Squaring the Shakespearean Circle

In the garden of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Stratford-on-Avon

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out as a Kindle book. Link

Quote of the Day

“The only reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead.”

• Sam Goldwyn, of his rival Louis B. Meyer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Padraig McGovern ; Peter Carberry | Two jigs | Connie the soldier & The frost is all over

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The internet is not ready for the flood of AI-generated text

Christopher Brennan’s essay on the way that many of our systems currently focus on engagement makes them particularly vulnerable to the incoming wave of content from bots like GPT-3.

We don’t need hyper-intelligent machines to dramatically change the way that the internet works. In my recent conversations, we talked about the issue of what happens when AI text-generation capabilities are more widespread and can generate what Winston calls “10,000 Wikipedias” worth of text in a very short time. You might have already gotten weary of our current state of “too much content,” but it is about to get far, far worse.

Some of the closest possibilities are commercial. OthersideAI has just raised millions in seed money for a use of GPT-3 that will write automatic emails for salespeople in the style of their choice. Porr, after revealing his blog as automated, wrote about automated copywriting, which could generate several options and then automatically A/B test them to see which gets the most engagement.

My week by Dominic Cummings

Lovely spoof. Excerpt:

Thursday

Boris says he wants to see me at the end of the day. I go into his office and he is sitting behind his desk with Carrie standing next to him.

“What is this, the Pride of Britain awards?” I ask.
“Very good, Dom, very drole,” says Boris, looking shifty.
“Tell him, Boris,” Carrie says.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this. The thing is, if I can speak freely, reductio ad absurdum, and get to the point, ergo propter hoc, as it were. Just to be perfectly clear…” he says.
“Stultus est sicut stultus facit,” I tell him.
“Eh?” he asks.
“Have you not seen Forest Gump, prime minister?” I ask.
“We haven’t got time for that now, let me get straight to the point…” he trails off.
“Tell him, Boris,” says Carrie.
“I will, stop interfering,” he says.
“Me?” I say, surprised.
“No, it’s your job to interfere,” he says.
“Not anymore,” says Carrie.
“Look, I’m dealing with this,” says Boris.
“What? Brexit? Coronavirus? The economy? Levelling-up? China? Barnier? Biden? You aren’t dealing with any of it,” I tell him.
“That’s your job,” he says.
“So, you want me to stop interfering?” I say confused.
“No, I want you to keep on interfering,” he says, now confused himself.
“Tell him Boris,” says Carrie.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this…” stutters Boris.
“You’re fired,” says Carrie.
“I wanted to say that,” says Boris.
“Fired?” I say, incredulously.
“Not fired exactly, it’s more that we are going to have to let you go, Dom,” says Boris, looking at his shoes.

The Light of the Charge Brigade…

…is the lovely heading of a fascinating post on Quentin’s blog.

The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.

This is what it looks like:

The really clever thing about this is how familiar it looks. Just like an ordinary service station. Except it isn’t ordinary: all those pump-like devices are electric charging points. There isn’t a litre of petrol anywhere. Making new things look ordinary is the way to get beyond the early adopters of any new technology to reach the mainstream, small-c conservative masses. That was the brilliance of the Toyota Prius hybrid. It looked normal — even boring and safe. Not in the least daring. But in its time it was revolutionary. Now the time has come for fully-electric EVs. And the same applies.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• An Open Letter to Santa Claus Regarding His Travel Plans. “While I understand that your home is melting and you do not have many Christmases left, it is most imperative that you stay in the North Pole this year. Until the COVID-19 vaccine is released to the public, unnecessary travel for anyone is gravely irresponsible… Link.

• Rusty but intact: Nazi Enigma cipher machine found in Baltic Sea. Link.

• NSF releases footage from the moment Arecibo’s cables failed. Video from two different cameras, with one capturing a close-up of the cables snapping. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

For hire

Quote of the Day

“I do not believe in Belief… Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.”

• E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon & George Harrison | Here Comes The Sun

Link

Long Read of the Day

Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Zach Carter

This will not be to everyone’s taste. But if you’re interested in Keynes (as I am) and if you’ve read Zachary Carter’s splendid new biography then you’ll love it. What’s particularly good is the fact that Cowen is pretty critical of Keynes, so it’s very much an anti-hagiographical conversation.

Here’s a little sample:

COWEN: I have at least 20 different friends who studied The General Theory, Keynes’s book from 1936, the big famous one. I ask them, “What’s the central message of The General Theory?” They all give me different answers, so I’d like to know, what’s your answer? There’s so much in the book, right? Incredibly rich and multifaceted, but what’s the bottom-line core of The General Theory?

CARTER: You love the hard questions. I wrote in the book that the bottom-line core message of The General Theory is that prosperity is not hardwired into human beings, that it has to be guided through political leadership. I think that traces back, to some extent, to what you were just talking about about India. He views the state and the government, from a very early age, as this sort of guiding hand. In the case of India, it’s a bit paternalistic, but also, domestically, he believes that government is a necessary force to organizing human affairs.

The General Theory — it’s a complicated book. In certain respects, it’s not always consistent with itself, but I think that there’s a political message, which is that political guidance is needed for prosperity to exist, for markets to function. There’s also a reevaluation of what economics is doing and how economics functions. Keynes is not focused on scarcity at this point, and I think Michał Kalecki has written about this.

I think this idea that Keynes is refocusing the nature of economics and economic humanity, from competition for scarce resources towards the idea that uncertainty about the future is the most important psychological condition for economics. If you believe in scarcity as the overriding issue, you’re going to come to different conclusions about how the world works than if you believe uncertainty is the overriding issue. I’m not sure which one of those is the most important, but those are the two that I think are key.

Great stuff.

Digital health passports should not be rolled out on a mass basis until COVID-19 vaccines are available to all, report warns

Digital health passports, sometimes also referred to as ‘immunity passports’, are digital credentials that, combined with identity verification, allow individuals to prove their health status (such as the results of COVID-19 tests, and eventually, digital vaccination records).

As the move to ‘return to normal’ strengthens immunity passports will become valuable and sought after for obvious reasons — like enabling you to travel, get a job, go to the theatre or a film perhaps. So you can write the script for what will happen next — and who will get the lion’s share of the certificates. (Hint: it won’t be the deserving poor.) Which is why an interesting new report from Exeter University is timely. It warns that digital health passports should not be introduced on a mass basis until coronavirus tests are available and affordable to everyone in the country. The same considerations apply to vaccines once these are approved and ready for widespread use.

The Report’s central findings are:

Digital health passports may contribute to the long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• However, digital health passports pose essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights, given that they:

• use sensitive personal health information;

• create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status;

• can be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights one may enjoy.

• Measures supporting the deployment of such digital health passports may interfere with the respect and protection of data and human rights, in particular the rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and the freedoms of movement, assembly, and to manifest one’s religion or beliefs.

• While public health interests may justify such interferences, policymakers must strike an adequate balance between protecting the rights and freedoms of all individuals and safeguarding public interests when managing the effects of the pandemic.

The research was carried out by Dr Ana Beduschi, from the University of Exeter Law School and is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research & Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19.

Stripe: the most important company you’ve never heard of

From Bloomberg:

Private financial technology business Stripe Inc. is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it higher than its last private valuation of $36 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The valuation being discussed could be more than $70 billion or significantly higher, at as much as $100 billion, said one of the people, who asked not be identified because the matter is private. That would make it currently the most valuable venture-backed startup in the U.S., according to CB Insights.

Stripe was co-founded in 2010 by two Irish lads — brothers John and Patrick Collison. The pair sold their first company for $5 million when they were teenagers and are now worth about $4.3 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their company currently has more than 2,500 employees and 14 global offices. An ad on its website suggests that it is poised to become much bigger and more important.

Stripe’s software, which competes with Square Inc. and Paypal Holdings Inc., is used by businesses to accept payments (including payments to Substack authors who charge subscriptions for their blogs). But that turned out to be just the boys’ first act.

Basically, Stripe now aims to become the central platform for financial transactions on the Internet. This is how the shrewd analyst Ben Thompson graphically summarises it on his daily subscription newsletter.

Watch this space. And, no, you can’t buy shares in it. It isn’t a public company.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Think really big bridges don’t vibrate in high winds? Think again. Link
• Boom and Bust wins Enlightened Economist Book of the Year. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Street scene, Arles, 2017

A relic from the days when people could travel freely!

Quote of the Day

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

• TS Eliot

(Except for the poetry of Seamus Heaney, where you get it the instant you read it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Yusuf Cat Stevens | Father and Son | Another Saturday Night | Festival de Viña 2015

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Substackerati

Terrific Columbia Journalism Review essay by Clio Chang about the company that runs the platform on which this (email) edition of my blog, Memex.1.1, is published. It’s a well-informed, nicely critical and beautifully-written piece, well worth your time if you’re interested in media ecology and what is happening to journalism.

Sample:

Substack, established in 2017 by three tech-and-media guys—Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi—is a newsletter platform that allows writers and other creative types to distribute their work at tiered subscription rates. Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative. And, for many, it’s a viable source of income. In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, on the climate crisis, told me that her gross annual income surpassed $200,000—and among paid-readership Substacks, she’s ranked fifteenth. “I literally opened my first savings account,” she said.

Rising seas predicted to flood thousands of affordable housing units by 2050

Researchers mapped where coastal homes could flood in the US

From the Verge:

Coastal cities in the US could find themselves grappling with a new housing crisis in the coming decades. The number of affordable housing units vulnerable to flooding could triple by 2050 as the planet heats up, according to a new study. That amounts to more than 24,000 homes that could flood at least once a year by 2050, compared to about 8,000 in 2000.

The study, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, ranks the states and cities at greatest risk. Its authors also unveiled a new interactive map that people can use to see how their hometown might be affected.

I tried to use the interactive map to see if Mar-a-Lago might be inundated, but I’d have needed to get my VPN to switch to a server in the US first and it was early in a busy morning and I concluded that life was too short. S

Still, it’s a nice thought…

Deal, no-deal, maybe-deal…

Fascinating thought from Jonty Bloom…

Ever since the referendum I have said the UK will leave without a deal, the fantasies of the ultras trumping any sensible negotiations in the public interest. But for the first time I see the possibility of a deal because of the Daily Mail and Telegraph, no less.

It will be a bad deal and ignores the pleas, lobbying, research and interests of almost every industry in the UK. But for almost the first time the papers have started noticing that no deal also means; holiday homes can only be used for 3 months at a time, car insurance will soar in price and pet passports will be an expensive pain in the derriere. Those are just three consequences of Brexit, there are many others and although these are similar issues to those hitting business, this time they hit people with votes.

The EU negotiating strategy, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” has led to this, far cleverer than “give us a deal or we break the law.” But all still depends on whether the PM will realise what is happening and stand up to the ultras. Will he notice in time that people don’t seem to care about other people’s jobs but care deeply about fido’s holidays? Ignoring that would as they say in Yes Minister, be a “brave decision”.

I wonder.

Facebook is still stumped by WhatsApp

How can it monetise it without destroying what makes it work?

Nice piece by Shira Ovide in the New York Times…

Perhaps never before has an online property been so popular and made such little money. More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp regularly to text or make phone calls, but it scarcely generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014.

That’s because WhatsApp is mostly a personal communications app, and Facebook doesn’t make money from that group chat with your cousins. This looks set to change. Haltingly, including by agreeing to buy a customer service start-up on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its trademark playbook to remake WhatsApp into an inescapable way for businesses to interact with us.

If Facebook figures it out, WhatsApp could change how we shop and use the internet forever — as the company’s main social network and Instagram did. If not, Facebook will own a spectacularly popular failure. The outcome will set trends for our digital lives and determine which businesses thrive or don’t.

To understand WhatsApp, you need to know about Facebook’s three-step playbook and why it’s breaking down…

What I love about WhatsApp is that it costs Facebook a tone of money to keep it going and yet it can’t wring a cent out of it. My hunch is that if they try to ‘monetise’ it, then a sizeable proportion the masses of people who love and use it will become disenchanted and drift to something else.

Nothing lasts forever.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Google Reveals Major Hidden Weakness In Machine Learning. It’s called underspecification, but it’s just the latest of the fundamental problems that the current feeding-frenzy with the technology conveniently ignores. Link.

• Ed Yong’s Must-Read Stories of the Pandemic. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Family Outing

Seen on our morning walk today.

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out on Kindle. Link

Quote of the Day

“The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time looking under the bed for Communists that they haven’t had time to look in the bed.”

• Michael Foot, on the Profumo affair, 1963.

The unsuitable lockdown

Looking in the wardrobe this morning for a shirt I suddenly realised that I haven’t worn a suit — or a jacket — for nine months. And I began to wonder if I will ever wear one again. I guess the answer is yes, but only if and when the University gets back to some kind of normality.

I always disliked wearing a suit until one of my colleagues who had been in the Navy suggested a way of dealing with the phobia. Think of it as your dress uniform, he said. After all, sometimes he’d had to put on his full uniform, medals, gold braid, scrambled egg cap, etc. But most of the time it had rested in his wardrobe in a moth-proof wrapper.

So to try and cheer myself up after my beloved Sue died in 2002 I decided to tackle the suit phobia and had one made by a very fancy London tailor. It cost an arm and a leg, but the uncanny thing was that when it was finished and I put it on it felt like something I had worn for years. And so I actually came to enjoy wearing it. It became my ‘uniform’, as it were. So I guess I will eventually get to wear it again occasionally — after I’ve got my vaccination certificate, perhaps.

Until then, residing in Zoomland, the dress code will continue to be sweaters and jeans.

Interestingly, few weeks ago David (Lord) Sainsbury, who is the Chancellor of the University, spoke at a Bennett Institute Webinar from his home. And he was in an open-necked shirt and a sweater. Bet he won’t be dressed like that in person, though.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Padraig McGovern & Peter Carberry | The road to town and other reels

Link

Long view of the Day

Not a long read today but a long view. “A Yorkshire Lad in LA” — Edward Saywell’s terrific lecture on the life and work of my favourite artist: David Hockney.

It’s an hour and a half but worth every minute.

For the sake of democracy, social media giants must pay newspapers

My Observer column in this morning’s paper:

One of the consequences of the rise of social media is that whatever public sphere we once had is now distorted and polluted by being forced through four narrow apertures called Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, services in which almost everything that people see, read or hear is curated by algorithms designed solely to increase the profitability of their owners.

One sees the effects of this transformation of the public sphere at all levels, but one of the most disturbing is in the decline of local newspapers. In many regions of democratic states what goes on in the courts, council chambers, planning committees, chambers of commerce, trade union branches, community centres, sports clubs, churches and schools now goes unreported because local newspapers have gone bust or shrunk to shadows of their former selves. Citizens of most UK towns and cities now have much less information about what’s happening in their localities than their grandparents did, no matter how assiduously they check their Facebook or Twitter feeds. And the quality of local democratic discourse has been accordingly impaired.

The tech companies are not wholly to blame for these changes of course. But they have played a significant role in undermining the institutions whose business model they vaporised. Looked at from that perspective, it seems wholly reasonable that societies should require social media companies to contribute to the support of news organisations that democracies require for their functioning and survival.

Do read the whole thing.

‘Why did it take nine hours to go 130 miles in our new electric Porsche?’

Cautionary tale of a couple who have a beautiful new Porsche Taycan EV but discovered that they were at the mercy of the UK’s ramshackle public charging network.

A couple from Kent have described how it took them more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger capable of producing enough power to their electric car.

Linda Barnes and her husband had to visit six charging stations as one after another they were either out of order, already had a queue or were the slow, older versions that would never be able to provide a fast enough charge in the time.

While the couple seem to have been “incredibly unlucky”, according to the president of the AA, Edmund King, their case highlights some of the problems that need ironing out before electric car owners can rely on the UK’s charging infrastructure.

When they finally got to a working fast charger at a motorway services station – via two more that were not operating – they were met with eight shiny Tesla chargers but discovered they were out of bounds because they are only available to the brand’s owners. Fortunately there was another non-Tesla fast charger that was available at the station and they were finally able to get enough power to get home with only 11% battery power to spare.

The really surprising thing about this (to me, anyway) is that the Porsche has such a short range.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• It seems that the Fakhrizadeh assassination was carried out by remote control. Link

• KFC Rolls Out Self-Driving 5G ‘Chicken Trucks’ in China. Allegedly the result of a partnership between a Chinese tech startup, Neolix, and Yum Brands, which owns KFC. *Link

• In other news: our galaxy is being slowly ‘Pulled’ Apart by a neighbouring galaxy. The Milky Way is being slowly twisted and deformed by the gravitational force of a neighbouring satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out on Kindle. If you’re interested you can get it here

The Mask

Venice, 2010.

Quote of the Day

“There can be no law if we were to invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose us and another for our friends.”

• President Eisenhower, speech on the Suez crisis, 31 October 1956

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Ace of Hearts

Link

Long read of the Day

You have to make a proper appointment with this — the piece David Foster Wallace wrote for Rolling Stone after spending a week on the campaign trail with John McCain in 2000. It’s long, long, long, but as beautifully written as anything DFW ever wrote. And it’s the best piece of campaign reporting I’ve ever read — and I’ve read a lot over the years. (The only other campaign reporter who comes close is Hunter Thompson.)

DFW starts with a detailed account of McCain’s horrific experience as a POW in Vietnam, and his refusal to accept a release because that would have given him a privilege over other servicemen who had been captured before him. Acceptance would have broken the Code in which he believed. For that refusal the Commandant, right there in the office, had guards break his ribs, re-break his arm and knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Now read on…

But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 – right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him – that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign, that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered – voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: “moral authority,” that old cliche, much like so many other cliche’s – “service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism” – that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we’ve seen, though – arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings – something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. About whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?

Like I say, it’s a mighty long read. But it leaves one musing in the silence afterwards. And thinking again about Trump’s attempt to belittle McCain way back in 2015. (“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”) This from a guy who dodged the draft using the pretext of a bone spur. (38% of people have the same bone growth that kept Trump out of Vietnam.)

The other thought is the tragedy of DFW’s death at the age of 46.

Et in Arcadia non sum

Pithy comment today on Jonty Bloom’s Blog

The news that Arcadia the British store group seems to be about to go into administration raises many issues about business in the UK. High Streets across the country will take another massive hit, with more empty stores adding to their misery and 13,000 staff could be out of work when unemployment is already soaring.

Sir Phillip Green on the other hand will still be a billionaire, or to be more precise his wife will be; she after all owns the company. Both are based in Monaco, not for the tax benefits you understand, but as Sir Phillip told Parliament because he found the schools there were so good.

We will have to take his word for that but the wider issue is how the owners of businesses can take billions out of a company and then watch it fail. Sir Phillip is not the first and he won’t be the last to do this. Accountants, lawyers and auditors arrange and sign off these deals, they are all perfectly legal.

But stripping cash from a business, loading it with debt, failing to fund the pension pot properly and then wringing your hands as thousands of loyal workers lose everything; is not a business model any country should be proud of. Not least because at the end it is the state and its taxpayers who pick up the bill.

I particularly like the effrontery of living in Monaco because of its excellent schools. Who knew?

But there is a bigger point. The liberal democracy to which so many of us want to return to after Trump and his authoritarian peers fade away is the same system that permitted, enabled — and sometimes even valorised — the kind of looting by private equity of serious enterprises like Arcadia. Is that really what we will return to after the pandemic? And if not, what are democratic institutions going to do about it?

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• A remarkable optical illusion. Link. Eventually, this convinced me that the rotating circles didn’t move. HT to Jason Kottke.

• Roadside America. On a series of road trips across the US, John Margolies recorded the fading remnants of a culture of roadside architecture which was under threat from freeway building, changing taste and corporate fast food. His photos of the bizarre, the surreal and the often downright brilliant examples of twentieth century popular architecture are, well, fantastic. [Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

100 Not Out, my lockdown diary, is now in the Kindle store!

You can get it here.

King’s in silhouette

Quote of the Day

“This could be the first Thanksgiving when you’d be better off being a turkey.”

• Dave Pell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Start Me Up

Link

Microsoft bought some of the rights to use this at the launch of Windows 95 (for an undisclosed but massive sum), presumably because it was the only operating system in the world where you had to press the ‘Start’ button to turn it off.

Long read of the Day

Surveillance Capitalism Wasn’t Built by Powerful Companies Alone

How societal norms and prevailing economic models still contribute to the development of harmful technologies.

By Anouska Ruhack

Link

This surveillance economy is made up not only of the powerful tech companies but also of the underlying assumptions, beliefs and economic models that reinforce them. Unless we scrutinize and question these beliefs, we risk merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…

What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers

Charlie Warzel has a terrific piece about what Facebook does to ‘ordinary’ people of a certain generation (mine). He asked two people to let him access their Facebook accounts to see what appears in their feeds, because it would be very different from what appears in the feed of a well-known New York Times journalist. It was.

Such a clever and simple idea. Here’s how it begins…

In mid-October I asked two people I’d never met to give me their Facebook account passwords for three weeks leading up to and after Election Day. I wanted to immerse myself in the feeds of a type of person who has become a trope of sorts in our national discussion about politics and disinformation: baby boomers with an attachment to polarizing social media.

I went looking for older Americans — not full-blown conspiracy theorists, trolls or partisan activists — whose news consumption has increased sharply in the last few years on Facebook. Neither of the two people I settled on described themselves as partisans. Both used to identify as conservatives slowly drifting leftward until Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party offered a final push. Both voted for Joe Biden this year in part because of his promise to reach across the aisle. Both bemoaned the toxicity of our current politics.

Every day, Jim Young, 62, opens up his Facebook app and heads into an information hellscape. His news feed is a dizzying mix of mundane middle-class American life and high-octane propaganda.

Great read throughout. Essentially, like many (perhaps most) people of their generation they signed up for Facebook for innocent reasons — like wanting to connect with people from their past, family, etc. And then, slowly, they started to discover that some of their friends were sharing weird stuff, and sometimes becoming stranger by the day…

That’s what ‘user engagement’ curation does to you.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• What some writers are (or could be) earning on Substack. Not this one, though. Link

• On (not) leaving San Francisco. Lovely photo essay by Om Malik.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

This is such a useful visualisation by Ian M. Mackay making the point that there is no single way of being sure that you’ve stopped the virus getting through.

Quote of the Day

“Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook said at the weekend they would transfer control of the @POTUS account, the official one for the US president, to the Biden administration on January 20.”

• Financial Times

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Where’er you walk | Semele HWV 58 / Act 2 | Bryn Terfel

Link

tl;dr: An AI that sums up research papers in a sentence

From Nature.

The creators of a scientific search engine have unveiled software that automatically generates one-sentence summaries of research papers, which they say could help scientists to skim-read papers faster.

The free tool, which creates what the team calls TLDRs (the common Internet acronym for ‘Too long, didn’t read’), was activated this week for search results at Semantic Scholar, a search engine created by the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, Washington. For the moment, the software generates sentences only for the ten million computer-science papers covered by Semantic Scholar, but papers from other disciplines should be getting summaries in the next month or so, once the software has been fine-tuned, says Dan Weld, who manages the Semantic Scholar group at AI2.

You can test it by submitting an Abstract of a paper here.

I tried it, by feeding it the Abstract of the landmark 2013 paper by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior”, which reads:

We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.

The ‘generated TLDR’ reads:

“We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including”

That’s not a demanding test, because the Abstract is a good summary of the paper. It’s be better to test it on more abstruse stuff — like preprint Abstracts in arXiv.org. Still… I can see it being useful for busy bloggers who aspire to curation!

Australian predictive policing tool for kids

Great blog post by Cory.

Predictive policing tools work really well: they perfectly predict what the police will do. Specifically, they predict whom the police will accuse of crimes, and since only accused people are convicted, they predict who will be convicted, too.

In that sense, predictive policing predicts “crime” – the crimes that the police prosecute are the crimes that the computer tells them to seek out and make arrests over. But that doesn’t mean that predictive policing actually fights actual crime.

Instead, predictive policing serves as empirical facewash for bias. Take last year’s biased policing statistics, give them to a machine learning model, and ask it where the crime will be next year, and it will tell you that next year’s crime will look much the same.

If the police then follow the oracle’s bidding and patrol the places they’re told to patrol and stop the people they’re told to stop, then yup, they will validate the prediction. Like all oracles, predictive policing only works when its self-fulfilling prophecy.

Michael Lewis: Why I live in Berkeley

Lovely little piece by one of my favourite writers. If I had to live in California I’d live in Berkeley too. Though I’d also like to have a weekend cottage in Carmel.

Hindsight: the only exact science

Steven Sinofsky used to be a senior Microsoft executive and is a knowledgeable blogger.

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Analogue nostalgia

Flowers as seen on the ground-glass screen of a Rolleiflex by an iPhone.

Anniversaries and what they evoke

57 years ago today, JFK was assassinated. Like everyone else, I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.

Yesterday was the centenary of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (one of the two such Sundays in recent Irish history).

Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia account of the event in 1920:

Bloody Sunday (Irish: Domhnach na Fola) was a day of violence in Dublin on 21 November 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. More than 30 people were killed or fatally wounded.

The day began with an Irish Republican Army (IRA) operation, organised by Michael Collins, to assassinate the “Cairo Gang” – a group of undercover British intelligence agents working and living in Dublin. IRA operatives went to a number of addresses and killed or fatally wounded 15 men. Most were British Army officers, one was a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) sergeant, and two were Auxiliaries responding to the attacks. At least two civilians were killed, but the status of some of those killed is unclear. Five others were wounded. The assassinations sparked panic among the British authorities, and many British agents fled to Dublin Castle for safety.

Later that afternoon, British forces raided a Gaelic football match in Croke Park. The RIC, supported by “Black and Tans”, Auxiliaries, and British soldiers, were sent to carry out a cordon and search operation. Without warning, these forces opened fire on the spectators and players, killing or fatally wounding 14 civilians and wounding at least sixty others. Two of those killed were children. Some of the RIC claimed they were fired at, and this was accepted by the British authorities. All other witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked, and a military inquiry concluded it was indiscriminate and excessive. The massacre further turned Irish public opinion against the British authorities.

The other ‘Bloody Sunday’ was in January 1972. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the Wikipedia page:

Bloody Sunday, or the Bogside Massacre, was a massacre on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, when British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment without trial. Fourteen people died: 13 were killed outright, while the death of another man four months later was attributed to his injuries. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers, and some were shot while trying to help the wounded. Other protesters were injured by shrapnel, rubber bullets, or batons, and two were run down by army vehicles. All of those shot were Catholics. The march had been organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The soldiers were from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment (“1 Para”), the same regiment implicated in the Ballymurphy massacre several months prior.

I’ve just watched the first episode of the new series of The Crown which opens with the murder, by the IRA, of Lord Mountbatten, a former Viceroy of India and Chief of the UK General Staff, who had a holiday house in County Sligo. That, plus the anniversary of the 1920 atrocity and memories of the 1972 one, led to two thoughts.

The first is the savagery of all of those three atrocities, and of the extent to which the 1972 massacre is still live in the memories of the people of Northern Ireland.

The second is a sense of wonder at the achievement of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to the savagery.

And then I thought of the cavalier way in which Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers are putting that fragile agreement at risk with their brinksmanship over negotiations with the EU. Giving power to this bunch of jokers was like entrusting the care of a delicate clock to a monkey.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Carberry, Padraig McGovern, Seamus O’Kane | Brittany Winter School | 2015

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Wonderful slow tune. Táimse im choladh is the first tune, I think.

Long read of the Day

The way we train AI is fundamentally flawed

TL;DR summary: The process used to build most of the machine-learning models we use today can’t tell if they will work in the real world or not. And yet we’re building a new world around them.

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If you think Biden’s administration will rein in big tech, think again

My Observer column this morning.

As readers of this column know only too well, section 230 of the 1996 US Telecommunications Act is the clause that exempts tech platforms from legal liability for anything that users post on their platforms. It’s the nearest thing social media has to a kill switch. Pull it and their business models evaporate. Trump had been threatening to pull it before the election, but he lacked the attention span to be able to do anything about it. Biden, on the other hand, had already talked about it in January and would have people around him who knew what they were doing. So maybe we were going to get some real progress in getting tech giants under control.

And then he gets elected and what do we find? Biden’s transition eam is packed withtech industry insiders. Tom Sullivan, from Amazon, is earmarked for the Department of State. Mark Schwartz, also from Amazon, is heading for the Office of Management and Budget, as are Divya Kumaraiah from Airbnb and Brandon Belford from Lyft, the ride-hailing company. The US Treasury gets Nicole Isaac from LinkedIn, Microsoft’s department of spam, and Will Fields, who was Sidewalk Labs’ senior development associate. (Sidewalk Labs was the organiser of Google’s attempt – eventually cancelled – to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a data-geyser for surveillance capitalism.) The Environmental Protection Agency, a body that Trump looted and sidelined, gets Ann Dunkin, who is Dell’s chief technology officer. And so on.

Well, I thought, perusing this sordid list, at least there’s nobody from Facebook on it. How innocent can you be?…

Read on

The pandemic has made us even more dependent on a highly invasive technological ecosystem

Terrific OpEd by Ron Deibert in the Globe and Mail on the way panic-stricken adoption of online systems has resulted in a massive step-up in the level and intrusiveness of surveillance technology. Here’s how it begins:

My son is an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia. Like many of his peers, he has seen his classes move online – and so have their exams.

Students in his program were recently required to consent to a remote exam invigilation software platform manufactured by a company called Proctorio. As with most tech companies, work-from-home measures and social isolation have been a boon to Proctorio: more than 2.5 million exams were proctored by the company in April, 2020, alone, a stunning 900-per-cent increase compared with April, 2019. Other companies in this space – such as ExamSoft, Examity and ProctorU – are enjoying similar surges in demand.

Once installed on a student’s device, applications like Proctorio can monitor students’ keystrokes, capture and record anything on their screens, track their web browsing, and even turn on cameras and microphones to record students’ faces, their surroundings and ambient sounds for evidence of cheating. Proctorio’s proprietary algorithms flag what it detects as “suspicious behavior” to faculty or teaching assistants (TAs) for follow up.

My son said using Proctorio made him feel “creeped out” and uncomfortable. Who can blame him?

It’s one thing to have a TA strolling up and down the aisles of an exam room. It’s quite another to force students to install spyware that tracks everything from their keystrokes to retina movements, sending that data down a mysterious black hole. Imagine having an omniscient, invisible robot looking over your shoulder, staring into your eyeballs, scrutinizing every movement, and scanning your bedroom – the entire time you’re taking an exam. Who could concentrate in those conditions? And yet, he had no choice: The course makes it mandatory…

It’s a great piece by a leading expert on the downsides of digital tech and in particular the surveillance it enables. And it highlights the way the institutional panic triggered by Covid has led universities — and employers, and other organisations everywhere to install and become reliant on tech that would be totally unacceptable in pre-pandemic times.

Well worth reading in full.

Coming soon to a store near you: the British government’s first disaster of 2021. A food shortage

Terrific piece by George Monbiot.

A few days ago, I carried out a small experiment. I sent almost identical requests to two government departments.

I asked the business department whether the UK holds strategic oil reserves. Yes: the UK keeps stocks equivalent to 90 days of net imports. I asked the environment department whether the UK holds strategic food reserves. No: they aren’t necessary, because “the UK has a highly resilient food supply chain”. The government treats oil as a strategic asset but food as a matter for the market.

So what happens if our “highly resilient food supply chain” breaks after Brexit transition, on 1 January? It won’t, the government promised. “Our risk assessments show there will not be an overall shortage of food in the UK,” whether or not there’s a deal. But when I pressed it to show me these risk assessments, the plural turned out to be misleading. There’s just one assessment: a “reasonable worst-case scenario” for the UK’s borders.

This is grim enough. It suggests that the flow of freight through the ports could be reduced by between 20% and 40%, while trucks travelling in either direction could be delayed by up to two days: a big problem for fresh food.

So far, so bad. But the UK’s border is only one link in the food supply chain, and it may not be the weakest.

The UK currently imports over 60% of its food, much if not most of it from the EU. And it turns out that the country is now chronically short of warehousing capacity — partly due to the pandemic and partly to restocking by companies in the hope that there’s a Christmas retail boom.

And the trouble is that it’s hard to stockpile, say, onions, tomatoes or salad — three of the things that we get from Europe.

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A lot of creativity is going into annotating classic paintings to make them ‘Covid-compliant’. Remember the way the Rockwell Thanksgiving picture (on this blog the other day) had been similarly updated.

Quote of the Day

“I always say that a successful parent is one who raises a child so that they can pay for their own psychoanalysis.”

• Nora Ephron

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert – Serenade (arr. Liszt)

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Long read of the Day

“They created a false image”: how the Reagans fooled America”

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I’ve never understood why Reagan has had such an easy ride. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we can see that the foundations of some of the dysfunction that has come to haunt present-day America were laid on his watch, especially with his folksy undermining of the idea of state capacity. As this quote from the piece puts it:

“He wasn’t intellectually curious. He wasn’t a deep thinker. He was, at heart, a reactionary. He was given the nuclear codes and the Oval Office and the greatest bully pulpit in the world, and what did he do with it? He tried to short-circuit the federal government in really detrimental ways. He implemented policies that hurt African Americans and economically disadvantaged minorities. He believed things that weren’t true and repeated them publicly. He was into science denial, he was a seeming believer in creation theory over evolution, he ignored and denied the Aids pandemic. He said trees cause pollution, which reminds us now of Trump saying wind turbines cause pollution.”

Spring-powered wheel claims to be ‘E-bike alternative at lower cost’

This belongs in the ‘important if true’ category.

An Ireland-based entrepreneur is claiming to have invented a power-assisted bicycle wheel that doesn’t use batteries, doesn’t need charging, is not speed restricted and has an infinite range.

Simon Chan says his SuperWheel, which is powered simply by weight and movement via a patented technology called ‘Weight to energy conversion technology’ (WTECT), supplies an efficiency improvement of over 30 per cent compared to a standard wheel.

According to SuperWheel: “The WTECT system is a type of suspension system, using the reactive force to generate additional torque, to facilitate the wheel rotation.”

The first batch has sold out, apparently. The key thing about it is that it just requires one to fit a new kind of wheel to an existing bike. It’ll be interesting to see what the cycling press make of it. Link

Populism, bridge-building and recovery

Interesting essay by Mick Fealty. The rise of populism, he says, is a

symptom of a deeper malaise in the modern governance system, namely that the old bridges which carry relations between the traditional centre (where key resources are) and the edge (the parish) is broken.

So how to build (or rebuild) such bridges?

Over the last few years myself and John Kellden have been working on a methodology which reverses the traditional dynamic of the focus group where instead of gathering opinions on stuff we already know we ask them to tell us what we don’t know, through anecdote.

This deliberately unfocused approach involves the gathering of small stories that illustrate the feelings (not the averaged thoughts) of ordinary people. Whilst opinions tend to converge then diverge, stories invariably diverge even if their themes converge as universal.

It’s not just because understanding the unknown unknowns has become more important in the whirl of digital society, but as part of a three stranded process over time it is capable of building an ongoing participatory inquiry into the sense and purpose government or itself.

The aim is to build a more reliable narrative map for deciding what’s needed whilst at the same time immersing politicians and policy makers in the quotidian language of ordinary people to create a shared and a sharable understanding of key the problems ahead.

As he describes it, the approach sounds interesting and original. More here. It’s refreshing to see a sharp critic also committed to trying to make things better.

Other, hopefully interesting,links.

• A 360-degree camera/microphone for hybrid meetings. “The Meeting Owl Pro is a 360-degree tabletop camera that automatically shifts focus to whomever is speaking in a room, training its lens and microphone on the speaker. In “hybrid” meetings, this means that virtual participants have a better feel for what’s happening in a meeting or classroom or wherever others are gathered in real life.” Hmmm… Costs nearly a grand. At that price it had better be good. Link.

• Tom Stoppard and the Last Crusade. Lovely essay by Tim Carmody about Hermione Lee’s marvellous new biography of Tom Stoppard.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? It’s free. One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And there’s a one-click unsubscribe link if you decide that your inbox is crowded enough already!

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