“Doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty.”
- Charles Sanders Peirce
Monthly Archives: October 2019
Titchwell church
Click to enlarge. Titchwell church is tiny. But it has the most distinctive spire in Norfolk
Linkblog
- Learning from the Ridley plan Fascinating essay on what an incoming Labour government could learn from Thatcher’s project.
- History of AI research Useful compendium by Luke Posey of significant papers and developments.
- New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding Sobering data from new satellite survey,published in Nature. Moral: best not to live in low-lying coastal regions. (Includes lots of large cities.)
- Key election safeguards won’t be ready for December poll Government was too busy with Brexit to legislate, apparently. And of course it has nothing to do with the Conservative’s social-media strategy for the election.
Linkblog
- If a Robotic Hand Solves a Rubik’s Cube, Does It Prove Something? Solving the cube is easy once you know the algorithm. But building a robotic hand that’s nimble enough to manipulate the cube is harder. The OpenAI researchers built a computer system “that learned to solve the Rubik’s Cube largely on its own”. (Italics added.) Wonder what ‘largely’ means.
- “Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts” Note the objective headline. But then that’s The Register’s style for you. Standfirst reads: “No next-gen mobile internet for you but, hey, no cancer either”.
- Machine learning on a USB stick Well, not quite. But we’re not far off as Google moves its Coral system off Beta status. The technology is on the way to being commoditised.
- Fascinating comparison of two photographs of the White House Situation Room during the Bin Laden mission and the Bagdadi mission Guess which one looks most staged.
Global risks 2035 update
From the Atlantic Council. Headlines are:
- The unipolar world of the 1990s, when the United States was the world’s sole superpower, is definitively over and will no longer be a realistic option for any president.
- An absolute United States’ decline is not inevitable, but an open conflict with China increases those risks considerably.
- A deep economic reversal in China could trigger a widespread economic meltdown that leads to a worst-case scenario of slower growth and a return to protectionism and political destabilization.
No real surprises, really.
Full report (pdf) here
Linkblog
- Media amnesia and the Facebook News Tab Why is Murdoch cosying up to Facebook?
- Data Analytics and Algorithmic Bias in Policing The RUSI Report.
- How a social network could save democracy from deadlock Interesting idea (based on the experience of Taiwan) by Carl Miller of DEMOS.
- HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ series if getting darker Clear case of fiction catching up with reality.
- More people still get their news from offline sources Good report by the Reuters Institute in Oxford. Challenges some conventional wisdom.
Facebook keeps digging itself into the hole
From a report in the Washington Post highlighted by Charles Arthur:
The Arizona ad, paid for by The Committee to Defend the President, is one of roughly two dozen such ads that two pro-Trump super PACs have purchased on Facebook over the past five months, according to an analysis of Facebook’s advertising archive by The Washington Post. Some of the ads falsely suggest that Democrats are purging voter rolls; others direct viewers to some version of a voter-registration form, but only after they submit information, such as their names, email addresses and political affiliations.
Responding to an inquiry from The Post, Facebook said this weekend that it was removing four of the voting-related ads for violating its policies. A spokesperson for the tech giant said it would send other ads purchased by another pro-Trump group, Great America PAC, to third-party fact-checkers to verify their assertions about states purging voter rolls.
Charles’s comment:
So Facebook won’t allow ads that might lead to voter suppression. Apart from the ones it allows. It’s exhausting; Facebook says it won’t allow something, journalists find multiple examples of it allowing something, repeat. The simple solution would be to ban political ads.
Yep. Remember Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. And the funniest thing of all is that, in terms of Facebook’s revenues, political ads earn peanuts.
LATER The NYT is reporting that some Facebook employees are getting agitated about the decision to give politicians’ ads a free run.
Linkblog
- Bundling and unbundling Perceptive essay by Drew Austin on digital tech’s relentless dissolving of value-chains.
- How steak became manly and salads became feminine Essay by a Yale historian about his new book on the history of cuisine.
- Artificial Intelligence Research Needs Responsible Publication Norms Thoughtful exploration on Lawfare of how potentially dangerous technologies should be revealed by researchers.
- The Psychology of Silicon Valley Interesting and useful book. Available on open access too.
Quote of the Day
“The answer to any question starting, ‘Why don’t they—…?’ is almost always, ‘Money.’”
- Robert Heinlein
The Boeing 737 MAX story — and its implications
This morning’s Observer column:
Here’s a question. Well, two questions, actually. One: how could an aircraft manufacturer long celebrated for its commitment to engineering excellence produce an airliner with aerodynamic characteristics that made it unstable under some circumstances – and then release it with remedial computer software that appeared to make it difficult for pilots to take control? And two: why did the government regulator approve the plane – and then dither about grounding the model after it had crashed?
The aircraft in question is the Boeing 737 Max. The regulator is the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The questions are urgent because this model has crashed twice – first in the Java Sea last October with the deaths of 189 people, and then in Ethiopia in March with the deaths of 157 people. Evidence retrieved from the second crash site suggested that the plane had been configured to dive before it came down. And the Ethiopian transport minister was quoted by Al-Jazeera on 4 April as saying that the crew “performed all the procedures repeatedly provided by the manufacturer but was not able to control the aircraft”. The FAA initially reaffirmed the airworthiness of the plane on 11 March but then grounded it on 13 March.
The full story of this catastrophe remains to be told, but we already know the outlines of it…