Cuttings: March 2020

Can computers ever replace the classroom? – article by Alex Beard in The Guardian. "In China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, ...in 2018 alone, [Derek Haoyang] Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups....
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to Li five years earlier.... He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand.... The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach.... Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher.... In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word 'hurry'. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word 'hurry' and related phrases.... Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as 'nuggets'. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs."

The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski: outbreaks of all kinds – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells the story of the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, about which we have heard so much lately. The book’s hero is Ronald Ross, the British doctor who in the late 19th century discovered that mosquitoes spread malaria and was rewarded with the 1902 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Ross wasn’t the first to describe an epidemic mathematically, but he was the first to do so armed with a thorough understanding of the biological and social processes that shape it, and this made all the difference. ... It’s partly thanks to Ross that we have the concept of herd immunity – hopeful because it means that not every mosquito has to be squashed, not every person has to be vaccinated, for a population to be protected against a disease.... A century on, ideas have changed. Now the thinking is that many of the things that Hudson and Ross might have considered independent – obesity, smoking, even loneliness – are catching, too. We talk about financial contagion and epidemics of knife crime, and methods borrowed from public health are being applied to try to nip these problems in the bud, or at least slow their spread. ... One of the most interesting and topical parts of the book is about the mathematical modelling of fake news."

Coming soon! Classic novels with added positivity – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian.  "Christie, Merriment on the Orient Express. Mann, Life in Venice. Rose, Twelve Agreeable Men. Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spa. Roth, Portnoy's Compliment. Joyce, Finnegan''s Birthday Party."

The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem – editorial in The Guardian. "Tim Lang in his new book, Feeding Britain, [warns that] our food system is 'stretched, open to disruption and far from resilient'. It is easy to castigate panic buyers for empty shelves. But while shopping responsibly will help others to get the food they need, only a few people are squirrelling away vast stocks. Research firm Kantar says the average spend per supermarket trip has risen by 16% to £22.13 month on month – not surprising when households realised they were likely to need lunches at home, including for children no longer in school, and could have to self-isolate for a fortnight. The underlying problem is that just-in-time supply chains can struggle to cope with even relatively small shifts, and that a handful of retailers dominate the market....The efficiencies that have kept food prices low, and the long and complex global chains that bring us such variety, come at a price."

Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies – article by Jordan Kisner.  "Consider the scene at the end of No Country For Old Men when Javier Bardem’s character has a car accident. After the crunch of impact, there are a few moments of what might be mistaken for stillness. The two cars rest smoking and crumpled in the middle of a suburban intersection. Nothing moves – but the soundscape is deceptively layered. There is the sound of engines hissing and crackling, which have been mixed to seem as near to the ear as the camera was to the cars; there is a mostly unnoticeable rustle of leaves in the trees; periodically, so faintly that almost no one would register it consciously, there is the sound of a car rolling through an intersection a block or two over, off camera; a dog barks somewhere far away. The faint sound of a breeze was taken from ambient sounds on a street like the one depicted in the scene. ... None of these sounds are there because some microphone picked them up. They’re there because [Skip] Lievsay chose them and put them there, as he did for every other sound in the film. The moment lasts about 20 seconds. No Country For Old Men is 123 minutes long.... The impact a tiny aural cue can have on the brain’s understanding of narrative is astonishing. On the third day of the mix, Lievsay and Larry were breezing through a scene of Miles [Davies] dropping in on one of his wife’s dance rehearsals when [director and star Don] Cheadle ...paused them. The scene sounded a little too dreamy. Cheadle wanted a more matter-of-fact sound.... Lievsay nodded and fiddled for a moment. When he replayed the scene, something small but extraordinary happened. I had watched this scene somewhere between one and two dozen times but this time I noticed something I’d never seen before: a young woman passing behind Frances with a stack of papers in her hand. Lievsay had given her footsteps. Without the footsteps, I’d somehow never seen her; now, I saw her, and her presence – along with a few other tweaks by Lievsay – suggested bustling in the room, people at work, things happening outside the eye contact forged between Miles and Frances. I didn’t exactly hear the difference: I just saw the scene differently."