Cuttings: December 2019

Slow-Reading is the New Deep Learning – article by David Handel on medium.com, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Speed-readers aspire to double, triple, or even massively increase their base reading rate. Research paper after research paper has concluded that as reading speed goes up as a result of effortful speed-reading, comprehension goes down. ... But there is a far more profound issue at hand that most critics overlook when they bash speed-reading. Reading with the intention of learning involves far more than achieving simple comprehension. ... By reading slowly, you allow for the requisite time to employ your central executive. You need to focus your attention, utilize the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. New ideas, concepts and facts you’re encountering must be moved into the episodic buffer where you can play with and manipulate them. And the best kind of manipulation you can employ with your working memory is metacognition.... As you read, you should be having an internal dialog using your inner voice (phonological loop) to perform quality assurance of the words that you are seeing and reading (visuospatial sketchpad). As you read, you should be consciously asking yourself questions ... Then you should use the results of this self-interrogation to regulate your next steps to master the material."

Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People – article by Sendhil Mullainthan in The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care. But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program. As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts.... One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias. Our 2004 résumé study resembled a complex covert operation more than traditional academic research. ... This went on for months... By contrast, uncovering algorithmic discrimination was far more straightforward.... Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior. Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found. With our résumé study, fixing the problem has proved to be extremely difficult.... By contrast, we’ve already built a prototype that would fix the algorithmic bias we found — as did the original manufacturer, who, we concluded, had no intention of producing biased results in the first place. ... Changing algorithms is easier than changing people: software on computers can be updated; the 'wetware' in our brains has so far proven much less pliable."

Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound – article by Charles Bramesco in The Guardian. Midge Costin's career’s emphasis on education gave her the idea to condense a semester’s worth of introductory material into one compact package, breaking down the essentials of her craft for an audience of laypeople. She introduces and defines key terms – foley work, automated dialogue replacement, mono v stereo v surround sound – in order to render visible labor that generally goes unseen and unnoticed when done well.... Just about everyone takes good audio work for granted, from the casual viewer to the budget-balancers at the studios. 'They say sound is 50% of the story, but on the films I was doing, the post-production sound budget would be 1% to 1.5% of the total,' Costin recalls. 'The average moviegoer thinks that when you turn on the camera, it starts also recording sound. They don’t even get that they’re recorded separately and synced. How much work going into sound, when done correctly, isn’t even perceptible.'"

'It's cool now': why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped. This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call 'a moment'.... Why now? We live in an era of complex fantasy video games such as The Witcher and Elder Scrolls that offer rich, incredibly detailed worlds to explore. In comparison, D&D still uses paper, pencils and dice. Now in its fifth iteration, it offers modernised and simplified rules, but the basic idea remains the same: a group of people sit round a table and pretend to be warriors, mages and elves embarking on imagined quests and deciding the outcome of battles and other climactic events through rolls of the dice.... Even the most sophisticated open-world fantasy video game imposes limits on players’ decisions and abilities. Your interactions are mostly restricted to combat or engaging in highly directed multiple-choice conversations, and there is a fixed narrative you have to follow. In D&D, however, everything is seamless and improvised – the Dungeon Master might have a plan, but if the players decide they don’t want to raid the dungeon, and instead want to hang out in an interesting local tavern, a good Master can be flexible enough to indulge that. ... The human contact element of D&D is also vital. In an era when much of our socialising is mediated through phone screens and social media, role-playing is one thing that gets people in the same room. 'With digital games, you can play co-op but it doesn’t quite have the connection of real people at a table,' says Richard Whitters, senior art director for D&D. 'This is a thing that humans have always done: gathering around the campfire, telling stories, interacting.' "

'Do you wind it up?': today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading – article by Sam Wallaston in The Guardian. "Three 15-year-old school children are on the phone, in class. No, it’s OK, they’re supposed to be; they’ve been told to, by me, with permission from their teacher. And they’re not actually on the phone, because they don’t know how to use it. It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone, finger-in-the-dial variety. They’re tapping it, prodding at the holes. Hahahaha – they haven’t got a clue. Loxford is an academy in Ilford, east London. I’ve come here with a suitcase stuffed full of the past, tech from my own childhood, mostly borrowed from nostalgic hoarder colleagues. Everything in the case is obsolete: it’s all been shrunk to fit into the smartphones today’s 15-year-olds almost all have. It’s a kind of social experiment, about different generations, lost skills, changing technology... OK, and it’s also about having a laugh; and getting my generation’s own back for those times we’ve had to go crawling to a teenager for technical assistance, such as asking how to make the video on WhatsApp work."

The Adventures of Apostrophe Man – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. (1) Apostrophe Man: "My super-sense is tingling! Somebody needs my help! (2) Apostrophe Man runs. (3) "My God!" says Apostrophe Man, having arrived at a burning building which a sign declares to be "St. Peters Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts". (4) Apostrophe Man summons his powers... (5) ... and zaps the sign. (6) "Much better," says Apostrophe Man. The sign now reads correctly "St. Peter's Library..." The Library itself has now been completely consumed by the fire.

Sister act: how Little Women has come of age on the big screen – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "Again and again lines in Gerwig’s [2019] film are drawn from Alcott’s own life.... In the book, Jo says: 'I don’t believe I shall ever marry. I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man'; in the film she says: 'I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe' – which comes from a letter Alcott wrote to a friend after visiting her just-married older sister. So many pithy statements about sexual politics are given to Amy ... and to Aunt March ... that the film threatens to become a 21st-century feminist lecture – until one remembers that they were all subjects about which Alcott herself was vocal. Not that she necessarily got her way: Alcott’s publisher was initially bored by Little Women and changed his mind only when his young daughters got hold of the manuscript and loved it (a similar scene appears in the film). He does not budge, however, in his demand that her female characters end the novel 'married – or dead, either way'. All four girls duly marry or die, and many critics have found this a profoundly disappointing outcome."

'They' beats 'the' to 2019's word of the year - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "They, a common pronoun that can be traced back to the 13th century, has been named word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary because of its growing usage for non-binary individuals.
The US dictionary, which has been in print for more than 150 years, said that look-ups for 'they' increased by 313% in 2019 compared with the previous year, as the public investigated the word’s shifting use and its increasing prominence in the news."

This Labour meltdown has been building for decades – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In North East Derbyshire last month [before the general election], I saw up close what was left: warehouses and care work. Bullying bosses, zero-hours contracts, poverty pay and social security top-ups. Smartphones to tell you whether you have a shift that morning, and Facebook to give you the news, or some dishonest fragment of it. Across the UK, mines were turned into museums, factories swapped for call centres, meaningful local government replaced by development quangos.... Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy. As the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans argue, the 'decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre ground'. Meanwhile, the big gap in the electoral market that opened up was for a party offering a welfare state with reactionary social policy. That was Nigel Farage; now it’s Boris Johnson. ... In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."

This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning.... Well, guess what. Labour’s 'radical' manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. ... Those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power. That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; ... it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not 'a 30-year project'. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing."

The real faultline in this election: landlords v tenants – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian. "[In the] Conservative election campaign, ... there was something cathartic about the moment that Lee Anderson, Tory parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, donned a black cagoule, stared into a mobile phone camera, and – with a zeal too seldom witnessed in contemporary politics – introduced himself to the wider world with a denunciation of 'nuisance tenants'. 'These people, who have to live somewhere, let’s have them in a tent in the middle of a field,' he grimaced. 'Six o’clock every morning, let’s have them up.' ... 'Let’s have them in the field, picking potatoes,' he continued, 'back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o’clock, same again the next day.'... Nearly a third of the [Conservative] party’s MPs, including the prime minister, are currently landlords (along with 11% of Labour MPs, and a quarter of Lib Dems). Little wonder that Anderson, a one-time Labour supporter ... now feels more at home on the other side of the party divide. His words were extreme. But the politics behind them reveal an unacknowledged faultline running through this election: it is a battle, broadly-speaking, between the rentiers and the renters – and the winners will define this country for a generation."

The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Long before the Tory demolition of Labour’s 'red wall', it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative. The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left.... The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation.... Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity. Immigration has become symbolic of this loss. We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.... The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. ... The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal."

To err is human: is that why we fear machines that can be made to err less? – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The AI evangelists complain [that] everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. If you are a prisoner applying for parole in some jurisdictions, for example, you had better hope that the (human) judge has just eaten when your case comes up. A fascinating empirical study ... found that 'the percentage of favourable rulings drops gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to about 65% after a break.'... In judging the debate about whether human intelligence (HI) is always superior to the artificial variety (AI), are we humans just demonstrating how capricious and irrational we can be? Er, yes, says Jason Collins, a behavioural and data scientist who now works for PwC Australia. In a wickedly satirical article in the online journal Behavioral Scientist, he turns the question we routinely ask about AI on its head: 'Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions,' he writes, 'we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm.'"

The millennium bug was real, and 20 years later we face the same threats – article by Martyn Thomas in The Guardian. "I led Deloitte Consulting’s Y2K work internationally in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t just business IT that had Y2K errors. Many PCs could not handle dates in 2000. Faults were found in the computers that controlled factories and offshore oil platforms. The UK’s Rapier anti-aircraft missile system had a Y2K fault that would have prevented it firing.... 10% of Visa credit-card machines couldn’t handle cards that expired after 1999... Internationally, correcting Y2K problems cost thousands of person-years of effort and many billions of pounds.... Then 1 January passed without a catastrophe and the myth started that the threat had been grossly exaggerated. There were many failures in January 2000, from the significant to the trivial. Many credit-card systems and cash points failed. Some customers received bills for 100 years’ interest while others were briefly rich for the same reason. Internationally, 15 nuclear reactors shut down; the oil pumping station in Yumurtalik failed, cutting off supplies to Istanbul; there were power cuts in Hawaii and government computers failed in China and Hong Kong..... Y2K should be seen as a warning of the danger that arises when millions of independent systems might fail because of a single event. But this lesson has not been learned. ..."