By John McDonnell
Last week I thought of Bennie Briscoe, and I typed his name in Google and found out that he died on December 28 2010. Most people today don't know who Bennie Briscoe was, but there was a time when he was considered the second-best middleweight boxer in the world. He was a bald Black man who fought with a furious intensity, and he is still considered one of the hardest punchers to ever ply that vicious sport. Bennie never took a step backward in the ring, and boxers knew they were in for a war when they signed to fight him.
Bennie was born in Georgia, and he moved north to Philly when he was a teenager. He got involved with boxing in the glory years of the sport in Philly, when there were champions and contenders in every gym, and they all had colorful nicknames, like "Kitten" Hayward, "Boogaloo" Watts, and "Gypsy Joe" Harris to name a few.
Bennie, though, didn't have a colorful nickname. He was simply known as "Bad" Bennie Briscoe, probably because bad is what his opponents felt when he got finished with them.
He was a feared presence in the sport, and because of that it's said that champions avoided him. He only got three World Title fights in a twenty year career, and he lost them all (once on a controversial call).
The funny thing about Bennie was that he was more revered in some ways in Philly than the guys who actually won championships. He was our town's everyday warrior, the guy you'd see on the subway going to work at his job in the Streets Department. Bennie worked 40 years in the Streets Department, and trained for his biggest fights while hoisting trash cans every day. He rarely missed work, and sent most of his boxing winnings home to his mother in Georgia. He was a fearsome boxer, but he carried a lunch box every day.
To me he epitomizes the Philadelphia I grew up in. It was a town full of lovable losers. The sports teams almost never won their respective championships. With the exception of the 1968 76ers and the Flyers of 1974 and 75, the Philly sports teams usually finished far back in the pack each year, with second place the best we could hope for.
Even when a championship was in reach, something always happened to the Philly teams to snatch it away from them. The 1964 Phillies infamously lost 10 games straight at the end of the season, just when they seemed a lock to make it to the World Series.
That's the world I grew up in.
Philly was always an also-ran, always behind New York and Washington in everything, and we always had an inferiority complex about it. It was a town of Bennie Briscoes, people who worked hard and had talent but just never seemed to get over the hump to be the best in their field.
That's why it's so amazing to see what's happened in recent years. Philadelphia is routinely written up in national magazines for its beauty, its charming neighborhoods, its restaurants, and yes, its sports teams. The Phillies won the World Series several years ago, and they have won four straight NL East Division championships. They are rated one of the best teams in baseball every year. And this year during the offseason the unthinkable happened, at least for someone from my generation -- a high-priced player, Cliff Lee, one of the best pitchers in the sport, turned down an offer from the New York Yankees in order to sign with the Phillies.
This was amazing. A superstar chose Philadelphia over New York? It seemed almost too good to be true, for someone from my era. And now the Phillies have what many people think could be one of the best pitching staffs in history. Las Vegas oddsmakers are betting they'll get back to the World Series again.
Philly has come a long way from the Bennie Briscoe days. We always had people like Bennie, the warriors, the good men who did their jobs every day and did them with skill and passion. Now, though, the town has a spring to its step, and a feeling of confidence that yes, we can win it all, we can get to the top of the mountain.
I'm glad Bennie got to see that before he died.
THE END
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Hello I Must Be Going, Watson
By John McDonnell
Okay, so IBM’s Watson computer can win at “Jeopardy”. Can it understand a Groucho Marx joke?
The news came out in mid-February that Watson, a computer built by IBM, beat two former champions at the game of “Jeopardy”. Beat them soundly, too.
I thought it was amusing when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, because I thought it was nothing more than a parlor trick. It’s just raw computing power, I told myself. Computers will never be more than glorified adding machines.
However, Watson has me worried. That's because this computer was specially built to do "natural language processing", which meant it had to analyze “Jeopardy” questions by sifting through a vast database of knowledge (encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, etc.) in microseconds, make hundreds of decisions in the blink of an eye, and then come up with what it decided was the correct answer.
I can accept that computers can do math a million times better than me. I'm not threatened by that at all. But when they start coming onto my turf, which is words and their meanings, then I get a little nervous. I'm a writer, and I have been one all my life. I've always had a certain skill at putting words together, and it's served me well both in school and in my profession.
I know that over the course of the last 30 years computers have proven to be better at humans in many things, and they have made major changes in industries and professions because of that.
But words? I thought I was safe from computer penetration of my field, simply because computers couldn't understand the nuances of words the way humans can. A human expression like, "It's raining cats and dogs," can completely flummox a computer, because the machines are so literal. Or, how about a Groucho Marx joke like, “I wanted to get a boat with a flat bottom, but the girl at the boathouse didn’t have one.” How can a computer understand the joke in that line?
For the “Jeopardy” challenge, IBM had to find a way to enable Watson to analyze expressions, decide between different meanings of a word, and take all sorts of gray areas into account that you don't have with a mathematics problem. Apparently, they succeeded. IBM announced that it is entering into a partnership with Nuance, a company that makes speech recognition software, to adapt its technology for commercial use in the near future.
What does this mean for my profession? One thing I can see is that it won't be long before writers will have the kind of software that musicians use to correct imperfections in a vocal performance. In other words, your word processing program will have a way to convert a clunky turn of phrase into something more clear, with more style and grace. The software will analyze a pedestrian turn of phrase and offer options for making it better. "Perhaps this metaphor will work better," it might say. "Here is a quote from Shakespeare that will express your point better." Or, "this section should be shorter; these words should be eliminated."
Not long after that I can see a program that will write articles, books, yes even fiction and poetry, and all you have to do is type in a few keywords. As the technology gets more sophisticated, you could have computers producing great literature just as now they make breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and science.
And then what? Will there be a time when people prefer computer writers over human ones? If a computer can write a best-selling detective novel or romance for a publisher, and the publisher doesn't have to pay royalties or deal with eccentric writers, I think publishers will jump at that arrangement. Why not?
And then guys like me will be among the millions of writers who have been replaced by a computer. They'll be hawking their wares on street corners, trying to get somebody to buy their novels or poems even though people will have programs on their laptops that can produce better writing for free, and in a matter of minutes.
There’s an expression that everyone thinks they have a novel in them. What will happen to them when the Watsons of the world can do it better? Will they become bitter? Will they destroy their computers? Will they form underground cults and seek to overthrow the computer companies and send us back to the Dark Ages when people still wrote literature?
It's not fair, I tell you. Somebody better stop this before it gets serious.
THE END
Okay, so IBM’s Watson computer can win at “Jeopardy”. Can it understand a Groucho Marx joke?
The news came out in mid-February that Watson, a computer built by IBM, beat two former champions at the game of “Jeopardy”. Beat them soundly, too.
I thought it was amusing when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990s, because I thought it was nothing more than a parlor trick. It’s just raw computing power, I told myself. Computers will never be more than glorified adding machines.
However, Watson has me worried. That's because this computer was specially built to do "natural language processing", which meant it had to analyze “Jeopardy” questions by sifting through a vast database of knowledge (encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, etc.) in microseconds, make hundreds of decisions in the blink of an eye, and then come up with what it decided was the correct answer.
I can accept that computers can do math a million times better than me. I'm not threatened by that at all. But when they start coming onto my turf, which is words and their meanings, then I get a little nervous. I'm a writer, and I have been one all my life. I've always had a certain skill at putting words together, and it's served me well both in school and in my profession.
I know that over the course of the last 30 years computers have proven to be better at humans in many things, and they have made major changes in industries and professions because of that.
But words? I thought I was safe from computer penetration of my field, simply because computers couldn't understand the nuances of words the way humans can. A human expression like, "It's raining cats and dogs," can completely flummox a computer, because the machines are so literal. Or, how about a Groucho Marx joke like, “I wanted to get a boat with a flat bottom, but the girl at the boathouse didn’t have one.” How can a computer understand the joke in that line?
For the “Jeopardy” challenge, IBM had to find a way to enable Watson to analyze expressions, decide between different meanings of a word, and take all sorts of gray areas into account that you don't have with a mathematics problem. Apparently, they succeeded. IBM announced that it is entering into a partnership with Nuance, a company that makes speech recognition software, to adapt its technology for commercial use in the near future.
What does this mean for my profession? One thing I can see is that it won't be long before writers will have the kind of software that musicians use to correct imperfections in a vocal performance. In other words, your word processing program will have a way to convert a clunky turn of phrase into something more clear, with more style and grace. The software will analyze a pedestrian turn of phrase and offer options for making it better. "Perhaps this metaphor will work better," it might say. "Here is a quote from Shakespeare that will express your point better." Or, "this section should be shorter; these words should be eliminated."
Not long after that I can see a program that will write articles, books, yes even fiction and poetry, and all you have to do is type in a few keywords. As the technology gets more sophisticated, you could have computers producing great literature just as now they make breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and science.
And then what? Will there be a time when people prefer computer writers over human ones? If a computer can write a best-selling detective novel or romance for a publisher, and the publisher doesn't have to pay royalties or deal with eccentric writers, I think publishers will jump at that arrangement. Why not?
And then guys like me will be among the millions of writers who have been replaced by a computer. They'll be hawking their wares on street corners, trying to get somebody to buy their novels or poems even though people will have programs on their laptops that can produce better writing for free, and in a matter of minutes.
There’s an expression that everyone thinks they have a novel in them. What will happen to them when the Watsons of the world can do it better? Will they become bitter? Will they destroy their computers? Will they form underground cults and seek to overthrow the computer companies and send us back to the Dark Ages when people still wrote literature?
It's not fair, I tell you. Somebody better stop this before it gets serious.
THE END
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