Gone Home - according to some players one of the best games of 2013, and according to others not a game at all. (See separate post about this.)
Penguin Café, performing at Saffron Hall - lovely to see them developing their own identity distinct from the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra, with a concert blending old and well-loved PCO tunes (such as Perpetuum Mobile, Beanfield, Telephone and Rubber Band, Music for a Found Harmonium), Penguin Cafe's new tunes from their own two albums (such as 1420), and new works yet to be recorded this year and being performed for the first time. Also lovely, in these days of ISIS and UKIP, to hear beautiful, warm and friendly music, which travels across national and cultural boundaries with ease; so one tune is described as existing mid-way between Africa, Cuba and Ireland, and another transforms a Chopin Nocturne into a steely Mexican romp (Black Hibiscus – the same sort of trick Simon Jeffes and the original PCO pulled with Giles Farnaby’s Dream).
Edward Scissorhands - Matthew Bourne ballet, at Milton Keynes Theatre (see clip). This was our grand-daughter's introduction to ballet (more accessible than, say, Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, which let's face it were the nineteenth-century equivalents), and she loved it, despite the differences from the film (which she knew). The only problem was that she wanted to see it again right away, which wasn't possible, this being the end of the tour. A cracking show, full of invention and wit, alternately funny and touching; Granny and I were both moved to tears at the end, when the snow starts to fall in the auditorium, thus dissolving the fourth wall and bringing us into the scene.
Nicola Benedetti, playing with La Cetra Barokorkester Basel at Saffron Hall. Laser-like coherence, precision and power from the strings, which would have been great on its own; having Nicola Benedetti as a soloist was a bonus.
Laura Mvula, Prom concert from 19 August 2014 - I've come late to Laura Mvula and also to my recording of this concert, and now I can see what the excitement is about. This is sophisticated soul (as one would hope, given her classical training), and the orchestral rearrangements of tracks from her Sing to the Moon album were fantastic. My favourite number, though, was CInnamon Tree: an Esperanza Spalding song, which Mvula performed in duet with her.
Good Omens - BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel, by Dirk Maggs who did the radio versions of the later Hitchhiker's Guide books and Gaiman's own Neverwhere. This was first transmitted over Christmas, but it's another set of recordings to which I've only just got. The first episode was a bit slow, but once the story is set up it rattles along with the familiar charm and wit and faith in the essentially decent nature of humanity so characteristic of both Gaiman and Pratchett, brought to life by Maggs' wizard-like command of the aural medium. Some sequences are so surreal that it's hard to imagine them being realised in any way other than on the page or on the radio: for example, the bit where one demon is chasing another not-exactly-nice-but-less-nasty demon through a telephone network, and the less-nasty demon times his exit just before an answering machine kicks in, thus leaving his pursuer trapped on the cassette tape, which he then destroys by pouring holy water on it. Sensational! Can't imagine anyone doing that on film or TV.
Friday, 3 April 2015
Cuttings February 2015
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen, noted gadfly of the tech world, is in this sardonic treatise concentrating his rhetorical fire on a class of people who really do think that the internet is the answer to all our current problems: not only in, say, getting a taxi or a sex partner, but also in education and politics. These are the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley, the wealthy or wannabe-wealthy libertarians with a fetish for 'disruption'. It is to their brand of what another critic, Evgeny Morozov, calls 'solutionism' that Keen is eager to retort in the negative.... What happened? Keen reminds us that, as is often forgotten, the internet was privatised. In the early 1990s, the US government 'handed over the running of the internet backbone to commercial internet service providers'. One super-wealthy tech investor called this moment, with a degree of smugness that it is tricky to gauge, 'the largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet'. Keen himself offers a trenchant geopolitical analogy: 'Just as the end of the cold war led to the scramble by Russian financial oligarchs to buy up state-owned assets, so the privatisation of the internet at the end of the cold war triggered the rush by a new class of technological oligarchs in the United States to acquire prime online real estate.'”
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist.... But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0... The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking. Like these other critics, Keen challenges the dominant narrative about the internet – that it’s a technology that liberates, informs and empowers people. The problem with this narrative, he points out, is not that it’s wrong – the network does indeed have the potential to do all of these marvellous things, and much more besides. The problem is that it’s not the whole story, and perhaps it will turn out to be the least important part of it."
The theatre of terror, by Yuval Noah Harari - article in The Guardian. "People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.... Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theatre producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to fight terrorism effectively we must realise that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to terrorist provocations.... During the modern era, centralised states have gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades western countries have managed to achieve almost zero political violence.... People have quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar can make a lot of noise. This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful.... Killing 17 people in Paris draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism. An act of terror that would have gone unnoticed in a medieval kingdom can rattle much stronger modern states to their very core."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "If you need reminding – or persuading – of the brilliance of Ladybird illustration, then head to Bexhill, East Sussex, where Ladybird By Design opens at the De La Warr pavilion on 24 January.... Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
Paper bank statements make it easier to manage finances, study says - article by Rebecca Smithers in The Guardian. "Consumers are able to better manage and improve their finances when they receive paper bank statements sent through the post rather than just accessing their accounts online, according to the results of a behavioural study... For the study, 3,600 adults were initially invited to participate, and half then sent a mock bank statement and a notice of changes to overdraft fees by post, while the other half were sent the same information by email. In the end 2,399 consumers took part in the entire exercise, answering detailed questions about the mock account. Respondents were told they would be entered into a cash prize draw if they answered the questions correctly, creating a setting where they had to undertake tasks that were in their own financial interest. The research found that consumers who received statements and other financial information by post were better able to understand the information given, act on it and then make better financial decisions as a result than those receiving the same information electronically."
We need an internet that leaves space in our heads to enjoy creative peace - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "The internet is not made for us. It’s not made for the benefit of us. All those sites we use, that pull us in – none of them has our creative health or our wellbeing at heart. The mechanics of the internet – the bright lights and dopamine rewards – are deadly in combination with social expectations and instincts, and make it so hard to resist. It feels the norm. But this haphazard attention war is not the norm. ... these companies need to build sites and services that better work for us, true. But we owe it to ourselves to be acutely aware of what we lose in all this noise.... If my journey offline has taught me anything it is balance; that this aspirational, hyperconnected life we see all around us is not normal. Life is all around us already, beautiful in its imperfections and its normalness, under our feet and under our noses, in the room with us, if only we would put our smartphones down for long enough to experience it."
The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts - article by Steve Kolowich in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. The latest figures come from the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey, which was based on a 2014 survey of more than 2,800 academic leaders and was released on Thursday. The survey, which has tracked opinions about online education for more than a decade, started asking academic leaders about MOOCs in 2012, when free online courses seemed poised to disrupt the walled gardens of elite college instruction. Back then, 28 percent of respondents believed MOOCs were sustainable, while 26 percent thought they were not. In this year’s survey, 16 percent believe MOOCs are sustainable, while 51 percent think they are not."
Students used to take drugs to get high. Now they take them to get higher grades - article by Carol Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "This year’s final students are the first to graduate into a brave new world of massive debt.... This is at a time when stories about graduate unemployment and exploited interns are never far from the news pages... And in this scenario, if you were offered a small white pill that held the promise of enhanced productivity, greater focus, more hours in the library, and, ultimately, the potential of a better degree, well… it’s not hard to see the attraction.... Modafinil: a prescription-only medication for narcolepsy that the NHS’s website describes as 'a central nervous system stimulant' that prevents 'excessive sleepiness during daytime hours'. 'It’s not that it makes you more intelligent,' says Phoebe, a history student. 'It’s just that it helps you work. You can study for longer. You don’t get distracted. You’re actually happy to go to the library and you don’t even want to stop for lunch. And then it’s like 7pm, and you’re still, "Actually, you know what? I could do another hour."'... You do have to be to be careful though, says Johnny. 'It gives you this amazing concentration but you have to make sure you’re actually in front of your books. I spent five hours in my room rearranging my iTunes library on it once.'"
The fascinating truth behind all those ‘great firewall of China’ headlines - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. On research by King et al on corpus of Chinese social media posts, published in Science in August 2014. "It confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world. 'Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored, ... whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored.'... The fact that an authoritarian regime allows vitriolic criticism of it in social media may seem paradoxical, but in fact it provides the most vivid confirmation of the subtlety of the Chinese approach to managing the net. 'After all,' observes King, 'the knowledge that a local leader or government bureaucrat is engendering severe criticism – perhaps because of corruption or incompetence – is valuable information. That leader can then be replaced with someone more effective at maintaining stability and the system can then be seen as responsive.' The internet, in other words, is the information system that enables the system to keep a lid on things."
Angela Brazil: dorm feasts and red-hot pashes - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Until the 1880s middle-class girls had been mostly educated at home under the watchful eye of mothers, governesses and elder sisters. But with the coming of academic boarding schools and high schools, young women’s bonds were increasingly with other girls of their own age. [Angela] Brazil’s books glory in this new complicity, showing loud, boisterous teenagers forming themselves into self-policing groups, untroubled by the distant rumble of prefects and teachers. ... In 1944, when Brazil was coming to the end of her life, the new Education Act furnished able girls from the middling middle classes with a free education at either a direct-grant or grammar school, leaving boarding public schools such as Benenden, the model for Malory Towers, to a financial and social elite. That didn’t stop girls wanting to read about such schools – Blyton and Brent‑Dyer sold extremely well right up to the early 1990s – but there was a sense that what was being described was a kind of education that had happened a long time ago and far away. Until 1997, that is, when JK Rowling, the comprehensive-educated girl who had grown up with a passion for boarding school fiction, sat down to reimagine Brazil’s universe for a new generation of girls – and boys."
David Carr: Advice to Students - from his online course materials, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. (David Carr, New York Times media journalist, joined Boston University Communications School in Autumn 2014 and died from cancer in February 2015.) "I grade based on where you start and where you end. Don’t work on me for a better grade—work on your work and making the work of those around you better. Show industriousness and seriousness and produce surpassing work if you want an exceptional grade.... * Don’t raise your hand in class. This isn’t Montessori, I expect people to speak up when they like, but don’t speak over anyone. Respect the opinions of others. * This is an intense, once-a-week immersion on the waterfront of modern media-making. If you don’t show up for class, you will flounder. If you show up late or unprepared, you will stick out in unpleasant ways. If you aren’t putting effort into your work, I will suggest that you might be more comfortable elsewhere. * If you text or email during class, I will ignore you as you ignore me. It won’t go well. * I expect you to behave as an adult and will treat you like one. I don’t want to parent you—I want to teach you."
Fifty tips for success - Dilbert cartoon. Young guy: "A 27-year-old tech millionaire published his list of fifty things you need to do to succeed." Dilbert: "In other words, he has no idea why he succeeded." Young guy: "Sure he does. He even has a list of his top thirty... priorities." (Pause) "Okay, I hear it now."
Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a 'good way', of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.... The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them. But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that 'good way' advocated by Dr Schmidt."
Why do people ignore security warnings when browsing the web? - article by Danny Bradbury in The Guardian. "Why is it so difficult for users to follow simple security and privacy messages? Maybe it’s because they’re not that simple. Often, warnings describe what the problem is ('this site’s SSL certificate has expired!') rather than what the consequences of continuing might be ('if you visit this site, it might infect your computer with malware that steals your bank details!'). Lujo [Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab security research centre] co-authored a paper on effective warning design that featured several key guidelines. They included describing the risk comprehensively, being concise, and offering meaningful choices about how to proceed. Google’s team reached similar conclusions. They stripped out the technical terms (most users don’t know what a certificate is, they found), and reduced the reading level by simplifying the text. That included making the text as brief as possible, even if it meant sacrificing detail. The Chrome developers also added illustrations to suggest danger, and started using background colours to represent different kinds and severity of threat."
The internet shaming of Lindsey Stone - article in The Guardian by Jon Ronson, extracted from his book So you've Been Publicly Shamed. "[Lindsay] and Jamie had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, 'smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington [the national cemetery] we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.'... By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes.... The next day, camera crews had gathered outside her front door.... [Her employer] was inundated with emails demanding [her sacking], so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. 'Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,' Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year. ... I had recently discovered the world of digital reputation management – companies that 'game' Google to hide negative stories stored online.... 'I have no idea what you actually do,' I had told Michael on the telephone before we met. 'Maybe I could follow someone though the process?' And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client."
Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat - article by Joanna Blythman in The Guardian, based on her book Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets. "Contacts within the industry provided me with a cover that allowed me to gain unprecedented access to manufacturing facilities, as well as to subscriber-only areas of company sites, private spaces where the chemical industry tells manufacturers how our food can be engineered. Even with 25 years of food chain investigations under my belt, it was an eye-opener. ... Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs 'clean label', with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign. Some companies have reformulated their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients with substitutes that are less problematic. Others, unconvinced that they can pass the cost on to retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of cheaper substances that allow them to present a scrubbed and rosy face to the public."
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’: how sharing our every moment on social media became the new living - article by Jacob Silverman in The Guardian. "Social media can resemble traditional, pre-literate societies, where communication is purely oral and everything – culture, news, gossip, history – is communicated through speech. When we retweet someone, we are just speaking their words again – ensuring that they are passed on and do not get lost in the flurry of communication. Media theorists refer to these eruptions of oral culture within literate culture as examples of 'secondary orality'. Social media’s culture of sharing and storytelling, its lack of a long-term memory, and the use of news and information to build social capital are examples of this phenomenon. While records of our activities exist to varying extents, secondary orality shows us how social media exists largely in a kind of eternal present, upon which the past rarely intrudes. Twitter is a meaningful example. It is evanescent: posts are preserved, but in practice, they are lost in one’s rapidly self-refreshing timeline – read it now or not at all. Twitter is also reminiscent of oral storytelling, in which one person is speaking to a larger assembled group and receiving feedback in return, which helps to shape the story. One of the digital twists here is that many storyteller-like figures are speaking simultaneously, jockeying for attention and for some form of recognition. The point is not that social media is atavistically traditional but that it returns elements of oral societies to us. Our fancy new digital media is in fact not entirely new, but a hybrid of elements we have seen in past forms of communication. The outbursts of tribalism we sometimes see online – a group of anonymous trolls launching misogynist attacks on a female journalist; the ecstatic social media groupies of Justin Bieber; the way one’s Twitter timeline can, for a short while, become centred around parsing one major event, as if gathered in a village square – are evidence of a very old-fashioned, even preliterate communitarianism, reified for the digital world."
The Internet is Not the Answer, by Andrew Keen - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Andrew Keen – like many who were involved in the net in the early days – started out as an internet evangelist.... But he saw the light before many of us, and rapidly established himself as one of the net’s early contrarians. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content which characterised the early days of web 2.0... The Internet Is Not the Answer joins a number of recent books by critics such as Jaron Lanier, Doc Searls, Astra Taylor, Ethan Zuckerman and Nicholas Carr, who are also trying to wake us from the nightmare into which we have been sleepwalking. Like these other critics, Keen challenges the dominant narrative about the internet – that it’s a technology that liberates, informs and empowers people. The problem with this narrative, he points out, is not that it’s wrong – the network does indeed have the potential to do all of these marvellous things, and much more besides. The problem is that it’s not the whole story, and perhaps it will turn out to be the least important part of it."
The theatre of terror, by Yuval Noah Harari - article in The Guardian. "People turn to terrorism because they know they cannot wage war, so they opt instead to produce a theatrical spectacle. Terrorists don’t think like army generals; they think like theatre producers.... Like terrorists, those combating terrorism should also think more like theatre producers and less like army generals. Above all, if we want to fight terrorism effectively we must realise that nothing the terrorists do can defeat us. We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves, if we overreact in a misguided way to terrorist provocations.... During the modern era, centralised states have gradually reduced the level of political violence within their territories, and in the last few decades western countries have managed to achieve almost zero political violence.... People have quickly got used to this, and consider it their natural right. Consequently, even sporadic acts of political violence that kill a few dozen people are seen as a deadly threat to the legitimacy and even survival of the state. A small coin in a big empty jar can make a lot of noise. This is what makes the theatre of terrorism so successful.... Killing 17 people in Paris draws far more attention than killing hundreds in Nigeria or Iraq. Paradoxically, then, the very success of modern states in preventing political violence make them particularly vulnerable to terrorism. An act of terror that would have gone unnoticed in a medieval kingdom can rattle much stronger modern states to their very core."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "If you need reminding – or persuading – of the brilliance of Ladybird illustration, then head to Bexhill, East Sussex, where Ladybird By Design opens at the De La Warr pavilion on 24 January.... Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
Paper bank statements make it easier to manage finances, study says - article by Rebecca Smithers in The Guardian. "Consumers are able to better manage and improve their finances when they receive paper bank statements sent through the post rather than just accessing their accounts online, according to the results of a behavioural study... For the study, 3,600 adults were initially invited to participate, and half then sent a mock bank statement and a notice of changes to overdraft fees by post, while the other half were sent the same information by email. In the end 2,399 consumers took part in the entire exercise, answering detailed questions about the mock account. Respondents were told they would be entered into a cash prize draw if they answered the questions correctly, creating a setting where they had to undertake tasks that were in their own financial interest. The research found that consumers who received statements and other financial information by post were better able to understand the information given, act on it and then make better financial decisions as a result than those receiving the same information electronically."
We need an internet that leaves space in our heads to enjoy creative peace - article by Jemima Kiss in The Guardian. "The internet is not made for us. It’s not made for the benefit of us. All those sites we use, that pull us in – none of them has our creative health or our wellbeing at heart. The mechanics of the internet – the bright lights and dopamine rewards – are deadly in combination with social expectations and instincts, and make it so hard to resist. It feels the norm. But this haphazard attention war is not the norm. ... these companies need to build sites and services that better work for us, true. But we owe it to ourselves to be acutely aware of what we lose in all this noise.... If my journey offline has taught me anything it is balance; that this aspirational, hyperconnected life we see all around us is not normal. Life is all around us already, beautiful in its imperfections and its normalness, under our feet and under our noses, in the room with us, if only we would put our smartphones down for long enough to experience it."
The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts - article by Steve Kolowich in The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. The latest figures come from the Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey, which was based on a 2014 survey of more than 2,800 academic leaders and was released on Thursday. The survey, which has tracked opinions about online education for more than a decade, started asking academic leaders about MOOCs in 2012, when free online courses seemed poised to disrupt the walled gardens of elite college instruction. Back then, 28 percent of respondents believed MOOCs were sustainable, while 26 percent thought they were not. In this year’s survey, 16 percent believe MOOCs are sustainable, while 51 percent think they are not."
Students used to take drugs to get high. Now they take them to get higher grades - article by Carol Cadwalladr in The Guardian. "This year’s final students are the first to graduate into a brave new world of massive debt.... This is at a time when stories about graduate unemployment and exploited interns are never far from the news pages... And in this scenario, if you were offered a small white pill that held the promise of enhanced productivity, greater focus, more hours in the library, and, ultimately, the potential of a better degree, well… it’s not hard to see the attraction.... Modafinil: a prescription-only medication for narcolepsy that the NHS’s website describes as 'a central nervous system stimulant' that prevents 'excessive sleepiness during daytime hours'. 'It’s not that it makes you more intelligent,' says Phoebe, a history student. 'It’s just that it helps you work. You can study for longer. You don’t get distracted. You’re actually happy to go to the library and you don’t even want to stop for lunch. And then it’s like 7pm, and you’re still, "Actually, you know what? I could do another hour."'... You do have to be to be careful though, says Johnny. 'It gives you this amazing concentration but you have to make sure you’re actually in front of your books. I spent five hours in my room rearranging my iTunes library on it once.'"
The fascinating truth behind all those ‘great firewall of China’ headlines - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. On research by King et al on corpus of Chinese social media posts, published in Science in August 2014. "It confirmed what other researchers had found, namely that, contrary to neoliberal fantasy, speech on the Chinese internet is remarkably free, vibrant and raucous. But this unruly discourse is watched by a veritable army (maybe as many as 250,000-strong) of censors. And what they are looking for is only certain kinds of free speech, specifically, speech that has the potential for engendering collective action – mobilising folks to do something together in the offline world. 'Criticisms of the government in social media (even vitriolic ones) are not censored, ... whereas any attempt to physically move people in ways not sanctioned by the government is censored.'... The fact that an authoritarian regime allows vitriolic criticism of it in social media may seem paradoxical, but in fact it provides the most vivid confirmation of the subtlety of the Chinese approach to managing the net. 'After all,' observes King, 'the knowledge that a local leader or government bureaucrat is engendering severe criticism – perhaps because of corruption or incompetence – is valuable information. That leader can then be replaced with someone more effective at maintaining stability and the system can then be seen as responsive.' The internet, in other words, is the information system that enables the system to keep a lid on things."
Angela Brazil: dorm feasts and red-hot pashes - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Until the 1880s middle-class girls had been mostly educated at home under the watchful eye of mothers, governesses and elder sisters. But with the coming of academic boarding schools and high schools, young women’s bonds were increasingly with other girls of their own age. [Angela] Brazil’s books glory in this new complicity, showing loud, boisterous teenagers forming themselves into self-policing groups, untroubled by the distant rumble of prefects and teachers. ... In 1944, when Brazil was coming to the end of her life, the new Education Act furnished able girls from the middling middle classes with a free education at either a direct-grant or grammar school, leaving boarding public schools such as Benenden, the model for Malory Towers, to a financial and social elite. That didn’t stop girls wanting to read about such schools – Blyton and Brent‑Dyer sold extremely well right up to the early 1990s – but there was a sense that what was being described was a kind of education that had happened a long time ago and far away. Until 1997, that is, when JK Rowling, the comprehensive-educated girl who had grown up with a passion for boarding school fiction, sat down to reimagine Brazil’s universe for a new generation of girls – and boys."
David Carr: Advice to Students - from his online course materials, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. (David Carr, New York Times media journalist, joined Boston University Communications School in Autumn 2014 and died from cancer in February 2015.) "I grade based on where you start and where you end. Don’t work on me for a better grade—work on your work and making the work of those around you better. Show industriousness and seriousness and produce surpassing work if you want an exceptional grade.... * Don’t raise your hand in class. This isn’t Montessori, I expect people to speak up when they like, but don’t speak over anyone. Respect the opinions of others. * This is an intense, once-a-week immersion on the waterfront of modern media-making. If you don’t show up for class, you will flounder. If you show up late or unprepared, you will stick out in unpleasant ways. If you aren’t putting effort into your work, I will suggest that you might be more comfortable elsewhere. * If you text or email during class, I will ignore you as you ignore me. It won’t go well. * I expect you to behave as an adult and will treat you like one. I don’t want to parent you—I want to teach you."
Fifty tips for success - Dilbert cartoon. Young guy: "A 27-year-old tech millionaire published his list of fifty things you need to do to succeed." Dilbert: "In other words, he has no idea why he succeeded." Young guy: "Sure he does. He even has a list of his top thirty... priorities." (Pause) "Okay, I hear it now."
Google and tech’s elite are living in a parallel universe - article by John Naughton in The Guardian. "Our world is bifurcating into parallel universes. In one – that populated by technology companies, investment banks, hedge funds and other elite institutions – people are over-stimulated, appreciated, overworked (but in a 'good way', of course) and richly rewarded. Meanwhile, in the other universe, people are under-stimulated, overworked and poorly rewarded. And the gap between the two universes appears to be widening, not narrowing every time Moore’s Law ratchets up another notch in computing power.... The digital revolution is driving inequality, not reducing it. That’s because the technology has certain characteristics (zero marginal returns, network effects and technological lock-in, to name just three) which confer colossal power on corporations that have mastered the technology. In the process it confers vast wealth on those who own them. But that wealth isn’t shared with the users of the platforms operated by those corporations: most of the work that generates revenues for Facebook or Google is done by unpaid workers – you and me. And folks who work in paid occupations powered by those platforms – Uber drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, to name just two – are not sharing in the wealth it generates for their owners either. Like Google’s smart creatives, these people are also overworked. But not in that 'good way' advocated by Dr Schmidt."
Why do people ignore security warnings when browsing the web? - article by Danny Bradbury in The Guardian. "Why is it so difficult for users to follow simple security and privacy messages? Maybe it’s because they’re not that simple. Often, warnings describe what the problem is ('this site’s SSL certificate has expired!') rather than what the consequences of continuing might be ('if you visit this site, it might infect your computer with malware that steals your bank details!'). Lujo [Bauer, Carnegie Mellon University's Cylab security research centre] co-authored a paper on effective warning design that featured several key guidelines. They included describing the risk comprehensively, being concise, and offering meaningful choices about how to proceed. Google’s team reached similar conclusions. They stripped out the technical terms (most users don’t know what a certificate is, they found), and reduced the reading level by simplifying the text. That included making the text as brief as possible, even if it meant sacrificing detail. The Chrome developers also added illustrations to suggest danger, and started using background colours to represent different kinds and severity of threat."
The internet shaming of Lindsey Stone - article in The Guardian by Jon Ronson, extracted from his book So you've Been Publicly Shamed. "[Lindsay] and Jamie had a running joke: taking stupid photographs, 'smoking in front of a no-smoking sign or posing in front of statues, mimicking the pose. We took dumb pictures all the time. And so at Arlington [the national cemetery] we saw the Silence And Respect sign… and inspiration struck.'... By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes.... The next day, camera crews had gathered outside her front door.... [Her employer] was inundated with emails demanding [her sacking], so Lindsey was called into work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the building. Her boss met her in the car park and told her to hand over her keys. 'Literally overnight, everything I knew and loved was gone,' Lindsey said. And that’s when she fell into a depression, became an insomniac, and barely left home for a year. ... I had recently discovered the world of digital reputation management – companies that 'game' Google to hide negative stories stored online.... 'I have no idea what you actually do,' I had told Michael on the telephone before we met. 'Maybe I could follow someone though the process?' And so we planned it out. We’d just need to find a willing client."
Inside the food industry: the surprising truth about what you eat - article by Joanna Blythman in The Guardian, based on her book Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets. "Contacts within the industry provided me with a cover that allowed me to gain unprecedented access to manufacturing facilities, as well as to subscriber-only areas of company sites, private spaces where the chemical industry tells manufacturers how our food can be engineered. Even with 25 years of food chain investigations under my belt, it was an eye-opener. ... Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs 'clean label', with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign. Some companies have reformulated their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients with substitutes that are less problematic. Others, unconvinced that they can pass the cost on to retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of cheaper substances that allow them to present a scrubbed and rosy face to the public."
‘Pics or it didn’t happen’: how sharing our every moment on social media became the new living - article by Jacob Silverman in The Guardian. "Social media can resemble traditional, pre-literate societies, where communication is purely oral and everything – culture, news, gossip, history – is communicated through speech. When we retweet someone, we are just speaking their words again – ensuring that they are passed on and do not get lost in the flurry of communication. Media theorists refer to these eruptions of oral culture within literate culture as examples of 'secondary orality'. Social media’s culture of sharing and storytelling, its lack of a long-term memory, and the use of news and information to build social capital are examples of this phenomenon. While records of our activities exist to varying extents, secondary orality shows us how social media exists largely in a kind of eternal present, upon which the past rarely intrudes. Twitter is a meaningful example. It is evanescent: posts are preserved, but in practice, they are lost in one’s rapidly self-refreshing timeline – read it now or not at all. Twitter is also reminiscent of oral storytelling, in which one person is speaking to a larger assembled group and receiving feedback in return, which helps to shape the story. One of the digital twists here is that many storyteller-like figures are speaking simultaneously, jockeying for attention and for some form of recognition. The point is not that social media is atavistically traditional but that it returns elements of oral societies to us. Our fancy new digital media is in fact not entirely new, but a hybrid of elements we have seen in past forms of communication. The outbursts of tribalism we sometimes see online – a group of anonymous trolls launching misogynist attacks on a female journalist; the ecstatic social media groupies of Justin Bieber; the way one’s Twitter timeline can, for a short while, become centred around parsing one major event, as if gathered in a village square – are evidence of a very old-fashioned, even preliterate communitarianism, reified for the digital world."
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
The design of free exploration learning: lessons from Gone Home
Gone Home, according to some computer games players, is one of the best games of 2013, and according to others it's not a game at all. Like the now-legendary Myst, it's a first-person exploration game, but with a naturalistic setting of 1990s small town America: your character, Katie, arrives at the family home after a pre-college European trip to find the house deserted with a note from her younger sister Sam on the front door; the game consists of your going round the house discovering notes and objects in order to find out what's happened. There are no hidden menaces, no jump scares (though the building's reputation as "the psycho house" and the dark and stormy night in which the events take place may mis-cue you into thinking there's a horror theme); just the real stuff of people's lives, their conflicts and disappointments - and, perhaps, a few inklings of hope and redemption.
Those players who get into the game seem to really get into it; those expecting something to shoot or even puzzles of a clearly-defined kind (as distinct from puzzles of interpretation) are disappointed. (The game's designer has produced a wickedly funny spoof trailer for a version of the game reworked as the first-person shooter - "Gun Home" - some players would clearly have liked it to be.)
As a learning designer, I was interested in how the game is designed to allow free exploration and yet lead you forwards on a journey of discovery; locked doors, filing cabinets, and so on, are used to prevent you from seeing certain things until you've seen others, so that you can't experience the backstory in the wrong order. Mum, Dad and Sam each have their own storyline, though Sam's is privileged; her audio journals to Katie give you direct access to her thoughts, and the attic - the final room you can reach - includes the objects which mark the conclusion of her storyline.
Like many players, of both genders and sexual orientations, I was both engaged and moved by the story of Sam's developing relationship with another girl from school, but I was also taken with the father's story: author of a moderately successful thriller some years ago, he failed to follow it with anything other than inferior sequels and he's now reduced to writing reviews for hi-fi magazines. After completing the game (as I thought), I was surprised to discover just how much of the father's storyline I'd missed. As this online comment shows, there are enough clues distributed around to reconstruct what happened to him as a child and why the house (which originally belonged to his Uncle Oscar) was known as "the psycho house", and also to give his storyline a happier ending than I originally thought. I wouldn't have seen all this without help though, because the game doesn't put pressure on you to uncover it, as it does with Sam's secrets.
That's the problem with designing games, or online courses, which are based on free exploration: you need to reconcile yourself to spending time and effort on developing features or branches which some of your players or learners are never going to experience.
Monday, 2 February 2015
Cuttings January 2015
"Inside out" trailer - referenced in MindHacks blog. "The new trailer for upcoming Pixar movie Inside Out is very funny and has a remarkably accurate depiction of brain function."
Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman, and Juvenescence by Robert Pogue Harrison – review
by Josh Cohen in The Guardian. "Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? is a spirited philosophical defence of the aspiration to maturity. As she sagely observes, by clinging impotently to youth, we impoverish youth and maturity alike. The vindictive subtext of the message that youth is the pinnacle of life, after all, is that things will only get worse. What better recipe for splitting our lives between an infantilised first act and its increasingly embittered aftermath? In Juvenescence, a penetrating and impressively omnivorous 'cultural history of our age', Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the same malign ambivalence in the collective drive to make ourselves younger in 'looks, behaviour, mentality, lifestyles and, above all, desires'. Our age’s self-defeating ruse is to give the younger generations sovereignty over culture, all the while depriving them of the 'idleness, shelter and solitude' needed to cultivate an authentically creative life.... Both books address our era’s tendency to set youth and age in facile opposition to one another, a tendency that gives rise, Neiman argues, to the most pernicious distortions of political life. In a consumer society, adulthood is confused with the capacity to accumulate overpriced toys, while 'ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams'."
Life after a viral nightmare: from Ecce Homo to revenge porn - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "You don’t have to have done anything for the internet to claim your name. At 16, Alex Lee became a global heartthrob and, to some, a hate figure, when someone snapped a picture of him simply doing his job: filling bags at Target. Even where some criticism might be fair, the error rarely warrants the punishment. When [Justine] Sacco tweeted 'Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!' she was very obviously joking about racism rather than advocating it, but still, not obviously enough. And you’d expect a 'global head of communications' to know better. [Breanna] Mitchell, who was, let’s remember, a schoolgirl, might have considered the sensitivity of a selfie in Auschwitz more carefully, but her picture was nothing like as crass as it seemed. She had talked for years about visiting with her father and, after he died, she had finally managed it. She took her phone out to record the moment and – perhaps out of habit – happened to smile. The picture was online for a month before anyone noticed. 'I literally woke up one morning and had literally a thousand things on my phone, notifications,' Mitchell said at the time. 'I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people telling me I need to kill myself.' When the race to denounce a bigot begins, people forget about details like whether or not they were guilty. We don’t need to ask where these torrents of scorn come from because we create them ourselves with our clicks and shares. If we had the proper context we might not laugh, so we don’t want context, and don’t get it. Nor is it likely to ever stop."
Vinyl's difficult comeback - article by John Harris in The Guardian. "In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment. A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company."
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerald Russell - review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "In the spring of 2006, Gerard Russell was a bored British diplomat stewing in the heat of the Green Zone in Baghdad.... Then he received a call from the high priest of the Mandeans. The Mandeans, he knew, claimed descent from Seth, son of Adam, and believed themselves to be the last followers of John the Baptist. They were also said to be the last surviving remnant of the Gnostic sects that once proliferated across the Middle East in late antiquity. In addition, Arab scholars had long recognised them as 'the last Babylonians'. It was, writes Russell, 'rather like being summoned to meet one of the knights of the Round Table'. He arranged to meet the high priest and his entourage in Al-Rasheed hotel on the edge of the Green Zone. The encounter had, however, a sad conclusion. The high priest told Russell how the American invasion of Iraq had unleashed a firestorm on his people. The Mandeans had been protected by Saddam Hussein, ...but during the anarchy after his fall, and the US occupation that followed, life had become impossible. The high priest spoke of the long series of forced conversions, bombings, killings and kidnappings for ransom that had affected his flock since 2002. Now he wanted to transport the entire community to the west: 'There are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq,' said the high priest. 'And we want to leave. We want your country to give us asylum.'"
Testament of Youth: Vera Brittain and her remarkable life - article in The Guardian by Alexandra Harris, on the occasion of the release of the film of Testament of Youth. "There wasn’t much encouragement in Buxton for a girl who wanted to go to Oxford, but Vera Brittain ignored the disapproving looks, went to Extension lectures, studied and struggled, almost walked out of her entrance exams, and got herself a place at Somerville in 1914. That’s a 20th-century story in itself, but it turned out not to be the central story of Brittain’s life. By the start of term, there was a war on. Her brother, Edward, and Roland Leighton, the man she loved, were going into the army rather than to New College and Merton respectively.... Brittain could not join Roland at the front, but she could put herself at the service of men like him by joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse. For the next four years, during which she lost, one by one, the people she had ever cared about, she worked with astonishing toughness and skill at hospitals in London, Malta and at the purgatorial clearing station in Étaples in northern France. She had been brought up in a society that insisted on a chaperone being present for a tea date with a man; now she had responsibility for mutilated male bodies. Back in Buxton the Germans were hated, but, under corrugated iron in France, the hand of a dying German soldier felt very much like Roland’s hand. Passionately and clear-sightedly, Brittain tried to make sense of these extraordinary situations."
Magna Carta 800 years on - article by David Carpenter in The Guardian. "In 1215, John was ... placed beneath the law, but the Magna Carta of 1215 was very far from giving equal treatment to all the king’s subjects. Socially it was a divided and divisive document, often reflecting the interests of a baronial elite a few hundred strong in a population of several millions. Having asserted that taxation required the common consent of the kingdom, the assembly giving that consent was to be attended primarily by earls, barons, bishops and abbots.... In 1215 itself both John and his enemies would have been astonished had they known that the Charter would live on and be celebrated 800 years hence. Especially as within a few months of its promulgation, Magna Carta seemed a dead letter. John had got the pope to quash it.... The barons, likewise abandoning the Charter, deposed John and elected another king in his place, none other than Prince Louis, the eldest son of the king of France. The Charter only survived because, after John’s death in October 1216, the minority government of his son, the nine-year-old Henry III, accepted what John had rejected. In order to win the war against Louis, and, having won the war, consolidate the peace, they issued new versions of the Charter. Then, in 1225, in order to secure a great tax, they issued what became the final and definitive Magna Carta. It is chapters of Henry III’s Charter of 1225, not John’s of 1215, which remain on the Statute Book."
The People's Platform by Astra Taylor - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. 'From a certain angle,' writes Taylor, 'the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.' In fact, she concludes, 'Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.' "
Can these 36 questions make you fall in love with anyone? - short note in The Guardian. "A 36-point questionnaire, which promises to help you and a partner kickstart a relationship, is being shared widely on the web. Could our singleton guinea-pigs find love among the probing questions?"
Seeing the sort: quick-sort with Hungarian folk dance - video and article in Journal of the New Media Caucus, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Algo-Rythmics project pairs basic sorting algorithms from an introductory computer science course with folk dances in Romania (Transylvania).... In the video, each dancer embodies a number (which they are wearing) in an array (depicted via a projection on the curtain behind them).... A comparison between two values is indicated in the dance by downstage movement. The operands wear hats, and the first operand (in a quicksort, known as the pivot) wears a hat with a flower. If the comparison operator evaluates as false (the first operand is greater than the second one), one of the dancers executes a retrograde (reverse) phrase. However, a comparison that evaluates as true (the first operand is less than the second) produces an extensive round of boot slapping. Successfully sorted dancers turn to face the upstage curtain and mostly stop moving."
TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on - article by Robert Crawford in The Guardian. "Because Eliot was a trained philosopher – he wrote a Harvard PhD on philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the subject – he knew that the 'self' in self-consciousness was unstable. 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' maps an unstable self.... Prufrock, inhibitingly aware that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome, alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a sense of vulnerability and pain.... As it develops, up until 'The Waste Land' and beyond, Eliot’s poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on its earlier performances. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it."
Flicker: Your Brain on Movies by Jeffrey Zacks – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "First, Zacks sets out the wealth of experimental evidence which shows that a filmed version of events will likely override our knowledge of the facts. Not only because superstimuli are so compelling, but because we’re not very good at remembering the sources of information that inform our opinions. Was that in the local paper or did my friend tell me about it? Did I learn that from a history book or from watching Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth? Was I watching Osama bin Laden in the film Zero Dark Thirty or in a documentary? The political implications are huge, if not entirely unexpected: Hollywood can win hearts and minds at the expense of the truth. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Zacks argues that there need be no further controversy about whether violence on TV, in games, or on film makes those exposed to it more aggressive: it does.... The mechanisms? Observational learning, being primed to interpret ambiguous stimuli as aggressive, and desensitisation. A strong cocktail."
How economic theory can help stop sexual assault [or: Changing beliefs about what other people believe] - article by Michael Chwe on PBS Newshour website, referenced in Mindhacks blog. "A great deal of social behavior, even violent behavior, is socially regulated in the sense that whether a person does it depends on whether other people do it and condone it.... For example, regardless of how individual members of a college fraternity feel about sexual assault, a fraternity, as a collective, can be a physical and social environment in which a perpetrator has greater confidence, because of fraternal loyalties, that surrounding people will not report him.... Project Callisto, is a web-based system for sexual assault reporting....A survivor can upload and time-stamp evidence, including images, audio and testimony, without having to decide at the time whether to forward it to authorities. This way, evidence is preserved soon after the assault, even if action is not immediate.... Callisto allows a survivor to choose to have his or her evidence forwarded to authorities automatically once another person uploads evidence about the same assailant.... By combining information, Callisto serves as an 'information escrow'.... If people are reluctant to be the only accuser, or are reluctant to report inconclusive information, then we should design a system that ensures that a person will not be the sole accuser and that his or her information will be aggregated with the information of others."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth, jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
The difference between plan and reality - cartoon by Anne-Marie Gainsford, on "the difference between what you think doing a degree will be and the reality of doing it".
The £8.8m typo: how one mistake killed a family business - Pass Notes in The Guardian. "[The] government agency that acts as the registrar for all companies in the UK... recorded information stating that Taylor & Sons Ltd – a 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm employing more than 250 people – had been wound up....The problem was Companies House hadn’t meant to report that Taylor & Sons Ltd had gone into liquidation. They had meant to say Taylor & Son Ltd....Companies House corrected their error three days later, but by then the damage was done: the information had cascaded uncontrollably across the internet.... A judge ruled that Companies House was legally responsible for the firm’s unhappy fate. Damages have yet to be awarded, but lawyers acting for Davison-Sebry have valued the company’s claim at £8.8m. Nine million quid for an ’S’? That’s like the most high-stakes game of Scrabble ever."
'A golden shining moment': the true story behind Atari's ET, the worst video game ever - article by Alex Godfrey in The Guardian. "On 22 September1983, in the dead of night, 13 trucks were driven to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and their contents emptied. Everything was buried and concreted. And that should have been that. But it wasn’t. A few days later, scavengers arrived and found some Atari ET video games. Word got out. The tie-in product had been released to much fanfare the previous December, but had gained a reputation as a stinker. Now, here in New Mexico, as legend began to have it, were millions of them, unloved, unsold, underground. The game, many believed, was responsible for Atari’s sudden downfall, and the company had physically buried its shame. Years later, the internet decreed ET to be the worst video game of all time. Over and over again. In April 2014, a documentary crew turned up to excavate the site and dig up the truth.... 'Why do people want to believe this specific version of this story?' [says Zak Pen, director of the documentary] Why did it need to be that the game was buried? Is it that we naturally are storytellers, and it sounds better that it was because it destroyed the video game industry?”'
Why Grow Up? by Susan Neiman, and Juvenescence by Robert Pogue Harrison – review
by Josh Cohen in The Guardian. "Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? is a spirited philosophical defence of the aspiration to maturity. As she sagely observes, by clinging impotently to youth, we impoverish youth and maturity alike. The vindictive subtext of the message that youth is the pinnacle of life, after all, is that things will only get worse. What better recipe for splitting our lives between an infantilised first act and its increasingly embittered aftermath? In Juvenescence, a penetrating and impressively omnivorous 'cultural history of our age', Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the same malign ambivalence in the collective drive to make ourselves younger in 'looks, behaviour, mentality, lifestyles and, above all, desires'. Our age’s self-defeating ruse is to give the younger generations sovereignty over culture, all the while depriving them of the 'idleness, shelter and solitude' needed to cultivate an authentically creative life.... Both books address our era’s tendency to set youth and age in facile opposition to one another, a tendency that gives rise, Neiman argues, to the most pernicious distortions of political life. In a consumer society, adulthood is confused with the capacity to accumulate overpriced toys, while 'ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams'."
Life after a viral nightmare: from Ecce Homo to revenge porn - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. "You don’t have to have done anything for the internet to claim your name. At 16, Alex Lee became a global heartthrob and, to some, a hate figure, when someone snapped a picture of him simply doing his job: filling bags at Target. Even where some criticism might be fair, the error rarely warrants the punishment. When [Justine] Sacco tweeted 'Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!' she was very obviously joking about racism rather than advocating it, but still, not obviously enough. And you’d expect a 'global head of communications' to know better. [Breanna] Mitchell, who was, let’s remember, a schoolgirl, might have considered the sensitivity of a selfie in Auschwitz more carefully, but her picture was nothing like as crass as it seemed. She had talked for years about visiting with her father and, after he died, she had finally managed it. She took her phone out to record the moment and – perhaps out of habit – happened to smile. The picture was online for a month before anyone noticed. 'I literally woke up one morning and had literally a thousand things on my phone, notifications,' Mitchell said at the time. 'I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people telling me I need to kill myself.' When the race to denounce a bigot begins, people forget about details like whether or not they were guilty. We don’t need to ask where these torrents of scorn come from because we create them ourselves with our clicks and shares. If we had the proper context we might not laugh, so we don’t want context, and don’t get it. Nor is it likely to ever stop."
Vinyl's difficult comeback - article by John Harris in The Guardian. "In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment. A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company."
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerald Russell - review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian. "In the spring of 2006, Gerard Russell was a bored British diplomat stewing in the heat of the Green Zone in Baghdad.... Then he received a call from the high priest of the Mandeans. The Mandeans, he knew, claimed descent from Seth, son of Adam, and believed themselves to be the last followers of John the Baptist. They were also said to be the last surviving remnant of the Gnostic sects that once proliferated across the Middle East in late antiquity. In addition, Arab scholars had long recognised them as 'the last Babylonians'. It was, writes Russell, 'rather like being summoned to meet one of the knights of the Round Table'. He arranged to meet the high priest and his entourage in Al-Rasheed hotel on the edge of the Green Zone. The encounter had, however, a sad conclusion. The high priest told Russell how the American invasion of Iraq had unleashed a firestorm on his people. The Mandeans had been protected by Saddam Hussein, ...but during the anarchy after his fall, and the US occupation that followed, life had become impossible. The high priest spoke of the long series of forced conversions, bombings, killings and kidnappings for ransom that had affected his flock since 2002. Now he wanted to transport the entire community to the west: 'There are only a few hundred of us left in Iraq,' said the high priest. 'And we want to leave. We want your country to give us asylum.'"
Testament of Youth: Vera Brittain and her remarkable life - article in The Guardian by Alexandra Harris, on the occasion of the release of the film of Testament of Youth. "There wasn’t much encouragement in Buxton for a girl who wanted to go to Oxford, but Vera Brittain ignored the disapproving looks, went to Extension lectures, studied and struggled, almost walked out of her entrance exams, and got herself a place at Somerville in 1914. That’s a 20th-century story in itself, but it turned out not to be the central story of Brittain’s life. By the start of term, there was a war on. Her brother, Edward, and Roland Leighton, the man she loved, were going into the army rather than to New College and Merton respectively.... Brittain could not join Roland at the front, but she could put herself at the service of men like him by joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse. For the next four years, during which she lost, one by one, the people she had ever cared about, she worked with astonishing toughness and skill at hospitals in London, Malta and at the purgatorial clearing station in Étaples in northern France. She had been brought up in a society that insisted on a chaperone being present for a tea date with a man; now she had responsibility for mutilated male bodies. Back in Buxton the Germans were hated, but, under corrugated iron in France, the hand of a dying German soldier felt very much like Roland’s hand. Passionately and clear-sightedly, Brittain tried to make sense of these extraordinary situations."
Magna Carta 800 years on - article by David Carpenter in The Guardian. "In 1215, John was ... placed beneath the law, but the Magna Carta of 1215 was very far from giving equal treatment to all the king’s subjects. Socially it was a divided and divisive document, often reflecting the interests of a baronial elite a few hundred strong in a population of several millions. Having asserted that taxation required the common consent of the kingdom, the assembly giving that consent was to be attended primarily by earls, barons, bishops and abbots.... In 1215 itself both John and his enemies would have been astonished had they known that the Charter would live on and be celebrated 800 years hence. Especially as within a few months of its promulgation, Magna Carta seemed a dead letter. John had got the pope to quash it.... The barons, likewise abandoning the Charter, deposed John and elected another king in his place, none other than Prince Louis, the eldest son of the king of France. The Charter only survived because, after John’s death in October 1216, the minority government of his son, the nine-year-old Henry III, accepted what John had rejected. In order to win the war against Louis, and, having won the war, consolidate the peace, they issued new versions of the Charter. Then, in 1225, in order to secure a great tax, they issued what became the final and definitive Magna Carta. It is chapters of Henry III’s Charter of 1225, not John’s of 1215, which remain on the Statute Book."
The People's Platform by Astra Taylor - review by John Naughton in The Guardian. "The big question about the net was always whether it would be as revolutionary as its early evangelists believed. Would it really lead to the overthrow of the old, established order? We are now beginning to see that the answer is: no. We were intoxicated by the exuberance of our own evangelism. 'From a certain angle,' writes Taylor, 'the emerging order looks suspiciously like the old one.' In fact, she concludes, 'Wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world – monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.' "
Can these 36 questions make you fall in love with anyone? - short note in The Guardian. "A 36-point questionnaire, which promises to help you and a partner kickstart a relationship, is being shared widely on the web. Could our singleton guinea-pigs find love among the probing questions?"
Seeing the sort: quick-sort with Hungarian folk dance - video and article in Journal of the New Media Caucus, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "The Algo-Rythmics project pairs basic sorting algorithms from an introductory computer science course with folk dances in Romania (Transylvania).... In the video, each dancer embodies a number (which they are wearing) in an array (depicted via a projection on the curtain behind them).... A comparison between two values is indicated in the dance by downstage movement. The operands wear hats, and the first operand (in a quicksort, known as the pivot) wears a hat with a flower. If the comparison operator evaluates as false (the first operand is greater than the second one), one of the dancers executes a retrograde (reverse) phrase. However, a comparison that evaluates as true (the first operand is less than the second) produces an extensive round of boot slapping. Successfully sorted dancers turn to face the upstage curtain and mostly stop moving."
TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on - article by Robert Crawford in The Guardian. "Because Eliot was a trained philosopher – he wrote a Harvard PhD on philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the subject – he knew that the 'self' in self-consciousness was unstable. 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' maps an unstable self.... Prufrock, inhibitingly aware that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome, alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a sense of vulnerability and pain.... As it develops, up until 'The Waste Land' and beyond, Eliot’s poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on its earlier performances. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it."
Flicker: Your Brain on Movies by Jeffrey Zacks – review by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "First, Zacks sets out the wealth of experimental evidence which shows that a filmed version of events will likely override our knowledge of the facts. Not only because superstimuli are so compelling, but because we’re not very good at remembering the sources of information that inform our opinions. Was that in the local paper or did my friend tell me about it? Did I learn that from a history book or from watching Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth? Was I watching Osama bin Laden in the film Zero Dark Thirty or in a documentary? The political implications are huge, if not entirely unexpected: Hollywood can win hearts and minds at the expense of the truth. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Zacks argues that there need be no further controversy about whether violence on TV, in games, or on film makes those exposed to it more aggressive: it does.... The mechanisms? Observational learning, being primed to interpret ambiguous stimuli as aggressive, and desensitisation. A strong cocktail."
How economic theory can help stop sexual assault [or: Changing beliefs about what other people believe] - article by Michael Chwe on PBS Newshour website, referenced in Mindhacks blog. "A great deal of social behavior, even violent behavior, is socially regulated in the sense that whether a person does it depends on whether other people do it and condone it.... For example, regardless of how individual members of a college fraternity feel about sexual assault, a fraternity, as a collective, can be a physical and social environment in which a perpetrator has greater confidence, because of fraternal loyalties, that surrounding people will not report him.... Project Callisto, is a web-based system for sexual assault reporting....A survivor can upload and time-stamp evidence, including images, audio and testimony, without having to decide at the time whether to forward it to authorities. This way, evidence is preserved soon after the assault, even if action is not immediate.... Callisto allows a survivor to choose to have his or her evidence forwarded to authorities automatically once another person uploads evidence about the same assailant.... By combining information, Callisto serves as an 'information escrow'.... If people are reluctant to be the only accuser, or are reluctant to report inconclusive information, then we should design a system that ensures that a person will not be the sole accuser and that his or her information will be aggregated with the information of others."
The golden age of Peter and Jane: how Ladybird took flight - article by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Whether it was Things to Make, Florence Nightingale or The Story of Oil, the layout was always the same. On the left-hand side was text in a font and vocabulary appropriate to your reading age, and on the opposite side was a full-page illustration of near-photographic accuracy, packed with such colour and exuberance that, decades later, it is still possible to close your eyes and recall every detail.... Although Wills & Hepworth, jobbing Loughborough printers, had been churning out mediocre children’s story books for decades, the classic Ladybird formula emerged from war‑time exigencies. In order to keep their presses rolling and make the most of their much reduced paper ration, Wills & Hepworth began to produce 56‑page books that could, ingeniously, be printed on just one large sheet measuring 30 inches by 40. This allowed them to keep the price to a very reasonable 2s 6d for an extraordinary 30 years. Ladybird books were cheap enough for a child to buy with her own pocket money, or for a grandparent to give as a stocking filler, or for schools to award as prizes (that’s how I got my Story of Clothes and Costume). And the fact that the books increasingly dealt only with factual subjects allowed parents and teachers to reassure themselves that they were spending money on building a better child. Buying a Ladybird book became a kind of public service."
The difference between plan and reality - cartoon by Anne-Marie Gainsford, on "the difference between what you think doing a degree will be and the reality of doing it".
The £8.8m typo: how one mistake killed a family business - Pass Notes in The Guardian. "[The] government agency that acts as the registrar for all companies in the UK... recorded information stating that Taylor & Sons Ltd – a 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm employing more than 250 people – had been wound up....The problem was Companies House hadn’t meant to report that Taylor & Sons Ltd had gone into liquidation. They had meant to say Taylor & Son Ltd....Companies House corrected their error three days later, but by then the damage was done: the information had cascaded uncontrollably across the internet.... A judge ruled that Companies House was legally responsible for the firm’s unhappy fate. Damages have yet to be awarded, but lawyers acting for Davison-Sebry have valued the company’s claim at £8.8m. Nine million quid for an ’S’? That’s like the most high-stakes game of Scrabble ever."
'A golden shining moment': the true story behind Atari's ET, the worst video game ever - article by Alex Godfrey in The Guardian. "On 22 September1983, in the dead of night, 13 trucks were driven to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and their contents emptied. Everything was buried and concreted. And that should have been that. But it wasn’t. A few days later, scavengers arrived and found some Atari ET video games. Word got out. The tie-in product had been released to much fanfare the previous December, but had gained a reputation as a stinker. Now, here in New Mexico, as legend began to have it, were millions of them, unloved, unsold, underground. The game, many believed, was responsible for Atari’s sudden downfall, and the company had physically buried its shame. Years later, the internet decreed ET to be the worst video game of all time. Over and over again. In April 2014, a documentary crew turned up to excavate the site and dig up the truth.... 'Why do people want to believe this specific version of this story?' [says Zak Pen, director of the documentary] Why did it need to be that the game was buried? Is it that we naturally are storytellers, and it sounds better that it was because it destroyed the video game industry?”'
Seen and heard: January 2015
New Year’s Day concert from the Vienna Musikverein, live on BBC – this year, with a technology theme. Extraordinary: I never realised before that you could use the titles of Strauss dances to map the conversational topics of the smart people in Vienna, like trends in social media: for example, the Explosions-Polka of 1847, following the discovery of guncotton.
Last Tango in Halifax - third series on BBC TV. Another dense dose of family conflict and personal trategy, but the critics (such as Rebecca Nicholson) are right in pointing to the quality of Sally Wainwright's writing and the superb cast's acting in carrying us along, so that it somehow never seems unrealistic. I'm inclined to agree with the Guardian TV critic who said of Derek Jacobi's character: "I hope I'm like that at his age."
Boxers and Saints - linked pair of graphic novels by Chinese American Gene Luen Yang, set in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion. In one, a village boy whose region is being oppressed and humiliated by European foreigners and their Christian priests, learns martial arts and joins the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists; in the other, a village girl, whose personality and birth order (fourth) means she's seen as unlucky, joins a Christian community to escape her oppressive family life. Their stories intertwine, of course, and follow a tragic trajectory as the Boxers come to take on not only the foreign devils but the secondary devils of Chinese christians. Expertly and movingly executed.
Scheherezade, by Rimsky-Korsakov - recording by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. I first heard a track from this on ClassicFM, played by John Suchet at the special request of his (Turkish) dry cleaner, who had enjoyed it on a previous playing. It's a wonderful piece of music anyway, but I think this must be the definitive recording of it: this orchestra, under conductor Sascha Goetzel, is specialising in European-oriental crossover music, and so they're perfectly placed to bring out the orientalisms of the score. They do some instrument substitutions too, so for example the violin theme as Scheherezade begins each story is accompanied by a kanun, which gives it a magical other-worldly quality.
Broken Age - fabulous adventure game (or rather, the first half of one) from Tim Schafer (ex-LucasArts, Grim Fandango etc), beautifully realised for iPad. There are two parallel stories: in one, a boy lives alone on a spaceship in a kiddy environment maintained by an overprotective maternal computer and is striving to break out of the system's limitations and escape childhood; in the other, a girl is chosen to be one of the village maidens sacrificed to a monster (it's considered an honour, and the maidens dress up as cup-cakes to boost their monster-attractiveness) but she breaks with tradition by asking "why don't we kill the monster instead?" Obviously the two of them have to meet - but for what happens after they do so we'll have to wait for the second act, due out this year. Beautiful graphics, great writing (every dialogue choice delivers something worth hearing), top quality voice acting (including Elijah Wood as the boy), and excellent music; definitely one of my all-time favourites.
Last Tango in Halifax - third series on BBC TV. Another dense dose of family conflict and personal trategy, but the critics (such as Rebecca Nicholson) are right in pointing to the quality of Sally Wainwright's writing and the superb cast's acting in carrying us along, so that it somehow never seems unrealistic. I'm inclined to agree with the Guardian TV critic who said of Derek Jacobi's character: "I hope I'm like that at his age."
Boxers and Saints - linked pair of graphic novels by Chinese American Gene Luen Yang, set in China at the time of the Boxer rebellion. In one, a village boy whose region is being oppressed and humiliated by European foreigners and their Christian priests, learns martial arts and joins the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists; in the other, a village girl, whose personality and birth order (fourth) means she's seen as unlucky, joins a Christian community to escape her oppressive family life. Their stories intertwine, of course, and follow a tragic trajectory as the Boxers come to take on not only the foreign devils but the secondary devils of Chinese christians. Expertly and movingly executed.
Scheherezade, by Rimsky-Korsakov - recording by the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. I first heard a track from this on ClassicFM, played by John Suchet at the special request of his (Turkish) dry cleaner, who had enjoyed it on a previous playing. It's a wonderful piece of music anyway, but I think this must be the definitive recording of it: this orchestra, under conductor Sascha Goetzel, is specialising in European-oriental crossover music, and so they're perfectly placed to bring out the orientalisms of the score. They do some instrument substitutions too, so for example the violin theme as Scheherezade begins each story is accompanied by a kanun, which gives it a magical other-worldly quality.
Broken Age - fabulous adventure game (or rather, the first half of one) from Tim Schafer (ex-LucasArts, Grim Fandango etc), beautifully realised for iPad. There are two parallel stories: in one, a boy lives alone on a spaceship in a kiddy environment maintained by an overprotective maternal computer and is striving to break out of the system's limitations and escape childhood; in the other, a girl is chosen to be one of the village maidens sacrificed to a monster (it's considered an honour, and the maidens dress up as cup-cakes to boost their monster-attractiveness) but she breaks with tradition by asking "why don't we kill the monster instead?" Obviously the two of them have to meet - but for what happens after they do so we'll have to wait for the second act, due out this year. Beautiful graphics, great writing (every dialogue choice delivers something worth hearing), top quality voice acting (including Elijah Wood as the boy), and excellent music; definitely one of my all-time favourites.
Thursday, 8 January 2015
Seen and heard: December 2014
Peter Pan – pantomime at Milton Keynes Theatre. Definitely the best panto in our grand-daughter’s four years of panto-going. At her first panto it was clear that most of the budget had been spent on a 3D film insert (that was back when 3D was all the rage), leaving not so much for costumes and sets, or even a decent script. This year they’d spent the budget much more wisely: on music rights (so every song was a hit), and on a good cast, including streetdance company Flawless (who did an astonishing dance-in-the-dark, only their body outlines visible picked out with flashing LED lights, worth the price of admission on its own) and a tremendous sulky Tinkerbell (the dwarf Francesca Mills, working on roller skates as well as wires).
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
Monster High: Frights, Camera, Action - DVD in our grand-daughter's Christmas bundle, of which most of the presents on her wishlist were Monster High branded, this being apparently what the smart seven-year olds are into these days. The Monster High series is set amongst the girls at an American west coast high school (boys can be referred to as "cute" but that's the extent of the sexual involvement), with the twist that all the characters are various kinds of horror film monster. There's a lot of wordplay, so for example this movie-themed episode refers to Hauntlywood instead of Hollywood, but unlike, say, Scooby Doo, no actual horror or scares; girl relationships and rivalries are the things which are important. It's quite well-written and a great deal better than it sounds, but I don't think I'll be checking out any further episodes on my own account.
Carols from King's 1954 - a remastered transmission of the very first of the annual broadcasts of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the year after the Coronation, usually taken as the tipping point in mass TV ownership and a landmark in event broadcasting. Interesting to see what hasn't changed (the choir, under Boris Ord, and the readings sounded pretty much the same - I'd expected the accents to be plummier) and what has. Camera positions were very limited of course, but so was the sound; they seemed to have miked the choir and the lectern, but they had great difficulty balancing the organ, so wisely most of the carols were a capella.
Sorcery 2 - very smooth and attractive app-conversion of Steve Jackson's 1984 gamebook. I've previously praised Sorcery 1 (see also the Adventure Gamers review), and this second part is even better, with a much more complex narrative including go-back-in-time loops to allow you to take other pathways (almost certainly necessary to find everything you need to complete the game). If anyone still believes a multiple-choice gamebook format means trivial problems because the solution has to be listed amongst the options, they should look at the players’ appeals for help at the bottom of this page. The engine behind Sorcery (and the well-reviewed 80 Days) is available in cut-down form as the Inklewriter, which I’m investigating (along with Undum) as another possible engine for a web-conversion of my 1987 game Bestiary, since it has a nicer and more contemporary look than Quest. (Varytale alas is no longer supported.)
Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince - a much-respected book, intended for screenplay authors moving into the games industry, but full of insight into the working of large-scale games development (maybe 100 people on the team for an AAA game). Of particular interest to me, from the point of view of explaining learning materials development to academics, were: (1) the role of the games designer, not to be confused with a graphic designer, who holds the vision of the gameplay on which the game will stand or fall (learning design plays an analogous role in learning materials development, though a learning designer doesn't have seniority over academic authors who it's assumed are normally their own learning designers); and (2) the advice to screenplay writers that "a game is not a film", meaning that what happens, and in what order, is as much dependent on the player as the game-makers (the analogous advice for academic authors would be that "learning materials are not textbooks", to counter their tendency to write didactic presentation first and treat learning activities as an add-on).
The Boston Record, CD of live concert by John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension - a welcome birthday present, though I can't now recall when or why I added it to my wishlist, as the name carries no associations for me. I must have seen a review and checked it out online. My playlist is now enhanced by their super-energetic guitar-led jazz rock; it's the sound of my generation.
"Sparks will fly: How to hack your home", Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Young People - this year given by a lively young woman named Danielle George, who turned out to be a professor of Engineering at Manchester. Quite a change from George Porter's lectures in my own childhood, and I don't just mean the age and gender of the lecturer. Where George Porter would teach the science and then do a demonstration (which might well be fun and cool), Danielle George started with the fun and cool demonstration and then explained what was going on. Also, characteristically for an engineer, she repeatedly referred to the practical work as "tinkering" or more especially "hacking" - shorn of its criminal and pejorative overtones to mean simply opening up a device and making it do something other than what it was originally built to do. This is the pedagogy of experiential learning applied in the lecture hall.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" - from a box set of Series 3, part of a Christmas present to complete my collection. This was the episode I chose to watch first, not only because it's a good one but because it's now regarded as a turning point in the entire Star Trek opus. The original series was full of Sixties idealism, portraying a future free of racial and social conflicts, with humanity at peace and able to devote its resources to science and exploration. There were a few threats to this happy world, in the form of the Klingons and the Romulans and so forth, but on the whole the original series showed an optimistic vision of human progress, and this was continued into the first seasons of The Next Generation. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” suggested for the first time that progress was not inevitable, by showing an alternative timeline in which the Federation was engaged in a damaging decades-long war with the Klingon Empire, and the Enterprise was a warship, fighting desperately for its survival. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine took the move away from the optimistic vision one stage further, portraying the protagonists' harmonious relationships as fragile things which needed to be built and sustained, constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the chaotic universe. If TNG gave us Bajor (part occupied Palestine, part occupied France), then DS9 gave us the Maquis (the Federation rebels who took up arms in rejection of the peace treaty with the Cardassians, taking their name from the guerilla fighters of the French resistance), and ultimately Section 31, Starfleet’s secret black operations division, which drove a coach and horses through the moral certainties of the original series with the claim that it was only their own unspeakable activities that allow Federation idealists to sleep safe in their beds. Say what you like about Star Trek: its vision of the future has certainly moved with the times.
Saturday, 3 January 2015
Cuttings December 2014
What should we do with private schools? - article by David Kynaston in The Guardian. "Are we sure that the systematic pursuit of social mobility is necessarily such a good idea? ... There is the argument that to bang on about social mobility is, whether out of naivety or pragmatic calculation, to be choosing the soft option. Or put another way, that it may in its own terms be justified to pursue greater equality of opportunity, but that what matters far more to the welfare of most people is greater equality of outcome – a far tougher policy objective, but one almost entirely written out of the script during the New Labour years and now only falteringly returned to."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
What should we teach our children about money? - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "My father would often ask the rhetorical questions 'Do you think I’m made of money?' or 'Do you think money grows on trees?', to which the only answer I could muster was yes. Money, for me, came out of nowhere. Children live, like high royalty, in a cash-free zone, where they are magically provided for by an invisible, beneficent hand. What, then, are we to teach our children about money – as they begin life with very little concept of how it works? They will eventually grasp that it is the oil that lubricates society – even basic social amenities like health or education are calculated on a pecuniary cost-benefit premise; ie, how curing this or that disease will benefit GDP."
The Madness of Modern Parenting - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Something has happened around the language, perception and presentation of danger in the area of parenting. Gestation and .... nought to three have become minefields.... Our culture becomes more and more neurotic, to the extent that, by 2013, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists was advising women not to sit on new furniture or eat from a new frying pan....The executive summary said 'this paper outlines a practical approach that pregnant women can take, if they are concerned.' There is so much wrong with that statement – either these things are harmful or they aren’t. If they are, they should be banned. If we don’t know but think they probably are, they should be banned while we find out. If we don’t know, but think they probably aren’t, then everyone should just stop worrying. Instead, this peels off a certain, superior kind of mother – the one who is 'concerned'... The end result is that risk is removed from the public domain – an environmental chemical can only be dealt with at a legislative level – and recast as individual responsibility."
Wonder Woman: the feminist - article by Jill Lapore in The Guardian. "Superman’s publisher, Charlie Gaines, read [Olive] Byrne’s article [in defence of comics] and was so impressed that he decided to hire [Byrne's interviewee William] Marston as a consulting psychologist. Marston convinced Gaines that what he really needed to counter the attack on comics was a female superhero. At first, Gaines objected. Every female pulp and comic-book heroine, he told Marston, had been a failure (which wasn’t strictly true). 'But they weren’t superwomen,' Marston countered. 'They weren’t superior to men.' A female superhero, Marston insisted, was the best answer to the critics, since 'the comics’ worst offence was their bloodcurdling masculinity'. In February 1941, he submitted a typewritten draft of the first instalment of 'Suprema, the Wonder Woman'."
Why our memory fails us - article by Chrisopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in The New York Times, cited in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 Blog. "In a 2008 talk, ... [Neil Degrasse Tyson] said that in order 'to distinguish we from they' - meaning to divide Judeo-Christian Americans from fundamentalist Muslims - [President George W. Bush] uttered the words 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' ... In his post-9/11 speech, Mr. Bush actually said, 'The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends,' and he said nothing about the stars. Mr. Bush had indeed once said something like what Dr. Tyson remembered; in 2003 Mr. Bush said, in tribute to the astronauts lost in the Columbia space shuttle explosion, that 'the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' Critics pointed these facts out; some accused Dr. Tyson of lying and argued that the episode should call into question his reliability as a scientist and a public advocate.... Politicians should respond as Dr. Tyson eventually did: Stop stonewalling, admit error, note that such things happen, apologize and move on. But the rest of us aren’t off the hook. It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it."
Good Omens: devilish festive fun as fantasy novel makes radio debut - article in The Guardian on the BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's novel Good Omens. "The task of writing and directing the project has fallen to Dirk Maggs, best known for his BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 'Good Omens is an epic,' said Maggs. 'I go on and on about radio being the true visual medium, and I truly believe it is – it paints pictures in the imagination and bypasses the optic nerve and sneaks in through the side door. So for me, radio is the perfect medium for Good Omens. We can create everything from the armies of heaven and hell to a bunch of children playing in a chalk quarry, it’s got all those elements.'"
Twitter and Instagram users can learn a lot about capturing the zeitgeist from a 1920s Chicago journalist - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian about Ben Hecht, who wrote a daily sketch of Chicago city life throughout most of the 1920s. "Hecht was part of an international cadre of reporters who all had a similar idea at the same time: to make newswriting literary, so it could sustain greater length, pack a bigger emotional punch, but to use demotic language for a mass audience. They called it 'reportage' – which is only French for reporting, but denotes its character as literary non-fiction.... "Eight years on from the start of Twitter, four years from the launch of Instagram, we should be claiming our right to be lyrical, observational and profound on social media.... Hecht’s generation took a new form that had become instantly hackneyed – tabloid journalism – and gave it literary edge. In the process, the society they lived in became more navigable. They understood that a packed, multiethnic urban community like Chicago in the 20th century could only be held together by a rapidly formed collective memory.... Today we live in a packed, multiethnic and urban globe. We have the tools to give ourselves the gift of memory, a collective shared experience with people we’ve never met, across a vast global network. Yet we’ve hardly exploited their potential. We should challenge ourselves to use them better."
Christmas TV: five key moments - article in The Guardian by Joe Moran, drawing on his book Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. "Our modern idea of Christmas owes as much to television as it does to the Victorians. Christmas and TV are made for each other: they both rely on the sense of a scattered national community, gathered together in 20m living rooms. Just as Christmas is ecumenical enough in its customs to be celebrated by people of all faiths and no faith, television requires us only to make the rudimentary commitment of turning on the set in order to join its fleeting and virtual society of viewers. Recalling the Christmas TV of the past is an evocative but slightly eerie experience. It makes you realise just how much forced bonhomie and fake snow, with a lot of it filmed under baking-hot studio lights in August, has been deployed over the last 70-odd years. All to convince us that at this time of year we have something in common."
That’s me in the picture: Ros Sare passing the poll tax protest, London, 1990 - "I was surprised when I saw this photograph in a colour supplement a few days after the demonstration. It was captioned 'A West End shopper argues with a protester', but that’s not what happened at all: I was trying to calm him down.... We had got to the Trocadero side of Piccadilly Circus, looking down Haymarket, when I saw the man in the picture – he looked like he could have been one of my sons’ friends. He was absolutely frantic. The police were holding him and I said to him, 'For god’s sake, calm down or you’ll get yourself arrested.' I wasn’t concerned about getting involved: I’m not the type to sit back. He said, 'They’ve got my girl', and then I saw this young girl, about 17, being held down by five policemen with her throat against the railings. It was awful. She was squealing. My husband went straight over and yelled at them, 'Let her go. You’re hurting her.' To our amazement, the police did let her go, and then somehow they let go of the lad, too. The couple were reunited and I said, 'Now just run. Get the hell out of here.' And they did.... A few years later, this image was used in a media textbook to illustrate how a picture can lie. I look like the typical conservative middle-England Tory voter (which I’m not), objecting to the protest. The truth is, I felt bloody angry that day." See also this discussion of the event, which reproduces Ros Sare's original letter correcting the reporting.
Francis Fukuyama: ‘In recently democratised countries I’m still a rock star’ - interview by Wesley Yang in The Guardian. "His book [The Origins of Political Order] makes clear the fundamental debility of a political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)