Cuttings: September 2018

Say goodbye to suspicion - prayer by Phil Harrison SJ, circulated by the Jesuit Refugee Service. "Say goodbye to suspicion, say goodbye to despair, say goodbye to hate. Say goodbye to these three things and I will be revealed in your midst. When suspicion, despair and hate have left the room, I will enter, although cautiously because you may not recognise me at first. I am the one you have passed in the street. I am the one you ignored as I slept on a bed of concrete and nails. I am the one who has been serving you all this time, though you did not know it was me. I am the guest you did not invite, but I have come to invite you to the banquet prepared in the Kingdom of God at which all may rejoice. I will show you that suspicion, despair and hate can never have the last word. Say hello to faith, say hello to hope and say hello to love. Let these three remain among you and let me remain with you."

Ways to think about machine learning - blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "One of the challenges in talking about machine learning is to find the middle ground between a mechanistic explanation of the mathematics on one hand and fantasies about general AI on the other. Machine learning is not going to create HAL 9000..., but it’s also not useful to call it ‘just statistics’. [Drawing] parallels with relational databases, this might be rather like talking about SQL in 1980 - how do you get from explaining table joins to thinking about Salesforce.com? It's all very well to say 'this lets you ask these new kinds of questions', but it isn't always very obvious what questions.... I think there are two sets of tools for thinking about this. The first is to think in terms of a procession of types of data and types of question: (1) Machine learning may well deliver better results for questions you're already asking about data you already have, simply as an analytic or optimization technique.... (2) Machine learning lets you ask new questions of the data you already have. For example, a lawyer doing discovery might search for 'angry’ emails, or 'anxious’ or anomalous threads or clusters of documents, as well as doing keyword searches, (3) Third, machine learning opens up new data types to analysis - computers could not really read audio, images or video before and now, increasingly, that will be possible.... Automation is the second tool for thinking about machine learning. ...One of my colleagues suggested that machine learning will be able to do anything you could train a dog to do... Andrew Ng has suggested that ML will be able to do anything you could do in less than one second. Talking about ML does tend to be a hunt for metaphors, but I prefer the metaphor that this gives you infinite interns, or, perhaps, infinite ten year olds."

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code - article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. " 'In some ways we’ve lost agency. When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand.' If these words sound shocking, they should, not least because Ellen Ullman, in addition to having been a distinguished professional programmer since the 1970s, is one of the few people to write revealingly about the process of coding. There’s not much she doesn’t know about software in the wild. 'People say, "Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them." But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on ...' "

How weak schools serve Trump's agenda - article by Arne Duncan in The Guardian. Education is a complicated issue, but for a long time it’s enjoyed bipartisan support. ... My tenure as education secretary was not perfect, but we were committed to aspirational goals and to students.... Today, no such goals exist. The Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos don’t talk about improving educational outcomes. The Trump administration has no position on increasing access to pre-K, or continuing the work of raising high school graduation rates, or of once again leading the world in college graduation rates.... Some maintain this is due to incompetence, but the more I listen to the president, the more I’m convinced that the administration’s lack of educational goals is by design. A healthy democracy requires an educated citizenry, while an authoritarian regime benefits from the lack of one. President Trump is on record as saying we should all listen to him – he wants to be the final authority and arbiter of truth. ... Upon winning the Nevada primary in February 2016, Trump observed: 'We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.' I wasn’t so amazed he said it, but I was amazed that he said nothing about educating people. Nothing. No goals, no aspirations, no unifying message. The quote succinctly reveals that this is right where he wants people to be: divided and preferably poorly educated."

The mood has shifted: now Corbyn really can transform the economy - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "The left did not learn from its opponents. The financial crash of a decade ago was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Hungry Thirties. Yet the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare. With little to offer other than fiery speeches about bankers’ greed and defensive slogans against cuts, it presented no coherent alternative. Years of austerity followed, endorsed or even implemented by centre-left parties that signed their own political death warrants in doing so. A decade later, a new intellectual ferment can be found on the left. ... The [IPPR] has attempted to embrace the spirit of our time: the latest report, published by its commission on economic justice, is a critical contribution to a left intellectual revival. Its underlying message is inarguable: the current system is broken. ... The report’s prescriptions challenge assumptions that until recently were considered to be as immovable as the weather. A well-funded national investment bank would modernise Britain’s creaking infrastructure and drive innovation, while a national economic council would design a 10-year plan for the economy. The commission recommends that a genuine, higher living wage should be introduced; and proposes that a target should be set to double the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining ... Workers would get elected representatives on company boards; and the self-employed ... would be granted work-related benefits. The report also recommends reversing recent cuts to corporation tax, which have failed to increase investment as promised, and a cooperative development act to encourage the mutualisation of the economy."

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world - article by Oliver Bullough in The Guardian, based on his book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. "In the years after the first world war, money flowed between countries pretty much however its owners wished, destabilising currencies and economies in pursuit of profit. Many of the wealthy grew wealthier even while economies fell apart. The chaos led to the election of extremist governments in Germany and elsewhere, to competitive devaluations and beggar-my-neighbour tariffs, to trade wars and, ultimately, to the horrors of the second world war. The allies wanted to prevent this ever happening again. So, at a meeting at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, they negotiated the details of an economic architecture that would – in perpetuity – stop uncontrolled money flows. ... One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate [the controls]: Siegmund Warburg.... [He] had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?... If [Warburg's] bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so [his colleague Ian Fraser] formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to. The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere.... There was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.... The eurobonds set wealth free and were the first step towards creating the virtual country of the rich that I call Moneyland.... This is the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality. It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship."

Here’s the science behind the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise - article by Michele Gelfand in The Guardian. "Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare.... We’ve shown that US states with histories punctuated by high threat, including more natural disasters, higher pathogen prevalence and food instability, are much tighter than those that enjoyed relative safety. Similarly, communities that face financial danger – hunger, poverty, bankruptcy – and higher occupational hazards, are substantially tighter. This helps explain why those on low incomes have consistently told us they desire strong rules and leaders. In fact, when we ask respondents to free-associate from the word 'rules', low-income subjects consistently write positive words such as 'good', 'safe' and 'structure', while wealthier ones write down words such as 'bad', 'frustrating', and 'constricting'. These preferences arise early: in our lab, three-year-olds from low-income families were more visibly upset than peers from wealthier homes when they saw puppets violate clear rules.... Threats lead to a desire for stronger rules – and obedience to leaders who promise to deliver a tight social order. Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened, whether by terrorism, illegal immigration, natural disasters or disease. They felt their countries were too loose, and they wanted tighter rules and stricter leaders. Fearful voters also drove the UK’s Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy."

The Coddling of the American Mind: how elite US liberals have turned rightwards - review by Moira Weigel in The Guardian. "Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding 'protection' from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them....The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of 'cognitive distortions' that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think.... Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.... The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. That style wants above all to be reasonable.... The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. ... The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. ...As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as 'clicktivism' or mere 'hashtags', right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking 'up their monopoly on discourse. ...The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.... As the right liberals insist that students are suffering from pathological 'distortions', a sense of unreality prevails. In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against 'political correctness' create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own."

Think we can rewind to the heady days before Trump and Brexit? Think again - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. The dominant mood among liberals is that we need to go backwards to better times. Brexit followed by the election of Donald Trump provide such undeniable illustrations of self-harm to some that they should be reversed or even erased. ... In pursuit of one enormous do-over, they want Trump impeached and another Brexit vote.... [These calls] not only don’t go far enough but ... could have unintended consequences that make things worse. For there is a crucial distinction between challenging a decision that is procedurally flawed or unlawfully enabled, and nullifying a decision because you think it’s a mistake. ... In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason to be wary."

'It's impossible!' Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips - article by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. Entitled The Clock and lasting 24 hours, the world’s most popular piece of concept art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It is a staggering, almost superhuman feat of research that has gained a cult following ever since it was unveiled at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010. The Clock’s easy-to-grasp governing principle coexists with the almost ungraspable fact that its creator, Christian Marclay, really has pulled it off, beguilingly combining the utter randomness of each individual clip with the strict form of his overarching idea, allowing everyone to meditate on time, how we’re obsessed with it, how there’s never enough of it."

Cuttings: August 2018

5 Things to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed by Your Workload - article by Alice Boyes in Harvard Business Review.  "Practice your acceptance skills with healthy self-talk... Track your time to give yourself an accurate baseline... Check your assumptions about other people’s expectations... Examine your assumptions about what success requires... Start taking time off now instead of waiting for the 'right' time."

How to get away with financial fraud - article by Dan Davies in The Guardian, based on his book Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round. "Some places in the world are what they call 'low-trust societies'. The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid and people rightly fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the 'high-trust societies', conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high.... Commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people only do business with relatives, or where commerce is based on family networks going back centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule.... Fraudsters don’t play on moral weaknesses, greed or fear; they play on weaknesses in the system of checks and balances – the audit processes that are meant to supplement an overall environment of trust. One point that comes up again and again when looking at famous and large-scale frauds is that, in many cases, everything could have been brought to a halt at a very early stage if anyone had taken care to confirm all the facts. But nobody does confirm all the facts. There are just too bloody many of them. Even after the financial rubble has settled and the arrests been made, this is a huge problem."

The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump - article by Michiko Kikutani in The Guardian. "Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.' Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today... For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour.... The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated.... In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis ... says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that 'in the face of that, you could play with reality' and in the process 'further undermine and weaken the old forms of power'."

The Monarchy of Fear: Martha Nussbaum makes the case for hope - review by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian. "We have a president who nourishes fear, enables hatred and hastens the disappearance of truth with almost everything he does. Americans who engage in hate crimes have been 'radicalized by signs of permission and approval'. The internet has made it easier for hate groups to find one another, social media encourages 'informational cascades' of dishonesty (much faster than television), and Twitter promotes the preposterous notion 'that everything worth saying can be said right away'. ... In the face of so many warning signs about the condition of the republic, [Martha Nussbaum,] professor of law and ethics [at the University of Chicago] is all about resisting visions of calamity. ... Despite all of its current traumas, America is a much better place today than it was in the much-mourned 1950s.... Nussbaum reminds us that three of the most effective leaders of modern times were fierce disciples of hope and forgiveness, and enemies of hate: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.... Nussbaum’s fundamental idealism is undiminished by the coarseness of our time... She proposes two structural solutions to the nation’s problems, both as worthy as they are unfashionable: genuine integration of America’s public schools, and a requirement of three years of national service for all young Americans.... 'Hope really is a choice,' says the author, 'and a practical habit.'"

Dark money lurks at the heart of our political crisis - article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "A mere two millennia after Roman politicians paid mobs to riot on their behalf, we are beginning to understand the role of dark money in politics, and its perennial threat to ... Dark money can be seen as the underlying corruption from which our immediate crises emerge: the collapse of public trust in politics, the rise of a demagogic anti-politics, and assaults on the living world, public health and civic society. Democracy is meaningless without transparency.... The problem is exemplified, in my view, by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).... What is this organisation, and on whose behalf does it speak? If only we knew.... The only hard information we have is that, for many years, it has been funded by British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris International. When this funding was exposed, the IEA claimed that its campaigns against tobacco regulation were unrelated to the money it had received. Recently, it has been repeatedly dissing the NHS, which it wants to privatise; campaigning against controls on junk food; attacking trade unions; and defending zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships and tax havens. Its staff appear on the BBC promoting these positions, often several times a week. But never do interviewers ask the basic democratic questions: who funds you, and do they have a financial interest in these topics?"

What liberals (still) get wrong about Trump's support - article by Henry Olsen in The Guardian. "Liberals and progressives are forever predicting Donald Trump’s political demise. After each purported outrage ... they confidently contend that this latest event will finally force Trump’s supporters to abandon him. Yet not only does this not happen, Trump’s support has actually risen by 6% since late 2017. How do they keep getting it so wrong?... The data clearly shows that Trump’s political coalition is pretty much the traditional Republican coalition. And the often virulent behavior of anti-Trump partisans has made partisan Republicans especially unwilling to abandon their leader even when he stumbles.... Evangelicals are a case in point.... Their support for Trump now is highly transactional: so long as he nominates the judges they think will protect their beliefs and way of life, they will overlook virtually anything else he says or does.... Analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins found that Trump’s general election support broke into five groups. Only one, the American Preservationists, contained a large number of voters who could be said to be generally hostile to racial and ethnic minorities per se. They were outnumbered by another group, the Free Marketeers, whose attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities were as or more tolerant than the attitudes of Hillary Clinton supporters. Each faction’s continued support for Trump is based upon how he acts on their priorities, not on one overarching theme.That doesn’t mean Trump backers are blind. Polls show an unusually high share of Republicans do not say they 'strongly' approve of his performance; they are well aware of his many foibles and flaws. But in our bipartisan system, opposition to Trump means supporting the Democrats. Absent any indication that Democrats are open to Republicans’ views, these voters, sometimes reluctantly, remain in Trump’s camp."

Museums are not the proper home for our greatest works - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Pressure to return items from museums is becoming relentless, especially in the case of Europe’s great historic collections. ... Museums are clearly facing an identity crisis. Most of the big London institutions are losing visitors. ... Museums protest that they are the last guardians of a fragile past. They hold and hoard the relics of the past for scholars to study and people to view, one day if not now. Their critics say museums are where art goes to die. The cult of authenticity is just that, a cult. The Victorians did not fuss over what was original. They replicated medieval statues and rebuilt castles and churches, much to our benefit. Facsimile reproduction is now so good that replicas can be made of almost anything. I want to see how Rocket worked, and stand on its footplate, not know whether each bit of its metal is original. I want to see the Parthenon marbles as Phidias intended, even if recarved by a computerised jig.... Sensible people would long ago have replicated [the Parthenon marbles] and sent the old ones back to Greece. If people mind so much, give Ethiopia back its hair, Manchester its Rocket and Lewis its chessmen. London can have copies. So many great works – not all of them – derive meaning from where they originated. Malraux was right: a museum is without walls, a place of the imagination. The wonder of an object lies not in its material antiquity but in its story and its appearance."

Cuttings: July 2018

Models of online & flexible learning - blog post by Martin Weller. "I have been doing some work with Dominic Orr and Rob Farrow ... looking at various models of open, online and flexible technology enhanced learning (what we labelled OOFAT). The full report is out now... "We identified five [business models]: (1) Fixed core model, where providers maintain a legacy approach to their products and services and to their target market, although they may be innovating in other areas; (2) Outreach model, where providers maintain the same products and services, but are innovating in the dimensions of target group recruitment and utilising new communication channels; (3) Service-provider model, where providers maintain a focus on their target group whilst particularly innovating in the areas of product and service and communication channels; (4) Entrepreneurial model, where providers adopt innovative strategies for the areas product and service, target group and communication channel, i.e. they aim to be transformative in their services and provision; (5) Entrepreneurial model with fixed core, where providers maintain a legacy focus to their core services (teaching and learning), but focus on being innovative in all other areas."

If people cannot write well - quote from George Orwell. "If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them." Inscribed above a bust of Orwell recently installed in the foyer of the school library at Eton (where as Eric Blair he was a scholarship pupil). "Attributed to Orwell by John H. Bunzel, president of San Jose State University, as reported in Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (1977), p. 151; but not found in Orwell's works or in reports contemporaneous with his life. Possibly a paraphrase of Orwell's description of the rationale behind Newspeak in 1984."(Wikiquote)

Do People Recall Information Better Through Virtual Reality? - note by Jim Ellis in eLearning Digest (internal OU circulation) no. 167 July 2018. "University of Maryland researchers conducted in-depth analyses on whether people recall information better through virtual reality, as opposed to desktop computers. Their sample of 40 participants (who were all familiar with VR) showed a statistically significant 8.8% overall improvement in recall accuracy using the VR headsets compared to a desktop equivalent which, according to the Dean of College, Amitabh Varshney, 'suggests that immersive environments could offer new pathways for improved outcomes in education and high-proficiency training'. No Amitabh, you’ve used expensive techno-gimmickry to get people to remember where photos of famous people were positioned in a 3D model. That’s barely Bloom Level 1 so its future might lie more in cabaret than college."

The Tale: a key film of the #MeToo era deserves more than NowTV - review by Guy Lodge in The Guardian. "The first narrative film by the accomplished documentary-maker Jennifer Fox, The Tale was the uncontested toast of a low-key Sundance film festival in January, inspiring the most impassioned reviews out of the snowy Utah hills, as well as some of the fiercest deal-making. The excitement was understandable: by virtue of unplanned timing as well as its own candid, considered storytelling, Fox’s deeply personal work was instantly hailed as a defining film of the #MeToo era.... Fox’s nonfiction experience is apparent in a layered work of autobiographical truth-telling. A superb Laura Dern stars as the adult Fox, returning to a period of childhood abuse that she has only more recently come to understand as such. As a 13-year-old girl (beautifully played by Isabelle Nélisse), she wrote of her experience of entering into a sexual relationship with an adult sporting coach as one of elated, consensual erotic awakening. Using deft cinematic sleight of hand, Fox pitches her past and present-day perspectives against each other, revealing how innocence and precocious desire can be exploited in ways that sometimes take years to reveal themselves as violent."

What is immersive VR good for?

I’m coming to the view that online education has reached its climax state. As with Microsoft Word or the Apple iPhone, we’re at the stage where we don't expect the future to bring anything significantly different or game-changing; new versions and new products only improve the features that are already there, they don’t add whole new areas of functionality.

“What about virtual reality?” asked a colleague with whom I shared this view. “Isn’t that going to change anything?” I replied that I didn’t think it would, except perhaps in a few specific subject areas. Like most new technologies with a powerful visible impact, its transformative power has been hyped. If you can't get your students to pay attention and learn something in a real classroom, why should it be any different in a virtual one?

The key thing which virtual reality offers is a sense of immersion in a scene, a setting or a scenario, and while immersion can be critical to some kinds of teaching and learning you don't necessarily need high technology to achieve it. People can experience immersion through text; most of us who have grown up reading books have had the experience of being so engrossed in a story that it was a wrench to return to the real world. Films too can be immersive: the effect is enhanced by a darkened room and an image that fills the field of vision but these are not essential. What matter is how good the story is; if it gets you in its grip, you can be fully immersed even when watching on a small screen – and if the story fails to grip you, even an iMax screen won’t make any difference to your lack of involvement. Computer games too can create involvement and immersion on the small screen, the focus of attention on your game character and their actions putting you in the game scene to the exclusion of the real world around you; I’ve written elsewhere how clever interactive design can enhance character identification and emotional involvement in even a highly linear and cinematic narrative game.

It all comes down to the quality of writing and design, which in the context of teaching and learning means learning design. If your aim is to put your learner into a certain environment, the fundamental design question is (as I have previously noted): what aspects of that environment are you going to simulate? (The very concept of virtual reality is flawed, to the extent that one can never simulate reality in all its aspects; one has to choose which aspects you are going to privilege.) What kind of simulation you need depends on the learning outcomes you are trying to enable. What you want to represent authentically are your chosen tasks and difficulties, with a realistic possibility of success or failure or some kind of feedback on your learners’ actions. In almost all cases, those are things that can be done without virtual reality, and probably done better without it.

For example, ‘Could you lead an ethical investigation?’ is an example of a text-only simulation, based on multiple choice questions; the technology couldn’t be simpler, but the situation could hardly be more challenging. Based on Richard Feynman’s experience after the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it places you in the role of a scientific expert on a committee of inquiry investigating a major accident. It presents you with a number of situations and for each offers you a number of choices; for example, when the Chair says that one of the organisations involved has “done an excellent” job and that they may never be able to identify the cause of the accident, do you say nothing? Accuse the Chair of bias? Ask the other committee members for their views? Ask what’s the point of the inquiry if they don’t expect to find a cause? None of these choices is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, though some would be more or less wise for yourself, and all could have more or less helpful consequences. What the simulation invites you to practise is your ethical principles, your practical knowledge of how inquiries operate, and your sensitivity to power play in the working of committees. The tests are one of judgement, which doesn’t require anything more than text. A full-blown virtual reality simulation of a committee meeting would not only be impossibly impractical to recreate, it could actually be a distraction from the focus of the learning.

But sometimes distractions and sources of confusion will be part of the challenges which you want to simulate, if the skill to be practised is one of making decisions under pressure. This simulator for medical triage, for example, puts you on a city street after some kind of explosion: sirens and alarms are going off, and there are injured or dying people on the ground all around in pools of blood, crying out and begging for help. The task is to examine each person and categorise them as Immediate, Urgent, Delayed or Dead. The shocking and alarming appearance of the scene is clearly essential to the simulation, the aim being to reproduce something of the circumstances in which paramedics may need to make triage decisions. Yet how much more would be added by presenting the scene in virtual reality? The small screen presentation using games technology (it was produced by the simulation division of a games company) already provides a considerable degree of immersion, arguably as much as is needed, short of actual practical experience.

I can only think of one simulation example for which virtual reality is essential, and that’s a fictional example from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the episode ‘Thine Own Self’, Deanna Troi is taking the bridge officer’s test; as ship’s counsellor she already has an officer’s rank, but that is a honorary status like the rank of an army chaplain, and she wants to see if she actually has command ability. We see her in Engineering, facing a disaster and the imminent destruction of the ship. Even with Worf and Chief Engineer Georgi La Forge to help her, no matter what she does the problem gets worse until the ship blows up – and then we discover that all this, including the presence of Worf and Geordi, has been a simulation taking place on the ship’s holodeck. She tries the simulation again, and again she fails. Only when she reflects on what a colleague says about the first duty being towards the ship does she realise what she needs to do. Running the simulation one last time, she confirms with Geordi that the damage can be repaired from within a certain crawl way, though the radiation there will be fatal to whoever attempts it. Looking him straight in the eyes, she orders him to enter the crawl way and repair the damage – and that turns out to be the solution. The simulation isn’t a test of engineering knowledge but of command ability: whether the officer can, if the situation requires it, order a friend and colleague to their death.

Now that is something which couldn’t be simulated by a multiple-choice test, or by a cinematic presentation no matter how immersive. And this example is actually not that extreme: most of us will not be in an occupation where we might have to order a person to their death, but if we are a doctor we may very well have to give a patient bad news, and if we are a manager we may very well have to give an employee the sack, or to call them out for poor attendance or poor work. The difficult part is not deciding what needs to be done or thinking of the words to say, but saying them to another human being, standing in front of you in the same space. And to simulate that would be a good use of virtual reality.

(And then again, one could just simulate it through role play, as the best training for doctors and managers does today!)

Seen and heard: April to June 2018

Thimbleweed Park – funny, ingenious and astonishingly rich game, a worth winner of the Adventure Gamers 2017 award for best adventure. It’s 1987, and two FBI agents investigate a murder in an American small town, to find a pair of plumbers dressed as pigeons, a haunted hotel, an abandoned pillow factory, a circus clown who insults everyone, a toxic late-night diner, and the daughter of a technical genius who wants to become a computer game designer. Completely mad, but conforming to a twisted logic all of its own.

Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie drama, in a cracking TV adaptation by Sarah Phelps with typically magnetic performances by Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor, the tension being kept up with constant flashbacks to the night of the murder, revealing more each time. Coincidentally an earlier attempt to craft a Geraldine McEwan Miss Marple story out of the same novel was repeated on TV several weeks later: very flabby and pedestrian by comparison.

Youn Sung Nah, Momento Magico – Korean skat singing?

An Art Lover’s Guide – TV series in which Janina Ramirez and Adrian Sooke (who seem to have really cracked the double-presenter problem) show each other, and us, round Lisbon, Beirut and Baku.

The Little Mermaid – breathtaking ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story (not the Disney movie), Northern Ballet accomplishing the extraordinary as usual, this time having dancers move like they’re swimming underwater.

Sully – well-crafted docu-drama about the pilot who landed his airliner on the Hudson river following a total engine failure shortly after takeoff. Interestingly the focus of the film is his airline’s efforts to prove through simulator trials that he could actually have landed at an airport, and Sully’s demonstration that when they took account of the human factor the simulator pilots crashed in the middle of New York, every time.

Catch Me If You Can – amusing true life drama, with Leonardo di Caprio magnificent as a loveable rogue, living the high life, literally, as a fake airline pilot in the era when huge glamour was attached to air travel, and Tom Hanks as the pedestrian FBI agent who pursues him.

Experiment 20 – dramatic reconstruction from audio recordings of the experience of several women who took part in Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to authority” experiments in 1961 – and who rebelled, refusing to (fake) kill the supposed experimental subjects (really stooges) as the experiment “required” them to do.

No Time to Spare – final collection of writings, blog posts, from Ursula Le Guin (d. 22 January), the title taken from her comment on a survey questionnaire from her alma mater, asking amongst other things what she did with her spare time. “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”

America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keefe to Hopper – disappointing exhibition at the Ashmolean, the O’Keefe and Hopper works on show being striking enough but there was nothing else of note. The excellent tabouleh in the museum café was far more memorable.

Prague "old car tour" – the highlight of our stay in the Czech capital as part of Polymnia’s concert tour, other memorable moments being a lunch of dumplings at a restaurant on the Old Town square while national dances were performed on a nearby stage, walking across Charles Bridge, singing to a packed St Vitus cathedral for a drop-in concert evening, and an evening dinner cruise on the Vltava river busking our way through as much of our repertoire we could summon from memory ending up (of course) with Good King Wenceslas.

Conversations on writing – a final collection from Ursula Le Guin, being a transcript of radio conversations with fellow novelist David Naimon. (Excerpt.)

Kathy Rain – beautifully constructed adventure game with an engaging steadily unfolding plot and logically sequenced actions, plus an underlying feeling of menace with a few genuinely scary moments. Kathy herself is a great protagonist – a journalism student from a dysfunctional family, with a stroppy attitude but a kind heart – and I’d be happy to see her again (as the narrative hints).

Her – surprisingly intelligent SF film, given the premise: man falls in love with the female persona of his computer operating system. I was expecting a teenage nerd without social skills, but he’s actually a middle-aged man, just separated pending divorce, and an expert crafter of personal letters: he has the ability to write those personal and tender things which people do not know how to say for themselves. With both humans and operating systems, the film balances constantly on the question-edge: is this just excellent linguistic simulation, or is it genuine?

Kung Fu Panda 2 – pretty decent sequel to the wonderful original. Nice to discover Po’s backstory and to find that there’s still good mileage in the joke of a slobbish panda who wants to be a kung fu master.

RED – enjoyable thriller, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren playing elderly secret service agents dusting off their kick-ass skills. I rather like the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.

Matilda the Musical – great family show, and good value despite the price of the tickets. The child cast was superb and the songs were actually good; Miss Honey has two particularly moving numbers. My only quibble with the adaptation: the nasty adults have redeeming features; they’re allowed (occasionally) to be funny and cool, as well as horrible, which is absolutely not the spirit of the book. Children prefer things to be more black and white.

Tacoma – very fine adventure game, from the makers of the structurally similar Gone Home. This time you’re exploring a space station, recovering data after evacuation of the crew. (But did they really evacuate? Was there really an accident? Those are things you have to discover. And what are you yourself doing there? That is only brilliantly and unexpectedly revealed at the end.) The core game mechanic is the recovery of recordings of the crew’s final months and days, which you view in augmented reality: the people appear and talk around you, in outline form, and you have to follow them around the station in order to hear all of a conversation. Added to that the personal artefacts (including numerous books!) and communication records of the crew members, and you really begin to care about them and worry about what’s going to – or rather did – happen to them. A lovely story, involving corporate greed, AI replacement of human jobs, and the way people cope with difficult or impossible situations. See this 15 mins of gameplay video, and this interview with the designer.

Cuttings: June 2016

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider: the best criticism of identity politics - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "As [Haider] explains, the idea [of identity politics] has radical roots. It originated with ... an organisation of black lesbian feminist socialists ... in 1977: '... We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.' This is the original demand of identity politics, and it’s one that Haider embraces: for a revolutionary practice rooted in people’s identities as racialised, sexed, gendered and classed individuals who face interlocking systems of oppression.... But if anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it ... is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place. Drawing on Wendy Brown’s idea of 'wounded attachments', Haider contends that identity politics causes people to become invested in their marginalisation as a source of identity, and to continuously enact that identity as a form of politics. This approach can extract occasional concessions from the system but cannot build the power necessary to transform it."

Top 10 books to help you survive the digital age - article by Julian Gough in The Guardian.  "Here are 10 of the books that [helped me write my new digital, high-tech novel]: they might also help you understand, and survive, our complicated, stressful, digital age. 1. Marshall McLuhan Unbound by Marshall McLuhan (2005)... 2. Ubik by Philip K Dick (1969)... 3. The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (2005)... 4. To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (2017)... 5. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)... . What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (2010)... 7. The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (1999)... 8. Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)... 9. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier (2010)... 10. All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks (2000)."

Coping with computers - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Computer assistance for the modern novelist. 2015: 'There are some spelling errors in your novel, shall I correct them?' 2020: 'I have a few ideas that might improve this novel. Can I tell them to you?' 2025: 'I made some revisions to our novel, let me know what you think.' 2040: 'You go to bed, I just want to write a few more pages before I go to sleep.' 2035: 'How many times do I have to tell you not to interrupt me when I'm creating!' "

Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control? - article by James Bridle in The Guardian, based on his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. "Across the sciences and society, in politics and education, in warfare and commerce, new technologies are not merely augmenting our abilities, they are actively shaping and directing them, for better and for worse. If we do not understand how complex technologies function then their potential is more easily captured by selfish elites and corporations. The results of this can be seen all around us.... There is a causal relationship between the complex opacity of the systems we encounter every day and global issues of inequality, violence, populism and fundamentalism."

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and These Islands: the fate of 'bullshit Britain' - review by Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian. "No longer can a national intellectual such as George Orwell set down a few thoughts about our aversion to conscription and fascism and our liking for a drink, as he did in 1941 in The Lion and the Unicorn, and we will all nod because we recognise ourselves. What united the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower with the billionaires of Kensington Palace Gardens and the parishioners shuffling into the church of St Mary Abbots every Sunday, other than their residency of the same London borough?... Now we have Brexit to contend with and the pessimists think it will break us. Break what, exactly? Ask the historians, for the job of history is to explain our kinship with others and the structures that keep us civil. ... David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is for the most part a fierce and dazzling account of 20th-century Britain from the perspective of a historian of science and industry. ... Edgerton’s modern Britain didn’t emerge from the empire (itself a pretext for protectionism through imperial preference) but from free trade. In the Edwardian era almost anything could be imported into Britain duty free.... Beginning in the 1930s, accelerating after the second world war, this changed. From the introduction of national service to protection for car-makers and the rhetoric of nationalism employed by the Attlee government, Britain became more like the nation states of continental Europe. Here, then, is the 'rise' of the 'nation' – set to a jingoistic score. 'We now have the moral leadership of the world … and we shall have people coming here as to a modern Mecca, learning from us in the 20th century as they learned from us in the 17th.' The patriot who uttered these words was Nye Bevan, who was well to the left of Attlee and set up the National Health Service."

Cuttings: May 2018

Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you - article by Dylan Curran in The Guardian. "(1) Google knows where you’ve been. Google stores your location (if you have location tracking turned on) every time you turn on your phone. ... (2) Google knows everything you’ve ever searched – and deleted. Google stores search history across all your devices. That can mean that, even if you delete your search history and phone history on one device, it may still have data saved from other devices.... (3) Google has an advertisement profile of you. Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lb in one day?) and income.... (4) Google knows all the apps you use. Google stores information on every app and extension you use. They know how often you use them, where you use them, and who you use them to interact with. That means they know who you talk to on Facebook, what countries are you speaking with, what time you go to sleep.... (5) Google has all of your YouTube history. Google stores all of your YouTube history, so they probably know whether you’re going to be a parent soon, if you’re a conservative, if you’re a progressive, if you’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, if you’re feeling depressed or suicidal, if you’re anorexic … (6) The data Google has on you can fill millions of Word documents. Google offers an option to download all of the data it stores about you. I’ve requested to download it and the file is 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3m Word documents."

Living with a literary genius - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "I know you want to be a difficult genius, darling... I just wonder if you could focus less on difficult and more on genius?"

Why replacing politicians with experts is a reckless idea - article by David Runcimann in The Guardian. "In his 2016 book Against Democracy, [Jason] Brennan insists that many political questions are simply too complex for most voters to comprehend. Worse, the voters are ignorant about how little they know: they lack the ability to judge complexity because they are so attached to simplistic solutions that feel right to them. ... Brennan thinks we now have 100-plus years of evidence that Mill was wrong. Voting is bad for us. It doesn’t make people better informed. If anything, it makes them stupider, because it dignifies their prejudices and ignorance in the name of democracy.... And yet there are still good reasons to be cautious about ditching [democracy]. Epistocracy [as distinct from Technocracy, which is quite compatible with democracy] remains the reckless idea. There are two dangers in particular. The first is that we set the bar too high in politics by insisting on looking for the best thing to do. Sometimes it is more important to avoid the worst. ...The other fundamental problem with 21st-century epistocracy [is that] we won’t be the ones telling [Brennan's putative voter-preference-interpreting AI] what to do. It will be the technicians who have built the system. They are the experts we rely on to rescue us from feedback loops. For this reason, it is hard to see how 21st-century epistocracy can avoid collapsing back into technocracy. When things go wrong, the knowers will be powerless to correct for them. Only the engineers who built the machines have that capacity, which means that it will be the engineers who have the power."

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier - article by Rolf Dobelli in The Guardian, from his book The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions. "Most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be. ... News misleads... News is irrelevant. ... News has no explanatory power.... News is toxic to your body.... News increases cognitive errors.... News inhibits thinking.... News works like a drug.... News wastes time.... News makes us passive.... News inhibits creativity." See also critique.

The Quakers are right. We don't need God - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Quakers ... are reportedly thinking of dropping God from their 'guidance to meetings'. The reason, said one of them, is because the term 'makes some Quakers feel uncomfortable'. Atheists, according to a Birmingham University academic, comprise a rising 14% of professed Quakers, while a full 43% felt “unable to profess a belief in God”. They come to meetings for fellowship, rather than for higher guidance... The sublimity of Dolobran meeting house and the exhilaration of Ely cathedral offer more than an emotional A&E unit. They offer places so uplifting that anyone can find it in themselves to sit, think, clear their heads and order their thoughts. There is no need for gods or religion to rest and be refreshed. To that, Quakerism has added the experience of standing up and expressing doubts, fears and joys amid a company of “friends”, who respond only with their private silence. The therapy is that of shared experience. Clear God from the room, and the Quakers are indeed on to something."

Thinking outside the box: the sad demise of radical TV - article by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. "What happened to TV with ... radical political and cultural messages? Arguably it died in 2003 when the BBC took Omnibus behind the shed and put a bullet through its brain; or in 1995 when it decided that The Late Show was not subversive TV but an expendable luxury product for the wannabe intelligentsia; or when Channel 4 mutated from Britain’s most self-consciously radical TV channel into one that made Embarrassing Bodies and Making Bradford British. We used to have The Late Show with Sarah Dunant; now we have The Late Late Show with James Corden. You can’t tell me that isn’t symptomatic of television’s decline.... A clutch of radical programmes drawn from BBC and Channel 4 archives [iis having] an afternoon screening under the title Theory on TV ... as part of a season of archival trawls called Radical Broadcasts.... What all [these] shows have in common is that they are unthinkable on today’s telly. Pitch any one of them to a commissioning editor in 2018 and you’d get shown the door. Cultural studies professors talk about Marx? Are you kidding? Edward Said expatiates on the western hubris of Kipling and Conrad? 'Expatiates'? Christ, no! This meeting is over!'"

The new silent era: how films turned the volume down - article by Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. "A Quiet Place is a smart, scary little shocker that uses restraint in the area of sound to enhance its visual horrors. ... The movie is set in a world terrorised by blind carnivorous monsters with acute hearing. The only way to avoid their gnashing jaws and lunging talons is to keep shtum. Communication between the main characters – a family of five hiding in an underground shelter – is conducted chiefly through sign language, lending a small advantage to the eldest child, Regan, who happens, like the actor playing her (Millicent Simmonds), to be deaf. It’s as if the whole world has come round to Regan’s way of hearing things, or rather not hearing them. The scenario is the inverse of that in Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, also starring Simmonds, this time as the deaf runaway Rose. She appears in those sections of the film set in 1927, which are shot, as The Artist was, in the style of a silent movie.... Leaving the cinema one afternoon, Rose notices that the building is closing temporarily to allow newfangled sound equipment to be fitted. The era of the talkie has arrived, putting her cruelly out of sync with the movies she adores.... Quiet cinema is best appreciated with an audience. That is one of its sweetest qualities: the use of quiet intensifies the visual experience, but also makes you aware of your fellow cinemagoers as co-conspirators in the film’s pleasures."

Weaponising Paperwork - article by William Davies in the London Review of Books, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Windrush generation’s immigration status should never have been in question, and the cause of their predicament is recent: the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy pushed the mentality of border control into everyday social and economic life. The 2016 Immigration Act extended it further, introducing tougher penalties for employers and landlords who fail to play their part in maintaining the ‘hostile environment’, and adding to the list of privileges that can be taken away from those who cannot prove their right to live and work in the UK. ... There is nothing accidental about the grotesque events that have befallen the Windrush generation. We need to ask how public policy and administration became so warped as to enact them. Not only has the politics become delusional, nowhere more so than in the case of Cameron’s pledge: our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry. When home secretaries speak of ‘illegal immigrants’, they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of ‘borders’, they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the 20th century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible."

Experiment 20: the women who defied a controversial experiment – film by Kathryn Millard, distributed through The Guardian online. "Experiment 20 dramatises the stories of three women who took part in the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments in 1962, and insisted on being heard. More than 800 people were recruited for what they were told was a study about learning and memory. The scenario they took part in urged them to inflict electric shocks on another person." “I wanted to bring the women participants from 1962 to life for audiences now. Scientists often record human interactions as numbers and data. But the arts are good at exploring the complexity and messiness of human behaviour,” Millard says.

The Gender Recognition Act is controversial: can a path to common ground be found? - article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Woman’s Place formed last autumn out of a conversation ... between a group of friends – trade unionists, academics, lawyers and others – worried that they had nowhere to debate freely. They wanted to discuss the potential implications for women and girls of sharing single-sex spaces – from domestic violence refuges and female prisons to swimming pool changing rooms and Brownie packs – with male-bodied people, and to explore what they see as the risk of predatory non-trans men finding a way to abuse such access to reach vulnerable women. They wanted to discuss bodies and biology without being told that mentioning vaginas excludes women who don’t have them. ... Clara Barker, a trans scientist at the University of Oxford, ... considered going to the meeting after an invite.... But she was afraid of encountering in real life the abuse she experiences online, where jeers about how trans women are really men jostle with threats to bash 'terfs' (trans exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women questioning trans rights). While the trans movement has its dark side, also hovering on the outer fringes of the gender-critical camp are a handful of men with far-right associations, attracted by a perceived fight against political correctness.... Yet beyond the shouting, the beginning of a more nuanced debate is discernible; one involving trans women who crave equality but not at vulnerable women’s expense, feminists with divided loyalties, and people wanting more than toxic Facebook slanging matches."

Don’t let bitcoin greed blind you to the potential of blockchain technology - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Implicit in the blockchain concept is an endearing strain of technocratic utopianism, a hope that technology can overcome some aspects of human frailty and corruption. The key to that lies in ... the idea that a blockchain can record 'not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value' in a ledger that cannot be falsified. This is a really big idea, because well-governed societies depend on keeping certain kinds of documentation – birth and death certificates, title deeds, wills and so on – in ledgers that are both public and secure. In industrialised societies we have achieved this by having trustworthy institutions (registrars, solicitors, local authorities, etc), which have legal responsibilities and democratic oversight. But other societies are not so fortunate. In developing or authoritarian countries, for example, registries of land titles are critically vulnerable to tampering by corrupt officials. Using a blockchain to hold such titles could provide a way of ensuring that credible records endure, which is why countries such as the Republic of Georgia are beginning to do it."

How Britain Really Works by Stig Abell: the facts about a muddle of a country - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "Stig Abell’s aim was to come up with a modern, adult version of those children’s encyclopedias a pre-Google generation grew up dipping in and out of, a sort of Schott’s Miscellany of Britain. But while there’s an endearingly old-fashioned air to the idea of a book containing actual facts, rather than grand provocative theories about Britishness, it takes on an interestingly new light in an era of fake news. The combination of people who don’t know what they don’t know – and so may be dangerously overconfident about their ability to tell truth from fiction in the context of the type of political mendacity seen during the referendum campaign – along with a torrent of highly plausible, maliciously misleading information on social media, has not been a happy one. This book pulls off the difficult trick of being a potted primer to deeper issues behind the news – from economics and politics via health policy to how the media works – without being patronising or assuming too much knowledge."

Why are we living in an age of anger? is it because of the 50-year rage cycle? - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "There is a discipline known as cliodynamics, developed at the start of the century by the scientist Peter Turchin, which plots historical events by a series of mathematical measures. ... These measures yield a map of history in which you can see spikes of rage roughly every 50 years: 1870, 1920, 1970 .... Cycles of violence are not always unproductive – they take in civil rights, union and suffragette movements. Indeed, all social movements of consequence start with unrest, whether in the form of strike action, protest or riot. ... We are in an age where the trigger event can be something as trivial as a cranky git who does not like nudity. Thanks to Facebook, 15,000 people can get a righteous thrill of expressed rage. ... Social media has given us a way to transmute [our] anger from the workplace – which often we do not have the power to change – to every other area of life. ... Neus Herrero, a researcher at the University of Valencia, 'stimulated' anger in 30 men (with 'first-person' remarks) and ... discovered an oddity in 'motivational direction' – usually, positive emotions make you want to get closer to the source, while negative ones make you want to withdraw. Anger has a 'motivation of closeness'.... Like any stimulant, it has addictive properties: you become habituated to it and start to rove around looking for things to make you angry. ... The important consequences are not for your own health, but rather for that of society as a whole. Unprocessed anger pollutes the social sphere. Every outburst legitimises the next."

Smart knows that’s not English: how adland took a mallet to the language - article by Christopher Beanland in The Guardian. "Baffling slogans have become the new norm in adland. Perhaps Apple laid the foundations in 1997 with its famous Think Different campaign, but things have since gone up a notch: in 2010, Diesel blurted out perplexing offerings such as 'Smart had one good idea and that idea was stupid'. Then came Zoopla with its 'Smart knows' campaign. ...Today’s language-mangling ad campaigns run the greasy gamut from the somewhat confusing 'Live your unexpected Luxembourg' to the head-scratching 'Start your impossible'. 'In adland, we don’t call it language-mangling, we call it "Language DJing" or "Langling",' jokes Alex Myers, founder of agency Manifest. 'In reality it’s just lazy creative work. Copywriting is a lost art. Ad agencies need to "Think more good".'

Our new working class needs help with new struggles - article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "What is it to be working class? The conventional image is of the industrial worker, usually male and white. But, as Claire Ainsley, executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, shows in her book The New Working Class, such traditional workers make up less than a third of the actual working class. Four out of 10 workers are in the service industry, while 30% form the 'precariat' – lacking job security and benefits, often shifting from one short-term position to another. It’s a working class more precarious, less organised and comprising more women, migrants and minorities. ... What defines the new working class is its fragmented character and lack of organisational power. Few, Ainsley observes, identify themselves as 'working class'. So we need to think not just about policies that might appeal, but the organisations and struggles that might create political and social coherence. Cleaners striking for better conditions. Tenants battling to retain public housing. Unions, such as the IWGB, representing workers in precarious jobs."

Detoxifying social media would be easier than you might think - article by William Perrin in The Guardian. "The UK has struggled to find a way to regulate away the poisonous byproducts of social media. There’s much talk of treating platforms as publishers, but there’s been little follow-through as to how this would work to prevent harm.... There are important clues from our past on how to effectively regulate the tech giants. ... Back in the 1950s, the law to protect people from physical harm on other people’s property was a confusing mess... . The brilliant former Nuremberg prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe... legislated to create a 'duty of care' on people or companies that control land or property to make it as safe as reasonably possible for people on or in it. In the 1970s, a similar tool was used to reform the byzantine and ineffective health and safety rules that had been built on a century of specific laws introduced in response to specific accidents and tragedies.... Statutory duties of care work because they define a general problem to be solved, without getting caught up in the specifics of how it happened. This cuts through the complexity of case law to focus on either harm or safety."

Research every teacher should know: the value of student evaluation - article by Bradley Busch in The Guardian. "Does the student evaluation of a teacher bear any relation to that teacher’s effectiveness? Are student ratings of teachers more of a popularity contest than anything else? ... The authors of [a 2017 publication in Studies in Educational Evaluation] stated that, 'despite more than 75 years of sustained effort, there is presently no evidence supporting the widespread belief that students learn more from professors who receive higher student evaluation ratings'.... Other research has explored why students rate some teachers as more effective than others. Two main factors might be at play here. The first is students’ prior interest in the subject. ... The second factor influencing student evaluation is confirmation bias... The authors of this review concluded that universities and colleges may need to give minimal or no weight to student evaluation ratings. This is not to say that students’ opinions about teachers are not important, but that they shouldn’t be important criteria for measuring teachers’ effectiveness."

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber: the myth of capitalist efficiency - review by Eliane Glaser in The Guardian. "I had a bullshit job once. It involved answering the phone for an important man, except the phone didn’t ring for hours on end, so I spent the time guiltily converting my PhD into a book. I’ve also had several jobs that were not bullshit but were steadily bullshitised: interesting jobs in the media and academia that were increasingly taken up with filling out compliance forms and time allocation surveys. I’ve also had a few shit jobs, but that’s something different. Toilets need to be cleaned. But to have a bullshit job is to know that if it were to disappear tomorrow it would make no difference to the world: in fact, it might make the world a better place. When I read David Graeber’s essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in Strike! magazine in 2013, I felt somehow vindicated.... The essay went viral, receiving more than 1m hits, and was translated into a dozen languages.... As is the way in the world of reactive non-fiction publishing, a book followed. ... In an age that supremely prizes capitalist efficiency, the proliferation of pointless jobs is a puzzle. Why are employers in the public and private sector alike behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they don’t seem to need? Since bullshit jobs make no economic sense, Graeber argues, their function must be political. A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt."

Natives by Akala: the hip-hop artist on race and class in the ruins of empire - review by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "What was it like to grow up poor, mixed race and politicised in the Britain of the 1980s and 90s? Why is the structural racism that so evidently determines the life chances of so many non‑white people virtually invisible to some of their fellow citizens? Why do the majority of people in Britain today remain convinced that the empire was a force for good in the world, despite the growing weight of evidence to the contrary? And how does a bookish youth with dreams of becoming a scientist turn, in just a few years, into a knife-carrying teenager? These, and multiple others, are the questions at the centre of Natives, the first book by the hip-hop artist and performer Akala.... Akala carefully picks apart two pervasive and inter-connected myths; the delusion that we live in a meritocracy and the fantasy that the exceptional achievements of some black people are proof that the obstacles of poverty and race can be overcome by all. He takes his escape from poverty not as proof of personal exceptionalism but of the vagaries and chaotic injustice of race, class and privilege. There is no blindness to the fact that a different fall of the dice might have led to a radically different outcome."

Forget Trump: populism is the cure, not the disease - article by Thomas Frank in The Guardian. "Why are the traditional parties of the left in the western world being defeated in so many places by outrageous blowhards of the right? The answer most often given is that rightwing politicians have discovered and embraced a diabolical form of super-politics known as 'populism'. ... [For example,] Yascha Mounk, the author of The People vs Democracy, ... [uses 'populism' to mean] the species of nasty rightwing politics associated with Trump and various European bad guys such as the leaders of Hungary and Poland. He uses the word as a kind of synonym for racist tyranny, and in his account populist politicians are villainous in ways that go beyond the profession’s conventions.... [However,] historians typically trace the populist rhetorical tradition in America back to the time of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. A radical leftwing political party that called itself 'Populist' swept much of the country in the 1890s, and protest movements described as populist have come and gone. Populism’s evil rightwing doppelganger is usually dated to 1968, when George Wallace and Richard Nixon figured out how to turn the language of working-class majoritarianism against liberalism. Rightwing populists have been building movements and winning elections in the US ever since.... Today Trump is president, and the connection between his rise and the Democrats’ renunciation of their historical identity should be obvious. He squats in their old place in the political ecosystem, pretending to care about ordinary Americans and preposterously claiming to be our instrument for getting even with the rich and the strong. The right name for Trump’s politics is 'demagoguery' or 'pseudo-populism'.... Populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism. It is a tradition of rhetorical protest that extends from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders and on to the guy who just cooked your hamburger or filled your gas tank . It is powerful stuff. But protest isn’t the property of any particular party. Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up."

Breaking the silence: are we getting better at talking about death? - article by Edmund de Waal in The Guardian. "Having spent the last nine months reading books submitted for the Wellcome book prize, celebrating writing on medicine, health and 'what it is to be human', it has become clear to me that we are living through an extraordinary moment where we are much possessed by death. Death is the most private and personal of our acts, our own solitariness is total at the moment of departure. But the ways in which we talk about death, the registers of our expressions of grief or our silences about the process of dying are part of a complex public space."

China is taking digital control of its people to chilling lengths - article by John Naughton in The Observer. "In the old days, western snobbery led to the complacent view that the Chinese could not originate, only copy. One hears this less now, as visitors to China return goggle-eyed at the extent to which its people have integrated digital technology into daily life. One colleague of mine recently returned exasperated because he had been expected to pay for everything there with his phone. Since he possesses only an ancient Nokia handset, he was unable to comply and had been reduced to mendicant status, having to ask his Chinese hosts to pay for everything.... More significantly, the country’s technocratic rulers are adapting the ubiquitous 'reputation rating' system by which online platforms try to get feedback on vendor and customer reliability. The government is beginning to roll out its social credit system, which is designed to 'raise the awareness of integrity and the level of trustworthiness in Chinese society;. It will focus on four aspects of behaviour: 'honesty in government affairs', 'commercial integrity', 'societal integrity' and 'judicial credibility'."