Edinburgh Photographic Society, 157th international exhibition of photography 2019. The doorkeeper took pains to explain to me that the only criterion for inclusion was that there had to have been a photograph somewhere in the history of each finished image. When I saw the exhibition, I understood why he had given me the warning: most of the images were obviously processed to a greater or lesser degree: some to create surreal effects, such as a man riding a mechanical fish through the sky, and a surprising number to make the image look as though it had been produced by pen and ink drawing. But my favourites were classic photographic pieces, especially the Movement Series of Fiona Spence.
Scottish national portrait gallery. Lovely building, family-sized rather than cathedral-sized gothic, including a beautiful library with an upper gallery. I wasn’t so struck by the paintings and busts, but perhaps I’d have been more impressed if I were Scottish.
Scottish national gallery. I shouldn’t have been surprised, this being a national collection, but as I walked around I kept on thinking: hey, this place is full of really famous paintings! My favourites were the Velázquez ‘Old woman cooking eggs’, notable for its elegant depiction of just-congealing egg whites, and a Botticelli Madonna and child, unusual in the Madonna not being face-on but in full eye-contact with her baby, the very image of empathic mirroring (as the therapists say). A really good café / restaurant too.
Philip Glass: Minimalism at the Organ. Concert by Mark Spalding at St Andrew’s and St George’s West, Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe Festival. Two pieces having their 50th anniversary (Two Pages, Music in Fifths) and one having its 40th (Fourth Series, Part 4, aka Mad Rush). A video camera in the organ loft gave us visual contact with the performer, and as a consequence, we were able to see him doing stretches in the pauses between pieces: it never occurred to me before that performing minimalist music could run the risk of repetitive strain injury. A great hour of immersive minimalism.
Star Trek: Beyond. perhaps the best of the three films since the reboot, being less dependent on stories or tropes from the “prime” cast. Still a huge emphasis on visual spectacle, which I guess is what the movie-going public now expects, though it was never part of the original series. (They didn’t have the budget, so had to rely on damn-fine storytelling.)
What three words (app). BBC news featured this great idea, to map the entire world in 3x3 metre squares, each bearing a three word name; useful for emergency services location finding, for example. But it depends on lots of people using it. And someone will probably think of an anti-social application.
Rise of the Nazis. Really informative documentary, the three parts following how Hitler successively became Chancellor, suspended parliamentary democracy, and finally usurped the power of the President. Quite scary to watch in a month when Boris Johnson suspended Parliament for five weeks because he didn’t want it to get in his way; had the Supreme Court not ruled it illegal, there would have been the precedent for a Prime Minister to suspend Parliament for however long he wanted, for any reason at all.
Raiders of the Lost Past – nice three-part series with Janina Ramirez cheerfully and enthusiastically illuminating three massively significant archaeological discoveries in the months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.
We has tribbles and also troubles. Very funny rendering of a classic original series Star Trek episode in “kitty pidgen”: the distinctive grammar in which captions are added to LOLcats photos. Sample: Captain Kirk frowning, with the caption “OMG THIS SUX”.
J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars. Well-reviewed intriguing puzzle-adventure game, in which you play the sole survivor of a deep space expedition, revived from hibernation, trying to find out what happened to the rest of the crew, with the assistance of the ship’s computer J.U.L.I.A. and the remote exploration Mobot who does the actually travelling and action in the game. Creative use of a simple interface – basically it’s static scene pictures with hotspots, plus the occasional animation or cut-scene – and some decent mini-games. Didn’t really grab me emotionally, despite the increasingly sinister storyline, but an enjoyable game nonetheless.
Cathy Moore's scenario-based training headquarters. Cathy Moore is one of the best bloggers around for incisive and insightful thinking on learning design for training, and recently she’s been sharing her ideas and experience around branching scenarios or simulations. This page collects together her various writing, including this page of links to example scenarios by herself and others, with comments reflecting on the design.
Friday, 11 October 2019
Thursday, 3 October 2019
Cuttings: September 2019
Strike 2.0: how gig economy workers are using tech to fight back – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian, based on his book Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the People. "An unlikely movement is currently under way to rewire the economy from within.... Organised resistance by digitally outsourced workers has erupted repeatedly on the streets of major cities in recent years, usually beginning in the back alley spots where delivery riders are encouraged by their apps to congregate and then fanning out rapidly through WhatsApp networks, word of mouth and some technological trickery. In 2016, for example, an announcement by Deliveroo that it would soon be unilaterally altering its rider payment structure prompted a six-day 'strike' in which riders acted en masse to make themselves unavailable for orders. ... In the words of one Deliveroo rider, the very technology that was designed to control workers was now being turned against their managers, allowing riders to 'occupy the system in a way'. Not unlike the assembly line of the last century, and the auto strikes in Flint that subverted it, a tool engineered for capital was being hacked by the labour force.... This struggle is global. It is not a coincidence that participants in the McStrike protests used chants adapted from the US 'Fight for $15' movement against low pay. The strikes by Deliveroo riders in British cities have been inspired and replicated by colleagues in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong, to name but a few. Historian Eric Hobsbawm once described surges in labour militancy as 'accumulations of inflammable materials which only ignite periodically, as it were under compressions'. Throughout the post-crash world, such compressions are piling up at pace."
The myth of the free speech crisis – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself 'has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or "fighting" words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.'”
From sex to money: the eight deep discussions that can save a dying relationship – interview by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "[John] Gottman, the renowned relationships researcher known for his work on divorce predictors, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, a psychologist, have been married for 32 years.... Their latest book, which they wrote as a couple, is Eight Dates. It guides couples through eight conversations – to have on dedicated dates.... The [topics]– trust, conflict, sex, money, family, fun, spirituality and dreams – came out of the Gottmans’ years of observing the flashpoints in relationships.... Might disagreement be a danger for readers of the book? 'It’s possible, but what we like to do is give people preparation in case conflict arises, so each chapter includes a bit of that,' says Julie. 'But also we very carefully tailored the questions so that people were encouraged to self-disclose as opposed to comment on each other’s thoughts. And when you self-disclose, that’s really the antidote to creating conflict as opposed to judging the other person for their point of view.'”
The return of parliament – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Back to Parliament - It's that time of year again! Here's our pick of the must-have kit for your little MPs... Water bottle full of wine: prep them for the worst term of their lives with a whole litre of rosé. ERG lunchbox: this is THE lunchbox to have, featuring the hugely popular team of heroes. Scientific calculator: remember to look for a Brexit function to calculate how screwed the economy is. Corrective fluid: essential for getting rid of details you don't like in economic forecasts. Dominic Cummings backpack: the Prince of Darkness's trendy dome-like head of evil is both capacious and sturdy. Antisemitism-cancelling headphones: Help them concentrate on Brexit homework by cancelling out distracting racism in their party. Multicolour pen: make their resignation letters really pop on Twitter!"
Will AI replace university lecturers? Not if we make it clear why humans matter – article by Mark Haw in The Guardian. "So far the best AI can manage is classroom assistance to human teachers. But AI edtech developers are nothing if not ambitious: this month, UK company Century Tech will partner the Flemish regional government to launch AI assistants in schools across half of Belgium. ... A large dataset now exists for student behaviour, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of students who have followed MOOCs (massive online open courses) over the past decade. The big question mark around MOOCs was how they could survive by giving away course content for free. With uncomfortable echoes of recent data controversies, it may turn out that building the training database for AI teaching was the MOOC business plan all along.... Universities, lecturers and students urgently need to identify and share what is really important about being taught by an actual human."
How to Review a Novel – article from 1980 by Mary-Kay Wilmers, reproduced in Literary Hub, referenced in article by John Naughton in The Observer. "How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: 'Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys.' 'For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, 1939 was a red-letter day.'... It looks as though the writers of these reviews have set out not to summarize the plot but to tell the story, with the drawback, from the novelist’s point of view, that readers may content themselves with the reviewer’s version. Other reviews begin with a different sort of story—the reviewer’s: 'Halfway through Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel I found I was laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks.' ... Different openings suggest different attitudes, both to the novel and to the practice of reviewing novels. There are ideologies of the novel and ideologies of the novel review, fictional conventions and reviewing conventions. They don’t necessarily overlap. A regular reviewer, confident of his own constituency, may describe a novel in terms of his own responses to it: he wouldn’t for that reason applaud a novelist for writing in a similarly personal vein. What reviews have in common is that they must all in some degree be re-creations: reshapings of what the novelist has already shaped. The writer’s fortunes depend on the reviews he gets but the reviewer depends on the book to see that his account of it—his “story,” to use the language of the newspaper composing room—is interesting. Dull novels don’t elicit interesting reviews: not unless a reviewer decides to be amusing at the novel’s expense or tactfully confines himself to some incidental aspect of it. A generous reviewer may also invent for the novel the qualities it might have had but hasn’t got."
We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job? – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "A recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random. My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for.... Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead?"
She Said: an inside look at the story that brought down Harvey Weinstein – interview by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "She Said goes much deeper than a compelling play-by-play of nailing the first Weinstein story. The immediate aftermath of publication, when the dam broke on story after story of sexual indignity, workplace harassment, or assault, 'only made us feel greater responsibility', Kantor told the Guardian. 'We said to ourselves: we’ve got to try to finally answer some of these lingering questions from the Weinstein story. How can a company become so complicit in predation? What are the systems that enable this kind of abuse?' In the face of a 'staggering' wave of personal and institutional responses, said Twohey, 'We just decided that the most important thing we could do was keep reporting.' .... In the preface, Kantor and Twohey explicitly pose the question: did the cultural change go too far? Or not far enough? It’s less the reporters’ paradigm than 'the question we saw play out in the world', said Kantor. 'We experienced the power of the post-Weinstein reckoning and this feeling of buried truth pouring out – this display of mass accountability without precedent.'"
Thousands demand Oxford dictionaries 'eliminate sexist definitions' – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for Oxford University Press to change the 'sexist' definitions of the word 'woman' in some of its dictionaries.... In response, OUP’s head of lexical content strategy Katherine Connor Martin has said... : 'If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory.' 'Nonetheless, part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear in the dictionary’s treatment. For instance, the phrase "the little woman" is defined as "a condescending way of referring to one’s wife", and the use of "bit" as a synonym for woman is labelled as "derogatory" in the thesaurus,' said Martin. 'Sensibilities regarding language are constantly changing, and our editorial team is always grateful for feedback to ensure that the status of offensive or denigrating terms is clear to our readers.'"
Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. ... Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.... The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties. The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged 'important' to be captured.... This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply 'speak for itself'. ... This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.... One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers.'Pics or it didn’t happen' is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience.... What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.... What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to 'truth... But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years. What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? ...Then the key question is not whether [reporting] is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. ... let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it."
The Guardian view on machine learning: a computer cleverer than you? – editorial in The Guardian. "It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires.... They can recognise a face, a voice, be trained to judge people’s motivations or beat a computer game. But we cannot say exactly how. This is the genius and madness behind the technology. The promise of AI is that it will imbue machines with the ability to spot patterns from data, and make decisions faster and better than humans do. What happens if they make worse decisions faster? Governments need to pause and take stock of the societal repercussions of allowing machines over a few decades to replicate human skills that have been evolving for millions of years. But individuals and companies must take responsibility too."
The writer's emergency supplies shelf – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Liquid ideas. Spray-on sexual tension. Plot twist in a can. Powdered thrills (4 sachets). Bottled Zeitgeist. Instant poetry. Assorted subplots. Prose polish. Minor characters (just add water). Eau de mystery. Concentrated romance, Tinned profundity, industrial strength."
The myth of the free speech crisis – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself 'has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or "fighting" words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.'”
From sex to money: the eight deep discussions that can save a dying relationship – interview by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "[John] Gottman, the renowned relationships researcher known for his work on divorce predictors, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, a psychologist, have been married for 32 years.... Their latest book, which they wrote as a couple, is Eight Dates. It guides couples through eight conversations – to have on dedicated dates.... The [topics]– trust, conflict, sex, money, family, fun, spirituality and dreams – came out of the Gottmans’ years of observing the flashpoints in relationships.... Might disagreement be a danger for readers of the book? 'It’s possible, but what we like to do is give people preparation in case conflict arises, so each chapter includes a bit of that,' says Julie. 'But also we very carefully tailored the questions so that people were encouraged to self-disclose as opposed to comment on each other’s thoughts. And when you self-disclose, that’s really the antidote to creating conflict as opposed to judging the other person for their point of view.'”
The return of parliament – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Back to Parliament - It's that time of year again! Here's our pick of the must-have kit for your little MPs... Water bottle full of wine: prep them for the worst term of their lives with a whole litre of rosé. ERG lunchbox: this is THE lunchbox to have, featuring the hugely popular team of heroes. Scientific calculator: remember to look for a Brexit function to calculate how screwed the economy is. Corrective fluid: essential for getting rid of details you don't like in economic forecasts. Dominic Cummings backpack: the Prince of Darkness's trendy dome-like head of evil is both capacious and sturdy. Antisemitism-cancelling headphones: Help them concentrate on Brexit homework by cancelling out distracting racism in their party. Multicolour pen: make their resignation letters really pop on Twitter!"
Will AI replace university lecturers? Not if we make it clear why humans matter – article by Mark Haw in The Guardian. "So far the best AI can manage is classroom assistance to human teachers. But AI edtech developers are nothing if not ambitious: this month, UK company Century Tech will partner the Flemish regional government to launch AI assistants in schools across half of Belgium. ... A large dataset now exists for student behaviour, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of students who have followed MOOCs (massive online open courses) over the past decade. The big question mark around MOOCs was how they could survive by giving away course content for free. With uncomfortable echoes of recent data controversies, it may turn out that building the training database for AI teaching was the MOOC business plan all along.... Universities, lecturers and students urgently need to identify and share what is really important about being taught by an actual human."
How to Review a Novel – article from 1980 by Mary-Kay Wilmers, reproduced in Literary Hub, referenced in article by John Naughton in The Observer. "How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: 'Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys.' 'For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, 1939 was a red-letter day.'... It looks as though the writers of these reviews have set out not to summarize the plot but to tell the story, with the drawback, from the novelist’s point of view, that readers may content themselves with the reviewer’s version. Other reviews begin with a different sort of story—the reviewer’s: 'Halfway through Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel I found I was laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks.' ... Different openings suggest different attitudes, both to the novel and to the practice of reviewing novels. There are ideologies of the novel and ideologies of the novel review, fictional conventions and reviewing conventions. They don’t necessarily overlap. A regular reviewer, confident of his own constituency, may describe a novel in terms of his own responses to it: he wouldn’t for that reason applaud a novelist for writing in a similarly personal vein. What reviews have in common is that they must all in some degree be re-creations: reshapings of what the novelist has already shaped. The writer’s fortunes depend on the reviews he gets but the reviewer depends on the book to see that his account of it—his “story,” to use the language of the newspaper composing room—is interesting. Dull novels don’t elicit interesting reviews: not unless a reviewer decides to be amusing at the novel’s expense or tactfully confines himself to some incidental aspect of it. A generous reviewer may also invent for the novel the qualities it might have had but hasn’t got."
We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job? – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "A recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random. My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for.... Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead?"
She Said: an inside look at the story that brought down Harvey Weinstein – interview by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "She Said goes much deeper than a compelling play-by-play of nailing the first Weinstein story. The immediate aftermath of publication, when the dam broke on story after story of sexual indignity, workplace harassment, or assault, 'only made us feel greater responsibility', Kantor told the Guardian. 'We said to ourselves: we’ve got to try to finally answer some of these lingering questions from the Weinstein story. How can a company become so complicit in predation? What are the systems that enable this kind of abuse?' In the face of a 'staggering' wave of personal and institutional responses, said Twohey, 'We just decided that the most important thing we could do was keep reporting.' .... In the preface, Kantor and Twohey explicitly pose the question: did the cultural change go too far? Or not far enough? It’s less the reporters’ paradigm than 'the question we saw play out in the world', said Kantor. 'We experienced the power of the post-Weinstein reckoning and this feeling of buried truth pouring out – this display of mass accountability without precedent.'"
Thousands demand Oxford dictionaries 'eliminate sexist definitions' – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for Oxford University Press to change the 'sexist' definitions of the word 'woman' in some of its dictionaries.... In response, OUP’s head of lexical content strategy Katherine Connor Martin has said... : 'If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory.' 'Nonetheless, part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear in the dictionary’s treatment. For instance, the phrase "the little woman" is defined as "a condescending way of referring to one’s wife", and the use of "bit" as a synonym for woman is labelled as "derogatory" in the thesaurus,' said Martin. 'Sensibilities regarding language are constantly changing, and our editorial team is always grateful for feedback to ensure that the status of offensive or denigrating terms is clear to our readers.'"
Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. ... Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.... The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties. The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged 'important' to be captured.... This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply 'speak for itself'. ... This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.... One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers.'Pics or it didn’t happen' is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience.... What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.... What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to 'truth... But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years. What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? ...Then the key question is not whether [reporting] is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. ... let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it."
The Guardian view on machine learning: a computer cleverer than you? – editorial in The Guardian. "It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires.... They can recognise a face, a voice, be trained to judge people’s motivations or beat a computer game. But we cannot say exactly how. This is the genius and madness behind the technology. The promise of AI is that it will imbue machines with the ability to spot patterns from data, and make decisions faster and better than humans do. What happens if they make worse decisions faster? Governments need to pause and take stock of the societal repercussions of allowing machines over a few decades to replicate human skills that have been evolving for millions of years. But individuals and companies must take responsibility too."
The writer's emergency supplies shelf – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Liquid ideas. Spray-on sexual tension. Plot twist in a can. Powdered thrills (4 sachets). Bottled Zeitgeist. Instant poetry. Assorted subplots. Prose polish. Minor characters (just add water). Eau de mystery. Concentrated romance, Tinned profundity, industrial strength."
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