Comrade Spears

In response to Cosma ...

Igor had just finished his studies at the Institute of Statistics and Econometrics and was transferred to the Department of Planning in the sub-section of Culture, Entertainment and Progress. He quickly became a rising star in the sub-committee for the allocation of resources in the music and recording industry when he figured out important improvements to the MTOT-PS (musical taste of teenagers prediction system). Igor implemented several new ways to predict the musical taste of young comrades in a progressive society, after long meetings with many members of the youth brigades. (His system was essentially an email based hitparade, coupled with a time-series module in R, using multivariate analysis of several input factors.) He could feed the results of his predictions directly into an optimization algorithm, which calculated the songs to be produced in the recording studios of the Department of Music and Happiness and finally the optimal number of CDs distributed in each month (*).

Unfortunately, several weeks after his new system was implemented somebody invented iTunes and production of all CDs was stopped, following orders from the Department of Computer Networks and Electronic Amusement.
Subsequently Igor was invited to a 'criticism and self-criticism' meeting at IMAWS (Investigation of Mis-Allocation and Wasteful Spending) which then led to an invitation to an ISCRA session (Investigation of Sabotage and Counter-Revolutionary Activities).

Fortunately, Igor was able to flee the country and has since found a new job as a consultant to EMI and Sony, figuring out novel ways to detect the pirating of music.

from The Short Stories of Vince Tullow


(*) The #1 Hit predicted, produced but never distributed by Igor's allocation system.