Thursday 30 July, 2020

Posted on July 30, 2020 by jjn1

Thursday 30 July, 2020

Quote of the Day

Every time Trump opens his mouth, he convinces somebody out there to vote for Biden.

Jack Shafer

Musical alternative to Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme

Link

Bach: Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565, played by Edson Lopes. (9 minutes)

Doc Searls is 65+

Doc is one of the Elder Statesmen of the Web. (He was one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto). And he’s just turned 65, which means he’s now in the blanket category known to marketers as “the over 65s”.

Thus I have now fallen over the edge of a demographic cliff, at the bottom of which is little of major interest to marketers, unless they’re hawking the cushy human equivalent of parking lots. You know: cruises, golf, “lifestyle communities,” “erectile dsyfunction,” adult diapers, geriatric drugs, sensible cars, dementia onset warnings…

For individuals, demographics are absurd. None of us are an age, much less a range of them. We’re animals who live and work and have fun and do stuff. Eventually we croak, but if we stay healthy we acquire wisdom and experience, and find ourselves more valuable over time.

Yet we become less employable as we climb the high end of the demographic ladder, but not because we can’t do the work. It’s mostly because we look old and our tolerance for bullshit is low. Even our own, which is another bonus.

Nearly 100% of the people I work with are younger than me, usually by a generation or two. I almost never feel old among them. Sometimes I joke about it, but I really don’t care. It helps to have been around. It helps to know how fast and well the mighty rise, and then fall. It helps to see what comes and stays, and to know why those things matter more than what comes and goes. It helps to know there are sand dunes older than any company born on the Internet.

Happy birthday, Doc!

Link

Echo frames

Aww isn’t this sweet? Alexa sitting just above your ear.

Meet Echo Frames – All-day glasses with hands-free access to Alexa. Just ask Alexa – Make calls, set reminders, add to your to-do lists, listen to podcasts, or control your smart home from anywhere. Designed for all-day wear – Echo Frames are lightweight and compatible with most prescription lenses. VIP Filter – Customize which notifications to receive from the contacts and apps that matter most to you (Android only). Thoughtful design – Amazon open-ear technology directs sound to your ears and minimizes what others can hear. And with no camera or display, you stay in the moment.

Don’t you just love the idea of “staying in the moment”!

Cummings saga damaged UK lockdown unity, study suggests

The scandal over Dominic Cummings’ trips to and around Durham during lockdown damaged trust and was a key factor in the breakdown of a sense of national unity amid the coronavirus pandemic, research suggests.

Revelations that Cummings and his family travelled to his parents’ farm despite ministers repeatedly imploring the public to stay at home – as exposed by the Guardian and the Daily Mirror in May – also crystallised distrust in politicians over the crisis, according to a report from the thinktank British Future.

The findings emerged in a series of surveys, diaries and interviews carried out over the first months of the pandemic as the public got to grips with profound changes to their habits, relationships and lifestyles.

The only thing that’s surprising is that anybody would be surprised by these findings.

Link

What’s involved in stripping Huawei out of UK mobile networks

Well, up to £500m if you’re BT, according to evidence given to a Commons Select Committee by a senior BT executive quoted by the Register.

Nikon versus Canon: A Story Of Technology Change

If you’re a photography geek (which, I’m sorry to say, I am), then you could happily spend a good deal of the morning following Steven Sinofsky’s wonderfully detailed account of how Canon displaced Nikon as the standard camera system for professional photographers. It’s really an illustration of some of the points Clayton Christensen was making in The Innovator’s Dilemma all those years ago.

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 you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Wednesday 29 July, 2020

Posted on July 29, 2020 by jjn1

Summer by the lake

Wednesday 29 July, 2020

Today’s musical alternative to Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme

John Field’s Nocturne #5 in B flat major played by John O’Conor.

Someone once said that John Field invented the Nocturne and Chopin perfected it. I’m not sure about that: I prefer Field’s compositions. But then, I’m no musician.

John Crace on the UK transport minister’s truncated holiday

Lovely spoof

A fitful night’s sleep hadn’t eased the tension in the Shapps’ family compound in the south of Spain. Conversation was limited to a few terse exchanges as Grant started packing his bags for his return home.

“But you told the Today programme back in April that you wouldn’t be taking a family holiday abroad this summer,” his wife reminded him. “So how come we’ve ended up in this villa and will have to quarantine for 14 days on our return?”

“Um …” Shapps mumbled. “Well, everything seemed to be getting a bit better, we had introduced some air corridors and the flights were dirt cheap …”

“So it’s sod’s law that you, the transport secretary, chose to fly on the one air corridor that you knew was going to be closed before we had even taken off.”

“Look, I’ve said I’m sorry countless times. I just couldn’t be seen to be acting on inside knowledge. Not that I had any.”

“So instead you look like a complete twat by cutting short a holiday you said you weren’t going to take, in order to get your 14 days of quarantine over and done with as soon as possible, while leaving me and the kids behind.”

“That’s one way of looking at it …”

“Chill out, Mum,” said the kids. “We’ll probably have a better time without him. At least we won’t have the embarrassment of being photographed on the beach again.”

Zuckerberg in the dock

The bosses of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook were hauled up (virtually) before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust this evening. It was occasionally interesting. Might write something about it tomorrow. But I couldn’t resist this image of Zuckerberg with a spinning rotor (an artefact of the relay, I guess) superimposed.

It was basically a theatrical event. But maybe it heralds something more serious.

Bats are social animals. Therefore they argue a lot. Just like humans.

Amazing study, reported in the Smithsonian magazine.

Egyptian fruit bats, it turns out, aren’t just making high pitched squeals when they gather together in their roosts. They’re communicating specific problems, reports Bob Yirka at Phys.org.

According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people.

Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds.

Clearly, this researcher hasn’t met our cats.

Tuesday 21 July, 2020

Posted on July 21, 2020 by jjn1

A bridge to the Folly

From our walk this afternoon.

Click on the image for a larger version.

Quote of the Day

“Who was that transistor salesman?”

President de Gaulle, after meeting Hayato Ikeda, Prime Minister of Japan in 1962.

(HT to Benedict Evans)

Joe Biden on foreign interference in US elections

From his statement:

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has concluded that the Kremlin’s interference in past elections represented “only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” Despite the exposure of Russia’s malign activities by the U.S. Intelligence Community, law enforcement agencies, and bipartisan Congressional committees, the Kremlin has not halted its efforts to interfere in our democracy. In Senate testimony on July 23 2019, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that Russia was “absolutely intent on trying to interfere with our elections.” And on March 27, 2020, the State Department held a briefing describing how Russia was recklessly spreading disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Russia is not the only foreign actor seeking to interfere in our democracy. Increasingly, other states have shown an interest in copying Russia’s tactics.

[…]

In spite of President Trump’s failure to act, America’s adversaries must not misjudge the resolve of the American people to counter every effort by a foreign power to interfere in our democracy, whether by hacking voting systems and databases, laundering money into our political system, systematically spreading disinformation, or trying to sow doubt about the integrity of our elections.

That is why, today, I am putting the Kremlin and other foreign governments on notice. If elected president, I will treat foreign interference in our election as an adversarial act that significantly affects the relationship between the United States and the interfering nation’s government. I will direct the U.S. Intelligence Community to report publicly and in a timely manner on any efforts by foreign governments that have interfered, or attempted to interfere, with U.S. elections. I will direct my administration to leverage all appropriate instruments of national power and make full use of my executive authority to impose substantial and lasting costs on state perpetrators. These costs could include financial-sector sanctions, asset freezes, cyber responses, and the exposure of corruption. A range of other actions could also be taken, depending on the nature of the attack. I will direct our response at a time and in a manner of our choosing.

Isn’t it strange that any American politician has to even say this? It’s a measure of the Republic’s decay.

Mary Trump’s book sold 950,000 copies on its first day

So CNN is reporting anyway. Good luck to her.

Andrew O’Sullivan leaves New York magazine

Andrew Sullivan officially left New York Magazine on Friday, claiming that the culture of the magazine and its new parent company, Vox Media, had become increasingly hostile to conservative voices like his.

It’s not entirely clear whether he was fired or has simply quit. Here he is in his own words:

I’m just no longer going to be writing for a magazine that has every right to hire and fire anyone it wants when it comes to the content of what it wants to publish.

The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem. I have a long essay in the coming print magazine on how plagues change societies, after all. I have written some of the most widely read essays in the history of the magazine, and my column has been popular with readers. And I have no complaints about my interaction with the wonderful editors and fact-checkers here — and, in fact, am deeply grateful for their extraordinary talent, skill, and compassion. I’ve been in the office maybe a handful of times over four years, and so there’s no question of anyone mistreating me or vice versa. In fact, I’ve been proud and happy to be a part of this venture.

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

I’m baffled by this, or at any rate by the attitudes he describes — and attributes to his former colleagues. I’m no conservative, but I’ve always enjoyed and admired Sullivan’s writing. In fact I’ve never really thought of him as a conservative. Nor, in a way, does he.

And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

The good news is that he’s not going silent. In fact he’s reviving his old blog — The Dish. And he’ll be running it on Substack, on which the daily version of this blog is published. I look forward to continuing to read him.

Look what came though my letter-box today

George Dyson’s new book. It’s out in the UK in less than a month. He’s one of the most interesting and original writers I know. I found his Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence one of the most stimulating resources to draw on when I was writing my history of the Internet many moons ago. In his new book he asks how we ended up with a world in which humans co-exist with technologies that we can no longer fully control or understand. Good question. I look forward to his answer.

Sunday 5 July, 2020

Posted on July 5, 2020 by jjn1

Hollyhocks

In the garden, this evening.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Quote of the Day

You may have lost interest in the pandemic. It has not lost interest in you.

The Economist

Boris Johnson’s ‘new deal’ is Roosevelt lite

This morning’s Observercolumn:

It’s back to the future time again. Boris Johnson is trying to wrap himself in the cape of Franklin Roosevelt and his famous New Deal, while his consigliere, Cummings, wants to go back to the 1950s and reboot Britain by building an imitation of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa – later Darpa, with the D standing for defence).

Both projects have touching aspects of romanticism, ignorance and absurdity. In relation to Johnson’s FDR tribute band, his proposed £5bn splash on infrastructure comes to about 0.2% of GDP, whereas Roosevelt’s New Deal was estimated to be worth 40% of US national income in 1929. Roosevelt built dams, housing, roads and bridges across America. He restored the banking system, set up the Securities and Exchange Commission, encouraged trade unions. From 1933, his public works administration built the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, the Grand Coulee Dam and completed the Hoover Dam. Roosevelt instituted a minimum wage and maximum hours in certain businesses and asserted the right of workers to organise. For his part, Johnson will be refurbishing schools and repairing bridges – both good in their way, but on a minuscule scale. And he doesn’t seem to have any plans for reining in the City or for encouraging workers’ rights. So his Roosevelt rhetoric is basically back-of-the-envelope hogwash.

What, then, of Cummings, back from his victory tour of the north-east?

Read on

Here’s a salutary suggestion

Watch Trump’s Inaugural Address with the benefit of hindsight. Sensitive souls may need to keep a sickbag handy. But in the light of what we now know, it’s a really instructive way of spending 16 minutes. Interestingly, the speech is well delivered; Trump’s speaking style has noticeably deteriorated since then, so the comparison is striking. My hunch is that the speech was written by Steve Bannon, who at that stage was playing the role for Trump that Dominic Cummings now plays for Boris Johnson.

A rare bird: a tech CEO with moral courage

Patrick Collison, the co-founder of the online-payments company Stripe, is one of the most interesting people in the tech world. Also, he appears to have a functioning conscience.

Covid simulations by Japanese supercomputer have bad news for open-plan offices

Simulation video available here.

The bottom line: plexiglass screens don’t guarantee your safety.

Monday 29 June, 2020

Posted on June 29, 2020 by jjn1

The path not taken

From a walk yesterday.

Whenever I walk in a wood I find myself thinking of Robert Frost.

EasY does it: just don’t check the bank statements

I’ve always thought that the big consulting firms are basically frauds, but I thought they could probably do audits. Seems I was wrong.

According to the FT,

EY between 2016 and 2018 did not check directly with Singapore’s OCBC Bank to confirm that the lender held large amounts of cash on behalf of Wirecard. Instead, EY relied on documents and screenshots provided by a third-party trustee and Wirecard itself.

A senior auditor at another firm said that obtaining independent confirmation of bank balances was “equivalent to day-one training at audit school”.

Hopefully, investors in Wirecard will now sue EY into the ground.

Maybe I will be an auditor when I grow up, on the grounds that I could at least spot when 1.9 billion Euro was missing.

Legal vetting

The Harvard Gazette has an intriguing interview with the great constitutional lawyer Lawrence Tribe, who’s about to retire. He started as a mathematician (going to Harvard at the edge of 16) and then switched to Law. Like many young legal high-flyers, after graduation he clerked for a Supreme Court judge Potter Stewart. There’s an hilarious excerpt in the interview about this:

Q: Were you able to get to know any of the other justices besides Stewart?

A: Yes. I got to know Marshall quite well and [Earl] Warren less well. I remember a hilarious experience with [John Marshall] Harlan, in particular. In those days, the Supreme Court had its own theory that explicit sexual material could be banned if it was sufficiently hardcore, whatever that meant. Stewart famously said, ‘I can’t define hardcore pornography, but I know it when I see it.’ And I asked him once, “Have you ever seen it?” And he said, “Yes, just once, off the coast of Algiers.” (Laughs) I could never find out more than that.

We used to go to the basement of the court to watch porno flicks because the court was in a phase where it would just have to judge — thumbs up or thumbs down — either this is hardcore pornography and can be banned, or it’s not. They had no criteria. They just basically looked at the movies. Harlan was going blind, and so he had Thurgood Marshall narrate the films. “Oh, he’s doing that? You’ve got to be kidding!” That was the screening process.

Much more interesting than I expected. I can see why his students (including Barack Obama) loved him.

Quarantine diary — Day 100

Final episode!

Link

Sunday 28 June, 2020

Posted on June 28, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

In 1990, the top three carmakers in Detroit had a market capitalization of $36 billion and 1.2 million employees. In 2014, the top three firms in Silicon Valley, with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, had only 137,000 employees.

William Robinson

A family outing

A scene from our walk yesterday evening. Think of it as my homage to John Constable! The Canada geese goslings have grown at an extraordinary rate. And it was very considerate of them and their parents to swim in such a straight line.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Is it payback time for Apple as the EU goes after its licences to print money?

This morning’s Observer column:

On 16 June, the European commission opened two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices. The first investigation will examine whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies. The second investigation is into whether restrictions imposed by Apple on the near field communication (NFC) capability of its iPhone and Apple Watch mean that banks and other financial institutions are prevented from offering NFC payment systems using Apple kit.

Let’s take the App Store first. When Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, it created an amazing new opportunity for software developers and, of course, for Apple itself. Because the new phone was basically a powerful handheld computer, that meant it could run smallish programs, which came to be called apps. And because it had an internet connection those programs could be efficiently distributed across the net. From this came the idea that Apple should set up an App Store to which developers could upload their programs. Apple, being a control-freak corporation, would vet those apps before they appeared on the store and would levy a 30% commission on sales. It seems like a great idea…

Read on

Thinking of moving to the US? Listen to this first

Stunning The Daily podcast on what’s been going on in Texas.

Made me realise I didn’t know the half of it.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton interviewed by Der Spiegel

Link. Interesting throughout. For example:

DER SPIEGEL: What has caused this mass-despair in white, middle-class life?

Deaton: Look at the labor market, at wages. Life-time jobs and the meaning that comes from a life like that is very important. Roles for men and women are defined by it, as is their place in the community. It’s almost like Marx: Social conditions depend on the means of production. And these means of production are being brought down by globalization, by automation, by the incredible force of health care. And that’s destroying communities.

DER SPIEGEL: Yet where there are losers, there should be winners as well. Who is to blame for this development?

Deaton: Many people have said that there are two ways of getting rich: One way is by making things, and the other is by taking things. And one of the ways of taking things is to make the government give you special favors. Those special favors don’t create anything, but they can make you rich, at the expense of everybody else.

Case: For instance, the pharma companies get a law passed that Medicare has to pay for drugs at whatever price the pharma companies choose. Or the doctors’ lobby doesn’t allow as many people to go to medical school, which helps to keep doctors salaries up. That’s one of the reasons why doctors are the largest single occupation in the top 1 percent.

DER SPIEGEL: Would you argue that those in the top 1 percent are peculiarly prone to rent seeking?

Deaton: No, but many people are in the 1 percent because of rent seeking. This mechanism is creating a lot of very wealthy people who would not be wealthy if the government hadn’t given them a license to rip off the rest. We’re not among the people who think of inequality as a causal force. It’s rent-seeking opportunities that create inequality.

DER SPIEGEL: How do the losers of this development react politically?

Deaton: Well, many of them like Donald Trump (laughs)!

I’ve just got their book.

If you thought that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory was dead and buried (I did), then think again.

Astonishing — and depressing — NYT story.

Sigh.

Quarantine diary — Day 99

Link

Friday 12 June, 2020

Posted on June 12, 2020 by jjn1

Edward Hopper

Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning.

There’s a marvellous piece, “Edward Hopper and American Solitude”, by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker , based on an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s landscape painting currently on show in the Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland’s premier museum of modern art, outside Basel. “Though termed a realist”, Schjeldahl writes,

Hopper is more properly a Symbolist, investing objective appearance with clenched, melancholy subjectivity. He was an able draftsman and masterly as a painter of light and shadow, but he ruthlessly subordinated aesthetic pleasure to the compacted description—as dense as uranium—of things that answered to his feelings without exposing them. Nearly every house that he painted strikes me as a self-portrait, with brooding windows and almost never a visible or, should one be indicated, inviting door. If his pictures sometimes seem awkwardly forced, that’s not a flaw; it’s a guarantee that he has pushed the communicative capacities of painting to their limits, then a little bit beyond. He leaves us alone with our own solitude, taking our breath away and not giving it back. Regarding his human subjects as “lonely” evades their truth. We might freak out if we had to be those people, but—look!—they’re doing O.K., however grim their lot. Think of Samuel Beckett’s famous tag “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Now delete the first sentence. With Hopper, the going-on is not a choice.

Lovely. I wish I could see the exhibition. The Gallery website has a few of the pictures online

Imagine hearing this in your living room

Link

Norah Jones has been giving concerts from her living room on YouTube. This is an excerpt from one of them. They’re absolutely entrancing, and I only learned about them by chance from a piece by Paul Elie in the New Yorker.

She has been writing new songs in response to the present. “My six-year-old has been waking up in the middle of the night for three months now, and I walk him back to his room and sit and wait for him to fall back asleep,” she told me. “I try not to look at my phone in the dead of night, but I was reading about all the things that are happening. A song will come to you, sometimes, and one came to me.” She played it right after the Ellington piece in last week’s show. It’s a cross between a street scene and a lullaby, focussed on the need to “love, listen, and learn.” Unidentified on YouTube, it sounded like a standard that Nina Simone might have sung — the sound of an artist trying to keep it together in a time of protest.

Unmissable. This is the kind of discovery that can makes one’s day.

Footnote for ageing hippies She is the daughter of Sue Jones and Ravi Shankar, who had a big influence on George Harrison and, through him, the other members of the Beatles.

The worst worst case

As some countries are beginning to ‘re-open’ their economies because they seem to have the pandemic under some kind of control, I can understand the ubiquitous longing to get back to normal. Sadly, I don’t think that’s realistic for the time being. In fact it may be that we are only the beginning of the crisis. That’s because we’re in a cascade of inter-related crises: one is a health, which is what has been grabbing most of the attention up to now; then there’s a looming economic crisis; and thirdly there’s political upheaval and culture warfare sparked by the murder of George Floyd. And, of course, for the UK there’s the added crisis attendant upon crashing out of the EU without a deal.

Now the economic impact of the pandemic is beginning to surface.

This is a picture of a particular economy falling off a cliff.

But actually, there’s a worse global scenario — that the banking system implodes again. This is the scenario outlined by Frank Portnoy from UC Berkeley in a long essay in The Atlantic. At the root of it is the addiction of the banks to a new kind of pernicious derivative product — collateralised loan obligations (CLOs).

“The financial crisis of 2008 was about home mortgages”, he writes.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to home buyers were repackaged into securities called collateralized debt obligations, known as CDOs. In theory, CDOs were intended to shift risk away from banks, which lend money to home buyers. In practice, the same banks that issued home loans also bet heavily on CDOs, often using complex techniques hidden from investors and regulators. When the housing market took a hit, these banks were doubly affected. In late 2007, banks began disclosing tens of billions of dollars of subprime-CDO losses. The next year, Lehman Brothers went under, taking the economy with it.

The post-2008 reforms were well intentioned, says Portnoy, but…

They haven’t kept the banks from falling back into old, bad habits. After the housing crisis, subprime CDOs naturally fell out of favor. Demand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses. CLOs bundle together so-called leveraged loans, the subprime mortgages of the corporate world. These are loans made to companies that have maxed out their borrowing and can no longer sell bonds directly to investors or qualify for a traditional bank loan. There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs.

It’s a long story, but the analogy with CDOs ie helpful. At the bottom of every CDO were sub-prime mortgages which had a high probability of default. At the bottom of every CLO are loans to companies which are in dire straits — and which were always in danger of failing even before Covid struck. But now many of them are terminally affected by the lockdown and are unlikely to return. So the CLOs for which they represented a manageable risk might suddenly start to look dodgy. And you can guess what would happen then.

The difference from 2008 is that national economies and central banks will not have the financial muscle to do another bailout.

Not a cheery read, but I think it’s important to get a perspective on the crisis we’re in.

US ‘policing’ is indeed disgraceful, but the UK has its problems too

Remember the Stephen Lawrence case — the inquiry into which confirmed that there was systemic institutional racism in the Metropolitan police.

People in glasshouses…

Europe resurfaces to find an odd mix of the familiar and the alien

This is wonderful. The New York Times sent a writer (Patrick Kingsley) and a photographer (Laetitia Vancon) to drive through Europe recording what they found. The result is an unmissable photo-essay, a reminder of the heyday of Life and the other mid-century news-magazines.

It also reminds me of the trip that Walker Evans and James Agee made in 1936 to report on the lives of poor sharecroppers in the Deep South which resulted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

__________________________________________________________________________

The peer-reviewing crisis widens and deepens

Long and thoughtful essay by Milton Packer on the looming crisis in scientific publication processes.

Packer has been vocal for a long time on the deficiencies of peer-review. Long before the pandemic he has been criticising its capriciousness (as Rodney Brooks did in his essay that I blogged about yesterday), its biases towards supporting accepted dogma, the lack of consistent quality in the review process, and perverse incentives in editorial decision making.

He thinks — rightly IMHO — that these weaknesses of the peer-review process have been amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. To put it crudely, here’s been a kind of academic feeding frenzy. But Packer sees the recent scandal of the retraction of two papers published in leading journals as

a real opportunity for us to reinvent peer review. We needed to do so before the pandemic; we desperately need to do so now. We must implement changes that will provide confidence in the validity of published work, and we need to revamp and strengthen the peer-review and editorial decision-making processes. The FDA imposes severe penalties on site investigators who submit fabricated data; many journal editors follow a similar policy. Fear of a potentially career-ending ban on publications in leading journals will certainly motivate most corresponding authors to perform the exceptionally high level of due diligence that is needed to restore the trust that the review process desperately depends on.

If academic medicine does not make these changes, then we only have ourselves to blame when the credibility of medical research in the public’s view crumbles.

Yep.

Quarantine diary Day 83

Link

Thursday 11 June, 2020

Posted on June 11, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

If blogging didn’t exist we’d have to invent it. “People writing what they know, fluidly, publicly, with an archive for the future.” That’s it.

Dave Winer

Walker Evans’s M2

(Apologies in advance to non-photographers)

Now there’s a properly used Leica. It belonged to the renowned American photographer Walker Evans, who bought it in 1962 and used it for as long as he used the 35mm format, i.e. until 1973 (when he began to use a Polaroid SX-70 almost exclusively). He gave the M2 as a gift to a personal and professional assistant, who has now put it up for auction. Starting bid €20,000. Auctioneer’s estimate: €40k-€50k.

Crazy prices, really. Wonder if it’ll make anywhere near that.

On the other hand, there are a lot of photographs made with that camera in museums and galleries worldwide — though they’re not from the period when Walker worked for the Farm Security Administration. For those assignments he used a range of bigger cameras including a heavy large-format 10×8 camera. Later on I think he used Rolleiflexes.

This is probably his most famous photograph, a portrait of the 27-year-old Allie Mae Burroughs, taken in 1936, when he was reporting for Fortune magazine on sharecroppers in the Deep South alongside the writer James Agee. This work was published in 1941 as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

The photograph is in the public domain. I think the original print is in the Library of Congress.

On the face of it, it’s such a simple picture. But you can see the stress of Depression-era farm life etched on this young woman’s face. So it speaks volumes.

I don’t think Evans ever saw himself as an artist. In his view he just pointed his camera and recorded things, as this video records:

Link

My first Leica was also an M2 (chrome, not black) which I bought in the year that Evans stopped using his; I bought it from an antiquarian bookseller and financed it partly by selling a couple of rare books that I had picked up in a house clearance.

More on ‘Sabbath mode’…

Yesterday’s post about the challenges posed by the Coronavirus for elevator manufacturers mentioned the idea of ‘Sabbath mode’, where the elevator stops at every floor automatically.

This sparked a lovely email from Dave Hill, an esteemed former colleague of mine, who pointed me to a post by a commenter on Richard Dawkin’s blog.

I just bought my second refrigerator. The first one lasted 28 years. I think they forgot the redundancy. The new one has something called Sabbath Mode. Someone on the internet suggested that means it plays Black Sabbath when you open the doors. Alas no. It means special settings to accommodate Orthodox Jewish superstitions about not being able to turn electricity off and on during the Sabbath.

Some immediate questions spring to mind: Will my refrigerator keep bacon OK ? Can it be opened by a menstruating women or will it just go into auto clean mode ? Is there a Pope setting so that it won’t keep treats during Lent ? Is there an Islamic fridge that doesn’t cool beer ?

More serious questions. Am I right to be vaguely annoyed by this ? It’s clearly not the most pressing issue in the world. But like finding I’m in a building with no 13th floor it irritates me.

Maybe I should just chill.

My recommendation: chill.

Rodney Brooks on peer-review

As someone who believes that peer-review is useful but over-rated and often wrongly fetishised by both the academy and journalism, I was much cheered by this wonderful essay by Rodney Books, the great MIT roboticist. His three most influential academic papers, he recalls, were all rejected by reviewers and remained unpublished until journal editors eventually saw the light.

The piece has a lovely reproduction of the handwritten excoriation of his “However, I was worried at a deeper intellectual level, and so almost simultaneously started writing about the philosophical underpinnings of research in AI, and how my approach differed. There the reviews were more brutal.

This was a a review of lab memo AIM-899, Achieving Artificial Intelligence through Building Robots”.

And just in case readers find it difficult to decipher, he provides a print version:

This paper is an extended, wandering complaint that the world does not view the author’s work as the salvation of mankind.

There is no scientific content here; little in the way of reasoned argument, as opposed to petulant assertions and non-sequiturs; and ample evidence of ignorance of the literature on these questions. The only philosopher cited is Dreyfus–but many of the issues raised have been treated more intelligibly by others (the chair definition problem etc. by Wittgenstein and many successors; the interpreted toy proscription by Searle; the modularity question by Fodor; the multiple behaviors ideas by Tinbergen; and the constructivist approach by Glymour (who calls it computational positivism). The argument about evolution leaks all over, and the discussion on abstraction indicates the author has little understand of analytic thought and scientific investigation.

Ages afterwards the paper was published unchanged but with a new title, “Intelligence without representation” in Artificial Intelligence Journal [vol 47, 1991, pp. 139–159], the mainstream journal of the field, and it now has 6,900 citations.

Brooks’s response to those initial reverses were typical: he pasted copies of the negative reviews to his office door in MIT!

As well as his experiences of peer-review as an author, he also reflects on his experience as an editor of a scholarly journal. In 1987 he co-founded the International Journal of Computer Vision, which is now in its 128th volume, and has had many hundreds of issues. The journal has a very strong reputation and consistently ranks in the top handful of places to publish in computer vision. Brooks co-edited the first seven volumes — a total of twenty eight issues.

Here’s what he learned:

1 Purely theoretical papers with lots of equations and no experiments involving processing an image were much more likely to get accepted than a paper which did have experimental results. “I attributed this”, says Brooks, “to people being unduly impressed by mathematics (I had a degree in pure mathematics and was not as easily impressed by equations and complex notation). I suspected that many times the reviewers did not fully read and understand the mathematics as many of them had very few comments about the contents of such papers”.

2 “One particular reviewer would always read the mathematics in detail, and would always find things to critique about the more mathematical papers. This seemed good. Real peer review. But soon I realized that he would always recommend rejection. No paper was ever up to his standard”.

3 Certain reviewers would always say accept. So, “it was just a matter of me picking the right three referees for almost any paper and I could know whether the majority of reviewers would recommend acceptance or rejection before I had even sent the paper off to be reviewed”.

4 “I came to realize”,he writes, “that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply understand the topic of the paper, and the biases of the reviewers, and not to treat the referees as having the right to determine the fate of the paper themselves. As an editor I had to add judgement to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new”.

I wish more journalists reading (or mis-reading) Covid-19 papers understood this. And that they they realised that science is, at its best, organised scepticism. Which of course is why it’s so infuriating for politicians who want to claim that they are “following” it.

Brooks’s essay is terrific from beginning to end. Well worth a read.

Quarantine diary — Day 82

Link

Wednesday 10 June, 2020

Posted on June 10, 2020 by jjn1

Bedtime by the lake

This evening, 21:00 hrs.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

What a real mudslide looks like

This you’ve just got to see.

The elevator problem

(Actually, we would call it the lift problem, but still…)

From The Elevator Arises As The Latest Logjam In Getting Back To Work:

Once the epitome of efficiency for moving masses of people quickly to where they needed to go, the elevator is the antithesis of social distancing and a risk-multiplying bottleneck. As America begins to open up, the newest conundrum for employers in cities is how to safely transport people in elevators and manage the crowd of people waiting for them.

If office tower workers want to stay safe, elevator experts think they have advice, some practical, some not: Stay in your corner, face the walls and carry toothpicks (for pushing the buttons). Not only have those experts gone back to studying mathematical models for moving people, but they are also creating technology like ultraviolet-light disinfection tools and voice-activated panels.

I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought of this problem. Maybe because, in the pre-pandemic era, I work(ed) in low-rise buildings.

Other product offerings in the works include calling the elevator via cellphone, antiviral stickers for elevator buttons, lobby concierge-run elevators, express service for each elevator ride, ultraviolet-light HVAC purification systems and even elevator buttons that riders can activate with their feet, their voice or hand gestures.

To reduce the need to touch buttons, Otis’ Smith said, elevators could be placed into “Sabbath service” mode, where they automatically go to each and every floor — a service offered for decades for those whose religion dictates they not operate electrical devices on certain days.

Don’t you just love the idea of “Sabbath mode”?

What happened at Lafayette Square to clear the ground for Trump’s bible stunt.

Amazing reconstruction by the Washington Post. Great journalism.

12 minutes long. Worth it.

The diffference between Nixon and Trump

Longish, thoughtful post by Larry Lessig. This bit really struck me:

Here’s the picture of a democracy coming to understand a fundamental truth — that Nixon was a crook, and had to go. The relevant dynamic in this picture is the correlation in the change in attitudes between Republicans and Democrats: Both lost confidence at the same time.

And here’s the equivalent chart for now.

This is what polarisation looks like.

Quarantine diary — Day 81

Link

Tuesday 9 June, 2020

Posted on June 9, 2020 by jjn1

The bee-loud glade

In our garden, this afternoon.

The inside story of the Dyson electric car that wasn’t

This detailed account in Autocar of James Dyson’s project (eventually abandoned) to design and build an electric car is riveting. He allegedly blew £2.5B of his own money on it. The project was abandoned when he concluded it would be impossible to make money, even on a car costing £150,000. But it had a 600-mile range, which meant that for their £150k owners wouldn’t be much bothered by battery range. And it was clearly aimed at the top end of the Chinese market. Lots of fascinating detail in the piece if — like me — you are interested in design, including the case for very large-diameter wheels. But the bit I like best comes at the end:

When a billionaire builds a car that carries his own name, one question rises above all others: what cars do you already own? It turns out that, following “a Ferrari period which I greatly enjoyed” and aside from “a small collection of Land Rovers”, Sir James Dyson’s favourite car is his 1970s Citroën SM – which, interestingly, is a long car with long-wheelbase, interconnected suspension that rides on big wheels, rather like his Hullavington creations.

“It was designed in the late 1960s,” Dyson says, “and what with the wonderful shape, the suspension and the swivelling headlights, it was incredibly futuristic. We have sleeping policemen to slow the traffic on several of our roads at Hullavington but you can take them at 50mph in the Citroën and hardly feel a thing. Mind you, there are some things about it that are very old-fashioned indeed. One is that its V6 engine produces a really wonderful throaty roar. Another is that it hardly ever starts first time…”

Full disclosure: I was a petrolhead once. And I thought the Citroen DS19 (an earlier model than the SM) was one of the most beautiful cars ever made.

Contact-tracing apps: the current list

Useful list and summary by Techcrunch.

Intellectual sectarianism within epidemiology

In his discussion of the science of COVID-19, the philosopher of medicine Jonathan Fuller recently wrote of two sects within epidemiology: public health epidemiologists who use diverse sources of data, and more skeptical clinical epidemiologists who privilege “gold standard” evidence. If we are to be successful in treating COVID-19, Fuller argued, then we need to blend the insights of each camp.

But for leading epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, this “bothsidesism” misdiagnoses the debate, which is more about the philosophy of action than the philosophy of evidence. The field is at its best when it synthesizes diverse methods, approaches, and forms of evidence from many branches of science—not when it believes that no evidence is not quite good enough. “Of course more data the better,” he writes. But the coronavirus pandemic requires urgent decisions “that must be made with the evidence we’ve got.”

I particularly like this passage in Lipsitch’s essay:

Fuller sees in the contrast two “competing philosophies” of scientific practice. One, he says, is characteristic of public health epidemiologists like me, who are “methodologically liberal and pragmatic” and use models and diverse sources of data. The other, he explains, is characteristic of clinical epidemiologists like Stanford’s John Ioannidis, who draw on a tradition of skepticism about medical interventions in the literature of what has been known since the 1980s as “evidence-based medicine,” privilege “gold standard” evidence from randomized controlled trials (as opposed to mere “data”), and counsel inaction until a certain ideal form of evidence—Evidence with a capital E—justifies intervening.

I keep coming back to the BS about the inefficacy of face masks allegedly justified by the absence of ‘gold-standard’ evidence with which we were routinely regaled to in the early months of the Covid outbreak in the UK.

Quarantine diary — Day 80

Link