Cuttings: July 2020

Back to the future on energy storage – blog post by John Naughton, "One of the main objections to electricity generation by renewable sources is the hoary old question: what happens when the wind stops or there’s not enough light for solar panels to do the trick?... For years and years we’ve been listening to tech evangelists (no doubt led by Elon Musk) telling us that the only solution is massive battery-complexes. ... So it was fascinating to hear Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate who was Obama’s Energy Secretary, explaining that there is a solution to the energy storage problem that’s been around for many decades.... The way it works is that when demand on the grid is low, you use the surplus electricity to pump water uphill to a reservoir. Then if there’s a sudden surge in demand, you open the sluices and water rushes down and starts to spin generators.... What’s really quaint about this, for those with long memories, is that the UK was providing fast-response electric power since 1984 via the Donorwig pumped storage station in Wales. It was constructed in the abandoned Dinorwic slate quarry and to preserve the natural beauty of Snowdonia National Park, the power station itself is located deep inside the mountain Elidir Fawr, inside tunnels and caverns. The project – begun in 1974 and taking ten years to complete at a cost of £425 million – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. And it paid for itself in two years. En passant: in the Trump era doesn’t it seem weird that there was a time when the person in charge of the US Department of Energy who was not only a Nobel prize-winner, but understood that his job was to act in the public interest rather than as a shill for the coal industry."

What's wrong with WhatsApp – article by William Davies in The Guardian, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “Groups originate for all sorts of purposes – a party, organising amateur sport, a shared interest – but then take on a life of their own.... If groups are perceived as a place to say what you really think, away from the constraints of public judgement or ‘political correctness’, then it follows that they are also where people turn to share prejudices or more hateful expressions, that are unacceptable (or even illegal) elsewhere. ... A different type of group emerges where its members are all users of the same service, such as a school, a housing block or a training programme. A potential problem here is one of negative solidarity, in which feelings of community are deepened by turning against the service in question.... while groups can generate high levels of solidarity, which can in principle be put to powerful political effect, it also becomes harder to express disagreement within the group.... When a claim or piece of content shows up in a group, there may be many members who view it as dubious; the question is whether they have the confidence to say as much. Meanwhile, the less sceptical can simply forward it on. It’s not hard, then, to understand why WhatsApp is a powerful distributor of ‘fake news’ and conspiracy theories. ... At the ETech conference [in 2003], a keynote speech was given by the web enthusiast and writer Clay Shirky, now an academic at New York University, which surprised its audience by declaring that the task of designing successful online communities had little to do with technology at all. The talk looked back at one of the most fertile periods in the history of social psychology, and was entitled ‘A group is its own worst enemy’. Shirky drew on the work of the British psychoanalyst and psychologist Wilfred Bion, who, together with Kurt Lewin, was one of the pioneers of the study of ‘group dynamics’ in the 40s. The central proposition of this school was that groups possess psychological properties that exist independently of their individual members. In groups, people find themselves behaving in ways that they never would if left to their own devices.’

Top 10 best-dressed characters in fiction – article by Amanda Craig in The Guardian. “1. The Silver Chair by CS Lewis. This novel is packed with clothes, but especially green ones symbolising nature, lust, magic and death. The seductive Lady of the Green Kirtle who bewitches and kidnaps Prince Rilian first appears to him in ‘a thin garment as green as poison’. It’s a great quest story, both funny and touching, and it takes two bullied children from a progressive public school in our world into the frozen north of Narnia, climaxing underground in a struggle that dramatises the nature of religious faith in a Platonic cave as the witch’s green dress turns into the coiling body of a gigantic serpent. 2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Jane is so fiercely attached to her Puritan dress that even when about to marry the rich Mr Rochester she rejects bright colours for ‘sober black satin and pearl grey silk’. Paradoxically, this makes her passionate originality flame brighter to him – and us – an original touch that makes this poor, plain, intelligent and brave young woman eternally beloved by readers. When happily reunited with Mr Rochester, we learn through him that her dress is blue – the colour of heaven and happiness.”

London hospital starts virtual ward rounds for medical students – article by James Tapper in The Guardian. “Imperial College has conducted what it said is the world’s first virtual ward round for medical students, which means an entire class of 350 students can watch a consultant examining patients rather than the three or four who have been able to accompany them in person. The virtual ward round involves the physician wearing Microsoft’s HoloLens glasses, which stream video to the students’ computers. While the doctor talks to the patient, students can hear both of them through the use of two microphones. Teachers are able to pin virtual pictures to the display, such as X-rays, drug charts or radiographs, or draw lines to highlight something they want to emphasise.”

Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong – article by Steve Rose in The Guardian. "It sounds like a sci-fi movie, or the weirdest series of Big Brother ever. Eight volunteers wearing snazzy red jumpsuits seal themselves into a hi-tech glasshouse that’s meant to perfectly replicate Earth’s ecosystems. They end up starving, gasping for air and at each other’s throats – while the world’s media looks on. But the Biosphere 2 experiment really did happen. Running from 1991 to 1993, it is remembered as a failure, if it is remembered at all – a hubristic, pseudo-scientific experiment that was never going to accomplish its mission. However, as the new documentary Spaceship Earth shows, the escapade is a cautionary tale, now that the outside world – Biosphere 1, if you prefer – is itself coming to resemble an apocalyptic sci-fi world. ... After a stable start, problems began to emerge. Food, for one. 'We really could have used more calories,' says Linda Leigh, ... who had been involved with stocking Biosphere 2 with wild plants, but many of the food crops were too slow or too labour-intensive to be worthwhile.... On top of that, oxygen levels decreased faster than anticipated, with a corresponding build-up of carbon dioxide.... A second mission went into the biosphere in March 1994, and looked to be faring better. A month later, though, out of the blue, [funder] Ed Bass decided on a mass purge. The purpose was to make the project more businesslike, it seems. [Biosphere 2 creator John P.] Allen and his team were swiftly ejected and a new CEO was literally helicoptered in: Steve Bannon. Yes, that Steve Bannon. Investment banker, future right-wing operator and Donald Trump strategist. As a metaphor for the fate of the planet, it could hardly be more apt." See also review of the documentary film, 'Spaceship Earth: 90s Arizona eco-experiment looks like reality TV' by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

The Number Bias by Sanne Blauw: how numbers can mislead us – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "The old saw that there are 'lies, damned lies and statistics' is attributed to various figures, but was already considered proverbial in 1890 – perhaps as an adaptation of the old lawyers’ joke that there were three kinds of liars: 'the liar simple, the damned liar and the expert witness'. Even though we have been well warned for more than a century, people still use statistics dishonestly all the time – as when, for example, it emerged that the number of Covid-19 tests the British government claimed were being performed each day included tens of thousands of test kits that had merely been sent out in the post, as well as multiple tests performed on the same individuals. There remain strong incentives for officials to lie in this way, however, because we assume – especially in an age that bovinely worships 'data' – that numbers presented in the media are objective and disinterested: just neutral measures of the world. But as Sanne Blauw, a Dutch economist and journalist, insists in this sharp (and funny) little book, they aren’t. Every decision about what to measure and how to measure it, indeed, bakes in social and moral assumptions."

Murder on the Middle Passage by Nicholas Rogers: slavery and the British empire – review by Michael Taylor in The Guardian. The antagonist of Rogers’s tale is John Kimber, a veteran of the slave trade.... It is trite to describe life on a slave ship as hell; ... even so, Rogers gives vital, awful details of the conditions that prevailed on British slave ships.... Kimber’s victim in this case was a girl [of just over 10 years old]. Since her enslavement and imprisonment on the Recovery, the girl had been raped, brutalised and inflicted with a severe case of gonorrhoea... When the girl would not ‘dance’ with the other enslaved Africans, Kimber flogged her daily with whips and ropes. Soon, she was struggling to walk, suffering from a crooked knee. This presented Kimber with a problem: if the girl was infirm, she would fetch a much lower price when the ship docked at Grenada. Kimber’s ‘solution’ was atrocious even by slaving standards. From the mizzen-mast of the ship he strung the girl up by her ‘bad’ leg, then her other leg, and then by her arms. In each position he whipped her. The ordeal lasted half an hour, after which the girl crawled to the hatch, fell down the stairs into the hold, collapsed, convulsed and died. ... After denouncing Kimber in parliament, Wilberforce quickly brought charges of murder before the High Court of Admiralty, which was the only place to try a man for alleged crimes committed on the high seas. ... With the slaveholding West India Interest mustering an array of witnesses who spoke to Kimber’s supposedly good character, the judge, Sir James Marriott, simply stopped the trial and directed the jury to find the accused not guilty. Even more perversely, Marriott immediately charged the prosecution’s witnesses, two members of Kimber’s crew who had testified against the captain, with perjury: one of them was convicted and sentenced to transportation.... It is this history – and not the triumphalist accounts of abolition and later emancipation – that we must heed; it is this history that reveals the darker, shameful, but essential truths of our imperial past.”

Recovery from Covid-19 will be threatened if we don't learn to control big tech – article by John Naughton in The Guardian. “What we have learned from the coronavirus crisis so far is that the only way to manage it is by coherent, concerted government action to slow the transmission rate. As societies move into a vaccination phase, then an analogous approach will be needed to slow the circulation of misinformation and destructive antisocial memes on social media. Twitter would be much improved by removing the retweet button, for example. Users would still be free to pass on ideas but the process would no longer be frictionless. Similarly, Facebook’s algorithms could be programmed to introduce a delay in the circulation of certain kinds of content. YouTube’s recommender algorithms could be modified to prioritise different factors from those they currently favour. And so on.”

Coronavirus guidance for fantastic quests – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “Before embarking on your quest, inform the High Council of Elders and download the tracking app. Seek advice from elderly wizards, witches and warlocks, only by enchanted mirror or Zoom call. Maintain a safe distance between the adventurers in your party at all times. After each use, treat all magical items with an incantation of cleanliness or sanitizing wipes. Successful quests may be celebrated with an outdoor gathering of up to six people or twelve hobbits.”

The future of education or just hype? The rise of Minerva, the world's most selective university –article by Bryony Clarke in The Guardian. “In 2012 [Ben] Nelson founded the Minerva Project, a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, with the aim of revolutionising higher education. ... The Minerva offering is very different to what most UK students were accustomed to, prior to the coronavirus pandemic shifting universities online. There are no lectures, faculty buildings, or exams. All teaching is done through online video classes. There is only one programme of study for first years, and rather than reading maths or history, students take courses aimed at teaching transferrable skills such as critical thinking and problem-solving, through classes named ‘multimodal communications’,‘empirical analyses’ and ‘complex systems’. Subject specialisms are chosen in the second year. ...Study after study has shown the efficacy of active learning, and ... professors are not supposed to speak in classes for any longer than a few minutes at a time, and students are expected to contribute to class discussions and group work. The online live video platform Forum is instrumental in facilitating this. ‘To achieve this kind of education, you have to have data,’ says Nelson. ‘You have to actually be able to track how engaged every single student is.’ This is achieved through a system that colour-codes students based on how much they talk in class.”