Victor Rozek
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As I See It: Searching for the Perfect Question
July 22, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreLying to get a job used to be a lot easier. There was a time when a fluffed-up resume was enough to get you an interview. A proper display of earnestness, a dash of personal charm, and a retelling of your exaggerated accomplishments would pretty much guarantee that you could keep living indoors. Back then, resume claims were seldom checked, and what checking occurred was not very useful. By law, companies could only verify employment, and unless you could cajole someone into speaking off the record, you learned nothing illuminating about the applicant.
At the end of the day, hiring
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As I See It: Co-opting The Valley
July 8, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreSingularity is so passé. At least the variety that proposed to meld a single individual with a machine. How small, how private, how self-absorbed. Dare to dream big. Why join with a single system when you can meld with the entire Silicon Valley?
Co-opting the Valley appears to be the latest not-so-secret strategy of the National Security Agency, whose interests and methodologies increasingly overlap with those of technology firms. By definition, a surveillance state plans to live forever. And, for the NSA, eternal life requires uninterrupted access to galactic flows of data. But why go through the trouble of stealing
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As I See It: Looking Through the PRISM
June 17, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreChristoph Meili was a security guard who worked the night shift at the Union Bank of Switzerland. One night while making his rounds, he discovered that the management of UBS was doing naughty, naughty things in the dark. There’s no pretty way to put this: they were working overtime to cheat the families of dead people. But not just people who died in the normal scheme of things. Oh, no. These people happened to be Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis. UBS probably didn’t want to disturb their descendants by digging up all those painful memories, so
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As I See It: Compassionate Computing, Or Dalai On The Desktop
June 10, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read morePhowa is a Sanskrit word meaning “the transference of consciousness at the time of death.” The intersection of science and religion, technology and spirituality, forms an uneasy junction, often distrustful and frequently violent. Historically, science has been derisive of faith, and believers were naturally suspicious of science. Thus, for centuries, few things have been more intransigent to change than religion. It came, if at all, at a glacial pace, resistant to modernity, impervious to reason. And perhaps that was as it should be.
If you believe you have a pipeline to the divine–that revelation is yours alone; and that your
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As I See It: To Ad Or Not To Ad
May 20, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreI never found Leonardo DiCaprio believable as an actor. No matter the costuming or how much makeup they trowel on his face, he always comes across as being a 12-year-old playing dress up. (He’s not unlike Tobey McGuire in that regard, but at least Tobey knows enough to make movies that appeal to 12-year-olds.) So when a moving flash ad for DiCaprio’s new opus, Gatsby, darkened my computer screen, it was both annoying and amusing. It did interrupt my browsing, but it also conjured up images of a child in a tuxedo throwing fits.
Not everyone finds advertising amusing,
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As I See It: Abiding Solitude
May 13, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreArguably the most memorable part of the movie Cast Away is watching Tom Hanks slowly going mad from an excess of solitude, eventually befriending a Wilson volleyball. Conversations and arguments ensue, and even though they’re one-sided, so deep is Tom’s character’s longing for a connection that an inanimate object is preferable to the terror of prolonged aloneness. If only Tom had texting.
Since the advent of the Internet, the business of assuaging loneliness has reached a feverish pitch. Self-help books and bars have been displaced by social media and pornography. And if connection is the new frontier, there are few
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As I See It: Yet Another Modest Proposal
April 22, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreNo more pencils. No more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks. Why so modest? Why not just get rid of teachers altogether? It is seldom presented so bluntly, but that’s the general thinking of a fledgling movement called Minimally Invasive Education, which prefers technology to teachers. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Given what educators are grappling with these days, the prospect of escaping the classroom may seem like a blessing.
We have been tossing educators into the fray for several thousand years with tolerable results. But the world is changing faster than the president’s commitment
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As I See It: Rigging Reputation
April 8, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIn Atlanta, the teachers cheated so the students didn’t have to. It was an imperfect solution to be sure, designed to relieve the pressures of standardized testing, an unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind, otherwise known as “Are our children learning?” Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of educators were involved over the span of a decade. As of 10 days ago, 35 have been indicted, including former superintendent Beverly Hall, charged with racketeering, theft, influencing witnesses, conspiracy, and making false statements. Can you spell “prison time?”
As test scores miraculously soared even in the poorest, most challenged districts, it became evident
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As I See It: All Things Big
March 25, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreMany years ago, 60 Minutes did a segment on the Israeli Air Force. At the time, the United States had just sold the Israelis a handful of our latest jet fighters and 60 Minutes wanted to see how Israeli pilots were using their new toys. Turns out they had made a number of low-tech modifications (some classified), which the Israelis believed would make the planes more user friendly. For one thing, they installed an inexpensive rear-view mirror so that the pilot could track enemy aircraft without turning his head. The reporter also asked about the vast array of gauges, flashing
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As I See It: Darwin vs. Zuckerberg
March 11, 2013 Victor Rozek
… Read moreMost of what I know about Mark Zuckerberg I learned from Aaron Sorkin. Which is to say I’ve seen a dramatized version of his life where selected events have been massaged, embellished, or possibly invented for theatrical effect. But I don’t much care. Social Network was entertaining, and not being a Facebook user or stockholder, I have nothing invested in Zuckerberg. I don’t care if he’s awkward with women. I don’t care if he stabs friends in the back or screws business associates. And I don’t much care that he’s rich or lonely or the most inventive geek since Mr.