Dreamfall – video playthrough of the game. I wanted to remind myself of the details of the story, and all the loose ends left unresolved, before going any further with the new sequel Dreamfall Chapters, of which the latest installment is just out. Handy that some people have published videos of their own playthroughs, because I didn't fancy replaying it myself: there were some unpleasantly tricky fighting and stealth sections which I found very hard to get past the first time. I still like it, but the dialogue feels flabby by comparison with The Longest Journey, the original from which this was a spin-off sequel. TLJ, dating from 1999 and released originally on multiple CDs, was designed within the technical limitations of the time, forcing the writers to be tighter and more focused. Sometimes constraints can be a good thing and more memory isn't necessarily a benefit.
The Adjustment Bureau - watched again on DVD, gaining pleasure on every viewing. The 1950s governmental -style suits and architecture of the Bureau's officers and offices looks great, and Emily Blunt is totally convincing as the effervescent dancer with whom Matt Damon's aspiring politician falls in love and for whom is willing to risk everything. I wonder what the original Philip K. Dick short story is like; the updating to the 2010s technology, society and politics must have taken some effort, but it works perfectly.
Neil Gaiman: Douglas Adams memorial lecture for Save the Rhino – which I watched because of Douglas Adams’ reported views on eBooks (how printed books would survive because they’re so good at what they do), but enjoyed most in the end for Neil Gaiman’s cheerful celebration of his friend’s life and thought (and also the life and thought of Terry Pratchett, who died shortly after the lecture was given), seeing his immortality in the enduring value of his stories and jokes for helping us to live in the world.
Canaletto: Celebrating Britain – exhibition at Compton Verney art gallery. Unexpectedly interesting, because the story of Canaletto in Britain turned out to be a microcosm of British history in the Georgian era: the rise of British trade and military power to world domination all visible in his paintings of London. Following the broader historical theme, on getting home, we were moved to watch from our video collection TV programmes on the music of Handel and the building of Bath, by David Starkey and Dan Cruickshank respectively.
Tuesday, 7 April 2015
Friday, 3 April 2015
Cuttings March 2015
Is The Dress blue and black or white and gold? The answer lies in vision psychology - post by Marie Rogers in "Head quarters" blog in The Guardian. "Would you like to have an argument with your colleagues this fine Friday? Just ask them what colour the dress above is. Some people say white and gold, whereas others claim it’s clearly blue and black.... It appears to be because of different interpretations of how the scene is illuminated. The brain automatically 'processes' visual input before we consciously perceive it. Differences in this processing between people may underlie The Great Dress Debate. In our everyday lives, there are many changes in the colour of the light illuminating our surroundings.... For example, the yellow glow of an incandescent light bulb versus the blue-ish hue of a fluorescent light. The light that an object reflects to the eye is a combination of both the colour of the object itself and the spectrum of the light source, which may vary. The brain is able to disentangle these two things and decide what colour the object is. Simply put, objects appear the same colour even if the light illuminating them changes – a concept known as colour constancy.... This is possibly something you’ve never thought about or been aware of before - you may well underestimate just how much the lighting in our world changes, because your brain compensates for it so well. This happens automatically without any conscious awareness. But, colour constancy is not perfect. In The Dress photo, there aren’t many cues or reference points to tell us the properties of the light source. This leads to ambiguity and the possibility of different interpretations."
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, based on his book Landmarks. "The same summer I was on Lewis [and was given the 'Peat Glossary' of Gaelic terms for moorland], a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the language preserved in the prose‑poem of the 'Peat Glossary', so I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry."
Some New Nature Words - Cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, 7 March 2015, Review p 14. Following the article by Robert Macfarlane the previous week (see above), noting how the Oxford Junior Dictionary had dropped many nature words and replaced them with words like blog and broadband. "Pipey-furrock: the marks left after broadband cable is laid. Smootle: a patch of snow in the shadow of a recycling bin. Brauft: a bird's nest built on a CCTV camera. Crobie-Tinkler: sunlight glinting off a mobile phone mast."
MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’ - report by Stuart Dredge of talk by Sean Percival (former VP Online Marketing at MySpace) at By:Larm conference. "[Quoting Percival:] 'News Corp [which bought MySpace in 2005 is a monster organisation, just mammoth proportions: many many billions of dollars, many many users. At the time I remember they said: ‘Hey! We’re not going to disrupt anything. We’re going to let it run: you’re special!’ And just preserve that and not do anything.... The reality was that as time went on, the corporate policies creeped in. The lawyers came in, the accountants. Everything came in. As opposed to being this nimble, fast-moving sports car, they started to become slow.... As opposed to preserving and letting it run as it is, it just got really, really corporate. Politics, greed, all the horrible things that come with big corporations, slowly sort-of crept in.' " "Percival said that one of MySpace’s main failings at this point was bloat, with verticals covering celebrity, fashion, sport and even books.'I can tell you: literature nerds were not going to MySpace to debate the latest John Grisham book! They [MySpace] just went everywhere, and that was a big, big mistake,' he said.'Facebook has done a really good job of not doing that … Lesson learned: do one thing great, not do many things good. Or in our case, we were doing many things kinda crappy.'”
The revolution that could change the way your child is taught - article by Ian Leslie in The Guardian. "[Doug Lemov] started with a spreadsheet. Cross-referencing test scores and demographics, he identified which schools were achieving the most exceptional results with poor students. Then he visited the classrooms of the best teachers in those schools with a videographer. He watched and rewatched the lessons he recorded, like a football coach studying the tape of a game, analysing in minute detail what these outstanding teachers were doing. He gave names to the techniques he saw them use. Then he circulated his notes to the teachers he worked with. Those teachers passed them on to teachers they knew, who passed them on in turn, until the document, known at that time only as 'the taxonomy', took on a samizdat life of its own. Lemov realised how far word of it had spread when a teacher from California got in touch to request a copy. In 2010, he was persuaded to turn his notes into a book, which became a surprise best-seller in education circles. In its latest edition, Teach Like a Champion lists '62 techniques that put students on the path to college'. Lemov says that some of the advice in the book is probably wrong, and he does not pretend it is comprehensive. But it has become the key text of an incipient transformation of teaching that has little to do with government edict or official policy."
Attachment and digital communication - Article by Linda Cundy in Therapy Today (vol 26, issue 1, February 2015, pp 18-23). "I have found it enormously helpful to ask about use of mobile phones, computer games, social network sites, apps and the internet as part of a [psychotherapeutic] assessment. Clients are often ashamed of some aspect of their use of computers or phones and find it a relief to be asked about it in a matter-of-fact way in the early stages of counselling or therapy. These dyamics may not be the presenting issue but they can enable deeper therapeutic work to begin.... Preoccupied attachment develops from experiencing inconsisent caregiving, perhaps due to a parent coping with depression, physical illness or multiple stressors, or to conflict between parents.... Preoccupied people are likely to rely heavily on communication technology to reach out to others. Long phone calls, frequent messages and hours spent on social network sites are a defence against the reality of separateness.... Dismissing attachment has its origins in early relationships where precocious self-reliance is encouraged and reliance on parental figures is discouraged and even ridiculed.... I suggest that dismissing individuals will use technology in oder to keep others at a comfortable distance. The instinct to attach persists but its expression is inhibited and distorted."
[Douglas Adams on eBooks] Douglas Adams made me a writer: Neil Gaiman salutes his friend and inspiration - news item in The Guardian. "Giving the annual Douglas Adams lecture last night, Gaiman spoke at length about his memories of his friend and fellow author, revealing the details of a conversation 'almost 30 years ago now', when the two were discussing the idea of ebooks. 'We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks,' Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London. 'I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.' Adams told Gaiman: ‘"Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books and no matter what happens books will survive." And he was right,' said Gaiman."
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed review: Jon Ronson on rants and tweets - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Near the end of last year, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry was sacked from the shadow cabinet after tweeting a picture of a house draped in English flags with the words 'Image from #Rochester'.... This happened too late to be included in Jon Ronson’s superb and terrifying new book, but the social media mob fury that greeted Thornberry’s tweet is a perfect example of his subject. We are living through what he calls 'a great renaissance of public shaming'."
Loads? Or many? It depends whether you’re an academic snob - column by Jonathan Wolff in The Guardian. "Every time I mark student work ... some turns of phrase impress and some jar, even when they communicate exactly the same thought. Single words make a difference. 'There are many theories of political obligation' is fine; 'There are lots of theories of political obligation' a bit worrying; and 'There are loads of theories of political obligation' sounds like the candidate is begging for a low mark. But what’s the difference? Many universities are analysing exam and essay results in great detail, looking especially at different attainment levels for students of different ethnic, racial or socio-economic backgrounds. The achievement gap is most notable and worrying in different drop-out rates, but it also appears at the level of module marks, if only by a few percentage points. Could it be that expectations about what counts as an 'academic turn of phrase' explain part of the difference? As far as I know, that research is still to be carried out. Exam scripts and coursework essays are treated as confidential, and research to date has typically been a matter of crunching and analysing grades, rather than investigating why the grades were given. But we need to dig deeper."
Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is a starkly empty film, preoccupied as it is with the thought that people themselves might be hollow. The plot depends on the notion that the replicants must be allowed to live no longer than four years, because as time passes they begin to develop raw emotions. Why emotion should be a capital offence is never sufficiently explained; but it is of a piece with the film’s investigation of a flight from feeling – what psychologist Ian D Suttie once named the “taboo on tenderness”. Intimacy here is frightful (everyone appears to live alone), especially that closeness that suggests that the replicants might be indistinguishable from us."
Alice in Wonderland: the never-ending adventures - article by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Guardian, based on his book The Story of Alice. "Carroll’s decision to send Alice below the earth’s surface ensured his story was fully up to date. By 1862, few literary environments were as crowded as the underground.... When Carroll completed the first manuscript version of his story, which he presented to Alice Liddell in 1864, he gave it the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Simultaneously he was expanding it into the more familiar version he published in 1865, in which he altered 'Under' to 'Wonder' and 'Ground' to 'land'. Carroll’s title has since become so well known that it slips off the tongue without any thought, but at the time it was an unusual choice. Alice often 'wonders', but never names the place she enters in her dream, and nor do any of the creatures who live there. It is only her older sister, on the final page of the story, who thinks of it as Wonderland. Perhaps the book she is reading on the riverbank is supposed to be one of the earlier attempts to locate this enchanted country. If so, she would have had a small library of examples to choose from. It was an idea firmly rooted in Romanticism. For German writers such as Friedrich Schiller or Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, whose poems 'In fernem Wunderland' ('In a Distant Wonderland') and 'Ein Wunderland' ('A Wonderland') were often translated and anthologised in the period, Wunderland referred to a place where anything could happen because it existed only in the imagination. The same idea also attracted English and American authors."
David Graeber: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’ - interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. " 'Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?' writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. 'Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?' "
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, based on his book Landmarks. "The same summer I was on Lewis [and was given the 'Peat Glossary' of Gaelic terms for moorland], a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the language preserved in the prose‑poem of the 'Peat Glossary', so I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry."
Some New Nature Words - Cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, 7 March 2015, Review p 14. Following the article by Robert Macfarlane the previous week (see above), noting how the Oxford Junior Dictionary had dropped many nature words and replaced them with words like blog and broadband. "Pipey-furrock: the marks left after broadband cable is laid. Smootle: a patch of snow in the shadow of a recycling bin. Brauft: a bird's nest built on a CCTV camera. Crobie-Tinkler: sunlight glinting off a mobile phone mast."
MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’ - report by Stuart Dredge of talk by Sean Percival (former VP Online Marketing at MySpace) at By:Larm conference. "[Quoting Percival:] 'News Corp [which bought MySpace in 2005 is a monster organisation, just mammoth proportions: many many billions of dollars, many many users. At the time I remember they said: ‘Hey! We’re not going to disrupt anything. We’re going to let it run: you’re special!’ And just preserve that and not do anything.... The reality was that as time went on, the corporate policies creeped in. The lawyers came in, the accountants. Everything came in. As opposed to being this nimble, fast-moving sports car, they started to become slow.... As opposed to preserving and letting it run as it is, it just got really, really corporate. Politics, greed, all the horrible things that come with big corporations, slowly sort-of crept in.' " "Percival said that one of MySpace’s main failings at this point was bloat, with verticals covering celebrity, fashion, sport and even books.'I can tell you: literature nerds were not going to MySpace to debate the latest John Grisham book! They [MySpace] just went everywhere, and that was a big, big mistake,' he said.'Facebook has done a really good job of not doing that … Lesson learned: do one thing great, not do many things good. Or in our case, we were doing many things kinda crappy.'”
The revolution that could change the way your child is taught - article by Ian Leslie in The Guardian. "[Doug Lemov] started with a spreadsheet. Cross-referencing test scores and demographics, he identified which schools were achieving the most exceptional results with poor students. Then he visited the classrooms of the best teachers in those schools with a videographer. He watched and rewatched the lessons he recorded, like a football coach studying the tape of a game, analysing in minute detail what these outstanding teachers were doing. He gave names to the techniques he saw them use. Then he circulated his notes to the teachers he worked with. Those teachers passed them on to teachers they knew, who passed them on in turn, until the document, known at that time only as 'the taxonomy', took on a samizdat life of its own. Lemov realised how far word of it had spread when a teacher from California got in touch to request a copy. In 2010, he was persuaded to turn his notes into a book, which became a surprise best-seller in education circles. In its latest edition, Teach Like a Champion lists '62 techniques that put students on the path to college'. Lemov says that some of the advice in the book is probably wrong, and he does not pretend it is comprehensive. But it has become the key text of an incipient transformation of teaching that has little to do with government edict or official policy."
Attachment and digital communication - Article by Linda Cundy in Therapy Today (vol 26, issue 1, February 2015, pp 18-23). "I have found it enormously helpful to ask about use of mobile phones, computer games, social network sites, apps and the internet as part of a [psychotherapeutic] assessment. Clients are often ashamed of some aspect of their use of computers or phones and find it a relief to be asked about it in a matter-of-fact way in the early stages of counselling or therapy. These dyamics may not be the presenting issue but they can enable deeper therapeutic work to begin.... Preoccupied attachment develops from experiencing inconsisent caregiving, perhaps due to a parent coping with depression, physical illness or multiple stressors, or to conflict between parents.... Preoccupied people are likely to rely heavily on communication technology to reach out to others. Long phone calls, frequent messages and hours spent on social network sites are a defence against the reality of separateness.... Dismissing attachment has its origins in early relationships where precocious self-reliance is encouraged and reliance on parental figures is discouraged and even ridiculed.... I suggest that dismissing individuals will use technology in oder to keep others at a comfortable distance. The instinct to attach persists but its expression is inhibited and distorted."
[Douglas Adams on eBooks] Douglas Adams made me a writer: Neil Gaiman salutes his friend and inspiration - news item in The Guardian. "Giving the annual Douglas Adams lecture last night, Gaiman spoke at length about his memories of his friend and fellow author, revealing the details of a conversation 'almost 30 years ago now', when the two were discussing the idea of ebooks. 'We were talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was something which resembled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when something like that happens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Douglas said no. Books are sharks,' Gaiman told a packed audience at the Royal Geographical Society in London. 'I must have looked baffled because he he looked very pleased with himself. And he carried on with his metaphor. Books are sharks … because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.' Adams told Gaiman: ‘"Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books and no matter what happens books will survive." And he was right,' said Gaiman."
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed review: Jon Ronson on rants and tweets - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Near the end of last year, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry was sacked from the shadow cabinet after tweeting a picture of a house draped in English flags with the words 'Image from #Rochester'.... This happened too late to be included in Jon Ronson’s superb and terrifying new book, but the social media mob fury that greeted Thornberry’s tweet is a perfect example of his subject. We are living through what he calls 'a great renaissance of public shaming'."
Loads? Or many? It depends whether you’re an academic snob - column by Jonathan Wolff in The Guardian. "Every time I mark student work ... some turns of phrase impress and some jar, even when they communicate exactly the same thought. Single words make a difference. 'There are many theories of political obligation' is fine; 'There are lots of theories of political obligation' a bit worrying; and 'There are loads of theories of political obligation' sounds like the candidate is begging for a low mark. But what’s the difference? Many universities are analysing exam and essay results in great detail, looking especially at different attainment levels for students of different ethnic, racial or socio-economic backgrounds. The achievement gap is most notable and worrying in different drop-out rates, but it also appears at the level of module marks, if only by a few percentage points. Could it be that expectations about what counts as an 'academic turn of phrase' explain part of the difference? As far as I know, that research is still to be carried out. Exam scripts and coursework essays are treated as confidential, and research to date has typically been a matter of crunching and analysing grades, rather than investigating why the grades were given. But we need to dig deeper."
Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless - article by Michael Newton in The Guardian. "It is a starkly empty film, preoccupied as it is with the thought that people themselves might be hollow. The plot depends on the notion that the replicants must be allowed to live no longer than four years, because as time passes they begin to develop raw emotions. Why emotion should be a capital offence is never sufficiently explained; but it is of a piece with the film’s investigation of a flight from feeling – what psychologist Ian D Suttie once named the “taboo on tenderness”. Intimacy here is frightful (everyone appears to live alone), especially that closeness that suggests that the replicants might be indistinguishable from us."
Alice in Wonderland: the never-ending adventures - article by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Guardian, based on his book The Story of Alice. "Carroll’s decision to send Alice below the earth’s surface ensured his story was fully up to date. By 1862, few literary environments were as crowded as the underground.... When Carroll completed the first manuscript version of his story, which he presented to Alice Liddell in 1864, he gave it the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Simultaneously he was expanding it into the more familiar version he published in 1865, in which he altered 'Under' to 'Wonder' and 'Ground' to 'land'. Carroll’s title has since become so well known that it slips off the tongue without any thought, but at the time it was an unusual choice. Alice often 'wonders', but never names the place she enters in her dream, and nor do any of the creatures who live there. It is only her older sister, on the final page of the story, who thinks of it as Wonderland. Perhaps the book she is reading on the riverbank is supposed to be one of the earlier attempts to locate this enchanted country. If so, she would have had a small library of examples to choose from. It was an idea firmly rooted in Romanticism. For German writers such as Friedrich Schiller or Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, whose poems 'In fernem Wunderland' ('In a Distant Wonderland') and 'Ein Wunderland' ('A Wonderland') were often translated and anthologised in the period, Wunderland referred to a place where anything could happen because it existed only in the imagination. The same idea also attracted English and American authors."
David Graeber: ‘So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary’ - interview by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. " 'Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?' writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. 'Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?' "
Seen and heard February 2015
Gone Home - according to some players one of the best games of 2013, and according to others not a game at all. (See separate post about this.)
Penguin Café, performing at Saffron Hall - lovely to see them developing their own identity distinct from the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra, with a concert blending old and well-loved PCO tunes (such as Perpetuum Mobile, Beanfield, Telephone and Rubber Band, Music for a Found Harmonium), Penguin Cafe's new tunes from their own two albums (such as 1420), and new works yet to be recorded this year and being performed for the first time. Also lovely, in these days of ISIS and UKIP, to hear beautiful, warm and friendly music, which travels across national and cultural boundaries with ease; so one tune is described as existing mid-way between Africa, Cuba and Ireland, and another transforms a Chopin Nocturne into a steely Mexican romp (Black Hibiscus – the same sort of trick Simon Jeffes and the original PCO pulled with Giles Farnaby’s Dream).
Edward Scissorhands - Matthew Bourne ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre (see clip). This was our grand-daughter's introduction to ballet (more accessible than, say, Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, which let's face it were the nineteenth-century equivalents), and she loved it, despite the differences from the film (which she knew). The only problem was that she wanted to see it again right away, which wasn't possible, this being the end of the tour. A cracking show, full of invention and wit, alternately funny and touching; Granny and I were both moved to tears at the end, when the snow starts to fall in the auditorium, thus dissolving the fourth wall and bringing us into the scene.
Nicola Benedetti, playing with La Cetra Barokorkester Basel at Saffron Hall. Laser-like coherence, precision and power from the strings, which would have been great on its own; having Nicola Benedetti as a soloist was a bonus.
Laura Mvula, Prom concert from 19 August 2014 - I've come late to Laura Mvula and also to my recording of this concert, and now I can see what the excitement is about. This is sophisticated soul (as one would hope, given her classical training), and the orchestral rearrangements of tracks from her Sing to the Moon album were fantastic. My favourite number, though, was CInnamon Tree: an Esperanza Spalding song, which Mvula performed in duet with her.
Good Omens - BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel, by Dirk Maggs who did the radio versions of the later Hitchhiker's Guide books and Gaiman's own Neverwhere. This was first transmitted over Christmas, but it's another set of recordings to which I've only just got. The first episode was a bit slow, but once the story is set up it rattles along with the familiar charm and wit and faith in the essentially decent nature of humanity so characteristic of both Gaiman and Pratchett, brought to life by Maggs' wizard-like command of the aural medium. Some sequences are so surreal that it's hard to imagine them being realised in any way other than on the page or on the radio: for example, the bit where one demon is chasing another not-exactly-nice-but-less-nasty demon through a telephone network, and the less-nasty demon times his exit just before an answering machine kicks in, thus leaving his pursuer trapped on the cassette tape, which he then destroys by pouring holy water on it. Sensational! Can't imagine anyone doing that on film or TV.
Penguin Café, performing at Saffron Hall - lovely to see them developing their own identity distinct from the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra, with a concert blending old and well-loved PCO tunes (such as Perpetuum Mobile, Beanfield, Telephone and Rubber Band, Music for a Found Harmonium), Penguin Cafe's new tunes from their own two albums (such as 1420), and new works yet to be recorded this year and being performed for the first time. Also lovely, in these days of ISIS and UKIP, to hear beautiful, warm and friendly music, which travels across national and cultural boundaries with ease; so one tune is described as existing mid-way between Africa, Cuba and Ireland, and another transforms a Chopin Nocturne into a steely Mexican romp (Black Hibiscus – the same sort of trick Simon Jeffes and the original PCO pulled with Giles Farnaby’s Dream).
Edward Scissorhands - Matthew Bourne ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre (see clip). This was our grand-daughter's introduction to ballet (more accessible than, say, Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, which let's face it were the nineteenth-century equivalents), and she loved it, despite the differences from the film (which she knew). The only problem was that she wanted to see it again right away, which wasn't possible, this being the end of the tour. A cracking show, full of invention and wit, alternately funny and touching; Granny and I were both moved to tears at the end, when the snow starts to fall in the auditorium, thus dissolving the fourth wall and bringing us into the scene.
Nicola Benedetti, playing with La Cetra Barokorkester Basel at Saffron Hall. Laser-like coherence, precision and power from the strings, which would have been great on its own; having Nicola Benedetti as a soloist was a bonus.
Laura Mvula, Prom concert from 19 August 2014 - I've come late to Laura Mvula and also to my recording of this concert, and now I can see what the excitement is about. This is sophisticated soul (as one would hope, given her classical training), and the orchestral rearrangements of tracks from her Sing to the Moon album were fantastic. My favourite number, though, was CInnamon Tree: an Esperanza Spalding song, which Mvula performed in duet with her.
Good Omens - BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel, by Dirk Maggs who did the radio versions of the later Hitchhiker's Guide books and Gaiman's own Neverwhere. This was first transmitted over Christmas, but it's another set of recordings to which I've only just got. The first episode was a bit slow, but once the story is set up it rattles along with the familiar charm and wit and faith in the essentially decent nature of humanity so characteristic of both Gaiman and Pratchett, brought to life by Maggs' wizard-like command of the aural medium. Some sequences are so surreal that it's hard to imagine them being realised in any way other than on the page or on the radio: for example, the bit where one demon is chasing another not-exactly-nice-but-less-nasty demon through a telephone network, and the less-nasty demon times his exit just before an answering machine kicks in, thus leaving his pursuer trapped on the cassette tape, which he then destroys by pouring holy water on it. Sensational! Can't imagine anyone doing that on film or TV.
Cuttings February 2015
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen, noted gadfly of the tech world, is in this sardonic treatise concentrating his rhetorical fire on a class of people who really do think that the internet is the answer to all our current problems: not only in, say, getting a taxi or a sex partner, but also in education and politics. These are the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley, the wealthy or wannabe-wealthy libertarians with a fetish for 'disruption'. It is to their brand of what another critic, Evgeny Morozov, calls 'solutionism' that Keen is eager to retort in the negative.... What happened? Keen reminds us that, as is often forgotten, the internet was privatised. In the early 1990s, the US government 'handed over the running of the internet backbone to commercial internet service providers'. One super-wealthy tech investor called this moment, with a degree of smugness that it is tricky to gauge, 'the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet'. Keen himself offers a trenchant geopolitical analogy: 'Just as the end of the cold war led to the scramble by Russian financial oligarchs to buy up state-owned assets, so the privatisation of the internet at the end of the cold war triggered the rush by a new class of technological oligarchs in the United States to acquire prime online real estate.'”
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist.... But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0... The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking. Like these other critics, Keen challenges the dominant narrative about the internet – that it’s a technology that liberates, informs and empowers people. The problem with this narrative, he points out, is not that it’s wrong – the network does indeed have the potential to do all of these marvellous things, and much more besides. The problem is that it’s not the whole story, and perhaps it will turn out to be the least important part of it."
The theatre of terror, by Yuval Noah Harari - article in The Guardian. "People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.... Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theatre producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to fight terrorism effectively we must realise that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to terrorist provocations.... During the modern era, centralised states have gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades western countries have managed to achieve almost zero political violence.... People have quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar can make a lot of noise. This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful.... Killing 17 people in Paris draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism. An act of terror that would have gone unnoticed in a medieval kingdom can rattle much stronger modern states to their very core."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "If you need reminding – or persuading – of the brilliance of Ladybird illustration, then head to Bexhill, East Sussex, where Ladybird By Design opens at the De La Warr pavilion on 24 January.... Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
Paper bank statements make it easier to manage finances, study says - article by Rebecca Smithers in The Guardian. "Consumers are able to better manage and improve their finances when they receive paper bank statements sent through the post rather than just accessing their accounts online, according to the results of a behavioural study... For the study, 3,600 adults were initially invited to participate, and half then sent a mock bank statement and a notice of changes to overdraft fees by post, while the other half were sent the same information by email. In the end 2,399 consumers took part in the entire exercise, answering detailed questions about the mock account. Respondents were told they would be entered into a cash prize draw if they answered the questions correctly, creating a setting where they had to undertake tasks that were in their own financial interest. The research found that consumers who received statements and other financial information by post were better able to understand the information given, act on it and then make better financial decisions as a result than those receiving the same information electronically."
We need an internet that leaves space in our heads to enjoy creative peace - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "The internet is not made for us. It’s not made for the benefit of us. All those sites we use, that pull us in – none of them has our creative health or our wellbeing at heart. The mechanics of the internet – the bright lights and dopamine rewards – are deadly in combination with social expectations and instincts, and make it so hard to resist. It feels the norm. But this haphazard attention war is not the norm. ... these companies need to build sites and services that better work for us, true. But we owe it to ourselves to be acutely aware of what we lose in all this noise.... If my journey offline has taught me anything it is balance; that this aspirational, hyperconnected life we see all around us is not normal. Life is all around us already, beautiful in its imperfections and its normalness, under our feet and under our noses, in the room with us, if only we would put our smartphones down for long enough to experience it."
The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts - article by Steve Kolowich in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. The latest figures come from the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey, which was based on a 2014 survey of more than 2,800 academic leaders and was released on Thursday. The survey, which has tracked opinions about online education for more than a decade, started asking academic leaders about MOOCs in 2012, when free online courses seemed poised to disrupt the walled gardens of elite college instruction. Back then, 28 percent of respondents believed MOOCs were sustainable, while 26 percent thought they were not. In this year’s survey, 16 percent believe MOOCs are sustainable, while 51 percent think they are not."
Students used to take drugs to get high. Now they take them to get higher grades - article by Carol Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "This year’s final students are the first to graduate into a brave new world of massive debt.... This is at a time when stories about graduate unemployment and exploited interns are never far from the news pages... And in this scenario, if you were offered a small white pill that held the promise of enhanced productivity, greater focus, more hours in the library, and, ultimately, the potential of a better degree, well… it’s not hard to see the attraction.... Modafinil: a prescription-only medication for narcolepsy that the NHS’s website describes as 'a central nervous system stimulant' that prevents 'excessive sleepiness during daytime hours'. 'It’s not that it makes you more intelligent,' says Phoebe, a history student. 'It’s just that it helps you work. You can study for longer. You don’t get distracted. You’re actually happy to go to the library and you don’t even want to stop for lunch. And then it’s like 7pm, and you’re still, "Actually, you know what? I could do another hour."'... You do have to be to be careful though, says Johnny. 'It gives you this amazing concentration but you have to make sure you’re actually in front of your books. I spent five hours in my room rearranging my iTunes library on it once.'"
The fascinating truth behind all those ‘great firewall of China’ headlines - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. On research by King et al on corpus of Chinese social media posts, published in Science in August 2014. "It confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world. 'Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored, ... whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored.'... The fact that an authoritarian regime allows vitriolic criticism of it in social media may seem paradoxical, but in fact it provides the most vivid confirmation of the subtlety of the Chinese approach to managing the net. 'After all,' observes King, 'the knowledge that a local leader or government bureaucrat is engendering severe criticism – perhaps because of corruption or incompetence – is valuable information. That leader can then be replaced with someone more effective at maintaining stability and the system can then be seen as responsive.' The internet, in other words, is the information system that enables the system to keep a lid on things."
Angela Brazil: dorm feasts and red-hot pashes - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Until the 1880s middle-class girls had been mostly educated at home under the watchful eye of mothers, governesses and elder sisters. But with the coming of academic boarding schools and high schools, young women’s bonds were increasingly with other girls of their own age. [Angela] Brazil’s books glory in this new complicity, showing loud, boisterous teenagers forming themselves into self-policing groups, untroubled by the distant rumble of prefects and teachers. ... In 1944, when Brazil was coming to the end of her life, the new Education Act furnished able girls from the middling middle classes with a free education at either a direct-grant or grammar school, leaving boarding public schools such as Benenden, the model for Malory Towers, to a financial and social elite. That didn’t stop girls wanting to read about such schools – Blyton and Brent‑Dyer sold extremely well right up to the early 1990s – but there was a sense that what was being described was a kind of education that had happened a long time ago and far away. Until 1997, that is, when JK Rowling, the comprehensive-educated girl who had grown up with a passion for boarding school fiction, sat down to reimagine Brazil’s universe for a new generation of girls – and boys."
David Carr: Advice to Students - from his online course materials, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. (David Carr, New York Times media journalist, joined Boston University Communications School in Autumn 2014 and died from cancer in February 2015.) "I grade based on where you start and where you end. Don’t work on me for a better grade—work on your work and making the work of those around you better. Show industriousness and seriousness and produce surpassing work if you want an exceptional grade.... * Don’t raise your hand in class. This isn’t Montessori, I expect people to speak up when they like, but don’t speak over anyone. Respect the opinions of others. * This is an intense, once-a-week immersion on the waterfront of modern media-making. If you don’t show up for class, you will flounder. If you show up late or unprepared, you will stick out in unpleasant ways. If you aren’t putting effort into your work, I will suggest that you might be more comfortable elsewhere. * If you text or email during class, I will ignore you as you ignore me. It won’t go well. * I expect you to behave as an adult and will treat you like one. I don’t want to parent you—I want to teach you."
Fifty tips for success - Dilbert cartoon. Young guy: "A 27-year-old tech millionaire published his list of fifty things you need to do to succeed." Dilbert: "In other words, he has no idea why he succeeded." Young guy: "Sure he does. He even has a list of his top thirty... priorities." (Pause) "Okay, I hear it now."
Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a 'good way', of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.... The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them. But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that 'good way' advocated by Dr Schmidt."
Why do people ignore security warnings when browsing the web? - article by Danny Bradbury in The Guardian. "Why is it so difficult for users to follow simple security and privacy messages? Maybe it’s because they’re not that simple. Often, warnings describe what the problem is ('this site’s SSL certificate has expired!') rather than what the consequences of continuing might be ('if you visit this site, it might infect your computer with malware that steals your bank details!'). Lujo [Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab security research centre] co-authored a paper on effective warning design that featured several key guidelines. They included describing the risk comprehensively, being concise, and offering meaningful choices about how to proceed. Google’s team reached similar conclusions. They stripped out the technical terms (most users don’t know what a certificate is, they found), and reduced the reading level by simplifying the text. That included making the text as brief as possible, even if it meant sacrificing detail. The Chrome developers also added illustrations to suggest danger, and started using background colours to represent different kinds and severity of threat."
The internet shaming of Lindsey Stone - article in The Guardian by Jon Ronson, extracted from his book So you've Been Publicly Shamed. "[Lindsay] and Jamie had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, 'smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington [the national cemetery] we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.'... By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes.... The next day, camera crews had gathered outside her front door.... [Her employer] was inundated with emails demanding [her sacking], so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. 'Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,' Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year. ... I had recently discovered the world of digital reputation management – companies that 'game' Google to hide negative stories stored online.... 'I have no idea what you actually do,' I had told Michael on the telephone before we met. 'Maybe I could follow someone though the process?' And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client."
Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat - article by Joanna Blythman in The Guardian, based on her book Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets. "Contacts within the industry provided me with a cover that allowed me to gain unprecedented access to manufacturing facilities, as well as to subscriber-only areas of company sites, private spaces where the chemical industry tells manufacturers how our food can be engineered. Even with 25 years of food chain investigations under my belt, it was an eye-opener. ... Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs 'clean label', with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign. Some companies have reformulated their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients with substitutes that are less problematic. Others, unconvinced that they can pass the cost on to retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of cheaper substances that allow them to present a scrubbed and rosy face to the public."
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’: how sharing our every moment on social media became the new living - article by Jacob Silverman in The Guardian. "Social media can resemble traditional, pre-literate societies, where communication is purely oral and everything – culture, news, gossip, history – is communicated through speech. When we retweet someone, we are just speaking their words again – ensuring that they are passed on and do not get lost in the flurry of communication. Media theorists refer to these eruptions of oral culture within literate culture as examples of 'secondary orality'. Social media’s culture of sharing and storytelling, its lack of a long-term memory, and the use of news and information to build social capital are examples of this phenomenon. While records of our activities exist to varying extents, secondary orality shows us how social media exists largely in a kind of eternal present, upon which the past rarely intrudes. Twitter is a meaningful example. It is evanescent: posts are preserved, but in practice, they are lost in one’s rapidly self-refreshing timeline – read it now or not at all. Twitter is also reminiscent of oral storytelling, in which one person is speaking to a larger assembled group and receiving feedback in return, which helps to shape the story. One of the digital twists here is that many storyteller-like figures are speaking simultaneously, jockeying for attention and for some form of recognition. The point is not that social media is atavistically traditional but that it returns elements of oral societies to us. Our fancy new digital media is in fact not entirely new, but a hybrid of elements we have seen in past forms of communication. The outbursts of tribalism we sometimes see online – a group of anonymous trolls launching misogynist attacks on a female journalist; the ecstatic social media groupies of Justin Bieber; the way one’s Twitter timeline can, for a short while, become centred around parsing one major event, as if gathered in a village square – are evidence of a very old-fashioned, even preliterate communitarianism, reified for the digital world."
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist.... But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0... The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking. Like these other critics, Keen challenges the dominant narrative about the internet – that it’s a technology that liberates, informs and empowers people. The problem with this narrative, he points out, is not that it’s wrong – the network does indeed have the potential to do all of these marvellous things, and much more besides. The problem is that it’s not the whole story, and perhaps it will turn out to be the least important part of it."
The theatre of terror, by Yuval Noah Harari - article in The Guardian. "People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.... Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theatre producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to fight terrorism effectively we must realise that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to terrorist provocations.... During the modern era, centralised states have gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades western countries have managed to achieve almost zero political violence.... People have quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar can make a lot of noise. This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful.... Killing 17 people in Paris draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism. An act of terror that would have gone unnoticed in a medieval kingdom can rattle much stronger modern states to their very core."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "If you need reminding – or persuading – of the brilliance of Ladybird illustration, then head to Bexhill, East Sussex, where Ladybird By Design opens at the De La Warr pavilion on 24 January.... Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
Paper bank statements make it easier to manage finances, study says - article by Rebecca Smithers in The Guardian. "Consumers are able to better manage and improve their finances when they receive paper bank statements sent through the post rather than just accessing their accounts online, according to the results of a behavioural study... For the study, 3,600 adults were initially invited to participate, and half then sent a mock bank statement and a notice of changes to overdraft fees by post, while the other half were sent the same information by email. In the end 2,399 consumers took part in the entire exercise, answering detailed questions about the mock account. Respondents were told they would be entered into a cash prize draw if they answered the questions correctly, creating a setting where they had to undertake tasks that were in their own financial interest. The research found that consumers who received statements and other financial information by post were better able to understand the information given, act on it and then make better financial decisions as a result than those receiving the same information electronically."
We need an internet that leaves space in our heads to enjoy creative peace - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "The internet is not made for us. It’s not made for the benefit of us. All those sites we use, that pull us in – none of them has our creative health or our wellbeing at heart. The mechanics of the internet – the bright lights and dopamine rewards – are deadly in combination with social expectations and instincts, and make it so hard to resist. It feels the norm. But this haphazard attention war is not the norm. ... these companies need to build sites and services that better work for us, true. But we owe it to ourselves to be acutely aware of what we lose in all this noise.... If my journey offline has taught me anything it is balance; that this aspirational, hyperconnected life we see all around us is not normal. Life is all around us already, beautiful in its imperfections and its normalness, under our feet and under our noses, in the room with us, if only we would put our smartphones down for long enough to experience it."
The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts - article by Steve Kolowich in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. The latest figures come from the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey, which was based on a 2014 survey of more than 2,800 academic leaders and was released on Thursday. The survey, which has tracked opinions about online education for more than a decade, started asking academic leaders about MOOCs in 2012, when free online courses seemed poised to disrupt the walled gardens of elite college instruction. Back then, 28 percent of respondents believed MOOCs were sustainable, while 26 percent thought they were not. In this year’s survey, 16 percent believe MOOCs are sustainable, while 51 percent think they are not."
Students used to take drugs to get high. Now they take them to get higher grades - article by Carol Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "This year’s final students are the first to graduate into a brave new world of massive debt.... This is at a time when stories about graduate unemployment and exploited interns are never far from the news pages... And in this scenario, if you were offered a small white pill that held the promise of enhanced productivity, greater focus, more hours in the library, and, ultimately, the potential of a better degree, well… it’s not hard to see the attraction.... Modafinil: a prescription-only medication for narcolepsy that the NHS’s website describes as 'a central nervous system stimulant' that prevents 'excessive sleepiness during daytime hours'. 'It’s not that it makes you more intelligent,' says Phoebe, a history student. 'It’s just that it helps you work. You can study for longer. You don’t get distracted. You’re actually happy to go to the library and you don’t even want to stop for lunch. And then it’s like 7pm, and you’re still, "Actually, you know what? I could do another hour."'... You do have to be to be careful though, says Johnny. 'It gives you this amazing concentration but you have to make sure you’re actually in front of your books. I spent five hours in my room rearranging my iTunes library on it once.'"
The fascinating truth behind all those ‘great firewall of China’ headlines - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. On research by King et al on corpus of Chinese social media posts, published in Science in August 2014. "It confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world. 'Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored, ... whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored.'... The fact that an authoritarian regime allows vitriolic criticism of it in social media may seem paradoxical, but in fact it provides the most vivid confirmation of the subtlety of the Chinese approach to managing the net. 'After all,' observes King, 'the knowledge that a local leader or government bureaucrat is engendering severe criticism – perhaps because of corruption or incompetence – is valuable information. That leader can then be replaced with someone more effective at maintaining stability and the system can then be seen as responsive.' The internet, in other words, is the information system that enables the system to keep a lid on things."
Angela Brazil: dorm feasts and red-hot pashes - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Until the 1880s middle-class girls had been mostly educated at home under the watchful eye of mothers, governesses and elder sisters. But with the coming of academic boarding schools and high schools, young women’s bonds were increasingly with other girls of their own age. [Angela] Brazil’s books glory in this new complicity, showing loud, boisterous teenagers forming themselves into self-policing groups, untroubled by the distant rumble of prefects and teachers. ... In 1944, when Brazil was coming to the end of her life, the new Education Act furnished able girls from the middling middle classes with a free education at either a direct-grant or grammar school, leaving boarding public schools such as Benenden, the model for Malory Towers, to a financial and social elite. That didn’t stop girls wanting to read about such schools – Blyton and Brent‑Dyer sold extremely well right up to the early 1990s – but there was a sense that what was being described was a kind of education that had happened a long time ago and far away. Until 1997, that is, when JK Rowling, the comprehensive-educated girl who had grown up with a passion for boarding school fiction, sat down to reimagine Brazil’s universe for a new generation of girls – and boys."
David Carr: Advice to Students - from his online course materials, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. (David Carr, New York Times media journalist, joined Boston University Communications School in Autumn 2014 and died from cancer in February 2015.) "I grade based on where you start and where you end. Don’t work on me for a better grade—work on your work and making the work of those around you better. Show industriousness and seriousness and produce surpassing work if you want an exceptional grade.... * Don’t raise your hand in class. This isn’t Montessori, I expect people to speak up when they like, but don’t speak over anyone. Respect the opinions of others. * This is an intense, once-a-week immersion on the waterfront of modern media-making. If you don’t show up for class, you will flounder. If you show up late or unprepared, you will stick out in unpleasant ways. If you aren’t putting effort into your work, I will suggest that you might be more comfortable elsewhere. * If you text or email during class, I will ignore you as you ignore me. It won’t go well. * I expect you to behave as an adult and will treat you like one. I don’t want to parent you—I want to teach you."
Fifty tips for success - Dilbert cartoon. Young guy: "A 27-year-old tech millionaire published his list of fifty things you need to do to succeed." Dilbert: "In other words, he has no idea why he succeeded." Young guy: "Sure he does. He even has a list of his top thirty... priorities." (Pause) "Okay, I hear it now."
Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a 'good way', of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.... The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them. But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that 'good way' advocated by Dr Schmidt."
Why do people ignore security warnings when browsing the web? - article by Danny Bradbury in The Guardian. "Why is it so difficult for users to follow simple security and privacy messages? Maybe it’s because they’re not that simple. Often, warnings describe what the problem is ('this site’s SSL certificate has expired!') rather than what the consequences of continuing might be ('if you visit this site, it might infect your computer with malware that steals your bank details!'). Lujo [Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab security research centre] co-authored a paper on effective warning design that featured several key guidelines. They included describing the risk comprehensively, being concise, and offering meaningful choices about how to proceed. Google’s team reached similar conclusions. They stripped out the technical terms (most users don’t know what a certificate is, they found), and reduced the reading level by simplifying the text. That included making the text as brief as possible, even if it meant sacrificing detail. The Chrome developers also added illustrations to suggest danger, and started using background colours to represent different kinds and severity of threat."
The internet shaming of Lindsey Stone - article in The Guardian by Jon Ronson, extracted from his book So you've Been Publicly Shamed. "[Lindsay] and Jamie had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, 'smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington [the national cemetery] we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.'... By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes.... The next day, camera crews had gathered outside her front door.... [Her employer] was inundated with emails demanding [her sacking], so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. 'Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,' Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year. ... I had recently discovered the world of digital reputation management – companies that 'game' Google to hide negative stories stored online.... 'I have no idea what you actually do,' I had told Michael on the telephone before we met. 'Maybe I could follow someone though the process?' And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client."
Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat - article by Joanna Blythman in The Guardian, based on her book Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets. "Contacts within the industry provided me with a cover that allowed me to gain unprecedented access to manufacturing facilities, as well as to subscriber-only areas of company sites, private spaces where the chemical industry tells manufacturers how our food can be engineered. Even with 25 years of food chain investigations under my belt, it was an eye-opener. ... Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs 'clean label', with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign. Some companies have reformulated their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients with substitutes that are less problematic. Others, unconvinced that they can pass the cost on to retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of cheaper substances that allow them to present a scrubbed and rosy face to the public."
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’: how sharing our every moment on social media became the new living - article by Jacob Silverman in The Guardian. "Social media can resemble traditional, pre-literate societies, where communication is purely oral and everything – culture, news, gossip, history – is communicated through speech. When we retweet someone, we are just speaking their words again – ensuring that they are passed on and do not get lost in the flurry of communication. Media theorists refer to these eruptions of oral culture within literate culture as examples of 'secondary orality'. Social media’s culture of sharing and storytelling, its lack of a long-term memory, and the use of news and information to build social capital are examples of this phenomenon. While records of our activities exist to varying extents, secondary orality shows us how social media exists largely in a kind of eternal present, upon which the past rarely intrudes. Twitter is a meaningful example. It is evanescent: posts are preserved, but in practice, they are lost in one’s rapidly self-refreshing timeline – read it now or not at all. Twitter is also reminiscent of oral storytelling, in which one person is speaking to a larger assembled group and receiving feedback in return, which helps to shape the story. One of the digital twists here is that many storyteller-like figures are speaking simultaneously, jockeying for attention and for some form of recognition. The point is not that social media is atavistically traditional but that it returns elements of oral societies to us. Our fancy new digital media is in fact not entirely new, but a hybrid of elements we have seen in past forms of communication. The outbursts of tribalism we sometimes see online – a group of anonymous trolls launching misogynist attacks on a female journalist; the ecstatic social media groupies of Justin Bieber; the way one’s Twitter timeline can, for a short while, become centred around parsing one major event, as if gathered in a village square – are evidence of a very old-fashioned, even preliterate communitarianism, reified for the digital world."
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