Category Archives: Politics

Monday 3 August, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Ireland is not a romantic dream; it is not a flag; it is 4.5 million people divided into two powerful traditions. The solution will be found not on the basis of victory for either, but on the basis of agreement and a partnership between both. The real division of Ireland is not a line drawn on the map, but in the minds and hearts of its people.”

  • John Hume, RIP

Today’s musical alternative to the morning news

John Field – Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major, played by Stephen Leaney

Link

Why there won’t be an ‘election night’ on November 3rd

Worrying (and not implausible) scenario in “How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong”

We may not know the results for days, and maybe weeks. And a lot could go wrong in the interval. So it’s time to rethink “election night”.

This might be alarmist, but it isn’t fantasy. Even the Facebook boss has woken up to it.

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told me in a brief interview on Saturday that he’s planning to brace his audience for the postelection period. He said the site planned a round of education aimed at “getting people ready for the fact that there’s a high likelihood that it takes days or weeks to count this — and there’s nothing wrong or illegitimate about that.” And he said that Facebook is considering new rules regarding premature claims of victory or other statements about the results. He added that the company’s election center will rely on wire services for definitive results.

It’s possible, of course, that Joe Biden will win by a margin so large that Florida will be called for him early. Barring that, it’s tempting to say responsible voices should keep their mouths shut and switch over for a few days to Floor Is Lava, and give the nice local volunteers time to count the votes. That, however, would just cede the conversation to the least responsible, and conspiratorial, voices.

Yep. This won’t be over until January 20 2021, when Trump is finally ejected from the White House.

Interestingly, a group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project have been gaming four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania.

For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.

But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.

In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do.

Which brings us — yet again — to Ben Franklin’s reply to the woman who asked him — as he emerged from the final deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 — “well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic”, said Franklin, “if you can keep it.”

We’ll see if they can.

Remembering John Hume

He was the greatest Irishman of our times. Tommie Gorman, RTE’s Northern Editor, knew Hume well and has written a lovely tribute to him.

Strasbourg was also the city where I saw him in his most sociable mode. He had a favourite restaurant, Maison Des Tanneurs, a family-run business at 42, Rue du Bain aux Plante. Religiously Hume would invite the quota of visiting journalists from Dublin, the Brussels-based Irish crew and any other waifs and stragglers to a meal.

He’d tell his party-piece joke about Mickey Doherty from Derry, he would insist on his visitors having Dame Blanche for desert, he would order more bottles of gewürztraminer and he would pay the bill. Before the fun broke up in the small hours, he would insist on singing ‘The Town I Love So Well’ in the nearby bar, The Aviator.

Hume had a real, steely courage to back his profound conviction that violence would never solve the Northern Ireland problem. And alongside that steel was an equally profound generosity of spirit. He gave the money from his Nobel Prize to charity.

Two inspired moves gave his cause momentum. One was to connect with the most powerful politicians of Irish extraction in the US — Senator Ted Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York State, and New York governor Hugh Carey. This enabled him to tap into the vast power of the Irish diaspora in the US, to erode the IRA’s fundraising grip on Irish-American sympathies and to challenge British influence in official Washington.

The second inspiration was to stand for the European Parliament where he was able to attract and harness the support of powerful European opponents of political violence — particularly Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl.

Hume suffered from dementia at the end. But, as Gorman recalls, his memories

often came back when our paths crossed after his retirement in 2004. At close up range his eyes would clock some form of familiarity. “What’s your name” he would say. I’d tell him who I was and give an account of some of our past adventures. Sometimes the anecdotes would register and he’d break into a smile.

May he rest in peace.

Why it’s difficult to assess how badly the UK is doing

Good Guardian piece by David Spiegelhalter:

It is worth noting that the problems of counting Covid-19 deaths are vividly illustrated every day, when the Public Health England dashboard releases a count for the UK; for example, 119 and 83 additional coronavirus deaths were reported last Tuesday and Wednesday. NHS England is currently experiencing fewer than 15 Covid-19 deaths a day in hospitals, but the implausibly high PHE figures for England apparently also include any of the 250,000-plus people who have ever tested positive and have gone on to die of any cause, even if completely unrelated to coronavirus.

The Department of Health and Social Care has suspended these daily figures, but they are still going on all the international sites, and presumably are being used by others to judge how things are developing in the UK. They may be giving an inappropriately negative picture, as the ONS recently reported that the total number of deaths in the UK has shown no overall excess for the past five weeks.

But when we look at where the deaths are happening it is clear that we are not back to normal: people are still staying away from hospitals and dying at home. In England and Wales there were 766 excess deaths that occurred at home in the week ending 17 July, only 29 of which were with coronavirus, whereas in hospitals 862 fewer deaths than normal were registered. So more than 100 deaths a day were happening in people’s homes that would normally happen in hospital – although this is at least a reduction from the peak of the epidemic, when there were 2,000 additional home deaths a week.

This is his takeaway:

My original comments still hold: we will need years to properly assess the effect of the epidemic and the measures taken against it. We’ve now got a league table, but as to why the UK has done so badly, the arguments will go on.

The nostalgia boom

Interesting survey. The UK’s favourite decade was the 1960s, apparently. 21% of “top-tier earners” (whoever they are) are “willing to spend more money opt vintage record players than the latest tech”. Men are twice as likely as women to see nostalgia as “an avoidance of the present”.

Personally, I long for the days when the marmalade was thicker and newspapers were so big that you couldn’t read them comfortably in trains.

Basically, what this demonstrates is why features editors love surveys when there’s no real news to report.

Compared with a chronological newsfeed, Twitter’s algorithm tends to show tweets that are more emotive

Fascinating piece of research by the Economist.

Source: Economist

The researchers wanted to find out if algorithmically-curated tweets are more emotive than chronologically-displayed ones. Answer: they are. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — after all, the algorithm prioritises content that increases ‘user engagement’ — which is where the revenues come from. But it’s nice to see some evidence for it.

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Sunday 2 August, 2020

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Quote of the Day

Can the planet afford more and more machine-learning?

This morning’s Observer column on GPT-3:

The apparent plausibility of GPT-3’s performance has led – again – to fevered speculation about whether this means we have taken a significant step towards the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – ie, a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. Personally, I’m sceptical. The basic concept of the GPT approach goes back to 2017 and although it’s a really impressive achievement to be able to train a system this big and capable, it looks more an incremental improvement on its predecessors rather than a dramatic conceptual breakthrough. In other words: start with a good idea, then apply more and more computing power and watch how performance improves with each iteration.

Which raises another question: given that this kind of incremental improvement is made possible only by applying more and more computing power to the problem, what are the environmental costs of machine-learning technology?

Read on

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

The easing of the lockdown on July 4 has had its predictable effect — alarming rises in numbers of new infections in many parts of country. These have now reached more than 4,000 new cases a day, attributed by the head of the government’s track-and-trace operation to social-distancing rules being “routinely flouted“ in virus hotspots.

Nothing in this is surprising. People are desperate to get back to some kind of normal behaviour — hugging friends and family, meeting, drinking, dancing, going to clubs, all the things they used to do. What everybody finds hard to realise, still less to accept, is that that ‘normal’ to which we long to return is no longer available. That train has left the station. The pre-pandemic past is indeed a different country.

When the virus first reached these shores, I had a conversation with a member of my family who saw it as just another kind of flu — more dangerous, certainly, but something essentially familiar. I tried — and failed — to persuade her that it was much more significant and far-reaching than that. Reflecting on the conversation afterwards, I thought that the analogy I should have used was that of the First World War — in the sense that the world post-1918 was unrecognisably different from the world as it was in 1913. And, as the depth and reach of the Coronavirus became clearer with every passing day, that seemed to be quite a persuasive analogy.

But actually that still doesn’t get the measure of the change that we are now living though. The most fundamental change that we — humankind — will have to accept is in our conception of our relationship with nature. This thought was sparked by reading  “From The Anthropocene To The Microbiocene“, a long essay by Tobias Rees in Noema magazine, a publication of the Berggruen Institute.

The thrust of the essay is that from Aristotle to Thomas Hobbes we humans thought of ourselves as part of nature — as just animals with a capacity for reason. But with Hobbes, we started to think of ourselves as apart from the natural world (where lives were famously “nasty, brutish and short”). And this distinction was steadily reinforced by the rise of science, the Enlightenment , capitalism, democratic politics, and so on. Nature was something that we could master, control and exploit (and despoil). As it happened, this hubristic belief in our intrinsic superiority was ultimately going to be our downfall as the pursuit of economic growth led to the collapse of the biosphere on which human life depends.

The significance of the Coronavirus, on this view, is that it interrupts our inexorable rush to climate catastrophe by reminding us of the extent to which our post-Hobbesian hubris was a delusion. We find ourselves unable to overcome and control this manifestation of part of the natural world. And getting a vaccine will not solve it, though it may make living with it more manageable. But these viruses are part of the human future from now on. They’re here to stay.

All of which means that our view of nature as something separate from us, was delusional. What we have to learn to accept is that we’re part of nature too. Given that we’ve had 400+ years of believing something very different, it’s not surprising that people are finding it difficult to come to terms with what lies ahead. There might be many lockdowns ahead until that penny finally drops.

Since we can’t beat nature, shouldn’t we be thinking of (re)joining it?

At last, the tech titans’ nerd immunity shows signs of fading

My OpEd piece in today’s Observer on last Wednesday’s Congressional Hearings on Big Tech.

The most striking thing about Wednesday’s congressional interrogation of the leaders of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon was the absence of deference to the four moguls. This was such a radical departure from previous practice – characterised by ignorance, grandstanding and fawning on these exemplars of the American Way – that it was initially breathtaking. “Our founders would not bow before a king,” said the House antitrust subcommittee chairman, David Cicilline, in his opening remarks. “Nor should we bow before the emperors of the online economy.”

If we wanted a radical departure from the legislative slumber of previous decades, this looked like it. And indeed, to a large extent, it was. One saw it, for example, in the aggressiveness of the questioning by the Democrats. At times, one was reminded of the proceedings of the US supreme court, where the justices constantly interrupt the lawyers before them to cut off any attempt at lawyerly exposition. The implicit message is: “We’ve done our homework. Now get to the point – if you have one.” It was like that on Wednesday.

The Democrats had done their homework: they had read the torrents of private emails that the subcommittee had subpoenaed. And, like any good prosecutor, they never asked a question to which they didn’t already know the answer.

The tech titans were mostly flummoxed by this approach…

Read on

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Saturday 1 August, 2020

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Waving, not drowning

Click on the image to see a larger size.

Today’s musical replacement for the morning’s radio news

Jan Lisiecki: Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp Minor (1830) at his 2013 Proms debut.

Link

I Tried to Live Without the Tech Giants. It Was Impossible

One of the standard dismissive tropes of the tech companies is the airy claim that if you don’t like what a particular company is doing then you can always move to another service which is “just a click away”.

In January and February last year Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Her aim was to see if one could have a normal life without using their services. It was an amazing — and valuable — piece of work.

Following Wednesday’s House Subcommittee interrogation of four of the Big Tech bosses, Kashmir wrote a reprise of her experiment for readers of The New York Times. It’s a good read. And you can guess what she found out.

Critics of the big tech companies are often told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.” My takeaway from the experiment was that it’s not possible to do that. It’s not just the products and services branded with the big tech giant’s name. It’s that these companies control a thicket of more obscure products and services that are hard to untangle from tools we rely on for everything we do, from work to getting from point A to point B.

One of the things Kashmir discovered, for example, is that nearly everything on the Web uses Amazon’s cloud services. So even when you think you’re not interacting with Amazon, it turns out that you are.

She found two kinds of reaction to her findings.

Some people said that it proved just how essential these companies are to the American economy and how useful they are to consumers, meaning regulators shouldn’t interfere with them. Others, like Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and ex officio member of the House’s antitrust committee, said at the time that the experiment was proof of their monopolistic power.

“By virtue of controlling essential infrastructure, these companies appear to have the ability to control access to markets,” Mr. Nadler said. “In some basic ways, the problem is not unlike what we faced 130 years ago, when railroads transformed American life — both enabling farmers and producers to access new markets, but also creating a key chokehold that the railroad monopolies could exploit.”

This is why in addition to old-style antitrust laws, we need news ones what are attuned to these new realities.

Jeff Bezos’s personal statement to the House Judiciary Subcommittee’s hearing last Wednesday

No matter what you think about Amazon or Bezos, this is a remarkable piece of storytelling. Here’s how it begins…

My mom, Jackie, had me when she was a 17-year-old high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Being pregnant in high school was not popular in Albuquerque in 1964. It was difficult for her. When they tried to kick her out of school, my grandfather went to bat for her. After some negotiation, the principal said, “OK, she can stay and finish high school, but she can’t do any extracurricular activities, and she can’t have a locker.” My grandfather took the deal, and my mother finished high school, though she wasn’t allowed to walk across the stage with her classmates to get her diploma. Determined to keep up with her education, she enrolled in night school, picking classes led by professors who would let her bring an infant to class. She would show up with two duffel bags—one full of textbooks, and one packed with diapers, bottles, and anything that would keep me interested and quiet for a few minutes.

My dad’s name is Miguel. He adopted me when I was four years old. He was 16 when he came to the United States from Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan, shortly after Castro took over. My dad arrived in America alone. His parents felt he’d be safer here. His mom imagined America would be cold, so she made him a jacket sewn entirely out of cleaning cloths, the only material they had on hand. We still have that jacket; it hangs in my parents’ dining room. My dad spent two weeks at Camp Matecumbe, a refugee center in Florida, before being moved to a Catholic mission in Wilmington, Delaware. He was lucky to get to the mission, but even so, he didn’t speak English and didn’t have an easy path. What he did have was a lot of grit and determination. He received a scholarship to college in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom. You get different gifts in life, and one of my great gifts is my mom and dad. They have been incredible role models for me and my siblings our entire lives.

You learn different things from your grandparents than you do from your parents, and I had the opportunity to spend my summers from ages four to 16 on my grandparents’ ranch in Texas. My grandfather was a civil servant and a rancher—he worked on space technology and missile-defense systems in the 1950s and ‘60s for the Atomic Energy Commission—and he was self-reliant and resourceful. When you’re in the middle of nowhere, you don’t pick up a phone and call somebody when something breaks. You fix it yourself. As a kid, I got to see him solve many seemingly unsolvable problems himself, whether he was restoring a broken-down Caterpillar bulldozer or doing his own veterinary work. He taught me that you can take on hard problems. When you have a setback, you get back up and try again. You can invent your way to a better place.

I took these lessons to heart as a teenager, and became a garage inventor. I invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker out of an umbrella and tinfoil, and alarms made from baking pans to entrap my siblings…

Tugs your heart-strings, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. But still: he came over as the most articulate of the four moguls.

Tom Loosemore’s ‘Internet-era ways of working’

Yesterday I blogged about something that I’d found on Tom Loosemore’s blog without giving a link to the blog. Which was a regrettable oversight — as a reader kindly pointed out to me — because Tom is always worth reading. So here’s the link.

This then set me thinking about other stuff he’s written, and I suddenly remembered a guide to intelligent ways of working that he’d written two years ago.

Here’s a early version of it that was seen pinned to a doorway, possibly somewhere in Whitehall.

The updated version is here

Don’t cower

Really good column by Josh Marshall.

I’ve been saying for months – along with so many others – that this Fall will be an ordeal of democracy. Perhaps one of the greatest threats our Republic has ever faced from internal enemies. But the truth is that the values and reflexes that make liberals and Democrats support things that will make society more just and humane lead them to react to moments like these with outrage and trembling more than mockery and power.

I can only suggest people not fall back into themselves.

All of this comes from Trump’s weakness rather than strength. A sinking ship. The answer in any trial of strength or right is to maintain the initiative rather than cower. Every reporter working a beat today should be asking Republican elected officials … asking isn’t even the right word – giving Republican elected officials their one chance to denounce and disassociate themselves from the President’s words. They have one chance. Tomorrow won’t cut it. If they want to go down with the President’s sinking ship, get their answer and lock them in.

Yep!

We need to talk about ventilation

Characteristically thorough coverage by Zeynep Tufecki of the question of aerosol transmission of the virus.

Long read, but worth it if you’re interested in the issue.

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Thursday 30 July, 2020

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Thursday 30 July, 2020

Quote of the Day

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

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.

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Wednesday 29 July, 2020

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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.

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Saturday 25 July, 2020

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Crooked timber

I never see trees like this without thinking of Kant’s sardonic observation: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

(The Crooked Timber blog btw is unfailingly interesting.)

Quote of the Day

“I thought HIV was a complicated disease. It’s really simple compared to what’s going on with COVID-19.”

  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, during a presentation at the BIO International Convention.

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

Chaconne in D minor by J.S.Bach, arranged and played by John Feeley

13 blissful minutes.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the suggestion.

A crib-sheet for Congress as it prepares for Tuesday’s antitrust hearings

Scott Galloway’s utterly brilliant list of questions for the tech moguls who are due to be quizzed next week. I doubt the legislators will have the bottle to ask them, though.

Does Elon Musk really want to go here? Really?

Link

Famous mask wearers

On an Instagram account called Plague History, artist Genevieve Blais has been modifying the subjects of artworks to give them face masks.

Lovely idea.

(HT to Jason Kottke)

Long read of the Day: YouTube’s Psychic Wounds by Nicholson Baker

Unmissable. Especially if you’ve never spent any time in the deepest recesses of YouTube’s weirdness.

YouTube, this endless, crowd-curated theater of ourselves, serves up the raw, the cooked, the failing, the heartrending, the shocking, the helpful, and the WTF? any time you want it. So a few months ago, when the Columbia Journalism Review asked me to watch YouTube videos for a little while, as an experiment, to see what news of the world was served up by its freshly tuned algorithm, I of course said yes.

And then I made a mistake. Using YouTube’s own search bar, I looked up some terms that I thought I should know more about before beginning: “deep state,” for instance…

link

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Thursday 23 July, 2020

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Portrait of one of the latest arrivals in our garden. Shot — appropriately enough — using the ‘portrait’ setting on the iPhone 11, which kept telling me to “move further away”! As Umberto Eco wisely observed all those years ago, the Mac is a Catholic machine: only one true way to salvation.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

Quote of the Day

“I don’t want to be a hero. I want to teach.”

  • Claudia, a music teacher at a school in Massachusetts, who doesn’t want teachers to be put at risk then be lionized, as has been the case for healthcare workers.

Fawkes News: Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy

This is lovely. And it’s a student project too.

How do we protect ourselves against unauthorized third parties building facial recognition models to recognize us wherever we may go? Regulations can and will help restrict usage of machine learning by public companies, but will have negligible impact on private organizations, individuals, or even other nation states with similar goals.

The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes1, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them. At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny, pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these “cloaked” photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, “cloaked” images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable, and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you using an unaltered image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public), and tries to identify you, they will fail.

Fawkes has been tested extensively and proven effective in a variety of environments, and shows 100% effectiveness against state of the art facial recognition models (Microsoft Azure Face API, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++).

They’ve put together a terrific 12-minute video which explains the system. Well worth watching.

Link

Given that facial-recognition is such a toxic technology, it’s great to see its weaknesses being turned against it.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for alerting me to it.

Where will everyone go?

I hate to say this, but compared with the upcoming climate crisis, the Coronavirus disruption is small beer. Nearly a decade ago the UK Cabinet office did a simulation study to try and figure out the effects of climate change on migration. The results, from my hazy memory, ran something like this. The model divided the global population into three groups: those who live in regions that will be relatively unaffected; those who were too poor to move, no matter how hot or inhospitable their locations became; and those who are able to move when things start to become intolerable where they are. The thing that most struck me about the scenarios was that most migrants will head for cities; and most of their target destinations are coastal cities which are at risk from sea-level rise.

But that was a crude modelling exercise. Now ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. Today they publish their findings.

It’s a long, riveting and in some ways alarming read. And a story that’s beautifully told, making great use of the Web and photography as well as supercomputer modelling.

The modellers simulate five scenarios for climate-driven population movement in Southern and Central America.

1 An optimistic/reference scenario, in which climate impacts are rapidly reduced on a global scale and there is regional convergence toward higher levels of development across Central America and Mexico.

2 A pessimistic scenario, in which climate change impacts are on the high end of current plausible scenarios and significant challenges to socioeconomic development exist throughout the region, exacerbating the gap between Central America and the United States.

3 A more climate-friendly scenario, which pairs a less-extreme climate outcome with the same challenging socioeconomic future as the pessimistic scenario.

4 A more development-friendly scenario, which follows the pessimistic climate future but assumes a more inclusive development pathway in which regional economic growth occurs quickly.

5 A moderate scenario, in which socioeconomic development occurs rapidly throughout the region accompanied by a moderate level of climate change.

It’s an extraordinary piece of reporting and investigation. Read it if you can.

Escalation by Tweet

The department of War Studies at King’s College London has just produced an interesting report on the risks of conducting international diplomacy via Twitter, especially during crises.

The Executive Summary reads:

Social media has quickly become part of the geopolitical landscape, and international leaders and officials are increasingly taking to Twitter during crises. For US decision-makers, however, Twitter presents a bit of a paradox: on the one hand, tweets from government officials may help shape the American public narrative and provide greater insights into US decision-making to reduce misperception by foreign actors. On the other hand, tweets may increase misperception and sow confusion during crises, creating escalation incentives for an adversary.

To reconcile this paradox, we examine the useof Twitter by international leaders during crises in recent years, some of which involved nuclear-armed states. In so doing, we explore the changing nature of escalation, which now resembles a complex web more than a ladder, and examine specific escalation pathways involving social media.

Based on this analysis, we find that social media has the potential to be a disruptive technology and exacerbate tensions during crises. To reduce the risk of tweets contributing to escalation in a crisis, we recommend the US Department of Defense:

• lead an interagency effort to develop best practices on the use of social media during crises;

• encourage leaders and officials to refrain from tweeting during crises and instead rely on more traditional means of communication, such as press releases and official statements;

• explore how to build public resilience to disinformation campaigns and provocations via social media during crises, as the American public is asymmetrically vulnerable to these attacks; and

• improve understanding of how various international actors use social media.

Twitter, as a company, and alliances such as NATO, also have a role to play in limiting the negative impact of Twitter during crises. If these findings could be summarised in 280 characters or less, it would be: ‘To manage escalation during crises, stop tweeting.’

One of my favourite accounts on Twitter is @RealPressSecBot — a bot that takes every one of Trump’s tweets and immediately reformats them as an official White House press statement. Which, in effect, is what they are.

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Wednesday 22 July, 2020

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Still life with lockdown accessories

The report into Russian meddling in UK democratic processes

The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee on Tuesday released its long-awaited report into Russian meddling in the U.K. democratic process.

A Financial Times Editorial commented…

The starkest accusation was that the government simply did not know whether Britain’s democratic processes had been compromised because — as one committee member put it — “they did not want to know”.

The report’s conclusions, says Politico,

are damning for the British government and there are elements that remain unknown because numerous parts are redacted. It was completed more than a year ago but its release was delayed after Downing Street refused to publish it before the December election then took months setting up the committee again after Boris Johnson won his 80-seat majority.

Politico’s four big takeaways from the report are…

1 The UK was slow to wake up to Russian threat

The crucial thrust of the report is that ministers and the U.K. intelligence agencies left Britain at risk of Russian meddling in the 2016 EU referendum.

But the committee stopped short of concluding that the referendum result was influenced by Russian actors, noting that such a verdict would be impossible to prove. Labour MP and ISC committee member Kevan Jones said the committee saw no evidence of Russian meddling because “nobody in government asked.”

2 Intelligence agencies are too complex

One issue the committee identified was the complicated network of intelligence agencies and who oversees them in government, meaning no single person or office took responsibility for democratic meddling.

3 Russian influence in politics ‘cannot be untangled’

The report notes that links between the Russian elite and the U.K allow access to business and politics that can be used for influence. “To a certain extent, this cannot be untangled and the priority now must be to mitigate the risk and ensure that, where hostile activity is uncovered, the tools exist to tackle it at source,” it added.

“Several members of the Russian elite who are closely linked to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin are identified as being involved with charitable and/or political organizations in the U.K., having donated to political parties, with a public profile which positions them to assist Russian influence operations.”

The report also lashed out at successive governments for allowing the U.K to become an attractive destination for Russian investment. “Russian influence in the U.K. is the new normal,” the committee said in a statement. “Successive governments have welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat,’ and connections at the highest levels with access to U.K. companies and political figures.”

It added, “This has led to a growth industry of ‘enablers’ including lawyers, accountants, and estate agents who are — wittingly or unwittingly — de facto agents of the Russian state.” The MPs refused to answer questions about whether Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister who had a show on Russia Today, was one of those enablers.

4 Relations between the ISC and the government are still not good

The press conference highlighted the frayed relations between the committee and the government. Downing Street refused to publish the report before the 2019 general election, and Johnson took months to reform the committee following his win, meaning it was unable to reveal the document until this week.

No. 10 also sought to meddle in the process for electing the chair. It tried to ensure former Cabinet minister Chris Grayling would get the top post, but he was defeated in an ambush by his fellow Conservative Julian Lewis, who was subsequently stripped of the whip.

This report, and the successful efforts of the Johnson administration to postpone and postpone its publication, confirms the slow-motion implosion of democracy in Britain. Just as in the US, foreign powers — both state and private billionaires — have found ways of undermining and influencing elections and avoiding antiquated electoral laws; and domestic political parties (mainly the Republicans in the US and the Tories in the UK — both of which which stood to gain from this manipulation — have no incentive to do anything about it.

In his terrific book, How Democracy Ends, David Runciman makes the point that most people who worry about the future of liberal democracy make the mistake of looking to the past (e.g. to Weimar Germany) for clues as to where we are headed. But democracies never fail backwards: they fail forwards in ways so novel that they are not initially detected. That’s what’s now happening in the ‘Anglosphere.’ And I fear the rot is now unstoppable, because nobody in the political mainstream has incentives to stop it.

What the CARES Act tells us about low pay in the US

From “US Unemployment Insurance Replacement Rates During the Pandemic” by Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel and Joseph S. Vavra. BFI Working Paper, May 14, 2020

As designed, we find that the ratio of mean benefits to mean earnings in the data under CARES is roughly 100%. However, this masks substantial heterogeneity. We find that 68% of unemployed workers who are eligible for UI will receive benefits which exceed lost earnings. The median replacement rate is 134%, and one out of five eligible unemployed workers will receive benefits at least twice as large as their lost earnings. Thus, the CARES Act actually provides income expansion rather than replacement for most unemployed workers. We also show that there is sizable variation in the effects of the CARES Act across occupations and across states, with important distributional consequences. For example, the median retail worker who is laid-off can collect 142% of their prior wage in UI, while grocery workers are not receiving any automatic pay increases. Janitors working at businesses that remain open do not necessarily receive any hazard pay, while unemployed janitors who worked at businesses that shut down can collect 158% of their prior wage.

These conclusions arise because the CARES Act sends a fixed $600 payment to unemployed workers who have very different prior earnings: $600 is a larger percentage of prior earnings for low than for high earners. Since the $600 UI payment was targeted to generate 100% earnings replacement based on mean earnings, this $600 payment tends to imply greater than 100% earnings replacement for those with less than mean earnings. Furthermore, these high replacement rates for below-mean workers are amplified by the fact that the distribution of earnings is skewed: median prior earnings are below mean prior earnings. This means that the typical unemployed worker has below-mean prior earnings and thus above-mean replacement rates. This implies that most workers have replacement rates above 100%.

Translation (by Sarah O’Connor in the FT): “Roughly two-thirds of Americans who became unemployed in the pandemic are receiving more in benefits than they were paid in their jobs, according to economists at the University of Chicago. For one in five, their income has doubled. The poverty rate actually seems to have fallen since the crisis hit.”

Link.

The US is spiralling into madness

One of the podcasts I try to find time for is the New York Times ‘The Daily’ which sometimes seems to fulfil the promise of podcasting to be ‘the second draft of history’. The other day there was an episode on ‘The Vaccine Trust Problem’ which was absolutely riveting, and which caused me to rethink some of my preconceptions about the vaccine question.

Basically, I had been thinking (and writing) about what I regard as the most alarming scenario of all: that we would eventually get an effective vaccine for Covid-19 but that it would make little difference because of the mobilisation of social media by conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. It would, I wrote, be “like the anti-MMR campaign, but on steroids”.

‘The Daily’ podcast edition startled me because it suggested that my belief that the main sources of vaccine scepticism and anti-vaccine campaigning were conspiracy-theorists and political malcontents was wrong. It turns out that vaccine scepticism is much more wideapread in the US, and not just confined to Trump supporters. Many people who abhor Trump and would like to see him gone are sceptical because they feel that anything that is rushed through on his watch is not to be trusted.

At the moment, opinion polls are suggesting that 50% of Americans, from all walks of life and political opinions, are sceptical about a vaccine. So while billions are being poured into developing one, the rapid timetable and Trump’s cheerleading are creating a whole new group of vaccine-hesitant patients.

This was the general message of a NYT report last Saturday.

The fastidious process to develop a safe, effective vaccine typically takes a decade; some have taken far longer. But the administration of Mr. Trump, himself once an outspoken vaccine skeptic, has been saying recently that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready this fall. While it has removed certain conventional barriers, such as funding, many experts still believe that the proposed timeline could be unduly optimistic.

But whenever a coronavirus vaccine is approved, the assumption has been that initial demand would far outstrip supply. The need to establish a bedrock of confidence in it has largely gone overlooked and unaddressed.

Earlier this month, a nationwide task force of 23 epidemiologists and vaccine behavior specialists released a detailed report — which itself got little attention — saying that such work was urgent. Operation Warp Speed, the $10 billion public-private partnership that is driving much of the vaccine research, they wrote, “rests upon the compelling yet unfounded presupposition that ‘if we build it, they will come.’”

My hunch is that this could indeed by the case in the US. Somehow I can’t see it panning out like that in Europe. But who knows? These are strange times.

Another aspect of this…

It also turns out that skepticism about coronavirus statistics is highly correlated with media consumption habits, according to a recent Avios-Ipsos opinion poll. 62% of Fox News watchers said the statistics of Covid deaths and infections are overblown, while only 7% of CNN and MSNBC watchers thought so.

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Tuesday 21 July, 2020

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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.

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Monday 20 July, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Biology enables, culture forbids.”

  • Yuval Noah Harari

Home working: be careful what you wish for

Interesting post by Ivana Isailović on “The ‘New Normal’ Privatization of the Workplace” in Law and Political Economy:

The changes we are seeing today seem more likely to reinforce inequalities, becoming another instance of how neoliberalism keeps reconfiguring our lives. Remote work has further eroded the weak labor protections at the heart of the industrial economy. More importantly, it risks intensifying the “economization” of our lives, by crowding out any non-work related activities and increasing the rat-race in the midst of the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

More data will be needed to understand the changes that are taking place today and their long-term effects, but what evidence there is suggests that workers are on the losing end. In 2017, a comparative study done by the International Labor Organization and Eurofund (EU agency for the improvement of living and working conditions) showed that overall remote work tends to have detrimental effects on workers. Instead of being protective of “work-life balance,” remote work is eroding it. This result was found in both countries with traditions of strong welfare states (e.g. France, Germany, Sweden) and in countries with weak social protections (e.g. the U.S.)

One problem seems to be that remote work blurs the lines between “work” and “private life.” Workers have reported that because of the lack of clear boundaries, the working day is spread out over longer periods of time, squeezing out “free time.” Moreover, this de facto overtime is rarely remunerated as such. Remote work also intensifies the pace of work, and therefore is associated with more employee stress and burnout (see also the recent Eurofund report from January 2020).

We’re already seeing lots of this.

Mask fascism on the rise

I don’t subscribe to the Washington Post (which may be a mistake — so will reconsider later) but Cory Doctorow does, and he relayed this from the paper:

In the Washington Post, this anonymous editorial from a 63 year old with asthma who makes $10/h in a dockside convenience store in a 900-person town in North Carolina where the sheriff refuses to enforce the state mask rule because he “doesn’t want to be the mask police.”

She describes how she is subjected to physical intimidation, verbal abuse — and risk of death from coronavirus — by customers, especially weekenders from Raleigh and Charlotte who ignore the increasingly desperate signs telling people that they can only shop with a mask on.

These bullies aren’t mollified by offers to bring their orders to them outside the store if they want to remain maskless, and certainly not by the offer of a free mask. Instead, they do things like open the door and scream “Fuck masks! Fuck you!” and storm off.

They tape handbills to the storefront with hoax information about the ADA entitling people to shop without masks, call her an agent of sharia law, or ask whether she’s preparing to turn “mind control” on her.

She describes a life of fear and trauma, where every day at work is a day of abuse and threats, where she and her co-worker sometimes have to lock themselves in the storage room to sob because burly men have screamed at them and threatened them.

What is wrong with these men?

The dark underbelly of the gig-economy

Lyft Is Selling — But Not Providing — Masks and Sanitiser to Drivers.

Why? Because it can’t give them away without conceding that its drivers are employees. And if they were employees well, they’d have rights and entitlements and health insurance and stuff.

KFC is working with a Russian 3D bioprinting firm to try to make lab-produced chicken nuggets

That’s according to The Verge.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a KFC outlet, but somehow I don’t think this would make me change the habits of a lifetime.

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