The Crown – At last I get what the fuss was about, having binge-watched Seasons 1 and 2 on DVD over the Christmas break. Truly excellent television, each hour-long episode feeling you drained and washed out like a full-length feature film. Great performances from top-deck actors, with high production values and powerful scripting from Peter Morgan who after The Queen and The Audience seems to have this genre of imagined history down pat. For my money, the best episodes are in the first season, especially the early ones, when Queen Mary is explaining the demands of The Crown, and where the main theme is the conflict between the Crown and the people who inhabit it. Significantly, the title is The Crown, not The Queen, “the Crown takes precedence” being the key line. Hans Zimmer’s theme music, elaborated by Rupert Gregson-Williams (who also did Wonder Woman), does critical work in establishing the feeling of a remorseless, inexorable, slow-grinding trans-historical force. (Based I think on Purcell’s Frost Scene music, which is actually used in one of the episodes, but here extended and amped up with full symphonic orchestra to tremendous effect, worth the price of the soundtrack album on its own.) Interesting tie-in books too, by Robert Lacey, giving the historical facts behind Season 1 and Seasons 2-3, making it clear just which scenes have been invented to convey (hopefully) an emotional, if not factual, truth.
The Subversive Copyeditor, by Carol Fischer Saller – Wise words from the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s online Q&A, and actually not all that subversive, the point being that what an author and a publisher wants (or should want) is not a copyeditor who slavishly follows rules but one who knows what the rules are, why they’re there, and when and how to bend or break them. So not so much use to the thousands of people who email the Q&A with variants of: “please will you tell my boss / wife / husband / teacher that they’re wrong and I’m right.” The most useful aspect of the book is the sage advice on how to work and get on with your colleagues in the production process. A book to dip into and re-read periodically.
Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse – Now this is a proper Broken Sword adventure game, after the poor showing of the fourth entry in the series: George and Nico sparking off each other again, travelling all over Europe and the Middle-East in pursuit of a gnostic mystery. Nice to have some puzzles which are actually solvable by ordinary people, and clever plotting so that the customary clues-hidden-in-the-painting trope is spread over several scenes throughout the game, instead of being delivered in one big indigestible lump.
Snowflakes are Dancing, by Isao Tomita– A favourite album of mine in the 1970s, when electro-classical based on Moog and other synthesisers was a thing, the trend having been kicked off by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos with Switched On Bach. I still like it; the rich electronic sound palate, like a good orchestration, skilfully brings colour to the Debussy piano originals.
Good Omens – Intermittently hilarious TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s collaboration, a serious rival to the Dirk Maggs-produced radio version of 2014, the great joy being Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon respectively, who combine forces to sabotage the imminent apocalypse because they’ve grown accustomed to living in the world and basically rather like it and don’t want it to end. The other elements aren’t as strong, so the middle episodes drag a little where the complicated plot gets very difficult to follow, but the ending is a blast.
The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath – interesting psychological design book, of which the basic claim – backed up by numerous case studies – is that emotional, impactful and transformative experiences are something which you can arrange and design, and not simply leave to happen if you’re lucky. Many of the examples are from customer service, but it has great implications for learning design.
Pet Shop Boys Ultimate – the soundtrack of the 1980s, rather as Abba was of the 1970s, and like Abba – as Stephen Fry observed – songs which are somehow just much better than pop songs need to be. And some, like ‘It’s a Sin’, are blisteringly powerful in their defiance.
Design for how people learn, by Julie Dirksen – really useful, practical and accessible handbook for learning design, considering each aspect (learning need, motivation, attention, memory, skill development etc) in terms of what’s known from psychology.
Chuchel – clever and amusing puzzle game from the much-respected Amanita Design company, who also produced Samorost and its sequels, Botanicula and Machinarium. I’m not sure I liked it as much as some reviewers, though; Chuchel’s personality is too bad-tempered and greedy to be really funny for me.
Star Trek: Discovery. Season 1 – Yes, well. Much anticipated, and some appealing aspects (anything with Michelle Yeoh in it has to be worth consideration, plus my son designed the space suit used in the opening episode), yet somehow… I just don’t care about the characters very much, except perhaps Michael Burnham played by the very good Sonequa Martin-Green. The manic pace, as in the recent ‘reboot’ movies, doesn’t help; there’s no time to get to know anybody before they're killed, or unmasked as someone else in disguise, or turn out to really be their counterpart from the mirror universe. It’s better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the pre-reboot shows, but it sounds as though Star Trek: Picard may be having the same problem. I want to watch Deep Space Nine again!
Endeavour, Series 7 – a short (three episodes) but excellent series, and if this turns out to be the final one it’ll have gone out on a high.
Age of the Image – Very perceptive four-part documentary series by James Fox. I’m not sure there’s really any overall thesis, but it’s a splendid tour through the histories of photography, film, advertising and manufactured image, featuring great examples – just the ones you’d want them to have bought the rights for.
Wanderlust: Travel Stories – Highly atmospheric portmanteau game or interactive novel, in which travellers meeting on Easter Island tell their stories of journeys past. One reviewer at least loved it, but I’m not entirely happy about the game aspect, because nothing you do seems to be capable of disrupting the overall storyline, which makes one wonder just how meaningful the choices are. Also it’s a bit weird to be playing a game with people journeying all over the place when in real life the world is in coronavirus lockdown.
Doctor Who: emergency transmission – A brilliantly conceived message to fearful children, and the fearful children in all of us if we’re honest. Highly appropriate, because of course Doctor Who is precisely about fear and overcoming fear – and The Doctor always comes through. I think this is the best thing Jodie Whittaker has done as The Doctor.
Sunday, 5 April 2020
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
Cuttings: March 2020
Can computers ever replace the classroom? – article by Alex Beard in The Guardian. "In China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, ...in 2018 alone, [Derek Haoyang] Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups....
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to Li five years earlier.... He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand.... The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach.... Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher.... In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word 'hurry'. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word 'hurry' and related phrases.... Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as 'nuggets'. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs."
The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski: outbreaks of all kinds – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells the story of the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, about which we have heard so much lately. The book’s hero is Ronald Ross, the British doctor who in the late 19th century discovered that mosquitoes spread malaria and was rewarded with the 1902 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Ross wasn’t the first to describe an epidemic mathematically, but he was the first to do so armed with a thorough understanding of the biological and social processes that shape it, and this made all the difference. ... It’s partly thanks to Ross that we have the concept of herd immunity – hopeful because it means that not every mosquito has to be squashed, not every person has to be vaccinated, for a population to be protected against a disease.... A century on, ideas have changed. Now the thinking is that many of the things that Hudson and Ross might have considered independent – obesity, smoking, even loneliness – are catching, too. We talk about financial contagion and epidemics of knife crime, and methods borrowed from public health are being applied to try to nip these problems in the bud, or at least slow their spread. ... One of the most interesting and topical parts of the book is about the mathematical modelling of fake news."
Coming soon! Classic novels with added positivity – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Christie, Merriment on the Orient Express. Mann, Life in Venice. Rose, Twelve Agreeable Men. Le CarrĂ©, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spa. Roth, Portnoy's Compliment. Joyce, Finnegan''s Birthday Party."
The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem – editorial in The Guardian. "Tim Lang in his new book, Feeding Britain, [warns that] our food system is 'stretched, open to disruption and far from resilient'. It is easy to castigate panic buyers for empty shelves. But while shopping responsibly will help others to get the food they need, only a few people are squirrelling away vast stocks. Research firm Kantar says the average spend per supermarket trip has risen by 16% to £22.13 month on month – not surprising when households realised they were likely to need lunches at home, including for children no longer in school, and could have to self-isolate for a fortnight. The underlying problem is that just-in-time supply chains can struggle to cope with even relatively small shifts, and that a handful of retailers dominate the market....The efficiencies that have kept food prices low, and the long and complex global chains that bring us such variety, come at a price."
Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies – article by Jordan Kisner. "Consider the scene at the end of No Country For Old Men when Javier Bardem’s character has a car accident. After the crunch of impact, there are a few moments of what might be mistaken for stillness. The two cars rest smoking and crumpled in the middle of a suburban intersection. Nothing moves – but the soundscape is deceptively layered. There is the sound of engines hissing and crackling, which have been mixed to seem as near to the ear as the camera was to the cars; there is a mostly unnoticeable rustle of leaves in the trees; periodically, so faintly that almost no one would register it consciously, there is the sound of a car rolling through an intersection a block or two over, off camera; a dog barks somewhere far away. The faint sound of a breeze was taken from ambient sounds on a street like the one depicted in the scene. ... None of these sounds are there because some microphone picked them up. They’re there because [Skip] Lievsay chose them and put them there, as he did for every other sound in the film. The moment lasts about 20 seconds. No Country For Old Men is 123 minutes long.... The impact a tiny aural cue can have on the brain’s understanding of narrative is astonishing. On the third day of the mix, Lievsay and Larry were breezing through a scene of Miles [Davies] dropping in on one of his wife’s dance rehearsals when [director and star Don] Cheadle ...paused them. The scene sounded a little too dreamy. Cheadle wanted a more matter-of-fact sound.... Lievsay nodded and fiddled for a moment. When he replayed the scene, something small but extraordinary happened. I had watched this scene somewhere between one and two dozen times but this time I noticed something I’d never seen before: a young woman passing behind Frances with a stack of papers in her hand. Lievsay had given her footsteps. Without the footsteps, I’d somehow never seen her; now, I saw her, and her presence – along with a few other tweaks by Lievsay – suggested bustling in the room, people at work, things happening outside the eye contact forged between Miles and Frances. I didn’t exactly hear the difference: I just saw the scene differently."
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to Li five years earlier.... He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand.... The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach.... Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher.... In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word 'hurry'. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word 'hurry' and related phrases.... Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as 'nuggets'. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs."
The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski: outbreaks of all kinds – review by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, tells the story of the mathematical modelling of infectious disease, about which we have heard so much lately. The book’s hero is Ronald Ross, the British doctor who in the late 19th century discovered that mosquitoes spread malaria and was rewarded with the 1902 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Ross wasn’t the first to describe an epidemic mathematically, but he was the first to do so armed with a thorough understanding of the biological and social processes that shape it, and this made all the difference. ... It’s partly thanks to Ross that we have the concept of herd immunity – hopeful because it means that not every mosquito has to be squashed, not every person has to be vaccinated, for a population to be protected against a disease.... A century on, ideas have changed. Now the thinking is that many of the things that Hudson and Ross might have considered independent – obesity, smoking, even loneliness – are catching, too. We talk about financial contagion and epidemics of knife crime, and methods borrowed from public health are being applied to try to nip these problems in the bud, or at least slow their spread. ... One of the most interesting and topical parts of the book is about the mathematical modelling of fake news."
Coming soon! Classic novels with added positivity – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Christie, Merriment on the Orient Express. Mann, Life in Venice. Rose, Twelve Agreeable Men. Le CarrĂ©, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spa. Roth, Portnoy's Compliment. Joyce, Finnegan''s Birthday Party."
The Guardian view on empty supermarket shelves: panic is not the problem – editorial in The Guardian. "Tim Lang in his new book, Feeding Britain, [warns that] our food system is 'stretched, open to disruption and far from resilient'. It is easy to castigate panic buyers for empty shelves. But while shopping responsibly will help others to get the food they need, only a few people are squirrelling away vast stocks. Research firm Kantar says the average spend per supermarket trip has risen by 16% to £22.13 month on month – not surprising when households realised they were likely to need lunches at home, including for children no longer in school, and could have to self-isolate for a fortnight. The underlying problem is that just-in-time supply chains can struggle to cope with even relatively small shifts, and that a handful of retailers dominate the market....The efficiencies that have kept food prices low, and the long and complex global chains that bring us such variety, come at a price."
Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies – article by Jordan Kisner. "Consider the scene at the end of No Country For Old Men when Javier Bardem’s character has a car accident. After the crunch of impact, there are a few moments of what might be mistaken for stillness. The two cars rest smoking and crumpled in the middle of a suburban intersection. Nothing moves – but the soundscape is deceptively layered. There is the sound of engines hissing and crackling, which have been mixed to seem as near to the ear as the camera was to the cars; there is a mostly unnoticeable rustle of leaves in the trees; periodically, so faintly that almost no one would register it consciously, there is the sound of a car rolling through an intersection a block or two over, off camera; a dog barks somewhere far away. The faint sound of a breeze was taken from ambient sounds on a street like the one depicted in the scene. ... None of these sounds are there because some microphone picked them up. They’re there because [Skip] Lievsay chose them and put them there, as he did for every other sound in the film. The moment lasts about 20 seconds. No Country For Old Men is 123 minutes long.... The impact a tiny aural cue can have on the brain’s understanding of narrative is astonishing. On the third day of the mix, Lievsay and Larry were breezing through a scene of Miles [Davies] dropping in on one of his wife’s dance rehearsals when [director and star Don] Cheadle ...paused them. The scene sounded a little too dreamy. Cheadle wanted a more matter-of-fact sound.... Lievsay nodded and fiddled for a moment. When he replayed the scene, something small but extraordinary happened. I had watched this scene somewhere between one and two dozen times but this time I noticed something I’d never seen before: a young woman passing behind Frances with a stack of papers in her hand. Lievsay had given her footsteps. Without the footsteps, I’d somehow never seen her; now, I saw her, and her presence – along with a few other tweaks by Lievsay – suggested bustling in the room, people at work, things happening outside the eye contact forged between Miles and Frances. I didn’t exactly hear the difference: I just saw the scene differently."
Sunday, 1 March 2020
Cuttings: February 2020
Alternative orthodoxy: a minority position – Daily Meditations post by Fr Richard Rohr. "Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition. ... Francis’ starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness and God’s identification with that suffering in Jesus. ... Since Jesus himself was humble and poor, then the pure and simple imitation of Jesus became Francis’ life agenda. ... He knew intuitively what many educators have now proven—that humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living .... The lecture method changes very few people at any deep or long-lasting level. It normally does not touch the unconscious, where all our hurts and motives lie hidden and disguised."
Magic moments: the indestructible appeal of easy listening radio – article by Simon Akram in The Guardian. "Looking back on the tectonic changes that have hit the music and media landscape in the past two decades, it seems a minor miracle that Magic, and music radio in general, still manages to pull in millions of listeners each week. Smartphones and streaming mean that anyone can instantly find just about any song ever recorded. And where, once upon a time, a favourite DJ might have been the person to introduce a listener to their new favourite song, nowadays streaming services such as Spotify can serve up endless personalised recommendations, based on your previous listening taste.
All this makes it hard not to wonder why, when you can just listen to what you want to listen to, would you want to listen to a radio station that may play songs you don’t like, punctuated by adverts for Great Western Railway and Mr Kipling, traffic updates about the M25, and, in between the songs, chitchat of dubious interest? ... What, in short, makes Magic magic? ... There is some data to suggest that in troubled times, consumers turn to music radio for comfort.... Even if you have heard a song a thousand times, there is something special about hearing it on the radio."
Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings - article by Stefan Collini in The Guardian. "As some twisted equivalent of a new year resolution, I decided I would sacrifice myself for the common good in January by spending the greater part of the month reading The Complete Blogs of Dominic Cummings. ... Cummings is knowledgeable about an impressive variety of disciplines, and from this formidable if eclectic reading he has attempted to synthesise ideas he believes would transform the way the world is run (lack of ambition is not a defect of his thinking). ... And there are any number of things he is right about, or anyway right-ish. One is the foolishness of diverting funding away from basic 'blue skies' scientific research in order to promote more applied work.... In his ambitious intellectual and educational synthesis there are some obvious, and rather predictable, lacunae. He is dismissive of most of the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, precisely because they purport to explore the distinctive power of 'the social': their practitioners are mostly 'charlatans'. Here he sounds like a souped-up version of Margaret Thatcher: there is no such thing as 'society', just the patterned interaction of evolutionarily moulded individuals. ... However, there is another omission that is less predictable, yet, in its way, more revealing. Cummings is practically silent about jurisprudence and the law. Great leaders, revolutionaries, 'men of action' and over-confident mavericks of all types always want to sweep the law aside, seeing only its negative character as a slow-moving body of outdated constraints on freedom of action – but that, of course, suggests why it is so precious. ... In Cummings’s ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. Human progress depends on giving those with the highest IQ (he’s very keen on the notion of IQ) the education that will allow them fully to develop their talents and then the freedom to apply them.... Politics is, by definition, the terrain of conflicting convictions, and although in principle Cummings lauds the idea of 'feedback' and the correction of error, in practice he seems to struggle with the idea of genuine intellectual disagreement. In a curious way, there is very little politics in Cummings’s political thinking: it’s largely about the operational process, not about the substantive aims, and there does not seem to be much feel for the irresolvable conflicts over fundamental values that are at the heart of political life."
A publisher's helpful 'suggestions' – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "We are all so excited to be publishing your new manuscript! We'd just like to suggest a few tweaks and a slight change of emphasis. Of course, by 'suggest' we mean 'insist on'. And by 'tweaks' we mean 'fundamental revisions'. And by 'a slight change of emphasis' we mean 'writing a completely different book'."
Common mistakes made by the inexperienced romantic novelist – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Too easy. 'I'll lose my allowance if I marry you!' 'That's ok: I'm immensely wealthy.' (2) Too many characters. 'Let me introduce my sisters: Jane, Beth, Jo, Emily, Anne, Lucy, Amy, Laura, Esther, Mary, Fanny, Emma, Kitty, Georgiana and Nell.' (3) Too prim. 'He unbuttoned his overcoat and used my Christian name!' 'Scandalous!' (4) Too many obstacles. 'I love you, but I'm dying and secretly married to your twin brother.' 'I must go to the North Pole and I'm a vampire.'"
How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. "Utra-processed foods (or UPF) now account for more than half of all the calories eaten in the UK and US, and other countries are fast catching up.... Evidence now suggests that diets heavy in UPFs can cause overeating and obesity. Consumers may blame themselves for overindulging in these foods, but what if it is in the nature of these products to be overeaten? In 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising its citizens to avoid UPFs outright. ... The concept of UPFs was born in the early years of this millennium when a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro [created] the Nova system (meaning a new star) [of classifying foods:] 'unprocessed and minimally processed foods'[,]... 'processed culinary ingredients' [such as] butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour[,]... 'processed foods' [such as] canned tomatoes and pulses, pickles, traditionally made bread (such as sourdough), smoked fish and cured meats.... Group 4 foods tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, but instead of being used sparingly to make fresh food more delicious, these ingredients are now transformed through colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to become more palatable. They contain ingredients unfamiliar to domestic kitchens... At the end of 2018, [nutritionist Kevin] Hall and his colleagues became the first scientists to test – in randomised controlled conditions – whether diets high in ultra-processed foods could actually cause overeating and weight gain.... For two weeks, Hall’s participants ate mostly ultra-processed meals such as turkey sandwiches with crisps, and for another two weeks they ate mostly unprocessed food such as spinach omelette with sweet potato hash. ... It turned out that, during the weeks of the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an extra 500 calories a day, equivalent to a whole quarter pounder with cheese. Blood tests showed that the hormones in the body responsible for hunger remained elevated on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet. ... Now that we have evidence of a link between diets high in UPFs and obesity, it seems clear that a healthy diet should be based on fresh, home-cooked food. "
My Very Own Crystal Ball: Four Must-Have Writing Skills for Customer Service Agents of the Future – blog post by Leslie O'Flavhavan on e-write. "Over the last decade, as companies added one written channel after another, I’ve observed (and helped) frontline customer service agents acquire the writing skills they need to respond to customers. First came email, then came chat, then social media, then SMS. Then there were customer forums. Then we added team messaging channels like Slack. With this growth in mind, I’d like to offer my crystal ball prognostications about the four writing skills agents will need in coming years. (Truth be told, it’d be great if most agents had these writing skills right now!) (1) The ability – and willingness – to contribute to stored knowledge sources. ... (2) The maturity to use tools that check spelling, punctuation, and grammar.... (3) The mental focus to create a through-line in omnichannel conversations with customers.... (4) The ability to express sincere empathy.... In the future, frontline customer service agents must have the emotional intelligence to understand why 'We regret any inconvenience this may have caused' is highly unsatisfying wording and why 'I understand why this delivery delay is so frustrating for you, and I’m ready to make things right' is so much better.... My crystal ball tells me the future of customer service writing is 'the same but more.' Customers’ need for quick, correct, helpful service—delivered with heart—will be the same, but the changes in the technologies we use for customer service will cause customers to expect more."
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty: if inequality is illegitimate, why not reduce it? – review by William Davies in The Guardian. "His premise in Capital and Ideology is a moral one: inequality is illegitimate, and therefore requires ideologies in order to be justified and moderated. 'All history shows that the search for a distribution of wealth acceptable to the majority of people is a recurrent theme in all periods and all cultures,' he reports boldly. As societies distribute income, wealth and education more widely, so they become more prosperous. The overturning of regressive ideologies is therefore the main condition of economic progress.... The result of .... postwar trends is that western democracies are now dominated by two rival elites, reflected in many two-party electoral systems: a financial elite (or 'merchant right') that favours open markets, and an educational elite (or 'Brahmin left') that stands for cultural diversity, but has lost faith in progressive taxation as a basis for social justice. With these as the principal democratic options, nativist parties prosper, opposing educational and economic inequality, but only on the basis of tighter national borders. There is a vacancy for parties willing to defend internationalism and redistribution simultaneously. Piketty concludes with a tentative policy programme aimed at meeting the nativist challenge along such lines. This includes some bold ideas (such as an equal education budget for every citizen, to be invested as they choose), but mostly rests on ideas of participatory governance, progressive taxation, democratisation of the EU and income guarantees that have been circulating on the radical liberal left for decades. Suffice to say that naming such policies is considerably easier than executing them. He might be right that, given the climate crisis among other factors, current levels of inequality cannot long be maintained and new policies will be introduced: he prefers to take an optimistic position, based on the assumption that 'inequality regimes' never last for ever."
When the bus ride to your destination is just a click away – article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "When my dad moved into residential care near my home in Liverpool last autumn, my first consideration – as a non-driver and not-very-good cyclist – was how often I’d be able to visit him. The best home we found for him was a 45-minute walk or a £5 cab ride away, with no direct bus since the hourly council-subsidised service was cut in 2017. There was a solution at hand: ArrivaClick, a form of 'demand-responsive' public transport that I describe to perplexed friends as a cross between an Uber and a bus, and has been running across south Liverpool since mid-2018. You download an app, enter your card details, location and destination, and a few seconds later you’re informed whether there’s a minibus within a five- to 15-minute timescale that can pick you up a few yards from where you’re standing. The driver follows a route, shown on a GPS-connected tablet, which can deviate slightly to make extra pick-ups of people who are going the same way. Depending on the time of day, I usually find myself travelling with three or four others who have summoned the app at the same time, paying an average of £2 or less per journey. It has enabled me to see my dad every other day and to take him on day trips and to GP appointments at a surgery where the nearest bus stop is a good 10-minute walk away. ArrivaClick currently runs 25 minibuses around south Liverpool, with plans to add more as the service gains in popularity: downloads of the app are running at 1,000 a week."
Antisocial by Andrew Marantz: America's online extremists – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "Antisocial scrutinises the online firestarters who see Trump as their avatar. Even if you don’t know their names, members of the 'alt-right' (far right) and the less overtly racist 'alt-light' have influenced media narratives, popularised abusive buzzwords, confected news stories and helped create the cultural context for the Trump presidency.... Marantz is knee-deep in the stuff. Obviously these people are awful but he takes pains to explain exactly what kind of awful, and why – like the Linnaeus of internet villainy.... Running like a mantra through the book is an aphorism inspired by the philosopher Richard Rorty: 'To change how we talk is to change who we are.'... Who changed the way we talk? Antisocial charts the death of the Silicon Valley dream of better living through communication. Committed to free speech (and to avoiding the cost of policing content), tech companies have been slow to accept responsibility for what appears on their platforms.... Though curious and humane... , [Marantz] is firmly sceptical and increasingly demoralised by his subjects’ company. While repurposing material from his New Yorker profiles, he uses digressions and footnotes to craft a metanarrative about the role of journalism in general and his own reporting in particular. Is he giving these narcissists and nihilists too much attention or not enough? He errs on the side of 'know your enemy' but understands that he cannot win. Trolls set 'an ingenious trap', he writes. 'By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet, and perhaps the world.'”
Magic moments: the indestructible appeal of easy listening radio – article by Simon Akram in The Guardian. "Looking back on the tectonic changes that have hit the music and media landscape in the past two decades, it seems a minor miracle that Magic, and music radio in general, still manages to pull in millions of listeners each week. Smartphones and streaming mean that anyone can instantly find just about any song ever recorded. And where, once upon a time, a favourite DJ might have been the person to introduce a listener to their new favourite song, nowadays streaming services such as Spotify can serve up endless personalised recommendations, based on your previous listening taste.
All this makes it hard not to wonder why, when you can just listen to what you want to listen to, would you want to listen to a radio station that may play songs you don’t like, punctuated by adverts for Great Western Railway and Mr Kipling, traffic updates about the M25, and, in between the songs, chitchat of dubious interest? ... What, in short, makes Magic magic? ... There is some data to suggest that in troubled times, consumers turn to music radio for comfort.... Even if you have heard a song a thousand times, there is something special about hearing it on the radio."
Inside the mind of Dominic Cummings - article by Stefan Collini in The Guardian. "As some twisted equivalent of a new year resolution, I decided I would sacrifice myself for the common good in January by spending the greater part of the month reading The Complete Blogs of Dominic Cummings. ... Cummings is knowledgeable about an impressive variety of disciplines, and from this formidable if eclectic reading he has attempted to synthesise ideas he believes would transform the way the world is run (lack of ambition is not a defect of his thinking). ... And there are any number of things he is right about, or anyway right-ish. One is the foolishness of diverting funding away from basic 'blue skies' scientific research in order to promote more applied work.... In his ambitious intellectual and educational synthesis there are some obvious, and rather predictable, lacunae. He is dismissive of most of the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, precisely because they purport to explore the distinctive power of 'the social': their practitioners are mostly 'charlatans'. Here he sounds like a souped-up version of Margaret Thatcher: there is no such thing as 'society', just the patterned interaction of evolutionarily moulded individuals. ... However, there is another omission that is less predictable, yet, in its way, more revealing. Cummings is practically silent about jurisprudence and the law. Great leaders, revolutionaries, 'men of action' and over-confident mavericks of all types always want to sweep the law aside, seeing only its negative character as a slow-moving body of outdated constraints on freedom of action – but that, of course, suggests why it is so precious. ... In Cummings’s ontology, the world appears to be made up of an extremely small number of outstandingly clever individuals and a mass of mediocrities. Human progress depends on giving those with the highest IQ (he’s very keen on the notion of IQ) the education that will allow them fully to develop their talents and then the freedom to apply them.... Politics is, by definition, the terrain of conflicting convictions, and although in principle Cummings lauds the idea of 'feedback' and the correction of error, in practice he seems to struggle with the idea of genuine intellectual disagreement. In a curious way, there is very little politics in Cummings’s political thinking: it’s largely about the operational process, not about the substantive aims, and there does not seem to be much feel for the irresolvable conflicts over fundamental values that are at the heart of political life."
A publisher's helpful 'suggestions' – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "We are all so excited to be publishing your new manuscript! We'd just like to suggest a few tweaks and a slight change of emphasis. Of course, by 'suggest' we mean 'insist on'. And by 'tweaks' we mean 'fundamental revisions'. And by 'a slight change of emphasis' we mean 'writing a completely different book'."
Common mistakes made by the inexperienced romantic novelist – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Too easy. 'I'll lose my allowance if I marry you!' 'That's ok: I'm immensely wealthy.' (2) Too many characters. 'Let me introduce my sisters: Jane, Beth, Jo, Emily, Anne, Lucy, Amy, Laura, Esther, Mary, Fanny, Emma, Kitty, Georgiana and Nell.' (3) Too prim. 'He unbuttoned his overcoat and used my Christian name!' 'Scandalous!' (4) Too many obstacles. 'I love you, but I'm dying and secretly married to your twin brother.' 'I must go to the North Pole and I'm a vampire.'"
How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. "Utra-processed foods (or UPF) now account for more than half of all the calories eaten in the UK and US, and other countries are fast catching up.... Evidence now suggests that diets heavy in UPFs can cause overeating and obesity. Consumers may blame themselves for overindulging in these foods, but what if it is in the nature of these products to be overeaten? In 2014, the Brazilian government took the radical step of advising its citizens to avoid UPFs outright. ... The concept of UPFs was born in the early years of this millennium when a Brazilian scientist called Carlos Monteiro [created] the Nova system (meaning a new star) [of classifying foods:] 'unprocessed and minimally processed foods'[,]... 'processed culinary ingredients' [such as] butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour[,]... 'processed foods' [such as] canned tomatoes and pulses, pickles, traditionally made bread (such as sourdough), smoked fish and cured meats.... Group 4 foods tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, but instead of being used sparingly to make fresh food more delicious, these ingredients are now transformed through colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to become more palatable. They contain ingredients unfamiliar to domestic kitchens... At the end of 2018, [nutritionist Kevin] Hall and his colleagues became the first scientists to test – in randomised controlled conditions – whether diets high in ultra-processed foods could actually cause overeating and weight gain.... For two weeks, Hall’s participants ate mostly ultra-processed meals such as turkey sandwiches with crisps, and for another two weeks they ate mostly unprocessed food such as spinach omelette with sweet potato hash. ... It turned out that, during the weeks of the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an extra 500 calories a day, equivalent to a whole quarter pounder with cheese. Blood tests showed that the hormones in the body responsible for hunger remained elevated on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet. ... Now that we have evidence of a link between diets high in UPFs and obesity, it seems clear that a healthy diet should be based on fresh, home-cooked food. "
My Very Own Crystal Ball: Four Must-Have Writing Skills for Customer Service Agents of the Future – blog post by Leslie O'Flavhavan on e-write. "Over the last decade, as companies added one written channel after another, I’ve observed (and helped) frontline customer service agents acquire the writing skills they need to respond to customers. First came email, then came chat, then social media, then SMS. Then there were customer forums. Then we added team messaging channels like Slack. With this growth in mind, I’d like to offer my crystal ball prognostications about the four writing skills agents will need in coming years. (Truth be told, it’d be great if most agents had these writing skills right now!) (1) The ability – and willingness – to contribute to stored knowledge sources. ... (2) The maturity to use tools that check spelling, punctuation, and grammar.... (3) The mental focus to create a through-line in omnichannel conversations with customers.... (4) The ability to express sincere empathy.... In the future, frontline customer service agents must have the emotional intelligence to understand why 'We regret any inconvenience this may have caused' is highly unsatisfying wording and why 'I understand why this delivery delay is so frustrating for you, and I’m ready to make things right' is so much better.... My crystal ball tells me the future of customer service writing is 'the same but more.' Customers’ need for quick, correct, helpful service—delivered with heart—will be the same, but the changes in the technologies we use for customer service will cause customers to expect more."
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty: if inequality is illegitimate, why not reduce it? – review by William Davies in The Guardian. "His premise in Capital and Ideology is a moral one: inequality is illegitimate, and therefore requires ideologies in order to be justified and moderated. 'All history shows that the search for a distribution of wealth acceptable to the majority of people is a recurrent theme in all periods and all cultures,' he reports boldly. As societies distribute income, wealth and education more widely, so they become more prosperous. The overturning of regressive ideologies is therefore the main condition of economic progress.... The result of .... postwar trends is that western democracies are now dominated by two rival elites, reflected in many two-party electoral systems: a financial elite (or 'merchant right') that favours open markets, and an educational elite (or 'Brahmin left') that stands for cultural diversity, but has lost faith in progressive taxation as a basis for social justice. With these as the principal democratic options, nativist parties prosper, opposing educational and economic inequality, but only on the basis of tighter national borders. There is a vacancy for parties willing to defend internationalism and redistribution simultaneously. Piketty concludes with a tentative policy programme aimed at meeting the nativist challenge along such lines. This includes some bold ideas (such as an equal education budget for every citizen, to be invested as they choose), but mostly rests on ideas of participatory governance, progressive taxation, democratisation of the EU and income guarantees that have been circulating on the radical liberal left for decades. Suffice to say that naming such policies is considerably easier than executing them. He might be right that, given the climate crisis among other factors, current levels of inequality cannot long be maintained and new policies will be introduced: he prefers to take an optimistic position, based on the assumption that 'inequality regimes' never last for ever."
When the bus ride to your destination is just a click away – article by Lynsey Hanley in The Guardian. "When my dad moved into residential care near my home in Liverpool last autumn, my first consideration – as a non-driver and not-very-good cyclist – was how often I’d be able to visit him. The best home we found for him was a 45-minute walk or a £5 cab ride away, with no direct bus since the hourly council-subsidised service was cut in 2017. There was a solution at hand: ArrivaClick, a form of 'demand-responsive' public transport that I describe to perplexed friends as a cross between an Uber and a bus, and has been running across south Liverpool since mid-2018. You download an app, enter your card details, location and destination, and a few seconds later you’re informed whether there’s a minibus within a five- to 15-minute timescale that can pick you up a few yards from where you’re standing. The driver follows a route, shown on a GPS-connected tablet, which can deviate slightly to make extra pick-ups of people who are going the same way. Depending on the time of day, I usually find myself travelling with three or four others who have summoned the app at the same time, paying an average of £2 or less per journey. It has enabled me to see my dad every other day and to take him on day trips and to GP appointments at a surgery where the nearest bus stop is a good 10-minute walk away. ArrivaClick currently runs 25 minibuses around south Liverpool, with plans to add more as the service gains in popularity: downloads of the app are running at 1,000 a week."
Antisocial by Andrew Marantz: America's online extremists – review by Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. "Antisocial scrutinises the online firestarters who see Trump as their avatar. Even if you don’t know their names, members of the 'alt-right' (far right) and the less overtly racist 'alt-light' have influenced media narratives, popularised abusive buzzwords, confected news stories and helped create the cultural context for the Trump presidency.... Marantz is knee-deep in the stuff. Obviously these people are awful but he takes pains to explain exactly what kind of awful, and why – like the Linnaeus of internet villainy.... Running like a mantra through the book is an aphorism inspired by the philosopher Richard Rorty: 'To change how we talk is to change who we are.'... Who changed the way we talk? Antisocial charts the death of the Silicon Valley dream of better living through communication. Committed to free speech (and to avoiding the cost of policing content), tech companies have been slow to accept responsibility for what appears on their platforms.... Though curious and humane... , [Marantz] is firmly sceptical and increasingly demoralised by his subjects’ company. While repurposing material from his New Yorker profiles, he uses digressions and footnotes to craft a metanarrative about the role of journalism in general and his own reporting in particular. Is he giving these narcissists and nihilists too much attention or not enough? He errs on the side of 'know your enemy' but understands that he cannot win. Trolls set 'an ingenious trap', he writes. 'By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet, and perhaps the world.'”
Monday, 3 February 2020
Cuttings: January 2020
How we gave Oxford University applicants a level playing field – article by Marchella Ward in The Guardian. "A huge range of factors are known to affect performance in the application process, including school type, access to experiences beyond the curriculum, opportunities to develop particular kinds of cultural capital and familiarity with higher education. Expecting all applicants to perform in similar ways was disadvantaging those who had not had the privilege of being taught how to make their abilities legible against the kinds of metrics used in university admissions processes. Once we had begun to think critically about our expectations of applicants – and to admit to ourselves that it was not fair to expect potential to look the same in applicants who had had vastly different opportunities – something changed. We looked at the kinds of questions we were asking and the kinds of answers we were expecting, we interrogated our own and each others’ assumptions about different forms potential might take in an applicant, and asked our admitting tutors to come together for a conversation about how to use contextual data to recognise diverse potential. As we sought to uncouple privilege from the assessment of potential, the most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged. This kind of statistic sometimes draws accusations of 'social engineering' but bear with me: all of our offer-holders, regardless of background, are expected to achieve similar A-level grades. It is obvious why those who have achieved these against a background of disadvantage should have a higher rate of success."
When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men.... The fight-or-flight response is just one provoked by a complex cocktail of hormones our brain releases in extreme danger. There’s cortisol, for energy, but also natural opiates, which act to dull physical and emotional pain, corticosteroids, which reduce energy, and oxytocin, which increases positive feelings. When a woman experiences sexual assault, she may fight or flee, but as a self-protection mechanism her body may also render her physically immobile – scientists refer to this as 'tonic immobility' or 'rape-induced paralysis' – and appear emotionless. It is the evolutionary equivalent to playing dead. Research suggests that up to 50% of survivors experience this during sexual assault. Additionally, the natural opiates inhibit survivors from encoding what happened into their memory, which makes it easy for legal defence teams to question their reliability as a witness.... Last August, Robin Tolson, a male judge in his 60s, issued a family court judgment in a child custody case that suggested a woman had not been raped by her partner because she hadn’t physically fought back. She appealed, and her case was heard by high court judge Alison Russell. ... Russell’s judgment ... is excoriating about her colleague, describing his approach to consent as 'manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence'. She says: 'The logical conclusion of this judge’s approach is it is both lawful and acceptable for a man to have sex with his partner regardless of their… willingness to participate.' Yes, you read that right: Tolson falls into the quarter of the population who think it’s OK for a man to rape his partner."
No history, no languages… the end of humanities only deepens divides – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Sunderland University wants to become more 'career-focused'. So it is to shut down all its language, politics and history courses and promote instead degrees that 'align with particular employment sectors'. It’s an illustration of what happens when universities turn into businesses, and their ethos is defined by the market. It’s also symbolic of the divisions that now rend Britain’s social fabric.... [It] seems to suggest that the study of the humanities should be reserved for the children of the rich, who can afford to move, while local working-class students should be confined to 'vocational' subjects. Existing divisions will only deepen."
Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece? Three million coins bearing the slogan 'Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations' are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union. However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation.'The "Brexit" 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,' wrote the novelist on Twitter."
A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders: the curious history of alphabetical order – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters.... The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.... It may be a good moment to tell the hidden history of alphabetical order, when computer algorithms seem ready to do away with it. Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed 'invisible through its eight centuries of active duty', in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance."
Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left – article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Walter Ong, a linguist and Jesuit priest who died at 91 in 2003[,] ... spent his life trying to understand the revolutionary technologies, such as the television and radio, unleashed during his lifetime. ... He did so by ... studying the difference between human cultures rooted in orality and those rooted in literacy. His topic matters for Twitter more than you may think.... For oral cultures, words are primarily vibrations in the air, Ong argued. Words must therefore be memorable, few in number, and tied to the concrete reality of day-to-day life. But after the advent of writing, words become more than invisible sounds. They become permanent symbols that exist outside their utterance and can be read long after the speaker has died. Words can also divorce from the physical world and start to reference ideas, concepts, and abstract states. And instead of words needing to aid memory, as they do in oral cultures (by using a repeated epithet, such as Homer’s 'wine-dark sea'), written words can suddenly act as a form of memory themselves. ... As I once wrote: 'Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.'... By 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. 'The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,' she said, 'where the collective "we" treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.' ... Twitter has been a mess of speech-like tweets interpreted as print and print-like tweets interpreted as speech for as long as most users can remember. [But recently] I’ve wondered if that instability presents a political problem—particularly for the left in the United States. The word that sticks out to me now from Stewart’s post is identity."
When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men.... The fight-or-flight response is just one provoked by a complex cocktail of hormones our brain releases in extreme danger. There’s cortisol, for energy, but also natural opiates, which act to dull physical and emotional pain, corticosteroids, which reduce energy, and oxytocin, which increases positive feelings. When a woman experiences sexual assault, she may fight or flee, but as a self-protection mechanism her body may also render her physically immobile – scientists refer to this as 'tonic immobility' or 'rape-induced paralysis' – and appear emotionless. It is the evolutionary equivalent to playing dead. Research suggests that up to 50% of survivors experience this during sexual assault. Additionally, the natural opiates inhibit survivors from encoding what happened into their memory, which makes it easy for legal defence teams to question their reliability as a witness.... Last August, Robin Tolson, a male judge in his 60s, issued a family court judgment in a child custody case that suggested a woman had not been raped by her partner because she hadn’t physically fought back. She appealed, and her case was heard by high court judge Alison Russell. ... Russell’s judgment ... is excoriating about her colleague, describing his approach to consent as 'manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence'. She says: 'The logical conclusion of this judge’s approach is it is both lawful and acceptable for a man to have sex with his partner regardless of their… willingness to participate.' Yes, you read that right: Tolson falls into the quarter of the population who think it’s OK for a man to rape his partner."
No history, no languages… the end of humanities only deepens divides – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Sunderland University wants to become more 'career-focused'. So it is to shut down all its language, politics and history courses and promote instead degrees that 'align with particular employment sectors'. It’s an illustration of what happens when universities turn into businesses, and their ethos is defined by the market. It’s also symbolic of the divisions that now rend Britain’s social fabric.... [It] seems to suggest that the study of the humanities should be reserved for the children of the rich, who can afford to move, while local working-class students should be confined to 'vocational' subjects. Existing divisions will only deepen."
Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece? Three million coins bearing the slogan 'Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations' are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union. However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation.'The "Brexit" 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,' wrote the novelist on Twitter."
A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders: the curious history of alphabetical order – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters.... The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.... It may be a good moment to tell the hidden history of alphabetical order, when computer algorithms seem ready to do away with it. Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed 'invisible through its eight centuries of active duty', in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance."
Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left – article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Walter Ong, a linguist and Jesuit priest who died at 91 in 2003[,] ... spent his life trying to understand the revolutionary technologies, such as the television and radio, unleashed during his lifetime. ... He did so by ... studying the difference between human cultures rooted in orality and those rooted in literacy. His topic matters for Twitter more than you may think.... For oral cultures, words are primarily vibrations in the air, Ong argued. Words must therefore be memorable, few in number, and tied to the concrete reality of day-to-day life. But after the advent of writing, words become more than invisible sounds. They become permanent symbols that exist outside their utterance and can be read long after the speaker has died. Words can also divorce from the physical world and start to reference ideas, concepts, and abstract states. And instead of words needing to aid memory, as they do in oral cultures (by using a repeated epithet, such as Homer’s 'wine-dark sea'), written words can suddenly act as a form of memory themselves. ... As I once wrote: 'Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.'... By 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. 'The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,' she said, 'where the collective "we" treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.' ... Twitter has been a mess of speech-like tweets interpreted as print and print-like tweets interpreted as speech for as long as most users can remember. [But recently] I’ve wondered if that instability presents a political problem—particularly for the left in the United States. The word that sticks out to me now from Stewart’s post is identity."
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
Seen and heard: October to December 2019
Beneath a Steel Sky – classic 1994 adventure by Charles Cecil, before he made the ground-breaking Broken Sword. Low resolution graphics and a basic point-and-click interface, but a great story with great characters and great voice acting (nice to hear British characters for a change) earns this game its place in adventure history.
Richard Alston Dance Company: Final Edition tour – seen at Northampton Derngate. As always, lovely light and beautiful dance, to evocative music (Monteverdi, Chopin, Elgar, Brahms). Sad to think that this is the last time we’ll see this fine company, which is disbanding because of the difficulties of operating in the current financial climate.
World on Fire – tremendous WW2 TV drama series. I loved the multiple international characters and inter-connecting storylines, but I was rather hoping for closure rather than a second series.
We must deliver: Brexit, Johnson and the robots of Milton Keynes – video by John Harris for The Guardian. During the conference season, with Parliament still stuck in Brexit debate, the Guardian ran an ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series, to explore life outside the Westminster bubble. This episode was from Milton Keynes, “a town evenly split between leave and remain, and hurtling into the future. Robots are delivering people’s shopping, but there’s also homelessness and glaring inequality, and clear signs that most people want no part of all the Brexit madness.” Our delivery robots really are cute, and I’m happy to see them getting a national profile. (See also the text version ‘Britain is less polarised than the media would have us believe’.)
The rise and fall of social media platforms 2003-2019 – Impressive and informative animated graphic, noted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.
Downton Abbey (film) – how good the splendour and period detail of the locations and large-scale set pieces look on the big screen, unlike say Dad’s Army with which the charm was largely in its tatty war-economy settings and confinement to a half-hour TV show.
Enneagram Rhapsody – perceptive and very funny, but only if you know the Enneagram. The large audience who get all the jokes turns out to be a US church where it’s been part of their ministry.
Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death – another adventure game in the Broken Sword series, but not one of the best. (See the review in Adventure Gamers.) George is as amusing as ever, especially when he’s trying to get into the Vatican by pretending to be a stupid American tourist, but Nico’s absence for the first half if the game is keenly felt, and her replacement is no substitute (even if there turns out to be a plot reason why she reveals nothing about herself). And many of the puzzles are just too hard.
Mythos – retelling of the ancient Greek myths by Stephen Fry. I was disappointed; some parts were boring, where Fry was trying to be scholarly and felt the need to tell us the names and relationships of obscure deities about whom nothing further is known; other parts were just silly, where he was trying to be a comedian and make the gods talk in 21st century colloquialisms. It is possible to tell myths in a way which is accessible and relatable and yet delivers their ancient power; Neil Gaiman did it with the Norse myths, for example.
His Dark Materials – excellent BBC dramatisation of the Philip Pullman novel series, with a very powerful Lyra in Dafne Keen, who was so good in Logan. Her reactions are particularly strong, the hallmark of a good actor, which locks the narrative around her and makes us see the fantastical places and events through her eyes. And a splendidly creepy turn from Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter.
Official Secrets – excellent film telling the story of GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, who in 2003 leaked US/UK efforts to blackmail UN representatives into supporting a war with Iraq. Kiera Knightly as Gun is particularly effective in showing the emotional toll of the investigation and subsequent prosecution. There’s also a neat reminder for all copy editors and proofreaders about the times when you shouldn’t change US to UK spelling. The archive footage of mass street protests against the war brought back memories and reminded us that governmental lies and efforts to circumvent or suppress the institutions of democracy did not originate with the Johnson administration.
Wyrd Sisters – decent local amateur production of the stage play derived from Terry Pratchett’s Shakespeare / Macbeth Discworld spoof. An interesting programme note that Pratchett anticipated the internet’s potential for spreading fake news in his 1995 interview of Bill Gates.
Akhnaten live from New York Met – my favourite Philip Glass opera. Great to see it staged and on a big screen, with top singers belting it out in close up.
Anna’s Quest – proper fairy tale adventure game, with a decidedly Germanic and Grimm (or grim) feel (the producer is German). Nicely scripted and voice-acted characters, including an innocent (but not dull) heroine, and well-integrated puzzles.
The Scarecrow’s Wedding – the Christmas show at The Stables. The performers, Scamp Theatre, really know their craft, in their interactions with the audience coming across like mature professionals rather than students just out of drama school. Skilled musicians too, singing some really great songs, including a blues number (sung by Betty O'Barley while keeping the crows at bay) worth the price of admission on its own.
Star Trek: Discovery – recent addition to the franchise, now available on Freeview. Interesting, though rather violent, and suffering from the absence of any likeable or even relatable characters; the principal character, Michael, is the strongest but for plot reasons she is necessarily remote. Still better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the classic shows. We’ll see how it develops.
Paddington 2 – fun sequel, with much more of the authentic trope of Paddington trying to help but getting into difficulties. Best sight gag: when he accidentally leaves a red sock in the prison washing machine, so that all the inmate’s uniforms are dyed pink. And a stirring speech by Mr Brown when he denounces Mr Curry’s bigoted anti-immigrant stance.
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – prequel to His Dark Materials. Compelling writing, with a very vivid sense of place – in this case, mainly the Thames above Oxford – and a persistent atmosphere of menace, which makes the actual violence when it does occur all the more shocking.
Richard Alston Dance Company: Final Edition tour – seen at Northampton Derngate. As always, lovely light and beautiful dance, to evocative music (Monteverdi, Chopin, Elgar, Brahms). Sad to think that this is the last time we’ll see this fine company, which is disbanding because of the difficulties of operating in the current financial climate.
World on Fire – tremendous WW2 TV drama series. I loved the multiple international characters and inter-connecting storylines, but I was rather hoping for closure rather than a second series.
We must deliver: Brexit, Johnson and the robots of Milton Keynes – video by John Harris for The Guardian. During the conference season, with Parliament still stuck in Brexit debate, the Guardian ran an ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series, to explore life outside the Westminster bubble. This episode was from Milton Keynes, “a town evenly split between leave and remain, and hurtling into the future. Robots are delivering people’s shopping, but there’s also homelessness and glaring inequality, and clear signs that most people want no part of all the Brexit madness.” Our delivery robots really are cute, and I’m happy to see them getting a national profile. (See also the text version ‘Britain is less polarised than the media would have us believe’.)
The rise and fall of social media platforms 2003-2019 – Impressive and informative animated graphic, noted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.
Downton Abbey (film) – how good the splendour and period detail of the locations and large-scale set pieces look on the big screen, unlike say Dad’s Army with which the charm was largely in its tatty war-economy settings and confinement to a half-hour TV show.
Enneagram Rhapsody – perceptive and very funny, but only if you know the Enneagram. The large audience who get all the jokes turns out to be a US church where it’s been part of their ministry.
Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death – another adventure game in the Broken Sword series, but not one of the best. (See the review in Adventure Gamers.) George is as amusing as ever, especially when he’s trying to get into the Vatican by pretending to be a stupid American tourist, but Nico’s absence for the first half if the game is keenly felt, and her replacement is no substitute (even if there turns out to be a plot reason why she reveals nothing about herself). And many of the puzzles are just too hard.
Mythos – retelling of the ancient Greek myths by Stephen Fry. I was disappointed; some parts were boring, where Fry was trying to be scholarly and felt the need to tell us the names and relationships of obscure deities about whom nothing further is known; other parts were just silly, where he was trying to be a comedian and make the gods talk in 21st century colloquialisms. It is possible to tell myths in a way which is accessible and relatable and yet delivers their ancient power; Neil Gaiman did it with the Norse myths, for example.
His Dark Materials – excellent BBC dramatisation of the Philip Pullman novel series, with a very powerful Lyra in Dafne Keen, who was so good in Logan. Her reactions are particularly strong, the hallmark of a good actor, which locks the narrative around her and makes us see the fantastical places and events through her eyes. And a splendidly creepy turn from Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter.
Official Secrets – excellent film telling the story of GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, who in 2003 leaked US/UK efforts to blackmail UN representatives into supporting a war with Iraq. Kiera Knightly as Gun is particularly effective in showing the emotional toll of the investigation and subsequent prosecution. There’s also a neat reminder for all copy editors and proofreaders about the times when you shouldn’t change US to UK spelling. The archive footage of mass street protests against the war brought back memories and reminded us that governmental lies and efforts to circumvent or suppress the institutions of democracy did not originate with the Johnson administration.
Wyrd Sisters – decent local amateur production of the stage play derived from Terry Pratchett’s Shakespeare / Macbeth Discworld spoof. An interesting programme note that Pratchett anticipated the internet’s potential for spreading fake news in his 1995 interview of Bill Gates.
Akhnaten live from New York Met – my favourite Philip Glass opera. Great to see it staged and on a big screen, with top singers belting it out in close up.
Anna’s Quest – proper fairy tale adventure game, with a decidedly Germanic and Grimm (or grim) feel (the producer is German). Nicely scripted and voice-acted characters, including an innocent (but not dull) heroine, and well-integrated puzzles.
The Scarecrow’s Wedding – the Christmas show at The Stables. The performers, Scamp Theatre, really know their craft, in their interactions with the audience coming across like mature professionals rather than students just out of drama school. Skilled musicians too, singing some really great songs, including a blues number (sung by Betty O'Barley while keeping the crows at bay) worth the price of admission on its own.
Star Trek: Discovery – recent addition to the franchise, now available on Freeview. Interesting, though rather violent, and suffering from the absence of any likeable or even relatable characters; the principal character, Michael, is the strongest but for plot reasons she is necessarily remote. Still better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the classic shows. We’ll see how it develops.
Paddington 2 – fun sequel, with much more of the authentic trope of Paddington trying to help but getting into difficulties. Best sight gag: when he accidentally leaves a red sock in the prison washing machine, so that all the inmate’s uniforms are dyed pink. And a stirring speech by Mr Brown when he denounces Mr Curry’s bigoted anti-immigrant stance.
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – prequel to His Dark Materials. Compelling writing, with a very vivid sense of place – in this case, mainly the Thames above Oxford – and a persistent atmosphere of menace, which makes the actual violence when it does occur all the more shocking.
Tuesday, 31 December 2019
Cuttings: December 2019
Slow-Reading is the New Deep Learning – article by David Handel on medium.com, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Speed-readers aspire to double, triple, or even massively increase their base reading rate. Research paper after research paper has concluded that as reading speed goes up as a result of effortful speed-reading, comprehension goes down. ... But there is a far more profound issue at hand that most critics overlook when they bash speed-reading. Reading with the intention of learning involves far more than achieving simple comprehension. ... By reading slowly, you allow for the requisite time to employ your central executive. You need to focus your attention, utilize the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. New ideas, concepts and facts you’re encountering must be moved into the episodic buffer where you can play with and manipulate them. And the best kind of manipulation you can employ with your working memory is metacognition.... As you read, you should be having an internal dialog using your inner voice (phonological loop) to perform quality assurance of the words that you are seeing and reading (visuospatial sketchpad). As you read, you should be consciously asking yourself questions ... Then you should use the results of this self-interrogation to regulate your next steps to master the material."
Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People – article by Sendhil Mullainthan in The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their rĂ©sumĂ©s were about as similar as two rĂ©sumĂ©s can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care. But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program. As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts.... One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias. Our 2004 rĂ©sumĂ© study resembled a complex covert operation more than traditional academic research. ... This went on for months... By contrast, uncovering algorithmic discrimination was far more straightforward.... Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior. Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found. With our rĂ©sumĂ© study, fixing the problem has proved to be extremely difficult.... By contrast, we’ve already built a prototype that would fix the algorithmic bias we found — as did the original manufacturer, who, we concluded, had no intention of producing biased results in the first place. ... Changing algorithms is easier than changing people: software on computers can be updated; the 'wetware' in our brains has so far proven much less pliable."
Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound – article by Charles Bramesco in The Guardian. Midge Costin's career’s emphasis on education gave her the idea to condense a semester’s worth of introductory material into one compact package, breaking down the essentials of her craft for an audience of laypeople. She introduces and defines key terms – foley work, automated dialogue replacement, mono v stereo v surround sound – in order to render visible labor that generally goes unseen and unnoticed when done well.... Just about everyone takes good audio work for granted, from the casual viewer to the budget-balancers at the studios. 'They say sound is 50% of the story, but on the films I was doing, the post-production sound budget would be 1% to 1.5% of the total,' Costin recalls. 'The average moviegoer thinks that when you turn on the camera, it starts also recording sound. They don’t even get that they’re recorded separately and synced. How much work going into sound, when done correctly, isn’t even perceptible.'"
'It's cool now': why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped. This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call 'a moment'.... Why now? We live in an era of complex fantasy video games such as The Witcher and Elder Scrolls that offer rich, incredibly detailed worlds to explore. In comparison, D&D still uses paper, pencils and dice. Now in its fifth iteration, it offers modernised and simplified rules, but the basic idea remains the same: a group of people sit round a table and pretend to be warriors, mages and elves embarking on imagined quests and deciding the outcome of battles and other climactic events through rolls of the dice.... Even the most sophisticated open-world fantasy video game imposes limits on players’ decisions and abilities. Your interactions are mostly restricted to combat or engaging in highly directed multiple-choice conversations, and there is a fixed narrative you have to follow. In D&D, however, everything is seamless and improvised – the Dungeon Master might have a plan, but if the players decide they don’t want to raid the dungeon, and instead want to hang out in an interesting local tavern, a good Master can be flexible enough to indulge that. ... The human contact element of D&D is also vital. In an era when much of our socialising is mediated through phone screens and social media, role-playing is one thing that gets people in the same room. 'With digital games, you can play co-op but it doesn’t quite have the connection of real people at a table,' says Richard Whitters, senior art director for D&D. 'This is a thing that humans have always done: gathering around the campfire, telling stories, interacting.' "
'Do you wind it up?': today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading – article by Sam Wallaston in The Guardian. "Three 15-year-old school children are on the phone, in class. No, it’s OK, they’re supposed to be; they’ve been told to, by me, with permission from their teacher. And they’re not actually on the phone, because they don’t know how to use it. It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone, finger-in-the-dial variety. They’re tapping it, prodding at the holes. Hahahaha – they haven’t got a clue. Loxford is an academy in Ilford, east London. I’ve come here with a suitcase stuffed full of the past, tech from my own childhood, mostly borrowed from nostalgic hoarder colleagues. Everything in the case is obsolete: it’s all been shrunk to fit into the smartphones today’s 15-year-olds almost all have. It’s a kind of social experiment, about different generations, lost skills, changing technology... OK, and it’s also about having a laugh; and getting my generation’s own back for those times we’ve had to go crawling to a teenager for technical assistance, such as asking how to make the video on WhatsApp work."
The Adventures of Apostrophe Man – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. (1) Apostrophe Man: "My super-sense is tingling! Somebody needs my help! (2) Apostrophe Man runs. (3) "My God!" says Apostrophe Man, having arrived at a burning building which a sign declares to be "St. Peters Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts". (4) Apostrophe Man summons his powers... (5) ... and zaps the sign. (6) "Much better," says Apostrophe Man. The sign now reads correctly "St. Peter's Library..." The Library itself has now been completely consumed by the fire.
Sister act: how Little Women has come of age on the big screen – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "Again and again lines in Gerwig’s [2019] film are drawn from Alcott’s own life.... In the book, Jo says: 'I don’t believe I shall ever marry. I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man'; in the film she says: 'I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe' – which comes from a letter Alcott wrote to a friend after visiting her just-married older sister. So many pithy statements about sexual politics are given to Amy ... and to Aunt March ... that the film threatens to become a 21st-century feminist lecture – until one remembers that they were all subjects about which Alcott herself was vocal. Not that she necessarily got her way: Alcott’s publisher was initially bored by Little Women and changed his mind only when his young daughters got hold of the manuscript and loved it (a similar scene appears in the film). He does not budge, however, in his demand that her female characters end the novel 'married – or dead, either way'. All four girls duly marry or die, and many critics have found this a profoundly disappointing outcome."
'They' beats 'the' to 2019's word of the year - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "They, a common pronoun that can be traced back to the 13th century, has been named word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary because of its growing usage for non-binary individuals.
The US dictionary, which has been in print for more than 150 years, said that look-ups for 'they' increased by 313% in 2019 compared with the previous year, as the public investigated the word’s shifting use and its increasing prominence in the news."
This Labour meltdown has been building for decades – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In North East Derbyshire last month [before the general election], I saw up close what was left: warehouses and care work. Bullying bosses, zero-hours contracts, poverty pay and social security top-ups. Smartphones to tell you whether you have a shift that morning, and Facebook to give you the news, or some dishonest fragment of it. Across the UK, mines were turned into museums, factories swapped for call centres, meaningful local government replaced by development quangos.... Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy. As the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans argue, the 'decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre ground'. Meanwhile, the big gap in the electoral market that opened up was for a party offering a welfare state with reactionary social policy. That was Nigel Farage; now it’s Boris Johnson. ... In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."
This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning.... Well, guess what. Labour’s 'radical' manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. ... Those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power. That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; ... it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not 'a 30-year project'. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing."
The real faultline in this election: landlords v tenants – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian. "[In the] Conservative election campaign, ... there was something cathartic about the moment that Lee Anderson, Tory parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, donned a black cagoule, stared into a mobile phone camera, and – with a zeal too seldom witnessed in contemporary politics – introduced himself to the wider world with a denunciation of 'nuisance tenants'. 'These people, who have to live somewhere, let’s have them in a tent in the middle of a field,' he grimaced. 'Six o’clock every morning, let’s have them up.' ... 'Let’s have them in the field, picking potatoes,' he continued, 'back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o’clock, same again the next day.'... Nearly a third of the [Conservative] party’s MPs, including the prime minister, are currently landlords (along with 11% of Labour MPs, and a quarter of Lib Dems). Little wonder that Anderson, a one-time Labour supporter ... now feels more at home on the other side of the party divide. His words were extreme. But the politics behind them reveal an unacknowledged faultline running through this election: it is a battle, broadly-speaking, between the rentiers and the renters – and the winners will define this country for a generation."
The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Long before the Tory demolition of Labour’s 'red wall', it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative. The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left.... The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation.... Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity. Immigration has become symbolic of this loss. We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.... The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. ... The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal."
To err is human: is that why we fear machines that can be made to err less? – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The AI evangelists complain [that] everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. If you are a prisoner applying for parole in some jurisdictions, for example, you had better hope that the (human) judge has just eaten when your case comes up. A fascinating empirical study ... found that 'the percentage of favourable rulings drops gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to about 65% after a break.'... In judging the debate about whether human intelligence (HI) is always superior to the artificial variety (AI), are we humans just demonstrating how capricious and irrational we can be? Er, yes, says Jason Collins, a behavioural and data scientist who now works for PwC Australia. In a wickedly satirical article in the online journal Behavioral Scientist, he turns the question we routinely ask about AI on its head: 'Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions,' he writes, 'we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm.'"
The millennium bug was real, and 20 years later we face the same threats – article by Martyn Thomas in The Guardian. "I led Deloitte Consulting’s Y2K work internationally in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t just business IT that had Y2K errors. Many PCs could not handle dates in 2000. Faults were found in the computers that controlled factories and offshore oil platforms. The UK’s Rapier anti-aircraft missile system had a Y2K fault that would have prevented it firing.... 10% of Visa credit-card machines couldn’t handle cards that expired after 1999... Internationally, correcting Y2K problems cost thousands of person-years of effort and many billions of pounds.... Then 1 January passed without a catastrophe and the myth started that the threat had been grossly exaggerated. There were many failures in January 2000, from the significant to the trivial. Many credit-card systems and cash points failed. Some customers received bills for 100 years’ interest while others were briefly rich for the same reason. Internationally, 15 nuclear reactors shut down; the oil pumping station in Yumurtalik failed, cutting off supplies to Istanbul; there were power cuts in Hawaii and government computers failed in China and Hong Kong..... Y2K should be seen as a warning of the danger that arises when millions of independent systems might fail because of a single event. But this lesson has not been learned. ..."
Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People – article by Sendhil Mullainthan in The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their rĂ©sumĂ©s were about as similar as two rĂ©sumĂ©s can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care. But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program. As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts.... One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias. Our 2004 rĂ©sumĂ© study resembled a complex covert operation more than traditional academic research. ... This went on for months... By contrast, uncovering algorithmic discrimination was far more straightforward.... Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior. Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found. With our rĂ©sumĂ© study, fixing the problem has proved to be extremely difficult.... By contrast, we’ve already built a prototype that would fix the algorithmic bias we found — as did the original manufacturer, who, we concluded, had no intention of producing biased results in the first place. ... Changing algorithms is easier than changing people: software on computers can be updated; the 'wetware' in our brains has so far proven much less pliable."
Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound – article by Charles Bramesco in The Guardian. Midge Costin's career’s emphasis on education gave her the idea to condense a semester’s worth of introductory material into one compact package, breaking down the essentials of her craft for an audience of laypeople. She introduces and defines key terms – foley work, automated dialogue replacement, mono v stereo v surround sound – in order to render visible labor that generally goes unseen and unnoticed when done well.... Just about everyone takes good audio work for granted, from the casual viewer to the budget-balancers at the studios. 'They say sound is 50% of the story, but on the films I was doing, the post-production sound budget would be 1% to 1.5% of the total,' Costin recalls. 'The average moviegoer thinks that when you turn on the camera, it starts also recording sound. They don’t even get that they’re recorded separately and synced. How much work going into sound, when done correctly, isn’t even perceptible.'"
'It's cool now': why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped. This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call 'a moment'.... Why now? We live in an era of complex fantasy video games such as The Witcher and Elder Scrolls that offer rich, incredibly detailed worlds to explore. In comparison, D&D still uses paper, pencils and dice. Now in its fifth iteration, it offers modernised and simplified rules, but the basic idea remains the same: a group of people sit round a table and pretend to be warriors, mages and elves embarking on imagined quests and deciding the outcome of battles and other climactic events through rolls of the dice.... Even the most sophisticated open-world fantasy video game imposes limits on players’ decisions and abilities. Your interactions are mostly restricted to combat or engaging in highly directed multiple-choice conversations, and there is a fixed narrative you have to follow. In D&D, however, everything is seamless and improvised – the Dungeon Master might have a plan, but if the players decide they don’t want to raid the dungeon, and instead want to hang out in an interesting local tavern, a good Master can be flexible enough to indulge that. ... The human contact element of D&D is also vital. In an era when much of our socialising is mediated through phone screens and social media, role-playing is one thing that gets people in the same room. 'With digital games, you can play co-op but it doesn’t quite have the connection of real people at a table,' says Richard Whitters, senior art director for D&D. 'This is a thing that humans have always done: gathering around the campfire, telling stories, interacting.' "
'Do you wind it up?': today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading – article by Sam Wallaston in The Guardian. "Three 15-year-old school children are on the phone, in class. No, it’s OK, they’re supposed to be; they’ve been told to, by me, with permission from their teacher. And they’re not actually on the phone, because they don’t know how to use it. It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone, finger-in-the-dial variety. They’re tapping it, prodding at the holes. Hahahaha – they haven’t got a clue. Loxford is an academy in Ilford, east London. I’ve come here with a suitcase stuffed full of the past, tech from my own childhood, mostly borrowed from nostalgic hoarder colleagues. Everything in the case is obsolete: it’s all been shrunk to fit into the smartphones today’s 15-year-olds almost all have. It’s a kind of social experiment, about different generations, lost skills, changing technology... OK, and it’s also about having a laugh; and getting my generation’s own back for those times we’ve had to go crawling to a teenager for technical assistance, such as asking how to make the video on WhatsApp work."
The Adventures of Apostrophe Man – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. (1) Apostrophe Man: "My super-sense is tingling! Somebody needs my help! (2) Apostrophe Man runs. (3) "My God!" says Apostrophe Man, having arrived at a burning building which a sign declares to be "St. Peters Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts". (4) Apostrophe Man summons his powers... (5) ... and zaps the sign. (6) "Much better," says Apostrophe Man. The sign now reads correctly "St. Peter's Library..." The Library itself has now been completely consumed by the fire.
Sister act: how Little Women has come of age on the big screen – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "Again and again lines in Gerwig’s [2019] film are drawn from Alcott’s own life.... In the book, Jo says: 'I don’t believe I shall ever marry. I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man'; in the film she says: 'I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe' – which comes from a letter Alcott wrote to a friend after visiting her just-married older sister. So many pithy statements about sexual politics are given to Amy ... and to Aunt March ... that the film threatens to become a 21st-century feminist lecture – until one remembers that they were all subjects about which Alcott herself was vocal. Not that she necessarily got her way: Alcott’s publisher was initially bored by Little Women and changed his mind only when his young daughters got hold of the manuscript and loved it (a similar scene appears in the film). He does not budge, however, in his demand that her female characters end the novel 'married – or dead, either way'. All four girls duly marry or die, and many critics have found this a profoundly disappointing outcome."
'They' beats 'the' to 2019's word of the year - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "They, a common pronoun that can be traced back to the 13th century, has been named word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary because of its growing usage for non-binary individuals.
The US dictionary, which has been in print for more than 150 years, said that look-ups for 'they' increased by 313% in 2019 compared with the previous year, as the public investigated the word’s shifting use and its increasing prominence in the news."
This Labour meltdown has been building for decades – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In North East Derbyshire last month [before the general election], I saw up close what was left: warehouses and care work. Bullying bosses, zero-hours contracts, poverty pay and social security top-ups. Smartphones to tell you whether you have a shift that morning, and Facebook to give you the news, or some dishonest fragment of it. Across the UK, mines were turned into museums, factories swapped for call centres, meaningful local government replaced by development quangos.... Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy. As the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans argue, the 'decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre ground'. Meanwhile, the big gap in the electoral market that opened up was for a party offering a welfare state with reactionary social policy. That was Nigel Farage; now it’s Boris Johnson. ... In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."
This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning.... Well, guess what. Labour’s 'radical' manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. ... Those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power. That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; ... it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not 'a 30-year project'. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing."
The real faultline in this election: landlords v tenants – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian. "[In the] Conservative election campaign, ... there was something cathartic about the moment that Lee Anderson, Tory parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, donned a black cagoule, stared into a mobile phone camera, and – with a zeal too seldom witnessed in contemporary politics – introduced himself to the wider world with a denunciation of 'nuisance tenants'. 'These people, who have to live somewhere, let’s have them in a tent in the middle of a field,' he grimaced. 'Six o’clock every morning, let’s have them up.' ... 'Let’s have them in the field, picking potatoes,' he continued, 'back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o’clock, same again the next day.'... Nearly a third of the [Conservative] party’s MPs, including the prime minister, are currently landlords (along with 11% of Labour MPs, and a quarter of Lib Dems). Little wonder that Anderson, a one-time Labour supporter ... now feels more at home on the other side of the party divide. His words were extreme. But the politics behind them reveal an unacknowledged faultline running through this election: it is a battle, broadly-speaking, between the rentiers and the renters – and the winners will define this country for a generation."
The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Long before the Tory demolition of Labour’s 'red wall', it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative. The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left.... The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation.... Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity. Immigration has become symbolic of this loss. We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.... The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. ... The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal."
To err is human: is that why we fear machines that can be made to err less? – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The AI evangelists complain [that] everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. If you are a prisoner applying for parole in some jurisdictions, for example, you had better hope that the (human) judge has just eaten when your case comes up. A fascinating empirical study ... found that 'the percentage of favourable rulings drops gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to about 65% after a break.'... In judging the debate about whether human intelligence (HI) is always superior to the artificial variety (AI), are we humans just demonstrating how capricious and irrational we can be? Er, yes, says Jason Collins, a behavioural and data scientist who now works for PwC Australia. In a wickedly satirical article in the online journal Behavioral Scientist, he turns the question we routinely ask about AI on its head: 'Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions,' he writes, 'we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm.'"
The millennium bug was real, and 20 years later we face the same threats – article by Martyn Thomas in The Guardian. "I led Deloitte Consulting’s Y2K work internationally in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t just business IT that had Y2K errors. Many PCs could not handle dates in 2000. Faults were found in the computers that controlled factories and offshore oil platforms. The UK’s Rapier anti-aircraft missile system had a Y2K fault that would have prevented it firing.... 10% of Visa credit-card machines couldn’t handle cards that expired after 1999... Internationally, correcting Y2K problems cost thousands of person-years of effort and many billions of pounds.... Then 1 January passed without a catastrophe and the myth started that the threat had been grossly exaggerated. There were many failures in January 2000, from the significant to the trivial. Many credit-card systems and cash points failed. Some customers received bills for 100 years’ interest while others were briefly rich for the same reason. Internationally, 15 nuclear reactors shut down; the oil pumping station in Yumurtalik failed, cutting off supplies to Istanbul; there were power cuts in Hawaii and government computers failed in China and Hong Kong..... Y2K should be seen as a warning of the danger that arises when millions of independent systems might fail because of a single event. But this lesson has not been learned. ..."
Friday, 6 December 2019
Cuttings: November 2019
If we’re serious about changing the world, we need a better kind of economics to do it – article by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, joint winners of the 2019 Nobel prize in economic science, in The Guardian. "We need to understand what undermines trust in economists. Part of the problem is that there is plenty of bad economics around. The self-proclaimed economists on TV and in the press – chief economist of Bank X or Firm Y – are, with important exceptions, primarily spokespeople for their firms’ economic interests, who often feel free to ignore the weight of the evidence.... Another part of the problem is that, especially in the UK and the US, a lot of the economics that has filtered into government thinking is the most beholden to orthodoxy, and the least able to pay attention to any fact that does not square with it.... But good economics is much less strident, and quite different. It is less like the hard sciences and more like engineering or plumbing: it breaks big problems into manageable chunks and tries to solve them with a pragmatic approach – a combination of intuition and theory, trial and acknowledged errors. ... We have spent our careers studying the poor, trying to apply this kind of experimental approach to the problems they face. Instead of relying on our intuition, or that of others, we set up large-scale, rigorous randomised controlled trials to understand what works, what does not work, and why. We are not alone: this movement has taken hold in economics. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the network we co-founded in 2013, has 400 affiliated or invited researchers, and together they have finished or are working on nearly a thousand projects on topics as different as the impact of sleep on productivity and happiness, and the role of incentives for tax collectors."
Now we have proof: the government used your money to lie about poor people – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Early this summer, a national newspaper published a string of curious articles. Under the logo Universal Credit Uncovered, the features promised readers of the Metro the truth about this most notorious of all benefits. The series began with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the paper, coupled with a four-page spread right in its centre, and continued week upon week for nine weeks.... Throughout its campaign, the DWP would summarise what it called 'Myths' about universal credit and then give readers the 'Facts'. The [Advertising Standards Authority] looked at three of the claims – and found they weren’t facts at all. They were lies, told by the government to its own taxpayers. In big letters, the DWP boasted that 'people move into work faster on Universal Credit than they did on the old system'. After poring over the statistics, the ASA has found this claim 'did not reflect the evidence … had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading'. 'If you need money,' readers were assured, 'your Jobcentre will urgently pay you an advance.' In its ruling, the ASA takes the government to task for not making it clear that this is only a loan and that the vast majority of claimants will have to wait five weeks for their first UC payment. Finally, the adverts’ claim that 'your Jobcentre can pay rent directly to landlords' was again found to be misleading because it only applies to a small number of claimants. It is no small thing for a watchdog to face down the government in such an uncompromising fashion. Yet at the end of its remarkable judgment, there is something even more startling. The DWP is told that in future it must have 'adequate evidence to substantiate the claims in their advertising, to include significant conditions [where the claims don’t apply], and to present significant conditions clearly'. The regulator has been forced to advise the Conservative government to tell the truth."
How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash – article by Rana Foroohar in The Guardian, extracted from her book Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech. See also review by John Naughton in The Observer. "[The economist] Zoltan Pozsar [in a report for Credit Suisse] forensically analysed the $1tn in corporate savings parked in offshore accounts, mostly by big tech firms. The largest and most intellectual-property-rich 10% of companies – Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) among them – controlled 80% of this hoard. According to Pozsar’s calculations, most of that money was held not in cash but in bonds – half of it in corporate bonds. The much-lauded overseas 'cash' pile held by the richest American companies ... was actually a giant bond portfolio. And it was owned not by banks or mutual funds, which typically have such large financial holdings, but by the world’s biggest technology firms. In addition to being the most profitable and least regulated industry on the planet, the Silicon Valley giants had also become systemically crucial within the marketplace, holding assets that – if sold or downgraded – could topple the markets themselves. Hiding in plain sight was an amazing new discovery: big tech, not big banks, was the new too-big-to-fail industry."
Quote of the day – John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, who had convinced them that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. ... A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These 'secular cycles' last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s... The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist. For the first few decades of his career, Peter Turchin had used sophisticated maths to show how the interactions of predators and prey produce oscillations in animal populations in the wild,... but by the late 1990s he ... found himself drawn to history instead: could the rise and fall of human societies also be captured by a handful of variables and some differential equations?... Turchin’s approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. [He also had the work of] Jack Goldstone, ... a mathematician-turned-historian... At the time Goldstone began his research, in the mid-70s, the prevailing view of revolution was best understood as a form of class conflict. But Goldstone made two observations that did not fit that view. First, individuals from the same classes, or even the same families, often ended up fighting on opposite sides. And second, revolutions had clustered in certain periods of history ... but there was no obvious reason why class tensions should have boiled over in those periods and not in others.... Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. ... It was a simple model, and Goldstone acknowledged as much. Although he could show that high Ψ predicted historical revolutions, he had no way of predicting what came next. That depended on the precise combination of the three components of Ψ, and on how they interacted with a given society’s institutions. Incomplete as they were, his efforts led him to see revolution in a depressing new light: not as a democratic correction to an inflexible and corrupt ancien regime, but as a response to an ecological crisis – the inability of a society to absorb rapid population growth – that rarely resolved that crisis."
Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig: an entertaining journey – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Toksvig comes across as a passionate enthusiast for many things: the theatre (early jobs included sweeping the stage and working on the electrics crew just to be in the building), for history, for her beloved father and for equality. She recalls recording a pilot episode as a potential host of Have I Got News for You in 1990. Angus Deayton also recorded one and afterwards she was told: 'We preferred yours, Sandi, but everyone has agreed you can’t have a woman in charge of making fun of the news.'... No one who has heard Toksvig speak will be surprised to find a bedrock of compassion and righteous anger underpinning the book. She rails against the airbrushing of women from history and talks about her reasons for co-founding the Women’s Equality party and her optimism for change, despite occasionally despairing at the next generation of feminists. When she hears Lena Dunham say being wolf-whistled by a man sometimes makes her feel 'validated', Toksvig splutters: 'Validated? What are we? Car park tickets?'"
For real change, Labour should ditch its top-down thinking – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Genuinely modern socialism would revolutionise Westminster and Whitehall and disperse their power – and so revive local government, which would be completely transformed. Labour wants to replace the Department for Work and Pensions with a new Department of Social Security: a better ambition would be to scrap a central ministry and hand the running of most benefits to councils. Much the same might apply to the local government department, and the administration of education, health and transport. Taxation could be thoroughly localised. The way places are run could start with something that the burgeoning localist movement, Flatpack Democracy, has made clear: the optimum population size for meaningful grassroots democracy is between 10,000 and 50,000. Once that point has been grasped, it opens the way to a whole world of participation (which, to state the blindingly obvious, would also depend on reforming our electoral system). Acknowledging this, and the way 'horizontal' local activity should be complemented by the help of the 'vertical' state, the left-inclined pressure group Compass calls the ideal model of modern politics '45° change'. It quotes the late environmentalist David Fleming, who said: 'Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.' The insight is so plainly put that you have to pause to absorb its radical implications. But this is the future, and until the British left thoroughly embraces it, its great revolution in thinking will remain incomplete."
'Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts': the secret life of the audiobook star – article by Tim Dowling in The Guardian. "The audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually."
The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter – blog post by Jason Kotke, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In winter 2017-18, I was depressed, anxious, wasn’t getting out of bed in the morning, spent endless time on my phone doing nothing, and had trouble focusing on my work.... Last year I was so anxious that it would happen again that all that stuff was worse and started basically a week into fall. Nothing helped.... The plan for this fall was to try a SAD lamp, therapy, maybe drugs, and lots more warm travel. But then something interesting happened. Sometime this fall ... I decided that because I live in Vermont, there is nothing I can do about it being winter, so it was unhelpful for me to be upset about it. I stopped complaining about it getting cold and dark, I stopped dreading the arrival of snow. I told myself that I just wasn’t going to feel like I felt in the summer and that’s ok — winter is a time for different feelings. "
The highest number of CEOs graduated from this unexpected UK university – news article on Study International website. "Top recruitment firm [Forward Role] ... surveyed 260,000 LinkedIn profiles to find out which university the majority of company leaders, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Managing Directors (MDs), graduated from in the UK. Results for the Top 20 universities producing the most CEOs showed that the highest number of CEOs and MDs didn’t come from Oxford or the highly-ranked London School of Economics – but rather from the Open University."
How our home delivery habit reshaped the world – article by Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian. "The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about shipping – about how much it cost, or about how long it would take – and he relentlessly shredded delivery times to make shipping incidental to the purchasing experience. Amazon’s emphasis on speed compelled other retailers to hurry, too, and encouraged us to believe that if something cannot be had quickly, it is barely worth having at all. It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards us in ever-quicker time."
Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019 – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times.... In advance of the lexicographers’ big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates. (1) People. A pretty ordinary word – and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of 'the people' has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. ... (2) Prorogue.... (3) Femtech.... (4) Sadfishing. One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece – in Metro in January. 'Sadfishing,' wrote Rebecca Reid, 'is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet'.... (5) Opoid.... (6) Pronoun. Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun ... is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note 'pronouns: he/him' or 'she/her' alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles.... (7) Woke. Woke ... entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition 'alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice'. So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders ... argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials – so-called 'wokewashing' – and ultimately to a backlash.... (8) Nanoinfluencer.... (9) Cancelled.... (10) Crisis...."
‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian, extracted from her book Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up. "Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something: freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English. ... all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought all British teenagers attended elite boarding schools such as Eton, spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England. In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: 'So is this what the rich west is really like?' "
This election will be all about identity, not money. And the Tories know it – article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Why would anyone not vote Labour? If person A knocks on your door and offers you £1,000, no questions asked, and person B offers £100, why refuse A? The question has long puzzled experts. ... US academic Jonathan Haidt, in an attempt to understand why on earth poor people voted for George W Bush [(Why would they want a wider wealth gap, worse healthcare and more corporate greed?)] [answered] that these 'left behinds' saw politics as about more than money. It was about their families and collective safety, about local and group identity, about faith and a morality seen as personal, not ordained by the state. ... Analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell into who voted for Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in the US found the tribes remarkably similar, with support in both cases more widely spread across ages and classes than initially supposed. Indeed, average leave and Trump voters had above-average incomes. What they shared was a concern about the continuity of their identity and way of life. They feared outsiders and newcomers."
On the Farm – article by Daisy Hildyard in The London Review of Books 7 June 2018, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "The Lisbon Treaty currently guides policy creation in light of the fact that ‘animals are sentient beings.’ When the clause was pushed out of UK law by 18 votes, there was an angry and slightly bewildered public response (when any response was registered at all). Parliament, in turn, reacted with some confusion. Michael Gove issued an official statement from Defra saying that the government wasn’t necessarily saying that animals are not sentient, but that it was saying it won’t say that they are.... It is true that Britain has a long history of protecting animals... The Animal Welfare Act of 2006 is substantially committed, as Gove says it is, to high standards. However, its clauses do not have much to say about laboratory or farm animals, or many species in the wild. They largely relate to domestic animals, the category of nonhuman which, given that human-style consciousness is, if anything, over-attributed to most pets, is least in need of a law certifying sentience.... Teresa Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, also issued a statement on the issue, in which she pledges to hold Gove to his promises and accepts that, in the reality she occupies when she is not voting in Parliament, ‘animals are sentient, can feel pain, and have feelings.’ ... So, Villiers and Gove say that they are not anti-sentience, but anti-pro-sentience, and not in real life, and only for the time being. ... Their scrambled and scrambling statements suggest a sense of shame. You know the story: you cast your vote against animal sentience and you feel it’s reasonable to do so, but then you have to go home and undress in front of the cat."
Now we have proof: the government used your money to lie about poor people – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Early this summer, a national newspaper published a string of curious articles. Under the logo Universal Credit Uncovered, the features promised readers of the Metro the truth about this most notorious of all benefits. The series began with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the paper, coupled with a four-page spread right in its centre, and continued week upon week for nine weeks.... Throughout its campaign, the DWP would summarise what it called 'Myths' about universal credit and then give readers the 'Facts'. The [Advertising Standards Authority] looked at three of the claims – and found they weren’t facts at all. They were lies, told by the government to its own taxpayers. In big letters, the DWP boasted that 'people move into work faster on Universal Credit than they did on the old system'. After poring over the statistics, the ASA has found this claim 'did not reflect the evidence … had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading'. 'If you need money,' readers were assured, 'your Jobcentre will urgently pay you an advance.' In its ruling, the ASA takes the government to task for not making it clear that this is only a loan and that the vast majority of claimants will have to wait five weeks for their first UC payment. Finally, the adverts’ claim that 'your Jobcentre can pay rent directly to landlords' was again found to be misleading because it only applies to a small number of claimants. It is no small thing for a watchdog to face down the government in such an uncompromising fashion. Yet at the end of its remarkable judgment, there is something even more startling. The DWP is told that in future it must have 'adequate evidence to substantiate the claims in their advertising, to include significant conditions [where the claims don’t apply], and to present significant conditions clearly'. The regulator has been forced to advise the Conservative government to tell the truth."
How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash – article by Rana Foroohar in The Guardian, extracted from her book Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech. See also review by John Naughton in The Observer. "[The economist] Zoltan Pozsar [in a report for Credit Suisse] forensically analysed the $1tn in corporate savings parked in offshore accounts, mostly by big tech firms. The largest and most intellectual-property-rich 10% of companies – Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) among them – controlled 80% of this hoard. According to Pozsar’s calculations, most of that money was held not in cash but in bonds – half of it in corporate bonds. The much-lauded overseas 'cash' pile held by the richest American companies ... was actually a giant bond portfolio. And it was owned not by banks or mutual funds, which typically have such large financial holdings, but by the world’s biggest technology firms. In addition to being the most profitable and least regulated industry on the planet, the Silicon Valley giants had also become systemically crucial within the marketplace, holding assets that – if sold or downgraded – could topple the markets themselves. Hiding in plain sight was an amazing new discovery: big tech, not big banks, was the new too-big-to-fail industry."
Quote of the day – John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, who had convinced them that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”
History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. ... A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These 'secular cycles' last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s... The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist. For the first few decades of his career, Peter Turchin had used sophisticated maths to show how the interactions of predators and prey produce oscillations in animal populations in the wild,... but by the late 1990s he ... found himself drawn to history instead: could the rise and fall of human societies also be captured by a handful of variables and some differential equations?... Turchin’s approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. [He also had the work of] Jack Goldstone, ... a mathematician-turned-historian... At the time Goldstone began his research, in the mid-70s, the prevailing view of revolution was best understood as a form of class conflict. But Goldstone made two observations that did not fit that view. First, individuals from the same classes, or even the same families, often ended up fighting on opposite sides. And second, revolutions had clustered in certain periods of history ... but there was no obvious reason why class tensions should have boiled over in those periods and not in others.... Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. ... It was a simple model, and Goldstone acknowledged as much. Although he could show that high Ψ predicted historical revolutions, he had no way of predicting what came next. That depended on the precise combination of the three components of Ψ, and on how they interacted with a given society’s institutions. Incomplete as they were, his efforts led him to see revolution in a depressing new light: not as a democratic correction to an inflexible and corrupt ancien regime, but as a response to an ecological crisis – the inability of a society to absorb rapid population growth – that rarely resolved that crisis."
Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig: an entertaining journey – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Toksvig comes across as a passionate enthusiast for many things: the theatre (early jobs included sweeping the stage and working on the electrics crew just to be in the building), for history, for her beloved father and for equality. She recalls recording a pilot episode as a potential host of Have I Got News for You in 1990. Angus Deayton also recorded one and afterwards she was told: 'We preferred yours, Sandi, but everyone has agreed you can’t have a woman in charge of making fun of the news.'... No one who has heard Toksvig speak will be surprised to find a bedrock of compassion and righteous anger underpinning the book. She rails against the airbrushing of women from history and talks about her reasons for co-founding the Women’s Equality party and her optimism for change, despite occasionally despairing at the next generation of feminists. When she hears Lena Dunham say being wolf-whistled by a man sometimes makes her feel 'validated', Toksvig splutters: 'Validated? What are we? Car park tickets?'"
For real change, Labour should ditch its top-down thinking – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Genuinely modern socialism would revolutionise Westminster and Whitehall and disperse their power – and so revive local government, which would be completely transformed. Labour wants to replace the Department for Work and Pensions with a new Department of Social Security: a better ambition would be to scrap a central ministry and hand the running of most benefits to councils. Much the same might apply to the local government department, and the administration of education, health and transport. Taxation could be thoroughly localised. The way places are run could start with something that the burgeoning localist movement, Flatpack Democracy, has made clear: the optimum population size for meaningful grassroots democracy is between 10,000 and 50,000. Once that point has been grasped, it opens the way to a whole world of participation (which, to state the blindingly obvious, would also depend on reforming our electoral system). Acknowledging this, and the way 'horizontal' local activity should be complemented by the help of the 'vertical' state, the left-inclined pressure group Compass calls the ideal model of modern politics '45° change'. It quotes the late environmentalist David Fleming, who said: 'Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.' The insight is so plainly put that you have to pause to absorb its radical implications. But this is the future, and until the British left thoroughly embraces it, its great revolution in thinking will remain incomplete."
'Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts': the secret life of the audiobook star – article by Tim Dowling in The Guardian. "The audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually."
The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter – blog post by Jason Kotke, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In winter 2017-18, I was depressed, anxious, wasn’t getting out of bed in the morning, spent endless time on my phone doing nothing, and had trouble focusing on my work.... Last year I was so anxious that it would happen again that all that stuff was worse and started basically a week into fall. Nothing helped.... The plan for this fall was to try a SAD lamp, therapy, maybe drugs, and lots more warm travel. But then something interesting happened. Sometime this fall ... I decided that because I live in Vermont, there is nothing I can do about it being winter, so it was unhelpful for me to be upset about it. I stopped complaining about it getting cold and dark, I stopped dreading the arrival of snow. I told myself that I just wasn’t going to feel like I felt in the summer and that’s ok — winter is a time for different feelings. "
The highest number of CEOs graduated from this unexpected UK university – news article on Study International website. "Top recruitment firm [Forward Role] ... surveyed 260,000 LinkedIn profiles to find out which university the majority of company leaders, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Managing Directors (MDs), graduated from in the UK. Results for the Top 20 universities producing the most CEOs showed that the highest number of CEOs and MDs didn’t come from Oxford or the highly-ranked London School of Economics – but rather from the Open University."
How our home delivery habit reshaped the world – article by Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian. "The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about shipping – about how much it cost, or about how long it would take – and he relentlessly shredded delivery times to make shipping incidental to the purchasing experience. Amazon’s emphasis on speed compelled other retailers to hurry, too, and encouraged us to believe that if something cannot be had quickly, it is barely worth having at all. It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards us in ever-quicker time."
Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019 – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times.... In advance of the lexicographers’ big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates. (1) People. A pretty ordinary word – and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of 'the people' has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. ... (2) Prorogue.... (3) Femtech.... (4) Sadfishing. One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece – in Metro in January. 'Sadfishing,' wrote Rebecca Reid, 'is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet'.... (5) Opoid.... (6) Pronoun. Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun ... is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note 'pronouns: he/him' or 'she/her' alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles.... (7) Woke. Woke ... entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition 'alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice'. So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders ... argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials – so-called 'wokewashing' – and ultimately to a backlash.... (8) Nanoinfluencer.... (9) Cancelled.... (10) Crisis...."
‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian, extracted from her book Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up. "Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something: freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English. ... all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought all British teenagers attended elite boarding schools such as Eton, spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England. In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: 'So is this what the rich west is really like?' "
This election will be all about identity, not money. And the Tories know it – article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Why would anyone not vote Labour? If person A knocks on your door and offers you £1,000, no questions asked, and person B offers £100, why refuse A? The question has long puzzled experts. ... US academic Jonathan Haidt, in an attempt to understand why on earth poor people voted for George W Bush [(Why would they want a wider wealth gap, worse healthcare and more corporate greed?)] [answered] that these 'left behinds' saw politics as about more than money. It was about their families and collective safety, about local and group identity, about faith and a morality seen as personal, not ordained by the state. ... Analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell into who voted for Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in the US found the tribes remarkably similar, with support in both cases more widely spread across ages and classes than initially supposed. Indeed, average leave and Trump voters had above-average incomes. What they shared was a concern about the continuity of their identity and way of life. They feared outsiders and newcomers."
On the Farm – article by Daisy Hildyard in The London Review of Books 7 June 2018, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "The Lisbon Treaty currently guides policy creation in light of the fact that ‘animals are sentient beings.’ When the clause was pushed out of UK law by 18 votes, there was an angry and slightly bewildered public response (when any response was registered at all). Parliament, in turn, reacted with some confusion. Michael Gove issued an official statement from Defra saying that the government wasn’t necessarily saying that animals are not sentient, but that it was saying it won’t say that they are.... It is true that Britain has a long history of protecting animals... The Animal Welfare Act of 2006 is substantially committed, as Gove says it is, to high standards. However, its clauses do not have much to say about laboratory or farm animals, or many species in the wild. They largely relate to domestic animals, the category of nonhuman which, given that human-style consciousness is, if anything, over-attributed to most pets, is least in need of a law certifying sentience.... Teresa Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, also issued a statement on the issue, in which she pledges to hold Gove to his promises and accepts that, in the reality she occupies when she is not voting in Parliament, ‘animals are sentient, can feel pain, and have feelings.’ ... So, Villiers and Gove say that they are not anti-sentience, but anti-pro-sentience, and not in real life, and only for the time being. ... Their scrambled and scrambling statements suggest a sense of shame. You know the story: you cast your vote against animal sentience and you feel it’s reasonable to do so, but then you have to go home and undress in front of the cat."
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