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 résumés were about as similar as two résumés 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 résumé 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 résumé 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. ..."
Tuesday 31 December 2019
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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