Month: August 2018

Don’t

I picked this up from a note at the end of John Naughton’s column in the Observer this week. It’s an entertaining keynote address that gives a good lay introduction to the issues AI raises – or, more accurately, ought to raise. Worth watching – if only for sage advice about what to look for when you buy your next internet connected dog bowl or door alarm…

The perils of purity

As we fidget on the edge of Autumn and the resumption of what passes for political life in this country this is a thoughtful piece from John Harris about centrism, the damaging rush to ideological purity across the political spectrum and the reasons why politics seems both detached from reality and utterly unable to deal with it:

One big tension defines where British politics has arrived. On both sides, there are a lot of people – from no-deal Brexiteers to the Corbyn hardcore – who seem to think that they are the custodians of their own variety of purity. What we are perhaps discovering is that this mindset may actually deliver the reverse: a polluted politics in which even people in positions of power keep very questionable company, debate tends to look like an indecipherable mess, and the biggest casualty is a national conversation that feels in any way useful.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/27/centrist-path-hardcore-brexiteers-corbynites

New music

It’s hard, if you aren’t in the swim of it, to know where to find new ‘classical’ music (does that even mean anything any more?) I get updates from the wonderful NMC, and follow hints and tips from occasional magazines and newsletters, but it’s all a bit haphazard. Which makes it a special joy to come across a new (to me) distributor. Another Timbre is based in Sheffield and looks really interesting. I came across them in a Guardian review of a new recording by a Canadian composer called Cassandra Miller. Have a listen to part of one of her pieces:

There are more samples on her site.

The article mentioned another composer from the same series, Linda Caitlin Smith.

Here’s one of her pieces:

Find her here

What numbers make visible & what they erase | The Enlightened Economist

I am always in awe of the Enlightened Economist – the breadth of her reading and the depth of her response to these detailed, complex books about economics, summed up in pithy insightful comments.

I’ve just read her comments on a book that – I think – is just about to be published – Caitlin Rosenthal’s Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management and found them fascinating.

Rosenthal looks at the business of running plantations with slave labour and finds that, well before factories were of any comparable size absent owners, resident managers, banks and markets were developing systems of management to deal with these large international operations.

Of course at the base of the pyramid you have the horror of slavery where human capital is just that, an asset to the business with a cash value. It’s chilling, but it’s what businesses, bureaucracies, governments do all the time. As we globalise, and resist it, as we wait for the rising tide of AI to wash over us, Rosenthal’s warning, quoted in the review seems very timely:

Rosenthal (formerly a management consultant) ends by pointing out that labor conditions for many people in the world still leave much to be desired: “Confronting plantation account books can remind us how easy it is to overlook the conditions of production from the comfort of a counting house or safety of a computer screen. Reckoning with the ways planters accounted for slavery should encourage us to rethink the kinds of data we record and how we use it. Quantitative records can help us to see farther, but only if we remember what the numbers make visible and what they erase.”
— Read on www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2018/08/what-numbers-make-visible-what-they-erase/