Gus Giordano, an early and tireless popularizer of American jazz dance who organized the first Jazz Dance World Congress, died on March 9 in Chicago. He was 84.The cause was pneumonia, according to his daughters, Nan and Amy Giordano.Mr. Giordano was best known through the performing of his company, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, founded in 1962 and based in Evanston, and through his teaching at dance conventions throughout the United States. The company, now directed by Nan Giordano, his daughter, is said to have been the first dance troupe to dedicate itself solely to jazz dance.The company’s programs featured pieces by Mr. Giordano and later, as he grew older, included dances by guest choreographers including Mia Michaels and Davis Robertson. The performers became known for their strong training, energy and hard-driving, precise way of moving.“Their sleek lines and high, silent jumps had the feel of a well-oiled 1958 Chevrolet Impala, a pure expression of another era and something we remember as historically sexy,” Erika Kinetz wrote in 2005 in The New York Times, reviewing “Giordano Moves,” a tribute presented at the 14th annual Jazz Dance World Congress in Chicago.Mr. Giordano organized the first congress in 1990, bringing jazz dance companies together for a week of master classes and performance in annual conventions held not only in the United States but also in countries including Japan, Germany and Mexico. He also wrote several books, including the 1975 “Anthology of American Jazz Dance,” published by Orion Publishing House in 1975, and “Jazz Dance Class: Beginning Thru Advanced,” published by Dance Horizons in 1992.
He was born in St. Louis and became interested in dance as a child. As a marine in World War II, he was assigned to perform in shows at military bases. He performed on Broadway after the war in musicals including “Paint Your Wagon” and “On the Town.” He moved to Chicago in 1953. In 1980, he won an Emmy for the television special “The Rehearsal.”
In addition to his daughters Nan and Amy, he is survived by two sons, Patrick and Marc, and eight grandchildren, all of Chicago.
Joseph Weizenbaum, whose famed conversational computer program, Eliza, foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, but who grew skeptical about the potential for technology to improve the human condition, died on March 5 in Gröben, Germany. He was 85.
Alessandro della Valle/Keystone
Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a famed computer program.
The cause was complications of cancer, said his daughter Sharon Weizenbaum.
Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1965 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines.
The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client’s statements as questions.
In fact, the responsiveness of the conversation was an illusion, because Eliza was programmed simply to respond to certain key words and phrases. That would lead to wild non sequiturs and bizarre detours, but Mr. Weizenbaum later said that he was stunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details.
“It was amazing the extent that people did not understand they were talking to a computer,” said Robert Fano, emeritus professor of electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T. In the wake of the creation of Eliza, which was described in a technical paper in January 1966, a group of M.I.T. scientists, including Claude Shannon, a pioneer in the field of cybernetics, met in Concord, Mass., to discuss the social implications of the phenomenon, Mr. Fano said.
The seductiveness of the conversations alarmed Mr. Weizenbaum, who came to believe that an obsessive reliance on technology was indicative of a moral failing in society, an observation rooted in his experiences as a child growing up in Nazi Germany.
In 1976, he sketched out a humanist critique of computer technology in his book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation.” The book did not argue against the possibility of artificial intelligence but rather was a passionate criticism of systems that substituted automated decision-making for the human mind. In the book, he argued that computing served as a conservative force in society by propping up bureaucracies as well as by redefining the world in a reductionist sense, by restricting the potential of human relationships.
“He raised questions about what kinds of relationships we want to have with machines very early,” said Sherry Turkle, a professor in the program in science, technology and society at M.I.T. who taught courses with Mr. Weizenbaum on the social implications of technology.
Mr. Weizenbaum also believed that there were transcendent qualities in the human experience that could not be duplicated in interactions with machines. He described it in his book as “the wordless glance that a father and mother share over the bed of their sleeping child,” Ms. Turkle said.
The book drove a wedge between Mr. Weizenbaum and other members of the artificial intelligence research community. In his later years he said he came to take pride in his self-described status as a “heretic,” estranged from the insular community of elite computer researchers.
Joseph Weizenbaum was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Berlin. He was the second son of Jechiel Weizenbaum, a furrier, and his wife, Henrietta. The family was forced to leave Berlin in 1935 when the Nazis enacted anti-Semitic legislation, and they emigrated the next year from Bremen, Germany, to the United States.
He began studies in mathematics at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1941, but left the next year to join the Army Air Corps, in which he served as a meteorologist. After the war he returned to complete his studies at the mathematics department, where he worked on the development and programming of the first large computers.
In 1952, he went into industry, working on an early General Electric computer development project for the Bank of America. In 1962, he was invited to become a visiting professor at M.I.T. and in 1970 became a professor of computer science at the school.
Attracted by his childhood experiences and the German language, Mr. Weizenbaum decided to return to Germany in 1996. His social criticism of computing technology was warmly received by a younger generation there. Much honored in German, he spoke frequently on the political and social consequences of technology.
His marriage to Ruth Manes Weizenbaum ended in divorce. Besides his daughter Sharon, of Amherst, Mass., he is survived by three other daughters: Miriam, of Providence, R.I.; Naomi, of Gröben; and Pm, of Seattle.
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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HOWARD METZENBAUM, WHO BATTLED BIG BUSINESS AS OHIO SENATOR
Associated Press
Howard M. Metzenbaum, in 1993, was in the Senate 19 years.
Published: March 14, 2008
Howard M. Metzenbaum, who for nearly two decades as a Democratic senator from
Ohio fought conservatives and big business with such effectiveness and ferocity that he became known as “the last angry liberal,” died Wednesday at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 90.His daughter Shelley H. Metzenbaum confirmed the death.Mr. Metzenbaum came from poverty to accumulate a fortune in the parking-lot business, but he made a political career of battling for the poor and the middle class. His style was stubborn, bombastic and often self-righteous — so grating that more than one colleague compared it to fingernails scraping across a blackboard.But Mr. Metzenbaum’s success in passing social legislation on issues like workers rights and adoption policy, in blocking pork-barrel excess and tax loopholes, and in inventing new ways to use the filibuster — long the tool of Southern segregationists — were unquestioned.“I think that even the people who don’t agree with his causes would concede he performs a very important and useful function,” Senator
Paul S. Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, said in an interview with The New York Times in 1984.
John Glenn, a Democrat who had an often-contentious relationship with Mr. Metzenbaum when both were senators from Ohio, said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in 1994: “I’ve worked with Howard Metzenbaum, and I’ve worked against Howard Metzenbaum. And it’s a whole lot more pleasant to work with him.”
Mr. Metzenbaum was a senator for 19 years, retiring in 1995 to become chairman of the Consumer Federation of America. In winning re-election in his last race, in 1988, he scored a wider margin of victory in traditionally Republican Ohio than that of Vice President George Bush, who was the Republican presidential nominee that year.
Mr. Metzenbaum, nicknamed Headline Howard for his love of publicity, denounced big oil companies, the insurance industry, savings and loans and the National Rifle Association, among many targets. At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 1991 hearings on the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, he hammered Mr. Thomas relentlessly on accusations of sexual harassment. Finally, Judge Thomas responded, “God is my judge, not you, Mr. Metzenbaum.”
Howard Morton Metzenbaum, grandson of an immigrant from Hungary, was born on June 4, 1917, in Cleveland. His father, Charles, eked out a living selling the goods of bankrupt companies.
Howard Metzenbaum ran track at his Cleveland high school and once raced against Jesse Owens, who left him in the dust. He sold magazines and delivered groceries as a teenager. Before he was old enough to drive, he owned a car, which he used to ferry patrons to a race track. He woke up one morning and found the car, a 1926 Essex, gone. His father had sold it to meet a mortgage payment.
At Ohio State University, Mr. Metzenbaum ran a bike rental business, played his trombone for pay and sold chrysanthemums outside the football stadium. After graduating in 1939, he went to the university’s law school, making money by drafting legislation for state lawmakers.
After graduating from law school, he won election in 1942 to the Ohio House, where he served until 1947. He was a state senator from 1947 to 1951, when he retired from politics after losing in a bid to become Senate majority leader. He blamed anti-Semitism for the defeat.
Mr. Metzenbaum had meanwhile started a business with a partner, Alva T. Bonda. They set up one of the first commercial parking lots to be built at an airport, in Cleveland, and quickly expanded nationwide. When the company was bought by ITT, Mr. Metzenbaum received $6 million. The partners also had successful investments in newspapers, banking and 17 Avis rental car franchises, the largest number under a single ownership.
Mr. Metzenbaum once described himself as “born knowing how to make money.”
With financial independence, Mr. Metzenbaum managed two successful campaigns for the United States Senate by Stephen M. Young, a Democrat, in 1958 and 1964. In 1970, Mr. Metzenbaum ran for the Senate himself. He faced Mr. Glenn, an astronaut and national hero, in the primary.
At the campaign’s start, Mr. Metzenbaum was known by 10 percent of Ohioans and Mr. Glenn by 95 percent. Mr. Glenn contended that his millionaire opponent was buying the election with huge expenditures for television advertising.
Mr. Metzenbaum agreed that unequal television exposure was unfair but said Mr. Glenn had enjoyed a tax-supported “$3.5-billion-dollar TV spectacular when he orbited the Earth.” Mr. Metzenbaum won a narrow victory over Mr. Glenn, but lost to Robert Taft Jr. in the general election.
In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon named Senator William B. Saxbe, Republican of Ohio, as his new attorney general. Ohio’s Democratic governor, John J. Gilligan, named Mr. Metzenbaum to the remaining year of Mr. Saxbe’s term.
As an appointed senator, Mr. Metzenbaum said he would be a “quiet voice” and voted the liberal line on issues like energy and gun control. In 1974, he and Mr. Glenn were again pitted against each other in the Democratic primary.
In the campaign, Mr. Metzenbaum said Mr. Glenn had never met a payroll, apparently meaning to suggest that Mr. Glenn had no business experience. But many understood Mr. Metzenbaum to mean that Mr. Glenn had never held a real job.
Mr. Glenn, a career marine, replied of the sacrifices members of the armed service make, referring poignantly to the graves of many of them at Arlington National Cemetery. Mr. Glenn won the primary and the election.
In 1976, Mr. Metzenbaum beat Mr. Taft and became an elected senator. He threw himself into fighting against the deregulation of gas and oil prices, called for tighter regulation of the insurance industry and fought for national health insurance.
Mr. Metzenbaum and Mr. Glenn reconciled in 1984 when Mr. Metzenbaum helped Mr. Glenn’s presidential campaign. In 1988, Mr. Glenn helped Mr. Metzenbaum’s re-election effort, including recording a commercial rebuttal of Republican accusations that Mr. Metzenbaum was soft on child pornography.
For all his public fierceness, Mr. Metzenbaum was known for personal touches like his huge bulletin board with photographs of friends and colleagues. Each year he would take each of his four daughters on a business trip.
Besides his daughter Shelley, of Concord, Mass., his survivors include his wife, the former Shirley Turoff; three other daughters, Barbara J. Metzenbaum of Topanga, Calif.; Susan M. Hyatt of Atherton, Calif., and Amy B. Metzenbaum of Mill Valley, Calif.; and nine grandchildren.
After the Democrats won a Senate majority in the 1986 election, Mr. Metzenbaum was glad to be more than “Senator No” to Republican initiatives. He had several legislative victories, including a law requiring companies to give voters 60 days’ notice of a plant shutdown.
In the 1994 interview with The Columbus Dispatch, he said, “I’ve proven that one person who is resolute in his or her positions can make a difference in this body, and that you don’t have to go along to get along.”
(Article courtesy of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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Ann
