‘Esther, the singing dog won’t sing!’ Rantzen and team on the joy of That’s Life! – article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian. "A young BBC trainee was sent, in the late 1970s, to film an Edinburgh dog that was reputed to sing along to his master’s bagpipes. 'But,' he recalls, 'the film crew set up, the guy in a kilt started playing, and the dog didn’t sing at all. It just sat there.' The fledging director was Adam Curtis... Back then, he was a junior in the Talented Pets section of That’s Life!, ... a show that was first broadcast 50 years ago this spring and had 15-20 million viewers. Curtis worried the silent canine meant the end of his career. 'I rang Esther [Rantzen] and said, "He’s not singing!" And Esther said, "Darling" – it was always in that theatrical way – "Darling, that’s brilliant! Just keep filming!" So I took various shots of a dog sitting silently next to a man playing the bagpipes incredibly loudly in his front room. I took the footage back and Esther – she always did the editing – turned it into a three-minute film of a dog doing nothing while this guy piped away with increasing desperation. And it was incredibly funny.' In between amusing animals, though, Curtis could find himself working on 'stories about housing estates collapsing because councils had taken bribes to build on brownfield sites'. This mix of reporting and chortling was central from the start. 'I had been brought up to believe,' says Rantzen, 'that mixing comedy and tragedy was a great British tradition. Hence the Porter scene in Macbeth. Taxi drivers used to ask, "Is your show meant to be funny or serious?" And I said, "Yes."’... 'We started with high-street vox pops,' Rantzen explains. 'Then the first consumer item was also light-hearted, to seduce viewers into watching. Next we put a "half-hard" consumer item ...which led into the centre of the show where we put our most serious reports. The transition out of the most serious – and we did life-and-death issues, so they could be very serious – was usually done via recaps by the reporters, bringing past stories up to date. The last recap was a fun one, so we could finish with talented pets or a live piece of nonsense that meant we could end on laughter. Ruthlessly, I also used to start the show with a pre-title clip of the funniest item from the previous week, to remind viewers of what they missed if they failed to watch us. Serve them right.'"
I really don’t know where I want to end up. How do I figure out what I want to do? – advice column by Eleanor Gordon Smith in The Guardian. "How do I figure out what I want? I feel like I am good at achieving goals that I care about, but I’m hopeless at deciding what goals to pursue...." "'Figuring out what you want' can get easily confused with two other questions that suck up your time and deplete your energy while dangling the possibility of getting it right just out of reach. The first is: 'What shouldI want?' Figuring out what you should want (not what you do want) is a miserable experience, because there are too many plausible responses....The second question we can accidentally embark on in the guise of asking what we want is: 'How can I have an ideal life?' When we ask that, we start to stress over all the possible ways we could improve things. Improvement is in principle never-ending, so the stress of trying to achieve it is also never-ending.... The question of what you want is separate to both. It’s about asking when you feel most like yourself. When do you feel at ease; like you have both feet firmly planted on the floor? When do you feel like the best of you is showing up in your interactions? When are you proud of yourself in that deep, lamp-in-the-soul type way?"
Coming soon! Classic novels improved by artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Android of Green Gables, Montgomery. A Suitable Bot, Seth. Portrait of the Automaton as a Young Machine, Joyce. Tech of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy. My Family and Other Algorithms, Durrell."
‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’: Why wasn’t Lucy Letby stopped as months of murder went by? – article by Josh Halliday in The Observer. "Dr Stephen Brearey recalls the [meeting at which] he first connected Lucy Letby to a series of unusual baby deaths on the neonatal unit where they worked. It was in a meeting with the hospital’s head of nursing and two other colleagues on Thursday, 2 July 2015. 'It can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy,' he told them. More than eight years later, 33-year-old 'nice Lucy' faces the rest of her life in prison after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six in crimes without parallel in modern Britain. Through exclusive interviews, the uncovering of internal confidential documents, and months of reporting from Manchester crown court, the Observer can today tell the full story of how concerns were raised about Letby for months before she was eventually removed from frontline care in July 2016...."
‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline – article by James Ball in The Guardian. "The 'wellness-to-woo pipeline' – or even 'wellness-to-fascism pipeline' – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories. It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. ... Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the 'incel' (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the 'secrets' of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to. What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But ... the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place. 'Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,' [says Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]. 'But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.' Women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to suffer from auto-immune disorders, chronic pain and chronic fatigue – and such patients often hit a point at which their doctors tell them there is nothing they can do. The conditions are under-researched and the treatments are often brutal. Is it any surprise that trust in conventional medicine and big pharma is shaken? And is it any surprise that people look for something to fill that void?... Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. 'New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,' he says.... Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them."
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder: inside a troubled marriage – review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian. "Eileen [O'Shaughnessy] was ill-served by Orwell’s own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man’s wife. It’s clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental – that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold. What I object to is her process of correction. ... Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps. Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. ... Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? ... For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren’t how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong." See also Anna Funder, 'Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story'.
Top 10 female spies in fiction – article by Kim Sherwood in The Guardian. "In [my] Double Or Nothing, the first novel in a series commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of 007, Bond has vanished and time is running out. A new ensemble cast of double O agents must work against the clock to find Bond and save the world from climate catastrophe. ... [Johanna] Harwood trains as a trauma surgeon before a life-altering event brings her to Moneypenny’s attention, now head of the double O section (in the world’s most overdue promotion). Harwood becomes 003. I hope to empower women to see themselves as the hero, while reflecting the diversity of real espionage. In a genre outwardly dominated by male writers and heroes, I sought out female spies in fiction to inspire me. Here are my Top 10..." 1. Sheila Matthews in While Still We Live, Helen MacInnes (1944)... 2. Stella in The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen (1948)... 3. Gala Brand in Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)... 4. Elsa in The Hothouse By the East River, Muriel Spark (1973)... 5. Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré (1983)... 6. Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow: The Name of the Rose by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (2011)... 7. Laura Last in A Quiet Life, Natasha Walter (2016)... 8. Juliet Armstrong in Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018)... 9. Who Is Vera Kelly? Rosalie Knecht (2018)... 10. Marie Mitchel in American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)
The Fraud by Zadie Smith: a trial and no errors – review by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Guardian. "Early on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations. ... In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, Hilary St Ives, though he’d never once visited the island. Mrs Touchet can trace back the gist of his knowledge about Jamaica to a propaganda booklet of the 1820s, when much of England could delude themselves into thinking that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was tantamount to the freedom of enslaved populations in British colonies. Ainsworth ignored the regular reports of tragic rebellions and vengeful colonial reprisals coming out of the Caribbean in the decades since to paint a prelapsarian portrait of 'long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa-trees'. ... Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.... In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as 'the English Victor Hugo', and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years.... At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of 'stolen truth': the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, the Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being 'high-born men' in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel. Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were 'two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined', joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s 'secret word': slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port."
AI prompt engineering: learn how not to ask a chatbot a silly question – article by Callum Baines in The Observer. "What is prompt engineering? ... Throw a question from the top of your head at ChatGPT and it may provide a satisfying answer, or not. Prompt engineering involves considering the idiosyncrasies of an AI model to construct inputs that it will clearly understand. This tends to produce outputs that are more consistently useful, interesting and appropriate to what you have in mind. Formulate the prompt well and the response may even surpass expectations.... So how do I do it? There are several popular prompting techniques. Employing personas is a common trick. Tell the system to act as a lawyer, personal tutor, drill sergeant or whatever else, and it will create outputs imitating their tone and voice. Or, as a reverse exercise, instruct it to complete a task with a specific audience in mind – a five-year-old, a team of expert biochemists, an office Christmas party – and you’ll get a result tailored for that demographic.... Chain-of-thought prompting, meanwhile, is more appropriate for problem-solving. Asking the model to 'think step by step' will encourage it to partition its output into bite-size chunks, which often makes for more comprehensive results.... What should I avoid? Vague language. Without additional information, AI models cannot infer your tastes, ideas or the vision of the product that’s in your head. Don’t skimp on specifics or context and don’t assume that if something is missing, the model will correctly fill in the blank."
What happens when AI reads a book – blog post by Etan Mollick, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Every author knows, and dreads, what most people want AI to do with books – summarize them. They want to distill down pages of thoughtful prose, carefully considered language, and specific phrases into a few pithy points. So, can AI do this? [After testing this on his own short book on entrepreneurship, the answer is] Yes. And surprisingly well. Further, it has enough 'sense' of context that you can ask for expansions – tell me the examples and research the book gives to support each point. And it does that, too.... What about the style and patterns of writing? Are there any phrases or verbal tics that repeat throughout the book?... Can it work as an editor? As an editor, offer both several broad suggestions, and several specific ones, about how the book could be made more accessible and like a pop science bestseller and also: create a better transition between chapters 2 and 3. give me the original and your changes, and why you made them.... Given that the AI has an impressive ability to understand text, one use case for this knowledge is to help teachers who often assign books to classes. Given the entire text of the book, can AI help an instructor create more meaningful learning as a result? I think the answer is yes. ... You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will make 5 quiz questions on the book suitable for college students. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an 'all of the above option.' At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer.... The AI did much better at a wide range of other educational tasks based around the book: write a case study in the style of a Harvard Business School case that would require students to use the lessons of the book and provide the instructor’s guide to the case resulted in an interesting in-class exercise that I could see using.... I was particularly interested in its ability to apply knowledge from the book in novel contexts and ways: Explain the main themes of the book to me at four different levels: first grader, 8th grader, college student, PhD student resulted in good summaries.... I also tried explain how the book might be useful to dairy farmer in Wisconsin, a ninja living in ancient Japan, an experienced venture capitalist, and Glormtok an orcish barbarian from the fantasy steppes (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This resulted in lessons that actually encapsulated what the book was about."
Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time – article by Frances Ryan in The Guardian. "Should someone off work with Parkinson’s be allowed a television? Does a supermarket assistant deserve a hobby? YouGov put a range of expenses to the public to ask at what income level they believed each should be attainable. The results are eye-opening. The survey shows that 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills, while 74% think they should have the means to eat a balanced diet – in effect, meaning that around a quarter of the public believe that people on out-of-work benefits shouldn’t be able to have electricity or a full complement of vitamins. Things get particularly interesting when respondents were asked about 'non-essentials'. Only 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for all, while 55% think everyone should be able to afford a television.... Such attitudes are grim, but hardly new. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in 1932: 'The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.' And yet it feels as if minds have hardened in recent years. The cost of living crisis has seen disposable income inequality in Britain rise, with the poorest fifth of the population enduring the biggest fall as they’re forced to spend more to cover the basics.Meanwhile, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours."
Coming soon! Classic novels improved by artificial intelligence – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Android of Green Gables, Montgomery. A Suitable Bot, Seth. Portrait of the Automaton as a Young Machine, Joyce. Tech of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy. My Family and Other Algorithms, Durrell."
‘Trust me, I’m a nurse’: Why wasn’t Lucy Letby stopped as months of murder went by? – article by Josh Halliday in The Observer. "Dr Stephen Brearey recalls the [meeting at which] he first connected Lucy Letby to a series of unusual baby deaths on the neonatal unit where they worked. It was in a meeting with the hospital’s head of nursing and two other colleagues on Thursday, 2 July 2015. 'It can’t be Lucy. Not nice Lucy,' he told them. More than eight years later, 33-year-old 'nice Lucy' faces the rest of her life in prison after being found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill another six in crimes without parallel in modern Britain. Through exclusive interviews, the uncovering of internal confidential documents, and months of reporting from Manchester crown court, the Observer can today tell the full story of how concerns were raised about Letby for months before she was eventually removed from frontline care in July 2016...."
‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline – article by James Ball in The Guardian. "The 'wellness-to-woo pipeline' – or even 'wellness-to-fascism pipeline' – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories. It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. ... Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the 'incel' (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the 'secrets' of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to. What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But ... the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place. 'Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,' [says Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]. 'But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.' Women are overwhelmingly more likely than men to suffer from auto-immune disorders, chronic pain and chronic fatigue – and such patients often hit a point at which their doctors tell them there is nothing they can do. The conditions are under-researched and the treatments are often brutal. Is it any surprise that trust in conventional medicine and big pharma is shaken? And is it any surprise that people look for something to fill that void?... Peter Knight, professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, who has studied conspiracy theories and their history, notes that the link between alternative therapies and conspiracy is at least a century old, and has been much ignored. 'New age and conspiracy theories both see themselves as counter-knowledges that challenge what they see as received wisdom,' he says.... Knight notes an extra factor, though – the wellness pipeline has become a co-dependency. Many far-right or conspiracy sites now fund themselves through supplements or fitness products, usually by hyping how the mainstream doesn’t want the audience to have them."
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder: inside a troubled marriage – review by Olivia Laing in The Guardian. "Eileen [O'Shaughnessy] was ill-served by Orwell’s own biographers, much like the four Mrs Hemingways and the two Mrs Hardys, and doubtless every other woman who has the misfortune of becoming a Great Man’s wife. It’s clear her husband expected inordinate quantities of unpaid labour and declined to pay attention to her physical health. I agree with Funder that Eileen’s treatment in life and afterlife isn’t accidental – that the minimising indifference is part and parcel of the ongoing patriarchal reduction of women to something less than fully human, at best helpmeet and at worst repellent slut or scold. What I object to is her process of correction. ... Her self-appointed task is to piece Eileen back together. Not by assembling a biography, as Sylvia Topp did with Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2020, but instead by writing a counterfiction to plug all those enigmatic gaps. Eileen herself used wit as a shield. Funder strips it away, converting the letters into staged scenes in which Eileen confesses to feelings she chose to disavow and suffers a conventional repertoire of emotions she declined to record. ... Is it useful to remove a woman’s agency? To deny her capacity to make her own choices, including potentially perverse or damaging ones? ... For me, the most disturbing moments in Wifedom weren’t how Eileen was treated by Orwell but the sustained attempt to present her as a sobbing victim, to display her broken when she sought so fiercely to present herself as strong." See also Anna Funder, 'Looking for Eileen: how George Orwell wrote his wife out of his story'.
Top 10 female spies in fiction – article by Kim Sherwood in The Guardian. "In [my] Double Or Nothing, the first novel in a series commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of 007, Bond has vanished and time is running out. A new ensemble cast of double O agents must work against the clock to find Bond and save the world from climate catastrophe. ... [Johanna] Harwood trains as a trauma surgeon before a life-altering event brings her to Moneypenny’s attention, now head of the double O section (in the world’s most overdue promotion). Harwood becomes 003. I hope to empower women to see themselves as the hero, while reflecting the diversity of real espionage. In a genre outwardly dominated by male writers and heroes, I sought out female spies in fiction to inspire me. Here are my Top 10..." 1. Sheila Matthews in While Still We Live, Helen MacInnes (1944)... 2. Stella in The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen (1948)... 3. Gala Brand in Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955)... 4. Elsa in The Hothouse By the East River, Muriel Spark (1973)... 5. Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré (1983)... 6. Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow: The Name of the Rose by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Daniel Acuña (2011)... 7. Laura Last in A Quiet Life, Natasha Walter (2016)... 8. Juliet Armstrong in Transcription, Kate Atkinson (2018)... 9. Who Is Vera Kelly? Rosalie Knecht (2018)... 10. Marie Mitchel in American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)
The Fraud by Zadie Smith: a trial and no errors – review by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in The Guardian. "Early on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations. ... In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, Hilary St Ives, though he’d never once visited the island. Mrs Touchet can trace back the gist of his knowledge about Jamaica to a propaganda booklet of the 1820s, when much of England could delude themselves into thinking that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was tantamount to the freedom of enslaved populations in British colonies. Ainsworth ignored the regular reports of tragic rebellions and vengeful colonial reprisals coming out of the Caribbean in the decades since to paint a prelapsarian portrait of 'long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa-trees'. ... Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.... In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as 'the English Victor Hugo', and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years.... At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of 'stolen truth': the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, the Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being 'high-born men' in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel. Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were 'two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined', joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s 'secret word': slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port."
AI prompt engineering: learn how not to ask a chatbot a silly question – article by Callum Baines in The Observer. "What is prompt engineering? ... Throw a question from the top of your head at ChatGPT and it may provide a satisfying answer, or not. Prompt engineering involves considering the idiosyncrasies of an AI model to construct inputs that it will clearly understand. This tends to produce outputs that are more consistently useful, interesting and appropriate to what you have in mind. Formulate the prompt well and the response may even surpass expectations.... So how do I do it? There are several popular prompting techniques. Employing personas is a common trick. Tell the system to act as a lawyer, personal tutor, drill sergeant or whatever else, and it will create outputs imitating their tone and voice. Or, as a reverse exercise, instruct it to complete a task with a specific audience in mind – a five-year-old, a team of expert biochemists, an office Christmas party – and you’ll get a result tailored for that demographic.... Chain-of-thought prompting, meanwhile, is more appropriate for problem-solving. Asking the model to 'think step by step' will encourage it to partition its output into bite-size chunks, which often makes for more comprehensive results.... What should I avoid? Vague language. Without additional information, AI models cannot infer your tastes, ideas or the vision of the product that’s in your head. Don’t skimp on specifics or context and don’t assume that if something is missing, the model will correctly fill in the blank."
What happens when AI reads a book – blog post by Etan Mollick, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Every author knows, and dreads, what most people want AI to do with books – summarize them. They want to distill down pages of thoughtful prose, carefully considered language, and specific phrases into a few pithy points. So, can AI do this? [After testing this on his own short book on entrepreneurship, the answer is] Yes. And surprisingly well. Further, it has enough 'sense' of context that you can ask for expansions – tell me the examples and research the book gives to support each point. And it does that, too.... What about the style and patterns of writing? Are there any phrases or verbal tics that repeat throughout the book?... Can it work as an editor? As an editor, offer both several broad suggestions, and several specific ones, about how the book could be made more accessible and like a pop science bestseller and also: create a better transition between chapters 2 and 3. give me the original and your changes, and why you made them.... Given that the AI has an impressive ability to understand text, one use case for this knowledge is to help teachers who often assign books to classes. Given the entire text of the book, can AI help an instructor create more meaningful learning as a result? I think the answer is yes. ... You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will make 5 quiz questions on the book suitable for college students. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an 'all of the above option.' At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer.... The AI did much better at a wide range of other educational tasks based around the book: write a case study in the style of a Harvard Business School case that would require students to use the lessons of the book and provide the instructor’s guide to the case resulted in an interesting in-class exercise that I could see using.... I was particularly interested in its ability to apply knowledge from the book in novel contexts and ways: Explain the main themes of the book to me at four different levels: first grader, 8th grader, college student, PhD student resulted in good summaries.... I also tried explain how the book might be useful to dairy farmer in Wisconsin, a ninja living in ancient Japan, an experienced venture capitalist, and Glormtok an orcish barbarian from the fantasy steppes (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). This resulted in lessons that actually encapsulated what the book was about."
Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time – article by Frances Ryan in The Guardian. "Should someone off work with Parkinson’s be allowed a television? Does a supermarket assistant deserve a hobby? YouGov put a range of expenses to the public to ask at what income level they believed each should be attainable. The results are eye-opening. The survey shows that 76% of Britons believe that everyone should be able to afford their utility bills, while 74% think they should have the means to eat a balanced diet – in effect, meaning that around a quarter of the public believe that people on out-of-work benefits shouldn’t be able to have electricity or a full complement of vitamins. Things get particularly interesting when respondents were asked about 'non-essentials'. Only 60% think seasonal celebrations should be attainable for all, while 55% think everyone should be able to afford a television.... Such attitudes are grim, but hardly new. As British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in 1932: 'The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.' And yet it feels as if minds have hardened in recent years. The cost of living crisis has seen disposable income inequality in Britain rise, with the poorest fifth of the population enduring the biggest fall as they’re forced to spend more to cover the basics.Meanwhile, ministers respond to growing hardship by telling the public to just work more hours."
