Hugo – and what a pointless exercise that proved to be! – since then my reading's been a bit all over the place.
Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, Paul Park (2013) With a title like that, I'd expected this to be literary fantasy, something Park does really well. It actually proved to be meta-fictional literary science fiction – something Park does even better. Park looks back over the history of his family – the title refers to a painting by his relative, which may or may not depict a UFO visitation – trying to draw links between some of the stranger people in his family tree, and various strange events which may or may not have had anything to do with them. It's impossible to tell what is fact and what is fiction – Park mentions his A Princess of Roumania, for example, among many other details which feel autobiographical. The introduction by John Crowley and the afterword by Elizabeth Hand play into the same conceit. Of course, I bought the signed, limited edition… but a note on the limitation page says the signatures were "culled from other sources". Huh? They're not real signatures? Or is that another meta-fictional joke? Anyway, highly recommended.
The Astronaut Wives Club, Lily Koppel (2013) Read for research for Apollo Quartet 4 All That Outer Space Allows. This is the only book published to date on the wives of the early astronauts, although Life Magazine did run a series of articles on each of the Mercury 7 wives back in the 1960s. There is also, as far as I'm aware, only one autobiography by the wife on an astronaut – The Moon is Not Enough (1978) by Mary Irwin, wife of Apollo 15's James B Irwin (yes, I have a copy). Having said that, several of the wives wrote or co-wrote their husbands' biographies, such as Rocketman by Nancy Conrad (2005), Moonwalker by Charlie and Dotty Duke (1990) and Starfall by Betty Grissom (1974). The wives of the Apollo 11 astronauts also appear in First on the Moon (1970), the first book about the mission (see here). Koppel's book is not especially insightful, and often borders on the banal, but I spotted no obvious inaccuracies, and it at least gives a more human portrayal of the astronauts than their own books do – but that's hardly surprising, given they all had egos as big as the Moon. As far as the Apollo Quartet is concerned, The Astronaut Wives Club will be treated much like Wikipedia – a good place to start, but I'm going to have to look further afield if I want to dig deeper. All the same, it was worth reading, and I hope it's merely the first book on a group of people who need to be written about more.
V is for Vengeance, Sue Grafton (2011) I've always much preferred crime novels which feature female protagonists, and my two favourite women PIs have always been VI Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone. I used to like Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books until I realised the plot of every one was exactly the same. But, Kinsey Millhone… In this one, a gangster is trying to turn legit, a process that accelerates after he meets the bored wife of a Hollywood lawyer (who has discovered her husband is having an affair with his secretary). Meanwhile, the gangster's not-so-smart brother is causing irruptions by behaving like, well, a gangster. Millhone gets dragged into it all when she witnesses a shoplifter in action and reports her to store security, said shoplifter being part of a state-wide operation run by the aforementioned gangster. The Millhone books are framed as reports given by Millhone to her client, although the narrative is presented as your typical crime novel – including sections not in Millhone's POV… which sort of spoils the framing conceit. But never mind. I liked this entry in the series much more than the preceding few. Dante, the gangster trying to go straight, was sympathetic; I liked the narrative of Nora, the lawyer's wife; and the various subplots came together pleasingly at the end.
Better to Have Loved, Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary (2002) Also read for research for Apollo Quartet 4 All That Outer Space Allows. This is sort of Merril's autobiography – it was compiled by Pohl-Weary from an aborted attempt by Merril to write an autobiography, her letters to various well-known sf names, and the introductions to some of her books (her collections and the anthologies she edited). Merril started out in the Futurians, an influential New-York-based group of fans in the 1940s, writing pulp fiction for hire, chiefly crime and westerns. They weren't a very pleasant bunch in those days – at one point, they reformed the Futurians specifically to exclude one person they felt wasn't much fun – but they were very close-knit, often kipping over for months at a time at friends' houses. Merril was certainly outspoken, and these days she'd probably be described as "poly" – neither of which in those days endeared her much to her fellow fans and writers. Some of the gossip Merril drops in is horribly fascinating – such as, for example, when Frederik Pohl was an editor early in his career he'd buy his friends' stories and keep 60% of the fee; or that, later, when Merril was an influential editor, writers would approach her and beg to be included in her next anthology, and they'd tell her they wouldn't even accept a fee. Merril moved to Canada in the 1960s, and eventually took Canadian citizenship. She comes across as one of those opinionated but interesting people you'd probably dislike on meeting. Worth reading.
Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić (1988) I've fancied reading this for years, so when I stumbled across a copy in a charity shop I snapped it up. But after all that… I'm not a big fan of weird fiction or magical realism – although when it's kept low-key, I'm happy to read it. I thought Patrik Ouředník's Europeana excellent, for example; which led me to think I might enjoy fiction by other Balkan fabulists. But this one just didn't work for me. I thought the structure clever and interesting, and some of the stories which make up the dictionary entries were quite good. But often Pavić pushed the fantasy too far, and it spoiled it for me. The book is structured as three "dictionaries" – they're not, they're more like glossaries – which cover the conversion of the Khazar people to one of the Abrahamic religions. There's a Christian dictionary, a Muslim one and a Jewish one, and each claims the Khazars converted to their religion. The dictionaries comprise biographies of important people and stories which illustrate their lives and/or their connection to the Khazars. The stories are… fantastic. Some of the details are amusing, like the person who saved up all their Tuesdays so they could use them at once; others, for me, just felt like a whimsy too far. I guess I like a lot of realism in my fantastika. Which is no doubt why I much prefer science fiction. Ah well. Back to the charity shop it goes, and I can cross Pavić off the list of authors I've always wanted to read.
New Soviet Science Fiction, Helen Saltz Jacobson, ed. (1979) I spotted this on eBay, discovered Macmillan had in the late 1970s published a short series of Soviet sf anthologies and novels, and immediately thought, ooh I can collect them. But just to see if it was worth doing so, I bought this cheap ex-library copy of New Soviet Science Fiction…. And yes, it was totally worth it. Now I'm going to have to find a decent copy to replace mine. And buy all the other books in the series too. The contents include fiction by Ilya Varshavsky, Kirill Bulychev, Dmitri Bilenkin, Gennady Gor, Vladen Bakhnov, Anatoly Dneprov, Vladimir Savchenko, Mikhail Emtsev and Eremei Parnov, and Vadim Shefner – with several of them contributing more than one piece. The Savchenko was good, a nice black comedy with a very Russian atmosphere. Some of the others feels like they've been translated too diligently into American English vernacular – I mean, what's the point of reading Russian sf if it reads just like US sf? Annoyingly, the book includes no prior publication details, so I've no idea how old some of these stories are.
Man Crazy, Carol Joyce Oates (1997) An author I've heard much about without actually ever getting around to reading. I stumbled across a copy of this book in a charity shop, so I bought it and… The narrator is a teenage girl with an absentee father and a drunken mother. She's white trash, moving from place to place, although only within a relatively small region, eventually getting into drinks, drugs and dalliances with inappropriate men… and eventually ending up in a biker cult. The control of voice is impressive, as is the way Oates builds up her story through a series of small vignettes (none really qualify as short stories, and some are shorter than flash fiction). But none of the cast likeable – even the man who becomes the sugar daddy of the narrator's mother isn't doing it out of the goodness of his heart… although his fate is hardly deserved. This is a bleak novel, which I was not expecting. I'm still not sure if I really liked it.
The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer 18: The Oath of the Five Lords, Yves Sente & André Juillard (2012) I've been impressed with a couple of Sente's scripts, more so than I have anything written by series creator Edgar P Jacobs – chiefly because Sente manages to stitch his stories into real history. And so he does in this one, and it's particularly effective. The story is essentially a murder-mystery. The titular lords are a secret society, created decades before to safeguard a pamphlet written by TE Lawrence but which he was never allowed to publish. Someone is bumping off the lords and stealing their portion of the pamphlet. It's up to Blake and Mortimer to learn the identity of the killer/thief before the pamphlet is all together lost and the five lords all murdered. It's not a very complex mystery, though Sente still manages a few bits of sleight of hand with his clues. I thought this one of the better entries in the series.


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I can't stand it any longer! Four Marines relieve themselves on dead enemies that had been killing and maiming their buddies, and by the media and Pentagon leadership's reaction you'd think there were implications on par with My Lai. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was "totally dismayed". Really Leon Panetta? "Utterly deplorable"?!
How about this for "utterly deplorable": The butchering of American GI's on the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 by beheading and evisceration after being wounded and bludgeoned to death, then dragging the bodies through the streets of the city, while children dance and laugh, and women and men alike sing victory songs to Allah. Not deplorable?
Or perhaps the two 101st Airborne soldiers captured and brutally tortured and finally gutted and beheaded in Yousifayya, Iraq in 2006, all captured on video for the viewing public by the barbarian AQ pukes who then take two other American boys KIA and tie them to IED booby traps on the road to the other bodies. This incident was hardly mentioned in the media, let alone by any government officials at the time.
If that's not "deplorable" enough Leon, how about Daniel Pearl, the civilian journalist who's head was hacked from his bound body while his gurgling screams were drowned by his own blood. As Daniel struggled against his murderers they read from the Quran and chanted praises to Allah. Is that deplorable?!
I am amazed that the United States Government can still raise a volunteer force of the best fighting men and women in the world in light of the fact that their government officials may or may not have their backs. Now that's "utterly deplorable"!
One specific instance that comes to mind is the bloody battle that 4 Navy SEALS who were on a surveilience mission in Afghanistan and were discovered by two Afghan goat herders. The SEALS knew if they released the herders, they were sure to bring the Taliban on them. However, if they did harm to them, their own government would crucify them. The SEALS chose to take on hundreds of Taliban rather than a civilian government who doesn't understand war. Three of the four SEALS never came home and Marcus lives the life of a "Lone Survivor". "Deplorable"?
War is war. It is not a football game where the rule book is enforced by umpires, close calls are reviewed in the instant replay booth, and afterward we all shake hands and go home. The object of war is to kill the enemy and break his stuff until he quits trying to kill you. Human emotion and frustration during war sometimes drives civil people to do things that society may view as unacceptable, at least under normal conditions. How "civilized" is war anyway? It is indeed "utterly deplorable".
Lt. Colonel Allen West, now Representative in the US Congress, suggests the Military handle the affair as follows:
"The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.
"As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell."
To Col. West I say, "Kudos"!
To a government who cannot decide if their paid military should be allowed to fight a war to a victorious end and are not willing to identify the enemy, I say this: "If our cause is not just, then get my son the hell out of Afghanistan!"
To my Marine son and his buddies I say this: "Semper Fi my brave boys; your politicians may be weak, but your people are strong!" Oooraah!
P.S. Here is a photo of a pose that General George S. Patton struck as he crossed the Rhine river, showing the Fuhrer what his thoughts were at the time. The following Patton quote was to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force: "…I have just pissed into the Rhine River. For God's sake, send some gasoline."


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OAKLAND — Discussing the events of the past week, Sandra Chatman said it "felt like somebody stabbed me in the heart."
Her granddaughter, 13-year-old Jahi McMath, has been declared brain-dead, just days after undergoing surgery to have her tonsils removed.
"They took away my granddaughter. That's how it feels," said Chatman.
Jahi's family, including her mother, Nailah Winkfield, huddled by her side at Children's Hospital Oakland for a sixth day Sunday, calling on the community for prayers and searching for answers on what went wrong during what was supposed to be a one-night stay for the family favorite.
Jahi arrived at the hospital Monday and was supposed to be released Tuesday, the family said.
Monday night, Chatman, a veteran nurse at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, noticed her granddaughter was bleeding from her mouth and nose. She later went into cardiac arrest.
Jahi spent Tuesday on a ventilator. By 2 a.m. Wednesday, doctors said she had swelling in her brain, and Thursday, she was declared legally brain-dead, family members said.
The hospital staff is reviewing what happened, as they do when any procedure does not have the anticipated results, said spokeswoman Melinda Krigel.
Jahi's uncle, 27-year-old Omari Sealey, said the hospital should have done more to stop the bleeding.
"There was a lack of urgency," Sealey said. "It's shock, it's disbelief. You never think something like this will happen to you."
Family members describe Jahi as a well-behaved, bubbly teen who has been looking forward to spending the holidays with family and attending an eighth-grade dinner dance at E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts.
Jahi's family has asked the hospital keep her on life support for as long as possible, even if it means spending Christmas at the hospital.
"As long as she has a pulse, we want her on life support," Sealey said. "We want her to come home for Christmas. We want to give her presents. We want a chance for a Christmas miracle."
Krigel, the hospital spokeswoman, said "the hospital is very, very sad about this outcome."
"It's incredibly sad," Krigel said. "What I can add is that there is informed consent that comes with any surgery and that with any surgery, there can be unanticipated outcomes."
Before her surgery, Jahi took off her pearl earrings and gave them to Chatman. She asked Chatman to put them back on her as soon as she woke up from surgery. The pearls are now tucked inside Chatman's purse, where they will stay.
"It's so hard to look at them. I get choked up," Chatman said. "I'll keep them for a lifetime. In every purse I carry. They will always be with me."
Contact David DeBolt at 510-262-2728, and at Twitter.com/daviddebolt. Contact Rick Hurd at 925-945-4789 and at Twitter.com/3rdERH.


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In college, I worked for the campus IT department, wiring up cat 5 connections, pulling cable, and troubleshooting faculty computers. Our division ran as an internal business, billing other departments at absurd rates for the services of student techs who operated with minimal training or oversight. I once "fixed" an old all-in-one Mac by hauling it down the shop, banging on the monitor until the picture reappeared, and then billing the Economics department $75. Good times.
While it's hard to outsource these sorts of on-campus repairs (at least without long shipping delays), it's far simpler to replace e-mail servers and IT support staff with a hosted solution that costs almost nothing. Google Apps has become one of the most widely used such solutions in higher education over the past couple of years, and it's easy to see the appeal of the service. Many students already know and use Gmail and they like the reliability that comes from a company like Google. But the effect on campus IT staffing can be dramatic.
Case in point: the University of Washington has just announced that 66 IT employees are getting the boot, in part because of cheap hosted alternatives. Google, in particular, is making a concerted pitch for handling higher ed online applications through its Google Apps Education Edition, and it has been taking that message on the road. Abilene Christian University, which earlier this year announced that it would become the first college in the country to pass out iPhones to freshmen, this month sent its CIO around the country with Google to talk up the Google Apps service.
"ACU is a perfect example of how educational institutions are moving towards the cloud and creating an environment where technology is used to enhance the learning experience rather than just for support," said Jeff Keltner of Google Apps for Education.
The transition is happening quickly. Notre Dame announced this last week that it would shift to Google Apps over the summer while maintaining current student e-mail addresses. Other schools like Clemson, Arkansas State, and UNC Greensboro have already made the switch, as have international institutions like Hebrew University, Universidad Panamericana, and Nihon University.
Google's services, built on its worldwide network of data centers, can scale with little marginal cost, and as such represent a far cheaper alternative to having every school in the world host its own e-mail servers and hire the technical help needed to keep them operating. But, as the University of Washington announcement reminds us, those decisions can have a human cost, just as car-building robots affected the auto industry. Critics also wonder about the possible dangers of outsourcing so much information to one company and about potential liability surrounding education records, but such concerns aren't in danger of derailing the Google Apps express.
From a student perspective, the move makes sense, at least if campus IT operates with the same sort of "efficiency" and "uptime" that characterized my own school's in-house efforts. With another collegiate year behind us now, are those of you in campus IT worried about the impact that hosted apps could have on your jobs? Or is this a necessary shift that will simply eliminated IT grunt work and free people up for more interesting work?


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Slaves to Big Data. Or Are We?
Work data:
Alternate URL:
Type of work: Article (academic)
Categories:e-Democracy | e-Government & e-Administration | e-Politics | Government and Public Administration | Politics and Political Science
Tags:big data
In this contribution the notion of Big Data is discussed in relation to the monetisation of personal data. The claim of some proponents as well as adversaries, that Big Data implies that 'n = all', meaning that we no longer need to rely on samples because we have all the data, is scrutinized and found both overly optimistic and unnecessarily pessimistic. A set of epistemological and ethical issues is presented, focusing on the implications of Big Data for our perception, cognition, fairness, privacy and due process. The article then looks into the idea of user centric personal data management, to investigate to what extent this provides solutions for some of the problems triggered by the Big Data conundrum. Special attention is paid to the core principle of data protection legislation, namely the principle of purpose binding. Finally, this contribution seeks to inquire into the influence of Big Data politics on self, mind and society, asking the question of how we can prevent ourselves from becoming slaves to Big Data.


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An internationally acclaimed interior design sensation, Miles Redd is known for his quirky brand of cozy glamour. This lavishly illustrated volume featured a diverse selection of his unique interiors, an inspiration to anyone interested in spirited, eclectic design.
Excerpt from Introduction:
"This is a book about dreams coming true; the curiosities in the rooms I have decorated; and the people, artists, and places that have inspired me. When all is said and done and I am long forgotten, maybe someone will find this book in a dusty library - if such a thing still exists - an glimpse a bit of the pleasure my like has given me. I want them to have the sensation of dancing across and MGM soundstage, silhouetted in a klieg light, because that was my intention with this book, a very personal blend of work and fantasy"


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Tigers stay alive in ALCS, hold off Rangers 7-5
DETROIT (AP) — Justin Verlander helped save Detroit's season with a gutsy effort and the Tigers hit for a sudden cycle to break away from Texas in a 7-5 victory Thursday that cut the Rangers' lead to 3-2 in the AL championship series.
Delmon Young hit two of Detroit's four homers and Miguel Cabrera had a tie breaking double in the sixth inning – thanks to a bizarre bounce off third base. After building a five-run cushion, the Tigers held off Texas despite Nelson Cruz 's record fifth home run of the series.
With closer Jose Valverde unavailable for Detroit, the Rangers cut it to 7-5 in the ninth and had Cruz on deck when Phil Coke retired Mike Napoli on a game-ending groundout with two runners on.
Coke got five outs for his first career postseason save.
The Rangers get another chance to reach the World Series for the second straight season in Game 6 Saturday night at home. Derek Holland will start for Texas against Max Scherzer .
A swift turn of events in the sixth helped Detroit pull ahead. The Tigers turned a bases-loaded double play to keep the score tied at 2, then opened the bottom half with a single, double, triple and homer – in order – to take a 6-2 lead.
It was the first time four consecutive batters on one team hit for a "natural" cycle in a postseason game, according to STATS LLC.
The Rangers were the ones who seemed on the verge of breaking the game open in the sixth, loading the bases with one out. But Ian Kinsler hit a grounder right to third baseman Brandon Inge , who merely had to step on the bag and throw to first for a double play.
Ryan Raburn led off the bottom half with a single, and Cabrera's slow grounder bounced high off third base and down the line, putting Detroit ahead 3-2. Victor Martinez followed with a rare triple down the right-field line, scoring another run, and Young added a two-run homer.
Raburn homered in the seventh to make it 7-2.
After using Valverde and Joaquin Benoit for three straight days, Detroit manager Jim Leyland announced before Game 5 that neither reliever would be available. He was hoping to make it through the day with just Verlander and Coke, and that's exactly what happened.
Verlander allowed four runs and eight hits in 7 1-3 innings, throwing a career-high 133 pitches. He struck out eight and walked three.
Verlander reached 100 mph on the stadium radar gun with pitch No. 133. Cruz, however, caught up to that fastball and sent it down the left-field line for a two-run homer, ending Verlander's night and setting a record for homers in a league championship series.
Cruz became the fifth player to hit five homers in a postseason series. Reggie Jackson , Ken Griffey Jr., Juan Gonzalez and Chase Utley were the others.
After winning 24 games and leading the American League in ERA and strikeouts, Verlander hadn't had much of a chance to shine this postseason. Two of his first three playoff starts were ended early by rain delays.
He didn't have to worry about that Thursday. Game 5 began under a cloudy sky with the sun peeking through over Comerica Park, and the threatening sky later in the game never amounted to anything.
Instead, the Rangers were Verlander's biggest obstacle. With two strikes on Kinsler in the first, Verlander went to his sweeping breaking ball, and the Texas second baseman pulled it to left field for a double. After going to third on a groundout by Elvis Andrus , Kinsler came home on Josh Hamilton 's sacrifice fly to give the Rangers a 1-0 lead.
Alex Avila tied it with an opposite-field homer to left in the third. The Detroit catcher has taken a beating behind the plate all year and has had a miserable postseason, going 2 of 33 before the homer.
Young was actually left off Detroit's ALCS roster because of an injury, but he returned before Game 2 after Magglio Ordonez re-fractured his ankle. Young's homer over the fence in left-center gave Detroit a 2-1 lead in the fourth.
Hamilton's RBI single in the fifth tied the game at 2.
NOTES: Young has five homers in the AL playoffs. He hit three during the division series against the New York Yankees . … Avila hit only three of his 19 homers during the regular season off left-handers. … There were a few empty seats visible when the teams took the field for the late-afternoon start.


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This looks delicious! I'll have to try it out soon.
I am not a lover of fish. It's not necessarily that I don't like it, because I do. But…it just doesn't seem like a real meal to me for some reason. So when I do make it, I like to add things to it, some excitement, so that it seems like it's more "meal-ish". I know it sounds weird, but what can I say? I was raised in a meat, vegetable, and potatoes household. A biscuits, bacon, pancakes, homemade soup, steak, turkey dinner and pie kind of household. You know, real food.
This meal actually shocked me. I really liked it. Every flavor was distinctive. Even the tiny amount of clementine zest and ginger added a unique and powerful dimension. Maybe the addition of a starch, the rice, made it feel like more of a normal meal to me, I don't know. But either way, it was quite tasty and it received great reviews from my husband.
Tangy Sesame Salad
2 Cups Napa Cabbage, thinly sliced
1 Cup Shredded Carrots
1/2 English Cucumber, peeled, cut down the middle and thinly sliced
1 Green Onion, sliced down the middle and thinly sliced
1 Heaping Tablespoon Cilantro, chopped
For The Dressing:
1/2 Cup Rice Vinegar
3 to 4 Drops Dark Sesame Oil, about 1/2 teaspoon
1/8 teaspoon Grated Fresh Ginger
1/2 teaspoon Gluten Free Soy Sauce
Prepare the salad ingredients.
Prepare the salad dressing. Whisk until fully incorporated.
Place the vegetables in a medium bowl, toss, cover, and refrigerate. Cover and refrigerate the dressing. Don't dress the salad until the fish is finished cooking or the salad will become limp.
Rockfish In A Pocket – Asian Style
Preheat Oven to 350°
4 Non-Oily Fish Fillets (I used Rockfish)
1/2 of a Large Red Bell Paper, thinly sliced
2 Green Onions, thinly sliced on an angle
1 Clove Garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon Grated Ginger
1/2 teaspoon Clementine Zest
Olive Oil
White Rice
For The Sauce:
1 Tablespoon Gluten Free Soy Sauce
1 Tablespoon Sweet Chili Sauce
1/2 Tablespoon Rice Vinegar
1/2 teaspoon Sriracha Sauce
Get the rice going first so it can cook while you are preparing the fish. Rinse and pat the fish dry with paper towels. Set aside. Prepare the pepper, onion, garlic, ginger, and clementine zest and set aside. In a small dish, add the soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, rice vinegar, and sriracha sauce.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, set aside. Cut 4 pieces of parchment for the fish pockets.
Place two fish fillets in the middle of one piece of parchment. Drizzle with a tiny amount of olive oil and rub it over the fillets. Take 1/2 of the clementine zest and grated ginger and rub into the fillets, dispersing it as evenly as possible. Spread 1/2 of the sliced garlic over the top.
Layer 1/2 of the peppers and onions over the top.
Stir the sauce well and drizzle 1/2 of it over the fillets.
Place another piece of parchment over the top of the fish, joining the long edges together by folding them over.
Continue rolling the sides and pressing along the edge with your fingernail or the handle of a butter knife until there is a sharp edge and the folded parchment reaches the fish.
Then roll the short edges the same way until it is completely folded and sealed.
Repeat with the remaining fillets. Place both pockets on the parchment lined baking sheet.
Bake for 20-25 minutes. While the fish is baking, toss the salad with the dressing.
Remove the pockets from the oven. Carefully slit open the top and pull apart. Be very careful, the steam from the fish is very hot.
You can eat this two ways. you can place the pocket on a plate and put the rice in it to soak up the juices and eat it that way. Or, you can put rice on your plate, place the fish on top of the rice and then pour the juices over it, which is what I did.
Oh, and in case you were ever curious about the "behind the scenes" recipe writing in food blogs…here's how I do it. Recipes scribbled on napkins, minus a picture of the incredible mess I made. A glamorous hobby, huh? Complete with a soy sauce stained pen. 😉
After an unfortunate "fish incident" when I was on chemo, I have a hard time using our stock of fish my husband caught on a trip to the Oregon Coast. But when I saw this recipe, I made it immediately. It was good even to me and my husband thought it was the BEST. Thanks!


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Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress has the power "to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or any Department or Officer thereof".
See the CRS/LII Annotated Constitution on the Necessary and Proper Clause.
See legislative power.
To see the Supreme Court's application of the clause, see McCulloch v. Maryland: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17/316


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Here's a clip of chirpy Londoner with an eye for criticism for her surroundings, Lily Allen. It's "LDN" a calypso-infused pop tune about the Big Smoke as taken from her debut album Alright, Still.
There is something to be said about duality in everyday life, and I think that's what may have been on Lily Allen's mind when she co-wrote this song for her debut, a song originally released as a single in September of 2006. Her voice is absolutely and unabashedly 'London' on this track, which adds a layer of credibility to what is easily interpreted as something of a pessimistic outlook on living there.
The song is a series of vignettes, outlining the darker side of living in a place where so many are thrust together in close quarters in various states of desperation, not unlike Richard Thompson's "The Sights and Sounds of London Town", which covers similar thematic ground.
To me, this is the song of one who once had an idealized vision of her hometown which is embodied by the bouncy calypso style, soon to be let down by reality as reflected in the lyrics. In some ways, it's sad to hear this story sung by someone so young that is basically about the cruelty of the world, even if that cruelty has a distinctive London air about it.
But, in other ways this is an encouraging tale. The song's narrator is a young woman who is aware of her surroundings. The tone of the song is disappointment (illustrated very well in the video at the end, when her plans are cancelled by the unknown party on the other end of her cellphone conversation). But, this is a song about someone being relieved of her illusions. In this, it's about a unique kind of liberation.
And to me, it's encouraging that this song tells the story for so many young people in an otherwise numb state of being, not realizing that life can be so much better than it is. When disappointment of this kind is expressed, the fight for change is often not far behind.
For more information, check out the legendary Lily Allen MySpace page, which was the hub of her success as a mainstream artist working outside of mainstream marketing channels.


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If David Byrne has never done anything quite like Here Lies Love before (I suppose a smartarse could draw some parallels to the cast recording of True Stories), it's still fair to say that this record is exactly the type of thing expected from him. From the baffling fraughtness of early Talking Heads to converting London's Roundhouse into a giant musical instrument last summer, Byrne's career has defined by a very cerebral, very dedicated form of weirdness, one that seems antithetical to the notion of 'wackiness'.
Thus Here Lies Love - a double album about the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, partly written in the disco idiom, and featuring a quite mind-boggling array of special guests – doesn't seem particularly unexpected, just the sort of thing that David Byrne does. What is rather eccentric is his choice of chief collaborator. Whatever you think of Fatboy Slim, you're unlikely to hold him up as the world's greatest disco producer. Certainly you'd think the New York-dwelling Byrne might have found somebody closer to home to trick out Here Lies Love with the requisite Studio 54 stylings (Marcos having been a fan of the NYC nightspot). Then again, you'd have to look back a very long time to find a David Byrne musical project that couldn't be reasonably summed up with the adjective 'tasteful'; he was never going to team up with Mike Simonetti here, more's the pity. In any case, what we have here are 22 tracks that drift between the lush tropicana of Byrne's 'proper' solo material, and a rubbery take on disco clearly somewhat indebted to the choppier rhythms of the new wave. There's rarely a moment when anything threatens to blow your head off with innovation, virtuosity, or melody, but at the same time it's accomplished and unindulgent, dynamic but restrained rhythms smoothly traversing an array of luxurious strings and punchy electronic swooshes.
And in some ways that's the review there, as Here Lies Love's concurrent failure and triumph is that neither the concept nor the eyepopping volumes of special guests have that much impact on the record as a whole. This is quite impressive considering the castlist consists of (deep breath): Florence Welch, Candie Payne, St Vincent, Tori Amos, Martha Wainwright, Nellie McKay, Steve Earle, Cyndi Lauper, Alison Moorer, Charmaine Clamor, Roisin Murphy, Camille, Theresa Andersson, Sharon Jones, Alice Russell, Kate Pierson, Sia, Santigold, Nicole Atkins, Natalie Merchant and Shara Worden.
If you actually bothered to read all those names, it's likely they made more of an impression than they will on record. Mostly fluting-voiced female singers with an already similar range, Here Lies Love further homogenises its star cast, giving them Byrne's lyrics to sing and casting them all as the notoriously crass former first lady of the Philippines. Well, probably: Byrne hardly offers a history lesson here. The lyrics dispense with a lot of the details of Marcos's life (no shoe collection), and don't try to capture her mannerisms, to the point it's questionable why exactly female vocalists were so crucial. Instead the focus is on what Byrne appears to have decreed to be the fundamentals of her personality, namely a faintly sociopathic desire to be liked that led to her acting like a massive douche. If you are familiar with the specifics of her reign, then you'll probably be mildly delighted/wildly affronted by such moments as the Natalie Merchant-sung 'Order 1081', a sublime whirl of strings that surely constitutes the best faux-power ballad about the benefits of illegally imposing martial law ever written ("got to stop all this confusion, gotta wipe away the scum, and the way to make it happen: order 1081"). For the most part, though, it all sinks into one big whole with comparatively little sense of narrative and few real stand-out turns. In some ways this is a blessing. Certainly it's relieving that Florence doesn't seize the opportunity to bellow her lungs out at top volume, and in general it's infinitely more pleasant than any double concept album has a right to be. At the same time one can't help but be drawn to the tracks that break the genteel air. For this reason Byrne's two vocal turns are easily the best, the hissed, paranoid funk of 'American Troglodyte' ("Americans are surfing that internet, Americans are listing to 50 Cent" – not a period piece, then) and 'Seven Years', where his quavering croon finds itself impaled by Shara Worden's icy keen, the most affecting guest turn on the record.
Ultimately there are only so many excuses you can make for the fact Here Lies Love isn't an out there masterpiece, merely a somewhat outré easy listening album. But Byrne got the out there masterpieces out of his system decades ago. These days he's a beloved elder statesmen figure who doesn't so much innovate as potter: Here Lies Love is exactly the sort of thing he ought to be doing.
6Andrzej Lukowski's Score


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Archive for September 14th, 2011
Managing & Mitigating Risk: The 2011 IBM Global Business Risk & Resilience Survey
Once again, IBM has published a global business risk and resilience study, this year in partnership with Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of IBM.
The study was conducted in June of this year, and included responses from 391 senior executives…Thirty-five percent of the respondents were C-level executives…About 39% were from North America,38% from Western Europe, 20% from Asia Pacific, and 3% from Eastern Europe.
Companies with less than U.S. $500M in revenue comprised 39% of the responses, and 48% of the respondents hailed from companies with more than U.S. $1 billion in revenue…The survey also covered a gamut of industries, including financial services (16%), IT and technology (16%), professional services (13%), manufacturing (8%) and healthcare (7%).
Before I dive into the results, here's the setup: Global organizations are increasingly emphasizing business resilience; that is, the ability to rapidly adapt to a continuously changing business environment. Resilient corproations are able to maintain continuous operations and protect their market share in the face of natural or man-made disasters as well as radical changes in the financial or economic climate. They are also equipped to seize opportunities created by unexpected events.
So, the question is, are they?
It's a mixed bag.
The research suggests that more and more businesses will adopt a more holistic approach to risk management in the next three years ass they deal with growing uncertainty and the increasing interconnectedness of the varied risks they face.
That's the good news, aspirational though it may be.
But in terms of today's reality, the study indicated that only a minority of companies (37%) has implemented an organization-wide business resilience strategy…with 42% saying they'll do so in the next three years.
Almost two-thirds (64%) say they have a business continuity plan of some sort, and a robust 58% have dedicated contingency plans for dealing with a variety of risks.
That's the topline…now on to the deeper dive:
- Larger organizations are more likely than smaller ones to have an integrated strategy. They, of course, typically have more to lose, and complexity increase's an organization's exposure to risk. Larger firms are more likely to have assigned overall responsibility for enterprise risk management to a single executive (which means, of course, direct accountability). Still, there is a contingent of small companies that have adopted integrated strategies. These companies also rank highly with regard to indicators of success such as revenue growth, profitability, and market share.
- Continuity, IT and compliance risks remain in the foyrefront, but companies are diversifying their strategies to build business resilience. Nearly 40% of respondents say their organization regards business continuity as primarily an IT issue. However, when they're asked to name their "primary risk management concern," some name more than one, including disaster recovery (47%), IT security (37%), and regulatory compliance (28%). Though most have started by addressing the largest threats first, they increasingly are expected to turn to such things as communications and training programs designged to build a more resilient culture overall.
- Business resilience planning increasingly involves specialists from across the organization, yet CIOs and IT pros remain the most prominent stakeholders. Hey, what happened to sharing the love…and the risk?? Because a culture that imbues responsibility for risk management at every level enables companies to respond to changes and unexpected events. A solid majority of respondents (60%) say that business resilience is considered a joint responsibility of all C-level execs. Yet as IT penetrates more deeply into every aspect of company operations, CIOs and IT pros remain key players in building more resilient organizations. Fifty-six percent of respondents say the CIO collaborates with top IT strategists much more frequently than three years ago.
How Can I Better Manage Risk Moving Forward?
In most organizations, improving business resilience requires a shift in corporate culture because that is what shapes values and behavior. If a company's culture blends risk awareness with other corporate values, then people instinctively know the right thing to do when confronted with an unexpected situation, and that reduces risk.
Understanding these principles is a good first step, but in interviews, executives are clear that buy-in from the top is essential to foster broad organizational change. Promoting holistic risk management concepts to peers and employees is also critical.
Taking an incremental approach with broad participation in strategy development can help, because it is easier to promote change if a new initiative is not seen as being pushed by one particular faction.
Senior-level commitment and adequate resources are also needed to develop comprehensive communications and training programs to support integrated risk management. One of the distinguishing features of the most resilient companies is that they are much more likely than other firms to have developed a communications strategy to push the message of resilience out to every corner of the organization.
Companies that embrace these measures are more likely to create an effective business resilience plan. This will provide a robust foundation on which to build a long-lived competitive position supported by end-to-end risk management.
Go here to download the full report.