Eastern APA Boston Job Candidate Hair Styling

Cancelled due to blizzard.

In keeping with tradition, this year's job candidate on-site hair salon (make-up, women's suit loaners also) will proceed.

Every year candidates ask about how to dress for an interview.  Dressing professionally is a good idea, although I recommend attention to hair.  The reason is simple.  Interviewers will be staring at your head.  A good haircut and style will go far.  But what about on-site improvements?   I do not cut hair.  However, if candidates--of any gender--would like to have help styling their hair (blow-drying, straightening, curling, hair products), please email me. (See profile.)

I also have small size (size 4ish) women's two piece suits that I can loan.  They are stylish, professional and *lucky*.

I'll need advance notice in order to know what days/times we can meet up.

Superpowerist Presumption: “Secret Agent” Edition

Among all Super-Powers, the power of Identity-Morph is among the most rare and powerful powers. Clark Kent transforms into Superman, five teenagers transform into the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and so on. In a world of Super-powered people, these legendary Super-Powered fighting forces have attained a status beyond the typical super-powered person. Something of some kind must activate the Identity-Morph, a coin, a phone call, a beacon in the night sky. Their Identities must remain secret at all costs, so the bonds of a Super-Powered fighting force are, themselves, powerful, as is the mechanism that sets up activation. A Super-Powerless person is utterly helpless against such secret bonds and mechanisms.

It seems that I currently posses the former phone number of one of the great Identity-Morphs, a certain D.C., from whom I inherited my phone number when I moved to my current address several years ago. Within an hour after my telephone (landline) service was connected, I received an automated phone call:

“This is a call for Dxxxx Cxxxx. Please call *loud static* at *loud static* or remain on the line *more loud static*.”

The call was intended for D.C., so I did not remain on the line. Every day after that I received the same automated call. Sometimes at 8:00 AM on the weekends. Ordinary people also called for DC and I was able to tell them that DC no longer had this phone number. These people would apologize for bothering me and did not call back. Only the automated call persisted. The periods of static on the tape seemed intentional. Whoever was behind the automated phone call wished to mask their identity in secrecy and render it impossible to contact him, her or “it.” I would have to remain on the line to uncover the mystery.

So I did.

The static of the automated phone call recording gave way after a while to some clicks that indicated the call was going through some system to an operator of some sort. A woman with a nasal voice, comically close to being the voice of an old-time phone operator began speaking to me:

“Dxxxx Cxxxx, thank you for contacting us,” she said.

“Um, I’m not Dxxxx Cxxxx,” I replied.

“This is XXX-XXX-XXXX,” the operator said.”

“Yes, it is. But I’m not Dxxxx Cxxxx,” I said.

“Please, put Dxxxx Cxxxx on the phone then,” the operator said. She seemed annoyed.

“Dxxxx Cxxxx does not live here. You have the wrong phone number for Dxxxx Cxxxx.”

“If this is XXX-XXX-XXXX, that is Dxxxx Cxxxx’s phone number.”

“Um, no it isn’t. Not anymore. I just moved to XXXXX and received this phone number.”

“If this is XXX-XXX-XXXX, it is Dxxxx Cxxxx’s phone number,” the operator repeated. Clearly, something was wrong. Basic, sound explanation seemed meaningless to her, but I persisted.

“Um, you’re not understanding me. I just received this new phone number one week ago. I am not Dxxxx Cxxxx, but a new resident, and I have a different address than the person you are looking for [I knew this from talking with the ordinary people looking for D.C.]. You have the wrong number now.”

“If you have answered the phone, we have the correct phone number,” the operator informed me.

“Did you hear what you just said?” I asked. At this point I was pushed beyond perplexity. My patience was at its end.

“If YOU have answered the phone,” the operator repeated, “we have the correct phone number.”

“YOU DO NOT HAVE THE CORRECT PHONE NUMBER FOR Dxxxx Cxxxx! I AM NOT Dxxxx Cxxxx. No one here is Dxxxx Cxxxx!”

“We will call you back when you CALM DOWN, MA’MAM.”

The operator hung up.

Indeed, the automated calls continued. As the year progressed new automated messages came and went. They were from agencies with strange names like, “IntraTell Corp.” and “AdvanceIT.” Whenever I saw the name of some bizarre company on my caller ID, I knew it was another agency seeking Dxxxx Cxxxx. This person was important, and, crucially, the phone number associated with Dxxxx Cxxxx was just as important. There was no way to disassociate the two. They were linked at a profound level. I realized that this link was so profound that it could only be explained by Super-Power Morph activation. The phone number I had received was the result of a mistake--a mistake attributable to Super-Powerist Presumption. Whoever Dxxxx Cxxxx was as an “ordinary person,” Dxxxx Cxxxx must also have possessed the power of Morph. The mechanism of the automated phone call was clearly a means to activate the Morph power. Anyone possessing the phone number was also expected to possess the Morph power associated with the number. Being Super-Powerless to begin with, I was failing the system massively. I had answered the phone.

Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrating Ruth Barcan Marcus

Ruth Barcan Marcus

Ruth Barcan Marcus is a philosopher and logician and pioneering figure in the quantification of modal logic and the theory of direct reference. The Barcan Formula is named after her.

Education

PhD 1946, Yale University


BA 1941, NYU

Academic Appointments

Prior to 1973: Chair of University of Illinois–Chi

cago Philosophy Department, then Professor at Northwestern University.

Since 1973: Halleck Professor at Yale, 1992, and then Senior Research Scholar at Yale and Visiting Distinguished Professor (One term per year) at UC, Irvine

The Barcan Formula is an axiom by Ruth Barcan Marcus, in the first extensions of modal propositional logic to include quantification.

The Barcan Formula is:

The statement reads: If everything is necessarily F, then it is necessary that everything is F. The Barcan formula has generated some controversy because it implies that all objects which exist in every possible world (accessible to the actual world) exist in the actual world. In other words, the domain of any accessible possible world is a subset of the domain of the actual world.

The Converse Barcan Formula is:

If a frame is based on a symmetric accessibility relation, then the Barcan formula will be valid in the frame if, and only if, the converse Barcan formula is valid in the frame.

Personal note: I will never forget the first time I read about Ruth Barcan Marcus' work. It was while I was in graduate school, and was reading an essay by W.V.O. Quine in which he was arguing against modal logic. Quine referred to her as "Miss Barcan" while all the other (male) philosophers were referred to by last names. He had nothing good to say about her views, which seemed to me of a piece with his philosophical program and unsurprising, yet I was bothered. The etiquette seemed completely wrong. Even if, charitably, Ruth Barcan had not yet earned her doctorate, which would explain the reference to her as "Miss," she had nevertheless published work substantial enough that he thought it worth attack in print. Why not just "Barcan"? What did indicating Barcan's unmarried status have to do with intensional logic?

Later on, when I became aware of the controversy surrounding Barcan's work possibly being plagiarized or borrowed from by Kripke, (a controversy described in this article by Jim Holt), it struck me that whatever the reality of the situation, there was a simple fact of the matter at hand. Looking around in the classrooms where I studied philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and logic, women were scarce. Still. It was not true that women were not capable of the rigors of logic. Pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper (developer of COBOL and pioneer of programming languages) and Ruth Barcan Marcus have been there all along. Under the radar--but why? Under-appreciated? Not any more, not on my watch.

Best Business Practice

On 81st Birthday, Oregon Man Gives Company to Employees

Best Facebook Comment

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Political Campaign Finance Reform 2.0

I’m just as pissed off about the recent Supreme Court Decision on corporate financed “free speech” as the next person. (Look, if you aren’t one of the pissed off people, I don’t understand you. Just leave now. Please. Seriously.)

So, what do we do? It doesn’t seem like there’s anything to do. But, maybe, that’s wrong, or not the entire story. There is a looming credibility problem. I could be off about this, but it’s not as though the advertisement industry hasn’t had to jump through stunning amounts of self-reflexive hoops in order to make quotidian sorts of commercials for products even remotely interesting for mass audiences. Now that political campaigns can’t remotely pretend not to be corporate sponsored, the ad-race is going to be on. Think about it. The amount of money that can now be funneled into campaign ads is ghastly, astronomical, beyond the pale. But when all this money gets thrown into the process, it very well may be the undoing of any and all campaign ads. Let political candidates A, B and C advertise exactly like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. This will be the precise point at which people generally will become bored in a huge way. Political candidates offering a dollar menu deal, and ever-new catchy “Lovin’ it” songs and hip visuals with giant production values will become just so much noise. Sure, people still, unfortunately, eat at McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy’s, but when was the last time anyone ever took anything seriously about their ads?

What we really need is to put a limitation on candidate’s endorsement of ads. People and corporations can spend as much as they want on ads backing whatever candidates they chose, but none of the candidates can say that they “approve the ad” unless the ad cost less than, say, $300 to make. Steven Spielberg can offer to direct an ad, but he’ll have to do it for free, and the ad would have to appear on PBS, on free-access network time, youtube or a .org website. Corporations can spend as much as they want, but they can’t state that the candidate “approved the ad.” Yeah, this will never happen. But it should. Noise, the unintended consequence of this mess, will make the candidates who use youtube and production values of 0 dollars more viable. Imagine someone just sitting there using their computer to say stuff or having to do interviews, engage in debates in order to get material for their ads and that being the content “approved” by the candidate. You can say I'm a dreamer...

Daily Show Strikes Again

Two for one clip. The Apparent Trap followed by John Oliver's report on Hawaiian Universal heath-care: