Cuttings: January 2020

How we gave Oxford University applicants a level playing field – article by Marchella Ward in The Guardian. "A huge range of factors are known to affect performance in the application process, including school type, access to experiences beyond the curriculum, opportunities to develop particular kinds of cultural capital and familiarity with higher education. Expecting all applicants to perform in similar ways was disadvantaging those who had not had the privilege of being taught how to make their abilities legible against the kinds of metrics used in university admissions processes. Once we had begun to think critically about our expectations of applicants – and to admit to ourselves that it was not fair to expect potential to look the same in applicants who had had vastly different opportunities – something changed. We looked at the kinds of questions we were asking and the kinds of answers we were expecting, we interrogated our own and each others’ assumptions about different forms potential might take in an applicant, and asked our admitting tutors to come together for a conversation about how to use contextual data to recognise diverse potential. As we sought to uncouple privilege from the assessment of potential, the most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged. This kind of statistic sometimes draws accusations of 'social engineering' but bear with me: all of our offer-holders, regardless of background, are expected to achieve similar A-level grades. It is obvious why those who have achieved these against a background of disadvantage should have a higher rate of success."

When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian.  "It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men.... The fight-or-flight response is just one provoked by a complex cocktail of hormones our brain releases in extreme danger. There’s cortisol, for energy, but also natural opiates, which act to dull physical and emotional pain, corticosteroids, which reduce energy, and oxytocin, which increases positive feelings. When a woman experiences sexual assault, she may fight or flee, but as a self-protection mechanism her body may also render her physically immobile – scientists refer to this as 'tonic immobility' or 'rape-induced paralysis' – and appear emotionless. It is the evolutionary equivalent to playing dead. Research suggests that up to 50% of survivors experience this during sexual assault. Additionally, the natural opiates inhibit survivors from encoding what happened into their memory, which makes it easy for legal defence teams to question their reliability as a witness.... Last August, Robin Tolson, a male judge in his 60s, issued a family court judgment in a child custody case that suggested a woman had not been raped by her partner because she hadn’t physically fought back. She appealed, and her case was heard by high court judge Alison Russell. ... Russell’s judgment ... is excoriating about her colleague, describing his approach to consent as 'manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence'. She says: 'The logical conclusion of this judge’s approach is it is both lawful and acceptable for a man to have sex with his partner regardless of their… willingness to participate.' Yes, you read that right: Tolson falls into the quarter of the population who think it’s OK for a man to rape his partner."

No history, no languages… the end of humanities only deepens divides – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Sunderland University wants to become more 'career-focused'. So it is to shut down all its language, politics and history courses and promote instead degrees that 'align with particular employment sectors'. It’s an illustration of what happens when universities turn into businesses, and their ethos is defined by the market. It’s also symbolic of the divisions that now rend Britain’s social fabric.... [It] seems to suggest that the study of the humanities should be reserved for the children of the rich, who can afford to move, while local working-class students should be confined to 'vocational' subjects. Existing divisions will only deepen."

Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece? Three million coins bearing the slogan 'Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations' are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union. However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation.'The "Brexit" 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,' wrote the novelist on Twitter."

A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders: the curious history of alphabetical order – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters.... The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.... It may be a good moment to tell the hidden history of alphabetical order, when computer algorithms seem ready to do away with it. Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed 'invisible through its eight centuries of active duty', in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance."

Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left – article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Walter Ong, a linguist and Jesuit priest who died at 91 in 2003[,] ... spent his life trying to understand the revolutionary technologies, such as the television and radio, unleashed during his lifetime. ... He did so by ... studying the difference between human cultures rooted in orality and those rooted in literacy. His topic matters for Twitter more than you may think.... For oral cultures, words are primarily vibrations in the air, Ong argued. Words must therefore be memorable, few in number, and tied to the concrete reality of day-to-day life. But after the advent of writing, words become more than invisible sounds. They become permanent symbols that exist outside their utterance and can be read long after the speaker has died. Words can also divorce from the physical world and start to reference ideas, concepts, and abstract states. And instead of words needing to aid memory, as they do in oral cultures (by using a repeated epithet, such as Homer’s 'wine-dark sea'), written words can suddenly act as a form of memory themselves. ... As I once wrote: 'Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.'... By 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. 'The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,' she said, 'where the collective "we" treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.' ... Twitter has been a mess of speech-like tweets interpreted as print and print-like tweets interpreted as speech for as long as most users can remember. [But recently] I’ve wondered if that instability presents a political problem—particularly for the left in the United States. The word that sticks out to me now from Stewart’s post is identity."

Seen and heard: October to December 2019

Beneath a Steel Sky – classic 1994 adventure by Charles Cecil, before he made the ground-breaking Broken Sword. Low resolution graphics and a basic point-and-click interface, but a great story with great characters and great voice acting (nice to hear British characters for a change) earns this game its place in adventure history.

Richard Alston Dance Company: Final Edition tour – seen at Northampton Derngate. As always, lovely light and beautiful dance, to evocative music (Monteverdi, Chopin, Elgar, Brahms). Sad to think that this is the last time we’ll see this fine company, which is disbanding because of the difficulties of operating in the current financial climate.

World on Fire – tremendous WW2 TV drama series. I loved the multiple international characters and inter-connecting storylines, but I was rather hoping for closure rather than a second series.

We must deliver: Brexit, Johnson and the robots of Milton Keynes – video by John Harris for The Guardian. During the conference season, with Parliament still stuck in Brexit debate, the Guardian ran an ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ series, to explore life outside the Westminster bubble. This episode was from Milton Keynes, “a town evenly split between leave and remain, and hurtling into the future. Robots are delivering people’s shopping, but there’s also homelessness and glaring inequality, and clear signs that most people want no part of all the Brexit madness.” Our delivery robots really are cute, and I’m happy to see them getting a national profile. (See also the text version ‘Britain is less polarised than the media would have us believe’.)

The rise and fall of social media platforms 2003-2019 – Impressive and informative animated graphic, noted in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.

Downton Abbey (film) – how good the splendour and period detail of the locations and large-scale set pieces look on the big screen, unlike say Dad’s Army with which the charm was largely in its tatty war-economy settings and confinement to a half-hour TV show.

Enneagram Rhapsody – perceptive and very funny, but only if you know the Enneagram. The large audience who get all the jokes turns out to be a US church where it’s been part of their ministry.

Broken Sword 4: The Angel of Death – another adventure game in the Broken Sword series, but not one of the best. (See the review in Adventure Gamers.) George is as amusing as ever, especially when he’s trying to get into the Vatican by pretending to be a stupid American tourist, but Nico’s absence for the first half if the game is keenly felt, and her replacement is no substitute (even if there turns out to be a plot reason why she reveals nothing about herself). And many of the puzzles are just too hard.

Mythos – retelling of the ancient Greek myths by Stephen Fry. I was disappointed; some parts were boring, where Fry was trying to be scholarly and felt the need to tell us the names and relationships of obscure deities about whom nothing further is known; other parts were just silly, where he was trying to be a comedian and make the gods talk in 21st century colloquialisms. It is possible to tell myths in a way which is accessible and relatable and yet delivers their ancient power; Neil Gaiman did it with the Norse myths, for example.

His Dark Materials – excellent BBC dramatisation of the Philip Pullman novel series, with a very powerful Lyra in Dafne Keen, who was so good in Logan. Her reactions are particularly strong, the hallmark of a good actor, which locks the narrative around her and makes us see the fantastical places and events through her eyes. And a splendidly creepy turn from Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter.

Official Secrets – excellent film telling the story of GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun, who in 2003 leaked US/UK efforts to blackmail UN representatives into supporting a war with Iraq. Kiera Knightly as Gun is particularly effective in showing the emotional toll of the investigation and subsequent prosecution. There’s also a neat reminder for all copy editors and proofreaders about the times when you shouldn’t change US to UK spelling. The archive footage of mass street protests against the war brought back memories and reminded us that governmental lies and efforts to circumvent or suppress the institutions of democracy did not originate with the Johnson administration.

Wyrd Sisters – decent local amateur production of the stage play derived from Terry Pratchett’s Shakespeare / Macbeth Discworld spoof. An interesting programme note that Pratchett anticipated the internet’s potential for spreading fake news in his 1995 interview of Bill Gates.

Akhnaten live from New York Met – my favourite Philip Glass opera. Great to see it staged and on a big screen, with top singers belting it out in close up.

Anna’s Quest – proper fairy tale adventure game, with a decidedly Germanic and Grimm (or grim) feel (the producer is German). Nicely scripted and voice-acted characters, including an innocent (but not dull) heroine, and well-integrated puzzles.

The Scarecrow’s Wedding – the Christmas show at The Stables. The performers, Scamp Theatre, really know their craft, in their interactions with the audience coming across like mature professionals rather than students just out of drama school. Skilled musicians too, singing some really great songs, including a blues number (sung by Betty O'Barley while keeping the crows at bay) worth the price of admission on its own.

Star Trek: Discovery – recent addition to the franchise, now available on Freeview. Interesting, though rather violent, and suffering from the absence of any likeable or even relatable characters; the principal character, Michael, is the strongest but for plot reasons she is necessarily remote. Still better than Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the classic shows. We’ll see how it develops.

Paddington 2 – fun sequel, with much more of the authentic trope of Paddington trying to help but getting into difficulties. Best sight gag: when he accidentally leaves a red sock in the prison washing machine, so that all the inmate’s uniforms are dyed pink. And a stirring speech by Mr Brown when he denounces Mr Curry’s bigoted anti-immigrant stance.

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman – prequel to His Dark Materials. Compelling writing, with a very vivid sense of place – in this case, mainly the Thames above Oxford – and a persistent atmosphere of menace, which makes the actual violence when it does occur all the more shocking.

Cuttings: December 2019

Slow-Reading is the New Deep Learning – article by David Handel on medium.com, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Speed-readers aspire to double, triple, or even massively increase their base reading rate. Research paper after research paper has concluded that as reading speed goes up as a result of effortful speed-reading, comprehension goes down. ... But there is a far more profound issue at hand that most critics overlook when they bash speed-reading. Reading with the intention of learning involves far more than achieving simple comprehension. ... By reading slowly, you allow for the requisite time to employ your central executive. You need to focus your attention, utilize the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. New ideas, concepts and facts you’re encountering must be moved into the episodic buffer where you can play with and manipulate them. And the best kind of manipulation you can employ with your working memory is metacognition.... As you read, you should be having an internal dialog using your inner voice (phonological loop) to perform quality assurance of the words that you are seeing and reading (visuospatial sketchpad). As you read, you should be consciously asking yourself questions ... Then you should use the results of this self-interrogation to regulate your next steps to master the material."

Biased Algorithms Are Easier to Fix Than Biased People – article by Sendhil Mullainthan in The New York Times, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "In one study published 15 years ago, two people applied for a job. Their résumés were about as similar as two résumés can be. One person was named Jamal, the other Brendan. In a study published this year, two patients sought medical care. Both were grappling with diabetes and high blood pressure. One patient was black, the other was white. Both studies documented racial injustice: In the first, the applicant with a black-sounding name got fewer job interviews. In the second, the black patient received worse care. But they differed in one crucial respect. In the first, hiring managers made biased decisions. In the second, the culprit was a computer program. As a co-author of both studies, I see them as a lesson in contrasts.... One difference between these studies is the work needed to uncover bias. Our 2004 résumé study resembled a complex covert operation more than traditional academic research. ... This went on for months... By contrast, uncovering algorithmic discrimination was far more straightforward.... Humans are inscrutable in a way that algorithms are not. Our explanations for our behavior are shifting and constructed after the fact. To measure racial discrimination by people, we must create controlled circumstances in the real world where only race differs. For an algorithm, we can create equally controlled just by feeding it the right data and observing its behavior. Algorithms and humans also differ on what can be done about bias once it is found. With our résumé study, fixing the problem has proved to be extremely difficult.... By contrast, we’ve already built a prototype that would fix the algorithmic bias we found — as did the original manufacturer, who, we concluded, had no intention of producing biased results in the first place. ... Changing algorithms is easier than changing people: software on computers can be updated; the 'wetware' in our brains has so far proven much less pliable."

Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound – article by Charles Bramesco in The Guardian. Midge Costin's career’s emphasis on education gave her the idea to condense a semester’s worth of introductory material into one compact package, breaking down the essentials of her craft for an audience of laypeople. She introduces and defines key terms – foley work, automated dialogue replacement, mono v stereo v surround sound – in order to render visible labor that generally goes unseen and unnoticed when done well.... Just about everyone takes good audio work for granted, from the casual viewer to the budget-balancers at the studios. 'They say sound is 50% of the story, but on the films I was doing, the post-production sound budget would be 1% to 1.5% of the total,' Costin recalls. 'The average moviegoer thinks that when you turn on the camera, it starts also recording sound. They don’t even get that they’re recorded separately and synced. How much work going into sound, when done correctly, isn’t even perceptible.'"

'It's cool now': why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again – article by Keith Stuart in The Guardian. "Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped. This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call 'a moment'.... Why now? We live in an era of complex fantasy video games such as The Witcher and Elder Scrolls that offer rich, incredibly detailed worlds to explore. In comparison, D&D still uses paper, pencils and dice. Now in its fifth iteration, it offers modernised and simplified rules, but the basic idea remains the same: a group of people sit round a table and pretend to be warriors, mages and elves embarking on imagined quests and deciding the outcome of battles and other climactic events through rolls of the dice.... Even the most sophisticated open-world fantasy video game imposes limits on players’ decisions and abilities. Your interactions are mostly restricted to combat or engaging in highly directed multiple-choice conversations, and there is a fixed narrative you have to follow. In D&D, however, everything is seamless and improvised – the Dungeon Master might have a plan, but if the players decide they don’t want to raid the dungeon, and instead want to hang out in an interesting local tavern, a good Master can be flexible enough to indulge that. ... The human contact element of D&D is also vital. In an era when much of our socialising is mediated through phone screens and social media, role-playing is one thing that gets people in the same room. 'With digital games, you can play co-op but it doesn’t quite have the connection of real people at a table,' says Richard Whitters, senior art director for D&D. 'This is a thing that humans have always done: gathering around the campfire, telling stories, interacting.' "

'Do you wind it up?': today’s teens tackle rotary phones, FM radio and map reading – article by Sam Wallaston in The Guardian. "Three 15-year-old school children are on the phone, in class. No, it’s OK, they’re supposed to be; they’ve been told to, by me, with permission from their teacher. And they’re not actually on the phone, because they don’t know how to use it. It’s an old-fashioned rotary telephone, finger-in-the-dial variety. They’re tapping it, prodding at the holes. Hahahaha – they haven’t got a clue. Loxford is an academy in Ilford, east London. I’ve come here with a suitcase stuffed full of the past, tech from my own childhood, mostly borrowed from nostalgic hoarder colleagues. Everything in the case is obsolete: it’s all been shrunk to fit into the smartphones today’s 15-year-olds almost all have. It’s a kind of social experiment, about different generations, lost skills, changing technology... OK, and it’s also about having a laugh; and getting my generation’s own back for those times we’ve had to go crawling to a teenager for technical assistance, such as asking how to make the video on WhatsApp work."

The Adventures of Apostrophe Man – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. (1) Apostrophe Man: "My super-sense is tingling! Somebody needs my help! (2) Apostrophe Man runs. (3) "My God!" says Apostrophe Man, having arrived at a burning building which a sign declares to be "St. Peters Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts". (4) Apostrophe Man summons his powers... (5) ... and zaps the sign. (6) "Much better," says Apostrophe Man. The sign now reads correctly "St. Peter's Library..." The Library itself has now been completely consumed by the fire.

Sister act: how Little Women has come of age on the big screen – article by Aida Edemariam in The Guardian. "Again and again lines in Gerwig’s [2019] film are drawn from Alcott’s own life.... In the book, Jo says: 'I don’t believe I shall ever marry. I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man'; in the film she says: 'I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe' – which comes from a letter Alcott wrote to a friend after visiting her just-married older sister. So many pithy statements about sexual politics are given to Amy ... and to Aunt March ... that the film threatens to become a 21st-century feminist lecture – until one remembers that they were all subjects about which Alcott herself was vocal. Not that she necessarily got her way: Alcott’s publisher was initially bored by Little Women and changed his mind only when his young daughters got hold of the manuscript and loved it (a similar scene appears in the film). He does not budge, however, in his demand that her female characters end the novel 'married – or dead, either way'. All four girls duly marry or die, and many critics have found this a profoundly disappointing outcome."

'They' beats 'the' to 2019's word of the year - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "They, a common pronoun that can be traced back to the 13th century, has been named word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary because of its growing usage for non-binary individuals.
The US dictionary, which has been in print for more than 150 years, said that look-ups for 'they' increased by 313% in 2019 compared with the previous year, as the public investigated the word’s shifting use and its increasing prominence in the news."

This Labour meltdown has been building for decades – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "In North East Derbyshire last month [before the general election], I saw up close what was left: warehouses and care work. Bullying bosses, zero-hours contracts, poverty pay and social security top-ups. Smartphones to tell you whether you have a shift that morning, and Facebook to give you the news, or some dishonest fragment of it. Across the UK, mines were turned into museums, factories swapped for call centres, meaningful local government replaced by development quangos.... Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy. As the Oxford political scientists James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans argue, the 'decline of class-based voting was driven by Labour’s shift to the political centre ground'. Meanwhile, the big gap in the electoral market that opened up was for a party offering a welfare state with reactionary social policy. That was Nigel Farage; now it’s Boris Johnson. ... In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."

This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect – article by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. "For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning.... Well, guess what. Labour’s 'radical' manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. ... Those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power. That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; ... it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not 'a 30-year project'. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing."

The real faultline in this election: landlords v tenants – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian. "[In the] Conservative election campaign, ... there was something cathartic about the moment that Lee Anderson, Tory parliamentary candidate for Ashfield, donned a black cagoule, stared into a mobile phone camera, and – with a zeal too seldom witnessed in contemporary politics – introduced himself to the wider world with a denunciation of 'nuisance tenants'. 'These people, who have to live somewhere, let’s have them in a tent in the middle of a field,' he grimaced. 'Six o’clock every morning, let’s have them up.' ... 'Let’s have them in the field, picking potatoes,' he continued, 'back in the tent, cold shower, lights out, six o’clock, same again the next day.'... Nearly a third of the [Conservative] party’s MPs, including the prime minister, are currently landlords (along with 11% of Labour MPs, and a quarter of Lib Dems). Little wonder that Anderson, a one-time Labour supporter ... now feels more at home on the other side of the party divide. His words were extreme. But the politics behind them reveal an unacknowledged faultline running through this election: it is a battle, broadly-speaking, between the rentiers and the renters – and the winners will define this country for a generation."

The idea that the British working class is socially conservative is a nonsense – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Long before the Tory demolition of Labour’s 'red wall', it had become accepted almost as a given that the working class was intrinsically socially conservative. The abandonment by working-class voters of social democratic parties throughout Europe, and their embrace of populism, was seen by many as a rejection of the liberal values that define the left.... The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation.... Working-class wariness of immigration is not an expression of an innate social conservatism but of the loss of trust, the breaking of social bonds and a sense of voicelessness. Working-class lives have been made more precarious not just through material deprivation, but through the erosion of the more intangible aspects of their lives – their place in society, the sense of community, the desire for dignity. Immigration has become symbolic of this loss. We should not, however, confuse anger at social atomisation and political voicelessness with social conservatism.... The problem is not that metropolitan liberals have become too liberal or the working class more conservative. It is that social and economic changes have unstitched the relationship between the social and the liberal that defines the left; the relationship between a defence of community, of policies that put social need before private profit and a defence of rights, whether of gay people or migrants, and of opposition to unequal treatment. ... The challenge for the left is not to embrace social conservatism but to reforge the link between the social and the liberal."

To err is human: is that why we fear machines that can be made to err less? – article by John Naughton in The Observer. "The AI evangelists complain [that] everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained. And yet society is apparently content to endure the astonishing irrationality and capriciousness of much human decision-making. If you are a prisoner applying for parole in some jurisdictions, for example, you had better hope that the (human) judge has just eaten when your case comes up. A fascinating empirical study ... found that 'the percentage of favourable rulings drops gradually from about 65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to about 65% after a break.'... In judging the debate about whether human intelligence (HI) is always superior to the artificial variety (AI), are we humans just demonstrating how capricious and irrational we can be? Er, yes, says Jason Collins, a behavioural and data scientist who now works for PwC Australia. In a wickedly satirical article in the online journal Behavioral Scientist, he turns the question we routinely ask about AI on its head: 'Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions,' he writes, 'we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm.'"

The millennium bug was real, and 20 years later we face the same threats – article by Martyn Thomas in The Guardian. "I led Deloitte Consulting’s Y2K work internationally in the mid-1990s. It wasn’t just business IT that had Y2K errors. Many PCs could not handle dates in 2000. Faults were found in the computers that controlled factories and offshore oil platforms. The UK’s Rapier anti-aircraft missile system had a Y2K fault that would have prevented it firing.... 10% of Visa credit-card machines couldn’t handle cards that expired after 1999... Internationally, correcting Y2K problems cost thousands of person-years of effort and many billions of pounds.... Then 1 January passed without a catastrophe and the myth started that the threat had been grossly exaggerated. There were many failures in January 2000, from the significant to the trivial. Many credit-card systems and cash points failed. Some customers received bills for 100 years’ interest while others were briefly rich for the same reason. Internationally, 15 nuclear reactors shut down; the oil pumping station in Yumurtalik failed, cutting off supplies to Istanbul; there were power cuts in Hawaii and government computers failed in China and Hong Kong..... Y2K should be seen as a warning of the danger that arises when millions of independent systems might fail because of a single event. But this lesson has not been learned. ..."

Cuttings: November 2019

If we’re serious about changing the world, we need a better kind of economics to do it – article by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, joint winners of the 2019 Nobel prize in economic science, in The Guardian. "We need to understand what undermines trust in economists. Part of the problem is that there is plenty of bad economics around. The self-proclaimed economists on TV and in the press – chief economist of Bank X or Firm Y – are, with important exceptions, primarily spokespeople for their firms’ economic interests, who often feel free to ignore the weight of the evidence.... Another part of the problem is that, especially in the UK and the US, a lot of the economics that has filtered into government thinking is the most beholden to orthodoxy, and the least able to pay attention to any fact that does not square with it.... But good economics is much less strident, and quite different. It is less like the hard sciences and more like engineering or plumbing: it breaks big problems into manageable chunks and tries to solve them with a pragmatic approach – a combination of intuition and theory, trial and acknowledged errors. ... We have spent our careers studying the poor, trying to apply this kind of experimental approach to the problems they face. Instead of relying on our intuition, or that of others, we set up large-scale, rigorous randomised controlled trials to understand what works, what does not work, and why. We are not alone: this movement has taken hold in economics. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the network we co-founded in 2013, has 400 affiliated or invited researchers, and together they have finished or are working on nearly a thousand projects on topics as different as the impact of sleep on productivity and happiness, and the role of incentives for tax collectors."

Now we have proof: the government used your money to lie about poor people – article by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. "Early this summer, a national newspaper published a string of curious articles. Under the logo Universal Credit Uncovered, the features promised readers of the Metro the truth about this most notorious of all benefits. The series began with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the paper, coupled with a four-page spread right in its centre, and continued week upon week for nine weeks.... Throughout its campaign, the DWP would summarise what it called 'Myths' about universal credit and then give readers the 'Facts'. The [Advertising Standards Authority] looked at three of the claims – and found they weren’t facts at all. They were lies, told by the government to its own taxpayers. In big letters, the DWP boasted that 'people move into work faster on Universal Credit than they did on the old system'. After poring over the statistics, the ASA has found this claim 'did not reflect the evidence … had not been substantiated and was therefore misleading'. 'If you need money,' readers were assured, 'your Jobcentre will urgently pay you an advance.' In its ruling, the ASA takes the government to task for not making it clear that this is only a loan and that the vast majority of claimants will have to wait five weeks for their first UC payment. Finally, the adverts’ claim that 'your Jobcentre can pay rent directly to landlords' was again found to be misleading because it only applies to a small number of claimants. It is no small thing for a watchdog to face down the government in such an uncompromising fashion. Yet at the end of its remarkable judgment, there is something even more startling. The DWP is told that in future it must have 'adequate evidence to substantiate the claims in their advertising, to include significant conditions [where the claims don’t apply], and to present significant conditions clearly'. The regulator has been forced to advise the Conservative government to tell the truth."

How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash – article by Rana Foroohar in The Guardian, extracted from her book Don't Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech. See also review by John Naughton in The Observer. "[The economist] Zoltan Pozsar [in a report for Credit Suisse] forensically analysed the $1tn in corporate savings parked in offshore accounts, mostly by big tech firms. The largest and most intellectual-property-rich 10% of companies – Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) among them – controlled 80% of this hoard. According to Pozsar’s calculations, most of that money was held not in cash but in bonds – half of it in corporate bonds. The much-lauded overseas 'cash' pile held by the richest American companies ... was actually a giant bond portfolio. And it was owned not by banks or mutual funds, which typically have such large financial holdings, but by the world’s biggest technology firms. In addition to being the most profitable and least regulated industry on the planet, the Silicon Valley giants had also become systemically crucial within the marketplace, holding assets that – if sold or downgraded – could topple the markets themselves. Hiding in plain sight was an amazing new discovery: big tech, not big banks, was the new too-big-to-fail industry."

Quote of the day – John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, who had convinced them that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”

History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future – article by Laura Spinney in The Guardian. "In its first issue of 2010, the scientific journal Nature looked forward to a dazzling decade of progress. ... A few weeks later, a letter in the same journal cast a shadow over this bright future. It warned that all these advances could be derailed by mounting political instability, which was due to peak in the US and western Europe around 2020. Human societies go through predictable periods of growth, the letter explained, during which the population increases and prosperity rises. Then come equally predictable periods of decline. These 'secular cycles' last two or three centuries and culminate in widespread unrest – from worker uprisings to revolution. In recent decades, the letter went on, a number of worrying social indicators – such as wealth inequality and public debt – had started to climb in western nations, indicating that these societies were approaching a period of upheaval. The letter-writer would go on to predict that the turmoil in the US in 2020 would be less severe than the American civil war, but worse than the violence of the late 1960s and early 70s... The author of this stark warning was not a historian, but a biologist. For the first few decades of his career, Peter Turchin had used sophisticated maths to show how the interactions of predators and prey produce oscillations in animal populations in the wild,... but by the late 1990s he ... found himself drawn to history instead: could the rise and fall of human societies also be captured by a handful of variables and some differential equations?... Turchin’s approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. [He also had the work of] Jack Goldstone, ... a mathematician-turned-historian... At the time Goldstone began his research, in the mid-70s, the prevailing view of revolution was best understood as a form of class conflict. But Goldstone made two observations that did not fit that view. First, individuals from the same classes, or even the same families, often ended up fighting on opposite sides. And second, revolutions had clustered in certain periods of history ... but there was no obvious reason why class tensions should have boiled over in those periods and not in others.... Goldstone suggested ways of measuring mass mobilisation potential, elite competition and state solvency, and defined something he called the political stress indicator (psi or Ψ), which was the product of all three. He showed that Ψ spiked prior to the French Revolution, the English civil war and two other major 17th-century conflicts – the Ottoman crisis in Asia Minor, and the Ming-Qing transition in China. ... It was a simple model, and Goldstone acknowledged as much. Although he could show that high Ψ predicted historical revolutions, he had no way of predicting what came next. That depended on the precise combination of the three components of Ψ, and on how they interacted with a given society’s institutions. Incomplete as they were, his efforts led him to see revolution in a depressing new light: not as a democratic correction to an inflexible and corrupt ancien regime, but as a response to an ecological crisis – the inability of a society to absorb rapid population growth – that rarely resolved that crisis."

Between the Stops by Sandi Toksvig: an entertaining journey – review by Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian. "Toksvig comes across as a passionate enthusiast for many things: the theatre (early jobs included sweeping the stage and working on the electrics crew just to be in the building), for history, for her beloved father and for equality. She recalls recording a pilot episode as a potential host of Have I Got News for You in 1990. Angus Deayton also recorded one and afterwards she was told: 'We preferred yours, Sandi, but everyone has agreed you can’t have a woman in charge of making fun of the news.'... No one who has heard Toksvig speak will be surprised to find a bedrock of compassion and righteous anger underpinning the book. She rails against the airbrushing of women from history and talks about her reasons for co-founding the Women’s Equality party and her optimism for change, despite occasionally despairing at the next generation of feminists. When she hears Lena Dunham say being wolf-whistled by a man sometimes makes her feel 'validated', Toksvig splutters: 'Validated? What are we? Car park tickets?'"

For real change, Labour should ditch its top-down thinking – article by John Harris in The Guardian. "Genuinely modern socialism would revolutionise Westminster and Whitehall and disperse their power – and so revive local government, which would be completely transformed. Labour wants to replace the Department for Work and Pensions with a new Department of Social Security: a better ambition would be to scrap a central ministry and hand the running of most benefits to councils. Much the same might apply to the local government department, and the administration of education, health and transport. Taxation could be thoroughly localised. The way places are run could start with something that the burgeoning localist movement, Flatpack Democracy, has made clear: the optimum population size for meaningful grassroots democracy is between 10,000 and 50,000. Once that point has been grasped, it opens the way to a whole world of participation (which, to state the blindingly obvious, would also depend on reforming our electoral system). Acknowledging this, and the way 'horizontal' local activity should be complemented by the help of the 'vertical' state, the left-inclined pressure group Compass calls the ideal model of modern politics '45° change'. It quotes the late environmentalist David Fleming, who said: 'Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.' The insight is so plainly put that you have to pause to absorb its radical implications. But this is the future, and until the British left thoroughly embraces it, its great revolution in thinking will remain incomplete."

'Your throat hurts. Your brain hurts': the secret life of the audiobook star – article by Tim Dowling in The Guardian. "The audiobook market has grown from a publishing industry side hustle into a huge global business. In a climate where print and ebook sales are stagnant, the UK audiobook market rose to £69m in 2018, an increase of 43% on the previous year. In the US, audiobook downloads generate revenue of close to a billion dollars annually."

The Secret to Enjoying a Long Winter – blog post by Jason Kotke, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "In winter 2017-18, I was depressed, anxious, wasn’t getting out of bed in the morning, spent endless time on my phone doing nothing, and had trouble focusing on my work.... Last year I was so anxious that it would happen again that all that stuff was worse and started basically a week into fall. Nothing helped.... The plan for this fall was to try a SAD lamp, therapy, maybe drugs, and lots more warm travel. But then something interesting happened. Sometime this fall ... I decided that because I live in Vermont, there is nothing I can do about it being winter, so it was unhelpful for me to be upset about it. I stopped complaining about it getting cold and dark, I stopped dreading the arrival of snow. I told myself that I just wasn’t going to feel like I felt in the summer and that’s ok — winter is a time for different feelings. "

The highest number of CEOs graduated from this unexpected UK university – news article on Study International website. "Top recruitment firm [Forward Role] ... surveyed 260,000 LinkedIn profiles to find out which university the majority of company leaders, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Managing Directors (MDs), graduated from in the UK. Results for the Top 20 universities producing the most CEOs showed that the highest number of CEOs and MDs didn’t come from Oxford or the highly-ranked London School of Economics – but rather from the Open University."

How our home delivery habit reshaped the world – article by Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian. "The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchases reach our homes. This divorce of a product from its voyage to us is perhaps the thing that Amazon has sold us most successfully. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, never wanted his customers to worry about shipping – about how much it cost, or about how long it would take – and he relentlessly shredded delivery times to make shipping incidental to the purchasing experience. Amazon’s emphasis on speed compelled other retailers to hurry, too, and encouraged us to believe that if something cannot be had quickly, it is barely worth having at all. It is as if we have forgotten that a product is an object moving through space, fighting gravity, air resistance and other forces of nature. Companies, though, are only too aware of it. While we choose and buy our purchases with mere inch-wide movements of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world so that our deliveries pelt towards us in ever-quicker time."

Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019 – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. "We are approaching the moment when the great dictionaries pick those that sum up our times.... In advance of the lexicographers’ big reveal, here are my top 10 candidates. (1) People. A pretty ordinary word – and one with a long history (its origins are murky once you get past Latin, where populus meant a community or nation). But the way the idea of 'the people' has been used over the past year, often cynically, makes it thoroughly contemporary. ... (2) Prorogue.... (3) Femtech.... (4) Sadfishing. One of those rare words whose origin can be precisely pinpointed to an opinion piece – in Metro in January. 'Sadfishing,' wrote Rebecca Reid, 'is when someone uses their emotional problems to hook an audience on the internet'.... (5) Opoid.... (6) Pronoun. Previously an innocuous piece of linguistic plumbing, the pronoun ... is having a moment. The word itself has become a signifier of the new gender politics: it is now not unusual to see the note 'pronouns: he/him' or 'she/her' alongside job title and address at the end of emails or on social media profiles.... (7) Woke. Woke ... entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, with the definition 'alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice'. So what makes it a potential word of the year 2019? Put simply, woke has gone mainstream and in doing so has been subject to a bizarre transformation. At the end of 2018, African American broadcaster Sam Sanders ... argued that any authenticity it once had was being lost due to overuse by white liberals, leading to its co-option by businesses keen to burnish their progressive credentials – so-called 'wokewashing' – and ultimately to a backlash.... (8) Nanoinfluencer.... (9) Cancelled.... (10) Crisis...."

‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain – article by Xiaolu Guo in The Guardian, extracted from her book Once Upon a Time in the East: A Story of Growing Up. "Before I left China, I was desperately looking for something: freedom, the chance to live as an individual with dignity. This was impossible in my home country. But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic. But as I walked along the London streets, trying to save every penny for buses or food, I lost sight of my previous vision. London seemed no more spiritually fulfilling than home. Instead, I was faced with a world of practical problems and difficulties. Perhaps I was looking for great writers to meet or great books to read, but I could barely decipher a paragraph of English. ... all I encountered were angry teenagers who screamed at me as they passed on their stolen bikes and grabbed my bag – they were the most frightening group I had ever met in my life. Before I came to England, I thought all British teenagers attended elite boarding schools such as Eton, spoke posh and wore perfect black suits. It was a stupid assumption, no doubt. But all I had to go on were the English period dramas that showed rich people in plush mansions, as if that was how everyone lived in England. In the evenings, I hid my long hair in my coat and walked along the graffiti-smeared streets and piss-drenched alleyways, passing beggars with their dogs, and I asked myself: 'So is this what the rich west is really like?' "

This election will be all about identity, not money. And the Tories know it – article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Why would anyone not vote Labour? If person A knocks on your door and offers you £1,000, no questions asked, and person B offers £100, why refuse A? The question has long puzzled experts. ... US academic Jonathan Haidt, in an attempt to understand why on earth poor people voted for George W Bush [(Why would they want a wider wealth gap, worse healthcare and more corporate greed?)] [answered] that these 'left behinds' saw politics as about more than money. It was about their families and collective safety, about local and group identity, about faith and a morality seen as personal, not ordained by the state. ... Analysis by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell into who voted for Brexit in Britain and Donald Trump in the US found the tribes remarkably similar, with support in both cases more widely spread across ages and classes than initially supposed. Indeed, average leave and Trump voters had above-average incomes. What they shared was a concern about the continuity of their identity and way of life. They feared outsiders and newcomers."

On the Farm – article by Daisy Hildyard in The London Review of Books 7 June 2018, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "The Lisbon Treaty currently guides policy creation in light of the fact that ‘animals are sentient beings.’ When the clause was pushed out of UK law by 18 votes, there was an angry and slightly bewildered public response (when any response was registered at all). Parliament, in turn, reacted with some confusion. Michael Gove issued an official statement from Defra saying that the government wasn’t necessarily saying that animals are not sentient, but that it was saying it won’t say that they are.... It is true that Britain has a long history of protecting animals... The Animal Welfare Act of 2006 is substantially committed, as Gove says it is, to high standards. However, its clauses do not have much to say about laboratory or farm animals, or many species in the wild. They largely relate to domestic animals, the category of nonhuman which, given that human-style consciousness is, if anything, over-attributed to most pets, is least in need of a law certifying sentience.... Teresa Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, also issued a statement on the issue, in which she pledges to hold Gove to his promises and accepts that, in the reality she occupies when she is not voting in Parliament, ‘animals are sentient, can feel pain, and have feelings.’ ... So, Villiers and Gove say that they are not anti-sentience, but anti-pro-sentience, and not in real life, and only for the time being. ... Their scrambled and scrambling statements suggest a sense of shame. You know the story: you cast your vote against animal sentience and you feel it’s reasonable to do so, but then you have to go home and undress in front of the cat."

Cuttings: October 2019

He, she, they … should we now clarify our preferred pronouns when we say hello? – article by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. "Little attention used to be paid to pronouns. In recent years, however, they have become a cornerstone of the culture wars.... pronoun introductions have become an established feature of some progressive spaces and university campuses. Many view this as a positive step towards a more nuanced understanding of gender. As Darius Hickman, a 23-year-old non-binary poet in New York says, these introductions mean people who don’t conform to traditional views of binary gender don’t feel alienated. 'Relying on clocking people’s gender based on appearances is harmful, especially since some people – oftentimes non-binary folks – can happen to look strictly binary, and a simple pronoun check makes things easier for everyone, including folks whose gender isn’t easy to tell.' But when gender is so complex and personal, is there really any such thing as a 'simple' pronoun check? At this stage, I should probably note that although I identify as a Progressive Lesbian™, the pressure of pronoun introductions often makes me feel uncomfortable. Actively announcing myself as a she/her makes it seem like I’m making my entire identity about my gender, which feels regressive. Further, while pronoun introductions are supposed to be about recognizing that gender is complex, it sometimes seems as though they – paradoxically – reinforce gender binaries. ... Wouldn’t it be better if we just worked towards a future where 'he' and 'she' weren’t weighted with so much meaning? What if we worked to break those limitations down instead?"

Social experiments to fight poverty – TED talk by Esther Duflo, the youngest person to win the Nobel prize in economics and the second woman to do so. Referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog.  "We have spent billions of dollars on aid. ... Has it done any good? ... Sadly, we don't know.
And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that -- take Africa for example.
Africans have already got a lot of aid. ... And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is.... So here are some other questions. ... Every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a 'last mile problem.' The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? And here's another question.... Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. ... Bed nets are very cheap... Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know? ... And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know? So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions...."

Crossing Divides: How a social network could save democracy from deadlock –  article by Carl Miller for BBC Click.  Referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "There is one thing that practically everyone can agree on: politics has become bitterly divided.... Yet what if it doesn't need to be this way? What if new ways can be found to break deadlocks and bring electorates back together?... For the last five years, Taiwan has been blending technology with politics to create a new way of making decisions. ... Their creation ... works by first seeking to crowdsource objective facts from those involved. Then users communicate with each other via a dedicated social media network called Pol.is, which lets them draft statements about how a matter should be solved, and respond to others' suggestions by either agreeing or disagreeing with them.... Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It churned through the many axes of agreements and disagreements and drew a map to show everyone exactly where they were in the debate. A number of different groups, with different attitudes, emerged.... There was no reply button, so people couldn't troll each other's posts. And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible. It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them."

How liberalism became ‘the god that failed’ in eastern Europe – article by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in The Guardian, based on their book The Light that Failed: A Reckoning. "In the spring of 1990, John Feffer, a 26-year-old American, spent several months criss-crossing eastern Europe in hope of unlocking the mystery of its post-communist future and writing a book about the historical transformation unfolding before his eyes.... East Europeans were optimistic but apprehensive. Many of those he interviewed at the time expected to be living like Viennese or Londoners within five years, 10 years at the most.... 25 years later, he decided to revisit the region and to seek out those with whom he had spoken in 1990. This time round, eastern Europe was richer but roiled by resentment. The capitalist future had arrived, but its benefits and burdens were unevenly, even crassly distributed. After reminding us that 'For the World War II generation in eastern Europe, communism was the "god that failed"', Feffer writes that 'For the current generation in the region, liberalism is the god that failed.'... Resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has played a decisive role. This lack of alternatives, rather than the gravitational pull of an authoritarian past or historically ingrained hostility to liberalism, is what best explains the anti-western ethos dominating post-communist societies today. The very conceit that 'there is no other way' provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world."

Seen and heard: July to September 2019

Edinburgh Photographic Society, 157th international exhibition of photography 2019. The doorkeeper took pains to explain to me that the only criterion for inclusion was that there had to have been a photograph somewhere in the history of each finished image. When I saw the exhibition, I understood why he had given me the warning: most of the images were obviously processed to a greater or lesser degree: some to create surreal effects, such as a man riding a mechanical fish through the sky, and a surprising number to make the image look as though it had been produced by pen and ink drawing. But my favourites were classic photographic pieces, especially the Movement Series of Fiona Spence.

Scottish national portrait gallery. Lovely building, family-sized rather than cathedral-sized gothic, including a beautiful library with an upper gallery. I wasn’t so struck by the paintings and busts, but perhaps I’d have been more impressed if I were Scottish.

Scottish national gallery. I shouldn’t have been surprised, this being a national collection, but as I walked around I kept on thinking: hey, this place is full of really famous paintings! My favourites were the Velázquez ‘Old woman cooking eggs’, notable for its elegant depiction of just-congealing egg whites, and a Botticelli Madonna and child, unusual in the Madonna not being face-on but in full eye-contact with her baby, the very image of empathic mirroring (as the therapists say). A really good café / restaurant too.

Philip Glass: Minimalism at the Organ. Concert by Mark Spalding at St Andrew’s and St George’s West, Edinburgh, as part of the Fringe Festival. Two pieces having their 50th anniversary (Two Pages, Music in Fifths) and one having its 40th (Fourth Series, Part 4, aka Mad Rush). A video camera in the organ loft gave us visual contact with the performer, and as a consequence, we were able to see him doing stretches in the pauses between pieces: it never occurred to me before that performing minimalist music could run the risk of repetitive strain injury. A great hour of immersive minimalism.

Star Trek: Beyond. perhaps the best of the three films since the reboot, being less dependent on stories or tropes from the “prime” cast. Still a huge emphasis on visual spectacle, which I guess is what the movie-going public now expects, though it was never part of the original series. (They didn’t have the budget, so had to rely on damn-fine storytelling.)

What three words (app). BBC news featured this great idea, to map the entire world in 3x3 metre squares, each bearing a three word name; useful for emergency services location finding, for example. But it depends on lots of people using it. And someone will probably think of an anti-social application.

Rise of the Nazis. Really informative documentary, the three parts following how Hitler successively became Chancellor, suspended parliamentary democracy, and finally usurped the power of the President. Quite scary to watch in a month when Boris Johnson suspended Parliament for five weeks because he didn’t want it to get in his way; had the Supreme Court not ruled it illegal, there would have been the precedent for a Prime Minister to suspend Parliament for however long he wanted, for any reason at all.

Raiders of the Lost Past – nice three-part series with Janina Ramirez cheerfully and enthusiastically illuminating three massively significant archaeological discoveries in the months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

We has tribbles and also troubles. Very funny rendering of a classic original series Star Trek episode in “kitty pidgen”: the distinctive grammar in which captions are added to LOLcats photos. Sample: Captain Kirk frowning, with the caption “OMG THIS SUX”.

J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars. Well-reviewed intriguing puzzle-adventure game, in which you play the sole survivor of a deep space expedition, revived from hibernation, trying to find out what happened to the rest of the crew, with the assistance of the ship’s computer J.U.L.I.A. and the remote exploration Mobot who does the actually travelling and action in the game. Creative use of a simple interface – basically it’s static scene pictures with hotspots, plus the occasional animation or cut-scene – and some decent mini-games. Didn’t really grab me emotionally, despite the increasingly sinister storyline, but an enjoyable game nonetheless.

Cathy Moore's scenario-based training headquarters. Cathy Moore is one of the best bloggers around for incisive and insightful thinking on learning design for training, and recently she’s been sharing her ideas and experience around branching scenarios or simulations. This page collects together her various writing, including this page of links to example scenarios by herself and others, with comments reflecting on the design.

Cuttings: September 2019

Strike 2.0: how gig economy workers are using tech to fight back – article by Jack Shenker in The Guardian, based on his book Now We Have Your Attention: The New Politics of the People. "An unlikely movement is currently under way to rewire the economy from within.... Organised resistance by digitally outsourced workers has erupted repeatedly on the streets of major cities in recent years, usually beginning in the back alley spots where delivery riders are encouraged by their apps to congregate and then fanning out rapidly through WhatsApp networks, word of mouth and some technological trickery. In 2016, for example, an announcement by Deliveroo that it would soon be unilaterally altering its rider payment structure prompted a six-day 'strike' in which riders acted en masse to make themselves unavailable for orders. ... In the words of one Deliveroo rider, the very technology that was designed to control workers was now being turned against their managers, allowing riders to 'occupy the system in a way'. Not unlike the assembly line of the last century, and the auto strikes in Flint that subverted it, a tool engineered for capital was being hacked by the labour force.... This struggle is global. It is not a coincidence that participants in the McStrike protests used chants adapted from the US 'Fight for $15' movement against low pay. The strikes by Deliveroo riders in British cities have been inspired and replicated by colleagues in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong, to name but a few. Historian Eric Hobsbawm once described surges in labour militancy as 'accumulations of inflammable materials which only ignite periodically, as it were under compressions'. Throughout the post-crash world, such compressions are piling up at pace."

The myth of the free speech crisis – article by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. "As a value in its purest form, freedom of speech serves two purposes: protection from state persecution, when challenging the authority of power or orthodoxy; and the protection of fellow citizens from the damaging consequences of absolute speech (ie completely legally unregulated speech) such as slander. According to Francis Canavan in Freedom of Expression: Purpose As Limit – his analysis of perhaps the most permissive free speech law of all, the first amendment of the US constitution – free speech must have a rational end, which is to facilitate communication between citizens. Where it does not serve that end, it is limited. Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others. He writes that the US supreme court itself 'has never accepted an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. It has not protected, for example, libel, slander, perjury, false advertising, obscenity and profanity, solicitation of a crime, or "fighting" words. The reason for their exclusion from first-amendment protection is that they have minimal or no values as ideas, communication of information, appeal to reason, step towards truth etc; in short, no value in regard to the ends of the amendment.'”

From sex to money: the eight deep discussions that can save a dying relationship – interview by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "[John] Gottman, the renowned relationships researcher known for his work on divorce predictors, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, a psychologist, have been married for 32 years.... Their latest book, which they wrote as a couple, is Eight Dates. It guides couples through eight conversations – to have on dedicated dates.... The [topics]– trust, conflict, sex, money, family, fun, spirituality and dreams – came out of the Gottmans’ years of observing the flashpoints in relationships.... Might disagreement be a danger for readers of the book? 'It’s possible, but what we like to do is give people preparation in case conflict arises, so each chapter includes a bit of that,' says Julie. 'But also we very carefully tailored the questions so that people were encouraged to self-disclose as opposed to comment on each other’s thoughts. And when you self-disclose, that’s really the antidote to creating conflict as opposed to judging the other person for their point of view.'”

The return of parliament – cartoon by Stephen Collins in The Guardian. "Back to Parliament - It's that time of year again! Here's our pick of the must-have kit for your little MPs... Water bottle full of wine: prep them for the worst term of their lives with a whole litre of rosé. ERG lunchbox: this is THE lunchbox to have, featuring the hugely popular team of heroes. Scientific calculator: remember to look for a Brexit function to calculate how screwed the economy is. Corrective fluid: essential for getting rid of details you don't like in economic forecasts. Dominic Cummings backpack: the Prince of Darkness's trendy dome-like head of evil is both capacious and sturdy. Antisemitism-cancelling headphones: Help them concentrate on Brexit homework by cancelling out distracting racism in their party. Multicolour pen: make their resignation letters really pop on Twitter!"

Will AI replace university lecturers? Not if we make it clear why humans matter – article by Mark Haw in The Guardian. "So far the best AI can manage is classroom assistance to human teachers. But AI edtech developers are nothing if not ambitious: this month, UK company Century Tech will partner the Flemish regional government to launch AI assistants in schools across half of Belgium. ... A large dataset now exists for student behaviour, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of students who have followed MOOCs (massive online open courses) over the past decade. The big question mark around MOOCs was how they could survive by giving away course content for free. With uncomfortable echoes of recent data controversies, it may turn out that building the training database for AI teaching was the MOOC business plan all along.... Universities, lecturers and students urgently need to identify and share what is really important about being taught by an actual human."

How to Review a Novel – article from 1980 by Mary-Kay Wilmers, reproduced in Literary Hub, referenced in article by John Naughton in The Observer. "How do novel reviews begin? Just like novels very often: 'Motherless boys may be pitied by mothers but are not infrequently envied by other boys.' 'For the friends of the Piontek family, August 31st, 1939 was a red-letter day.'... It looks as though the writers of these reviews have set out not to summarize the plot but to tell the story, with the drawback, from the novelist’s point of view, that readers may content themselves with the reviewer’s version. Other reviews begin with a different sort of story—the reviewer’s: 'Halfway through Beryl Bainbridge’s new novel I found I was laughing until the tears ran down my cheeks.' ... Different openings suggest different attitudes, both to the novel and to the practice of reviewing novels. There are ideologies of the novel and ideologies of the novel review, fictional conventions and reviewing conventions. They don’t necessarily overlap. A regular reviewer, confident of his own constituency, may describe a novel in terms of his own responses to it: he wouldn’t for that reason applaud a novelist for writing in a similarly personal vein. What reviews have in common is that they must all in some degree be re-creations: reshapings of what the novelist has already shaped. The writer’s fortunes depend on the reviews he gets but the reviewer depends on the book to see that his account of it—his “story,” to use the language of the newspaper composing room—is interesting. Dull novels don’t elicit interesting reviews: not unless a reviewer decides to be amusing at the novel’s expense or tactfully confines himself to some incidental aspect of it. A generous reviewer may also invent for the novel the qualities it might have had but hasn’t got."

We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job? – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "A recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random. My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for.... Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead?"

She Said: an inside look at the story that brought down Harvey Weinstein – interview by Adrian Horton in The Guardian. "She Said goes much deeper than a compelling play-by-play of nailing the first Weinstein story. The immediate aftermath of publication, when the dam broke on story after story of sexual indignity, workplace harassment, or assault, 'only made us feel greater responsibility', Kantor told the Guardian. 'We said to ourselves: we’ve got to try to finally answer some of these lingering questions from the Weinstein story. How can a company become so complicit in predation? What are the systems that enable this kind of abuse?' In the face of a 'staggering' wave of personal and institutional responses, said Twohey, 'We just decided that the most important thing we could do was keep reporting.' .... In the preface, Kantor and Twohey explicitly pose the question: did the cultural change go too far? Or not far enough? It’s less the reporters’ paradigm than 'the question we saw play out in the world', said Kantor. 'We experienced the power of the post-Weinstein reckoning and this feeling of buried truth pouring out – this display of mass accountability without precedent.'"

Thousands demand Oxford dictionaries 'eliminate sexist definitions' – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Almost 30,000 people have signed a petition calling for Oxford University Press to change the 'sexist' definitions of the word 'woman' in some of its dictionaries.... In response, OUP’s head of lexical content strategy Katherine Connor Martin has said... : 'If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory.' 'Nonetheless, part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear in the dictionary’s treatment. For instance, the phrase "the little woman" is defined as "a condescending way of referring to one’s wife", and the use of "bit" as a synonym for woman is labelled as "derogatory" in the thesaurus,' said Martin. 'Sensibilities regarding language are constantly changing, and our editorial team is always grateful for feedback to ensure that the status of offensive or denigrating terms is clear to our readers.'"

Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more? – article by William Davies in The Guardian. "From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. ... Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important.... The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties. The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged 'important' to be captured.... This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply 'speak for itself'. ... This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.... One way in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers.'Pics or it didn’t happen' is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience.... What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.... What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout even louder about their commitment to 'truth... But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past 20 years. What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? ...Then the key question is not whether [reporting] is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. ... let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it."

The Guardian view on machine learning: a computer cleverer than you? – editorial in The Guardian. "It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires.... They can recognise a face, a voice, be trained to judge people’s motivations or beat a computer game. But we cannot say exactly how. This is the genius and madness behind the technology. The promise of AI is that it will imbue machines with the ability to spot patterns from data, and make decisions faster and better than humans do. What happens if they make worse decisions faster? Governments need to pause and take stock of the societal repercussions of allowing machines over a few decades to replicate human skills that have been evolving for millions of years. But individuals and companies must take responsibility too."

The writer's emergency supplies shelf – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Liquid ideas. Spray-on sexual tension. Plot twist in a can. Powdered thrills (4 sachets). Bottled Zeitgeist. Instant poetry. Assorted subplots. Prose polish. Minor characters (just add water). Eau de mystery. Concentrated romance, Tinned profundity, industrial strength."