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

Link

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.

Link

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)

Link

Long read of the Day

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

Link

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.

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7:

The Ring of Kerry must be one of the most celebrated round-trips in the Western world. On a fine day, it’s easy to see why. This is the view you come one rounding a bend after passing through Waterville.

Quote of the Day

“She fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing arm-chairs tight about the hips that season.”

• P.G. Wodehouse

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Stainsby Girls

Link

Keep the volume down if you don’t want to annoy the neighbours. Turn it up if you do.

Long read of the Day

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done

How personal productivity transformed work — and failed to.

Lovely New Yorker essay by Cal Newport which will resonate with anyone who’s ever read Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Logic School

Interesting and novel. An online course for techies to get them thinking about the kind of world they are creating. Runs for twelve weeks from March 8 through May 31, 2021.

Its theme of “creative protest”covers

issues of justice in tech through a multitude of approaches — whether it’s organizing in the workplace, contributing to an existing data visualization project or worker-owned platform, or building a new platform to nurture creative activism. Participants will work towards a final project as part of the program. Logic School meets for a live, two-hour session each week. Before a session, participants are expected to complete self-guided work: listening, reading, reflecting, and making progress on their final projects.

It’s free (funded by the Omidyar Network) and requires a commitment of five hours a week.

Software is trying to change your habits. Make sure you agree with it.

Software is trying to change your habits. Make sure you agree with it.

Link Nice little sermon, with homely examples.

Facebook notifications used to be so simple: if someone tagged me or responded to one of my posts, the red dot would let me know. Over time, this changed, and I started getting notifications for all kinds of things. Sometimes I’d get notifications about a friend liking a post by someone I don’t know. Occasionally I’d get notifications that were just friend recommendations.

As with malls, this isn’t some accident. This is a decision Facebook made. I can only speculate, but the data probably showed people are more likely to engage with content if there’s a notification, and a decision was made to put more stuff in the notifications. Their agenda, if I had to guess, is for me to spend more time on Facebook.

You might not think about this much. Tech companies do—a lot.

The shopping mall also has an agenda: they want you to walk around, see a bunch of different stores, and buy stuff. Knowing about this agenda can help you make better decisions. Maybe you’ll look up maps before heading to the mall, so you know where you’re going. Maybe you’ll give yourself a strict budget ahead of time, so you don’t overspend. Or maybe you don’t mind the mall’s agenda and are perfectly happy to wander and buy things.

My point here isn’t that malls are bad—it’s that they’re not neutral. Malls are designed with an agenda, and knowing about that agenda can help you make better decisions.

Software is the same way. The companies that make software have an agenda, and every design choice is in service of that agenda. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but that agenda may or may not line up with yours. So it’s worth thinking about your agenda and how it aligns with the agenda of the services you’re using.

Yeah. When you can wean yourself off the dopamine.

Zen and the art of Rosetta emulation

Yesterday I blogged about the new M1 processor that Apple has developed and now rolled out in some of its Macintosh line. I knew that the main Apple apps ran very well in the new architecture (no surprise there), but also knew that many of the programs that are part of my workflow ecosystem weren’t ready for the new processor and would therefore have to run under the Rosetta emulation software — which would therefore mean (I assumed) that they would run slowly until they had been rewritten.

Seems that I was wrong. Quentin emailed me this morning to alert me to a review that Samuel Axon had done for ArsTechnica. Here’s the relevant extract:

Every now and then, the Hollywood studio system makes a sequel to a movie that came out a long, long time ago. It hasn’t usually gone well.

Rosetta in macOS Big Sur is such a sequel, but it’s for the most part a phenomenal success. It’s better than the original. The last time the Rosetta name appeared, it was there to help PowerPC applications run on Intel Macs after Apple made the last architecture transition, back in 2006. Now, as Apple leaves Intel behind, Rosetta 2 is here to make apps made for Intel Macs run on the new Apple Silicon ones, like the Mac mini with the M1.

Rosetta 2 translates apps developed for x86 macOS to work on the M1 or other Apple Silicon CPUs, which are not capable of natively running said apps. It does this ahead of time, not on the fly—meaning when you install the app or first launch it (depending on the installation method) it is recompiled for the new architecture. Further, the app is automatically recompiled again as Apple releases relevant software updates.

The results are near-perfect. You’ll be prompted to install Rosetta when you first launch a legacy app, and that installation just takes a few seconds. After that, and in almost all cases, the user might never know whether an app was originally native to this hardware or not. The only common clue is that the translated Intel apps might take a few seconds longer to launch from the dock for the first time.

We installed and tested 120 apps—a wide variety of types and inclusive of both Mac App Store apps and Web downloads—and almost none of them failed to launch, ran noticeably slowly, or produced errors that impacted usage. The few exceptions were all 3D games downloaded on Steam, which mostly worked but with problems in a couple of titles.

This is astonishing, really astonishing. And if you were looking for an excuse for not buying the new Macs, it’s just been undermined. Sigh.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Lockdowns For Thee, But Not For Me. An anthology of Covid hypocrisy by elites. Link
• Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Be Able To Fix Your Things. Good podcast on the Right to Repaior movement. Link. It isn’t just tech companies either. John Deere doesn’t want you fixing your tractor.

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Girls’ Night Out, 2010

Life before social distancing.

Quote of the Day

“It was through the Second World War that most of us suddenly appreciated for the first time the power of man’s concentrated efforts to understand and control the forces of nature. We were appalled by what we saw.”

• Vannevar Bush, 1967 in Science is Not Enough

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Johnny Cash | The Gambler

Link

Re: cycling

Coming home today after a pleasant sunlit cycle ride (our government-approved daily exercise) I noticed that the odometer on my (electric) bike had nudged from 4,199.9 miles to 4,200.

We’ve had those bikes for about three years, which means that I’ve cycled the distance from Cambridge to Nairobi in that time. (When I told my wife this, she replied deadpan that she had cycled 4,800 miles in the same time, which rather put me in my place, even after I tried to rationalise it with the thought that her daily commute to work is a mile longer than mine.)

The really interesting thing, though, is that without our bikes, those 4,200/4,800 miles would have been travelled in cars, with attendant environmental costs.

Norman Rockwell’s ‘Thanksgiving’ picture, Covid version

From Dave Winer’s blog.

Apple ARM Macs arrive — but don’t expect all third-party apps to work without emulation

Geeky stuff, but interesting. Apple’s achievement in building its own processor — the M1 — based on ARM architecture and delivering it on time is astonishing, given the technical complexity of doing it. And it seem that all of Apple’s own main apps (Mail, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc.) run just fine on the new processor. But many third-party apps are not yet ready for it and have to run via the Rosetta emulator. The Register has a useful summary of the current state of play.

The moral of the story is don’t upgrade just yet if those third-party programs are important for your workflow. Which is annoying because the new laptops are blazingly fast, and seem to have much better battery life.

Trump’s Firehose of Falsehood

Very perceptive piece:

What Trump and his supporters are up to should be thought of not as a litigation campaign that is likely to fail, but as an information-warfare campaign that is likely to succeed—and, indeed, is succeeding already. More specifically, they are employing a tactic called “the firehose of falsehood.” This information-warfare technique, according to researchers at the RAND Corporation, is marked by “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

After Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain in 2018, Kremlin-controlled media blamed Britain. And/or Ukraine. And/or it was an accident. And/or it was suicide. And/or it was a revenge killing by relatives. And/or Russia did not produce the nerve agent that was used. And/or an entirely different nerve agent was used. The Washington Post, which published a flowchart of Russia’s kaleidoscopic inventions, summarized what the propagandists were up to: “They fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories, and red herrings, intended not so much to persuade people as to bewilder them.”

Unlike more traditional forms of propaganda, the firehose of falsehood does not aim primarily at persuading the public of something that is false (although this is a welcome result). Rather, it floods the information environment with so many lies, half-truths and theories that the public becomes disoriented, confused and distrustful of everyone.

The Russians were the great innovators in this space. And the alt-right have learned a lot from them.

John Williams gets Gold

Composer John Williams received the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society last night. There was a nice interview with him on this morning’s Today programme.

Link

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Oslo got pedestrian and cyclist deaths down to zero. How did they do it? Hint: it involves fewer cars. Link
• How I Draw Spherical Panoramas. By Paul Heaston. Lovely — and ingenious, with a nice hack at the end. Link
• Was Roger Fenton’s famous photo of the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ faked? Errol Morris’s investigation. Link

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Smart doggie

On the beach in Antibes one sweltering August Sunday. The dog was sitting sensibly in the shade while his master and mistress roasted in the sun like kebabs on a barbeque.

Quote of the Day

”Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation. You choose a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not the Member for Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament. “

• Edmund Burke, speech to Bristol voters, 1774

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” | from Rinaldo

Link

Jonty on Brexit

From Jonty’s blog:

I get the strong feeling by reading the analysis of those closer to politicians than I have ever been or will be, that what is stopping a deal is the fear that the UK government will be accused of selling out.

Given that a clear majority of the population now think that Brexit was a mistake (according to the polls), that every industrial lobby group I can think of is begging for a deal, and the police are warning of dire consequences of no deal, this is amazing. Also a no deal will play straight into the SNP’s hands and the cunning plan to break international law has come up against the reality of a new US president. Even parts of the fishing industry are warning of the consequences for exports if there is not a deal, ironic indeed.

All in all it is a sign of how much the internal schisms of the Tory party are still dominating this vital national policy.

How opioids were sold to medics

Cory Doctorow has a good post about the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of the Inspector General has issued a “special fraud alert” on “Speaker Programs.” Strangely these two terms — ‘speaker program” and “fraud” — don’t suggest an obvious connection, but Cory explains how one exists.

If you’re a pharma giant, your profit margin is largely dependent on the willingness of doctors to prescribe – and overprescribe – your products. Doctors often don’t want to do this, so you need to “align incentives” to make the magic happen.

Lucky for Big Pharma, docs have a “continuing education” requirement to keep their licenses current. This creates a vacuum. Pharma companies pay the expenses of docs who write a lot of scrips for their dope to attend “seminars” in fancy resorts, flying in their families.

For the writin’ doc whales who top the overprescription charts, pharma companies have an even sweeter deal: they get to PRESENT at these “seminars” and pull down six-figure “speaking fees” on top of the all-expense-paid family junket to a luxury tropical resort.

The DoJ investigation suggests that the polite term for these arrangements might be ‘scams’.

Cory goes into interesting detail. Basically the quid-pro-quo is junkets in exchange for prolific prescribing.

Amazon continues to morph into critical infrastructure

From today’s FT…

Walgreens Boots Alliance and CVS Health shares fell more than 9 per cent and Rite Aid was down more than 16 per cent soon after Amazon announced a disruptive online delivery service on Tuesday, offering big discounts for prescription medicine in the US.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Italian Police Use Lamborghini To Transport Donor Kidney 300 Miles In Two Hours. That’s an average speed of 146mph. Not bad. Link.
• The best $475 I ever spent: A kayak that made me appreciate where I come from. A nice lockdown story. Link.
• The 200 Most Common Online Passwords of 2020 Are Awful. They are. Link.

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Someone’s country seat

Actually, the result of a spot of fly-tipping.

Quote

“Reality is what I see, not what you see. “

• Anthony Burgess

Musical alternative

George Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues | with Acker Bilk & his Band (1965)

Link

Long read of the Day

 The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse

Riveting essay on the work of Peter Turchin, a quantitative historian who believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. The key driver of this cyclical historical pattern, he believes, is a society’s “overproduction of elites”. Since you’re reading this (and I’m writing it) we’re both probably part of the problem. But it’s a great read whether or not you believe that history repeats itself.

The unfollowing of Trump?

Jack Shafer on whether Trump is headed for oblivion — or not.

On the one hand…

Don’t worry about the thin squealing you hear wafting in from the White House. It’s just the sound of the last thousand cubic meters of gas escaping the rapidly deflating Trump presidency.

This doesn’t mean we’ve heard the last from Donald Trump—or that during his descent from office he’ll be incapable of causing mischief and detonating crises. But given the way the attention economy works, with each passing day he will become less and less relevant as the bilge and sewage of his “rigged” and “stolen” election protests move deeper and deeper inside the A section of the newspaper and our focus toggles instead to the Biden presidency, Covid-19 fallout, the economy, foreign entanglements, natural catastrophes and the endless surprises the future brings. Trump’s slide from the political A list to the B list and maybe even the C list will be secured on Jan. 20, when Joe Biden takes the oath, so if you plan on missing him once he’s gone, prepare yourself for his vanishing act now.

On the other hand…

Trump has always disrupted the natural laws of news, so his ex-presidency should be allowed a few exemptions. For one thing, Trump, unlike term-limited presidents or other incumbents who’ve lost, has already signaled an ongoing involvement in politics and perhaps another run in 2024. Many of his 73 million voters will still heed his messages, donate to his permanent campaign, tune in when he phones Fox & Friends, cloister in airplane hangars for his rallies, and watch him on his new TV channel if he nabs one. He is, after all, the man who enjoyed campaigning for president more than actually being president.

On balance, Shafer seems unusually (for him) optimistic:

There is no criticism like the criticism of straightforward indifference,” Alexander Cockburn wrote in 1986. As the ritual of inauguration gathers speed, as every third word on cable news and the front pages is about Biden and Kamala Harris, as the imperial powers of the presidency change hands, and as Trump slinks off to his exile in Mar-a-Lago, Trump will feel something close to straightforward indifference as the nation finally unfollows him.

The Obama interview

In The Atlantic.

Which brought him to his main point: “America as an experiment is genuinely important to the world not because of the accidents of history that made us the most powerful nation on Earth, but because America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work,” he said.

The threats to American democracy—and to the broader cause of freedom—are many, he said. He was withering on the subject of Donald Trump, but acknowledged that Trump himself is not the root of the issue. “I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life,” he said. “He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”

Trump, Obama noted, is not exactly an exemplar of traditional American manhood. “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”

He sees the origin of the populist wave in the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running-mate. The wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy.

“I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.”

“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

Interesting throughout. Reminds one of what a serious politician is like.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Lego creates largest set ever: Rome’s Colosseum with 9,036 pieces. Link.
• Jeremy Mayer’s astonishing sculptures. The write stuff: made from old typewriters. Thanks to Cory for the Link.
• In Which a Cat Narrates Feline History in the Age of European Conquest. Well, the Ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods. Link
• The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. Wonderfully clever spoof. Link. Many thanks to James Miller, Whom God Preserve, for the link.

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Sloe gin anybody?

Seen on a walk today. Some people make gin with these.

Quote of the Day

“Cummings is not an evil genius, he is ultimately a tragic figure. He embodies everything wrong with the Westminster political elite. He is an oddball, entirely self obsessed and egoistical, thinking he is smarter than everybody else while knowing next to nothing beyond a superficial waffle. He bluffed his way to the most powerful unelected position in Britain. In the process he duped us all, damaged the perception of the U.K. on the world stage, and nearly derailed the premiership of the most popular Tory PM since Churchill. One day he himself will admit it — it was all BS.”

• An unnamed Downing Street adviser speaking to Politico on Day One A.D. (after Dom)

That bit about “the most popular Tory PM since Churchill” is baloney IMHO.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn Cello Concerto in C (3rd movement)

Link

Long read of the Day

More than tools: who is responsible for the social dilemma?

Perceptive essay by Niall Docherty on the documentary film about the impact of social media.

Biden’s transition team is packed with folks from the tech industry

This from Protocol doesn’t necessarily bode well for anyone hoping that a Biden election might mean doing something about the tech giants.

Here’s the list of people from big-name tech companies:

* Tom Sullivan, Amazon's international policy team (State Department)
* Mark Schwartz, Amazon Web Services' enterprise strategist (Office of Management and Budget)
* Divya Kumaraiah, Airbnb's strategy and program lead for cities (Office of Management and Budget)
* Brandon Belford, Lyft's senior director and its public policy team's chief of staff (Office of Management and Budget)
* Nicole Isaac, LinkedIn's senior director of North America policy (Treasury Department)
* Will Fields, Sidewalk Labs' senior development associate (Treasury Department)
* Clare Gallagher, Airbnb's partnerships & events manager (National Security Council)
* Matt Olsen, Uber's trust and security officer (Intelligence Community)
* Arthur Plews, Stripe's strategy and operations lead (Small Business Administration)
* Ted Dean, Dropbox's public policy lead (U.S. Trade Representative)
* Ann Dunkin, Dell's chief technology officer (Environmental Protection Agency)
* Phillip Carter, Tableau Software's senior corporate counsel (Department of Veterans Affairs)
* Nairi Tashjian Hourdajian, VP of comms at Figma (Department of Transportation)
* Nicole Wong, former Google and Twitter, former Obama Deputy Chief Technology Officer (Office of Science and Technology Policy)

There is one consolation — there’s nobody from Facebook. But overall it looks suspiciously as though ye olde revolving door — the process of regulatory capture — is spinning vigorously. I hope I’m wrong.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• How to Shop for a Mechanical Keyboard. Sounds daft, but actually very informative. Keyboards really matter if you have to use a computer all the time. Link.
• Can the bike boom keep going? From Bloomberg. Link.
• How I knew that the internal combustion engine was dead. Ford have released an all-electric Transit van. White Van Man will never be the same again. Link

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

Acrobatics in Venice

Quote

“Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad. It is usually both”

• Robert Musil

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The blackbird (hornpipe) ; The chorus (reel) | Padraig McGovern & Peter Carberry

Link

Long read of the Day

Alison Gopnik: the Grandmother Hypothesis

This is an utterly fascinating essay by one of the most insightful thinkers about children and human development I’ve encountered. Here’s how it begins:

Human beings need special care while we are young and when we become old. The 2020 pandemic has made this vivid: millions of people across the world have taken care of children at home, and millions more have tried to care for grandparents, even when they couldn’t be physically close to them. COVID-19 has reminded us how much we need to take care of the young and the old. But it’s also reminded us how much we care for and about them, and how important the relations between the generations are. I have missed restaurants and theatres and haircuts, but I would easily give them all up to be able to hug my grandchildren without fear. And there is something remarkably moving about the way that young people transformed their lives to protect older ones.

But this raises a puzzling scientific paradox. We know that biological creatures are shaped by the forces of evolution, which selects organisms based on their fitness – that is, their ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. So why has it allowed us to be so vulnerable and helpless for long stretches of our lives? Why do the strong, able humans in their prime of life put so much time and energy into caring for those who are not yet, or no longer, so productive? New research argues that those vulnerabilities are intimately related to some of our greatest human strengths – our capacities for learning, cooperation and culture…

The Economist on Covid vaccines: “The technology of hope”

This is the best and most informative piece I’ve read on the reality, problems and potential of Covid vaccines.

DELIVERANCE, WHEN it arrives, will come in a small glass vial. First there will be a cool sensation on the upper arm as an alcohol wipe is rubbed across the skin. Then there will be a sharp prick from a needle. Twenty-one days later, the same again. As the nurse drops the used syringe into the bin with a clatter, it will be hard not to wonder how something so small can solve a problem so large.

On November 9th Pfizer and BioNTech, two firms working as partners on a vaccine against covid-19, announced something extraordinary about the first 94 people on their trial to develop symptoms of the disease. At least 86 of them—more than nine out of ten—had been given the placebo, not the vaccine. A bare handful of those vaccinated fell ill. The vaccine appeared to be more than 90% effective.

Within a few weeks the firms could have the data needed to apply for emergency authorisation to put the vaccine to use. The British and American governments have said that vaccinations could start in December. The countries of the EU have also been told it will be distributed quickly…

Yes, but that’s just the start of it. Worth reading in full.

Scott Galloway on Corona Corps

Scott Galloway is one of my favourite commentators on the tech industry. But he’s also good on politics — as well as being very perceptive (and critical) on how universities in the US are swindling students during the pandemic. He has an intriguing blog post this week in which he advances an idea of how to marshal the students who are currently being cheated out of an education while also doing what needs to be done to bring the pandemic. It’s an idea borrowed from the Peace Corps of the 1960s.

The equation for flattening the curve is simple: Testing x Tracing x Isolation = Flattening. On the whole, unless you are a Floridian, Americans have answered the call to take up arms (distancing) against the enemy. Testing is still a sh*tshow, but private-sector leaders (Bezos, Bloomberg) are trying to fill the void of federal incompetence. The missing link may be tracing. We currently have approximately 2,500 tracers who focus mostly on STDs and food-borne illnesses. The amount of time, hours really, between someone coming into contact with the virus and being isolated is paramount. We need 100,000 to 300,000 tracers.

As he puts it, “An Army Stands Ready”. Kids shouldn’t be going to college until the virus has been brought under control. They should all have a gap year — but one spent doing something that is socially useful: working on testing and tracing in the Corona Corps. Just like the Peace Corps back in the day.

This fall, 4 million kids are supposed to show up on campuses around the nation. I have 280 kids registered for my fall Brand Strategy class. I don’t believe it’s going to happen. The thought of 280 kids sitting elbow to elbow in a classroom presents our trustees with a challenging scenario.

Gap years should be the norm, not the exception. An increasingly ugly secret of campus life is that a mix of helicopter parenting and social media has rendered many 18-year-olds unfit for college. Parents drop them off at school, where university administrators have become mental health counselors. The structure of the Corona Corps would give kids (and let’s be honest, they are still kids) a chance to marinate and mature. The data supports this. 90% of kids who defer and take a gap year return to college and are more likely to graduate, with better grades. The Corps should be an option for non-college-bound youth as well.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Joe Biden went out cycling today. A man after my own heart. Link

• New device puts music in your head — no headphones required. Yeah, I know, I’m a gadget freak, but this is interesting. Link. There’s a video aimed at sceptics (I think).

• China congratulates Joe Biden on being elected President. Interesting: they must know something the Republicans don’t. 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!

Brancaster, Norfolk. Where I’d love to be if we weren’t locked down.

Quote of the Day

”We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Joseph Haydn – String Trio, Op.53, No.3 in D Major

Link

Death and Venice

Colm Toibín is in Venice, on his own. He’s written an enchanting diary column for the London Review of Books which I fear may be behind its paywall. In case it is, these last two paragraphs will give you a feel for it:

One of the subjects to muse on as old age begins is how unfair life is. Venice is a good place for such thoughts. One day I walked down to Riva dei Sette Martiri which is where I stayed first in the city. I had a coffee and looked out over the misty water. I came to this very spot first in 1977, which is 43 years ago. If I have the chance to come and sit here in 43 years’ time, I will be 108. I realise that this is a most banal and useless subject for contemplation. But what else is there to think about?

There was quietness to ponder; maybe that was enough. When I stood outside the Accademia, the only sound came from a stray boat on one of the lesser canals and a vaporetto on the Grand Canal, a dutiful, useful ghost, taking the small population of Venice from one place to another while the hordes that normally come to the city remained crouched in their homes, fearful, socially distant. Once they come back, we can all start complaining again. Until they do, we will wear our masks and whisper about small mercies and think about light and shade.

Long read of the Day

 Can lab-grown brains become conscious?

From Nature

In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity.

These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems. Like many scientists, Muotri has temporarily pivoted to studying COVID-19, using brain organoids to test how drugs perform against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies1. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This is an angle on consciousness I never expected.

Why the current lockdown is different

From Jonty’s blog:

I was walking the hound this morning which involves crossing a major road near me, which used to have numerous shops on it. You can tell by the facades that even though they are now flats they all used to be shops, now there is only one newsagent left. It made me think about the latest rebound in UK GDP figures, and whether it will last? The latest lockdown strongly suggests it won’t, the economy is bound to take another hit and for one sector in particular this lockdown will be much worse.

Many years ago I persuaded the manager of a huge department store on Oxford Street to talk about the run up to Xmas. One thing really surprised me; the store made well over 50% of its profits in November and December, it may have been as high as 75%, it was a long time ago. The January sales also brought in quite a bit of money but as the manager told me, that meant the shop was making a loss for 9 months of the year.

Which is why the retail sector is so anxious about this new lockdown. Although the last one was tough, at least it didn’t cover the most and possibly only profitable time of the year, like this one does.

What is wrong with people in the US?

This from Tyler Cowen today:

He comments:

And rising, 1500 per day seems baked in, 2000 per day might also be within reach. I just don’t get you people who say this isn’t a big deal.

Nor do I. It’s strange how this kind of carnage looks like being ‘normalised’.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• AlphaGo: the full documentary. No matter what you think about AI this film (about how a machine beat the World Champion at Go) is wonderful. And it’s on YouTube. 90 minutes. Pour a drink and sit back. And look out for Eric Schmidt’s cameo appearance. Link.
• Ruby Bridges Tells Her Story. In 1960, at the age of six, Ruby Bridges was the first black pupil at the newly desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She was escorted to her first day of school by federal marshals, a journey that was immortalized by Normal Rockwell in a 1964 painting called ‘The Problem We All Live With’. Ruby is now 66 and has published a new book. Jason Kottke has a lovely post about it which includes the Rockwell painting.

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!