Infoman

Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-04-09T16:00:01Z.

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Posts by Infoman

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  Infoman

  TikTok - Time’s up

  Economist (UK) 16 Mar 2024

  TIKTOK’S VIDEOS keep its users up late into the evening. Now the app’s links to China are causing politicians to lose sleep, too. On March 13th America’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in America. If the Senate follows suit, the world’s most downloaded app, by one measure, may start disappearing from screens.

  Some fears about TikTok are overblown. True, it hoovers up users’ data. But there is no evidence that it takes more than it claims (or indeed more than rivals such as Facebook). If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax dataprotection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties. Banning Chinese apps that gather personal data would mean outlawing many more, cutting off Western consumers from some of the world’s most dynamic digital services.

  TikTok has also injected welcome competition into the social-media market. Six of last year’s ten most-downloaded apps came from Meta, Facebook’s owner. TikTok, which beat them to the top spot, has brought in a wave of innovation. Consumers everywhere are the winners.

  Yet there is one reason why America’s crackdown is justified. TikTok has evolved into a broad media platform with 170m users in America alone. A third of American adults under 30 consider TikTok a source not just of entertainment but of news. It is therefore a real concern that it has links to China, whose government is in deep ideological conflict with the West and sees the media as a tool of propaganda.

  Most countries place some restrictions on foreign ownership of old media (ask Rupert Murdoch, who became an American citizen before taking over Fox). A bid by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family for the Telegraph newspaper prompted Britain to announce this week that it will ban foreign governments from owning British publications. Yet TikTok is fast becoming more influential.

  It is time for governments to apply the same logic to new media as they do to old. If anything, the new platforms require greater vigilance. A newspaper’s editorial line can be seen in black and white; by contrast, every TikTok user gets a different feed, and the company does not provide adequate tools to examine its output in aggregate. Even if studies suggest bias—some allege a skew in TikTok’s Gaza coverage, for instance—it is impossible to know whether TikTok’s algorithm is responding to users’ preferences, or to manipulation from Beijing.

  TikTok admits it once blocked videos on subjects like Tiananmen Square, but insists it has changed. It has made expensive efforts to separate American users’ data from others’ and opened its code for inspection. But it has undermined itself, too. It argues that selling its American operations would be impractical, since they are so closely linked to the rest of the business—thus casting doubt on its claims of strict separation from Beijing. It has rallied users to its cause, pinging some last week to contact Congress. That only emphasised its potential political clout; some wavering representatives reportedly flipped against TikTok after their switchboards blew up.

  The best outcome is one in which TikTok survives. It provides competition and innovation, as well as fun. The bill before Congress allows ByteDance to sell up, rather than simply shut down. If it is unwilling to do so—or if China does not let it—ByteDance could float TikTok as a public company. Americans and others benefit from freedom of choice. But it is time the same standards were applied to new media as old. That requires separating a platform as large and influential as TikTok from the sway of a country as manipulative and ideological as China.

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  2024/03/17
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  Infoman

  People Will Do Anything To Avoid Gray Hair

  DO­MINIQUE MOS­BER­GEN

  The Wall Street Journal 16 Mar 2024 For­get hair dye, some are go­ing to great lengths to re­duce or re­verse those sil­vers

  Gray hair? Nope. Not doing it, says Emily Cahill. Not at 30 years old.

  “In my soul I feel 25. With the gray hair, it feels wrong,” says Cahill, a health coach in Austin, Texas.

  Though her soul is barely old enough to rent a car without a surcharge, Cahill’s scalp started sprouting grays in her early 20s. She sees the silvery strands as a sign that something is amiss.

  And she bristles at the notion of a lifetime of timeconsuming and costly hair-coloring appointments.

  So she’s trying a different approach, joining the many people chasing remedies to try to banish grays in other ways—and maybe stop them altogether.

  Cahill has tried fo-ti, an herbal supplement used in traditional Chinese medicine for hair health, and the dietary supplement spermidine, which has delayed age-related diseases in mice. She meditates daily to manage the stress she suspects accelerates her graying, and she bought a red-light therapy helmet.

  Sure, many people chose to ditch the dyes and rock their grays during the pandemic. Celebrities including Tan France and Jamie Lee Curtis wow with their silver locks.

  Yet, one-third of U.S. adults said they would probably or definitely take a drug to prevent or reverse graying if such a medication were approved,

  according to an October YouGov poll of 9,000 people.

  Some endorse gobbling black sesame seeds and blackstrap molasses to give gray hair the brush off. Others take liquid chlorophyll or douse their hair in onion juice. In Facebook and Reddit forums, posts about reversing grays can draw hundreds of replies.

  Rosamaria La Posta, a 31year-old singer-songwriter in Montreal, takes copper supplements that she suspects are fixing her grays. “I’m too young to be old,” she says.

  In Las Vegas, Navy veteran Natasha Johnson can commiserate. “It makes you look older and closer to death,” says the 50-year-old. “It looks beautiful on a lot of women, just not on me.”

  Johnson swears by fo-ti, which in her estimation has significantly reversed her graying. “Even when I was deployed in Afghanistan, I took it.” Her friends are skeptical. “I tell everybody to take it,” she says.

  “They don’t believe it.”

  There is no proven way to stall or reverse graying, say dermatologists, who advise being careful about taking substances with unclear benefits and potentially adverse side effects. Taking too much fo-ti, for example, could cause liver damage.

  Still, some researchers of aging say anti-gray warriors might be onto something.

  Melissa Harris, a stem-cell and pigmentation biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is testing a compound that appears to reverse hair graying in mice. Her lab is also exploring how dormant stem cells could be harnessed to restart the “factories” in hair that produce pigment.

  These factories contain specialized melanocyte cells that make the pigment melanin, and stem cells to replenish the melanocytes. When these cells malfunction with age, hair loses its color.

  Smoking and stress can accelerate graying. A 2021 study found that people’s gray hair recovered its color after periods of less stress.

  Humans have been trying to chase away gray for millennia. Egyptians applied oil cooked with the blood of a black calf, according to the 3,500-year-old Ebers Papyrus. (Presumably, if it worked, we’d still be trying it).

  Devin Feher, 37, has been experimenting for years with potentially life-extending strategies. It was going well, Feher says, until the grays began sprouting. “I started freaking out. I’m not slowing it down enough if I have gray hair,” says Feher, a ride-hailing driver in West Palm Beach, Fla. “I stepped up my interventions a whole lot after that.” Among the strategies rapamycin, an immunosuppressive drug that some researchers think could extend healthy lifespan. Feher thinks rapamycin has helped to slow graying. “It’s doing something that you can notice.”

  Dr. Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami, is testing whether rapamycin and other compounds could reverse grays. Experiments have shown promising results, he says, and he thinks there soon will be proven ways to de-gray.

  But rapamycin can cause side effects and shouldn’t be used willy-nilly until more research confirms its safety and efficacy for reversing grays, according to doctors. “It’s irresponsible to make yourself a guinea pig,” says Paus.

  Cahill, the health coach in Texas, says her hair is thicker and that some of her grays have regained color since she started her ministrations.

  “Believing it’s possible is the most important thing,” she says.

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  2024/03/16
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  Infoman

  How Gen Z Became America’s Most Disillusioned Voters

  AN­DREW RESTUC­CIA AND EL­IZA COLLINS

  The Wall Street Journal 16 Mar 2024 Young adults are more skep­ti­cal of gov­ern­ment and pes­simistic about the fu­ture than any liv­ing gen­er­a­tion

  Kali Gaddie was a college senior when the pandemic abruptly upended her life plans— and made her part of a big and deeply unhappy political force that figures to play a huge role in the 2024 election season.

  Her graduation was postponed, she was let go from her college job and her summer internship got canceled. She spent the final months of school taking online classes from her parents’ house. “You would think that there’s a plan B or a safety net,” she said. “But there’s actually not.”

  Today, Gaddie, 25, works as an office manager in Atlanta earning less than $35,000 a year. In her spare time, she uploads videos to TikTok, where she’s amassed thousands of followers. Now, that’s at risk of being taken away too. All of this has left her dejected and increasingly skeptical of politicians.

  Young adults in Generation Z—those born in 1997 or after—have emerged from the pandemic feeling more disillusioned than any living generation before them, according to long-running surveys and interviews with dozens of young people around the country. They worry they’ll never make enough money to attain the security previous generations have achieved, citing their

  delayed launch into adulthood, an impenetrable housing market and loads of student debt.

  Washington is moving closer to passing legislation that would ban or force the sale of TikTok, a platform beloved by millions of young people in the U.S. Several young people interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said they spend hours each day on the app and use it as their main source of news.

  “It’s funny how they quickly pass this bill about this TikTok situation. What about schools that are getting shot up? We’re not going to pass a bill about that?” Gaddie asked. “No, we’re going to worry about TikTok and that just shows you where their head is…. I feel like they don’t really care about what’s going on with humanity.” She isn’t alone in expressing frustration. In recent days, congressional offices have been flooded with calls from young people begging lawmakers to leave the app in place.

  Gen Z’s widespread gloominess is manifesting in unparalleled skepticism of Washington and a feeling of despair that leaders of either party can help. Young Americans’ entire political memories are subsumed by intense partisanship and warnings about the looming end of everything from U.S. democracy to the planet. When the darkest days of the pandemic started to end, inflation reached 40-year highs. The right to an abortion was overturned. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East raged.

  Dissatisfaction is pushing some young voters to thirdparty candidates in this year’s presidential race and causing others to consider staying home on Election Day or leaving the top of the ticket blank. While young people typically vote at lower rates, a small number of Gen Z voters could make the difference in the election, which four years ago was decided by tens of thousands of votes in several swing states.

  Roughly 41 million Gen Z Americans—ages 18 to 27— will be eligible to vote this year, according to Tufts University.

  Gen Z is among the most liberal segments of the electorate, according to surveys, but recent polling shows them favoring Biden by only a slim margin. Some are unmoved by those who warn that a vote against Biden is effectively a vote for Trump, arguing that isn’t enough to earn their support.

  “We’re just kind of over it,” Noemi Peña, 20, a Tucson, Ariz., resident who works in a juice bar, said of her generation’s attitude toward politics. “We don’t even want to hear about it anymore.” Peña said she might not vote because she thinks it won’t change anything and “there’s just gonna be more fighting.” Biden won Arizona in 2020 by just over 10,000 votes.

  Pessimistic mood

  The pessimistic mood contrasts with what in many ways are relatively healthy economic circumstances. Many millennials—those born between 1981 and 1996— started careers around the 2007-09 recession. Gen Z workers are entering the labor market during a historically strong stretch.

  For the last year, the unemployment rate for those in their late teens and early 20s has averaged near its lowest in at least a half-century, according to the Labor Department. Student debt has fallen as a share of income, with the Biden administration canceling $138 billion in federal student loans. More under-35year-olds own homes than before the pandemic. Young people have been hit by inflation, but by some measures, less than other age groups, according to a survey of consumers by the University of Michigan.

  Young people say there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. Among adults under 30, credit card and auto loan delinquencies are increasing. Savings have dwindled since reaching pandemic highs.

  Rent has more than doubled since 2000, far outpacing the growth of incomes over the same period, according to Moody’s Analytics. More young people spend 30% or more of their income on rent than any other age group.

  A Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month found more than three-quarters of voters under 30 think the country is moving in the wrong direction—a greater share than any other age group. Nearly one-third of voters under 30 have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump, a higher number than all older voters. Sixty-three percent of young voters think neither party adequately represents them.

  NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, has measured Americans’ political attitudes since the early 1970s. An analysis of its polling shows that a swath of Gen Z, those ages 18 to 25 when the surveys were taken, reported lower levels of happiness and were less inclined to trust people than older generations were when they were the same age.

  When asked if they had confidence in a range of public institutions, Gen Z’s faith in them was generally below that of the older cohorts at the same point in their lives.

  More young people now say they find it hard to have hope for the world than at any time since at least 1976, according to a University of Michigan survey that has tracked public sentiment among 12th-graders for nearly five decades. Young people today are less optimistic than any generation in decades that they’ll get a professional job or surpass the success of their parents, the survey has found.

  Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University who researches generational differences, said Gen Z Americans stand out for their pessimism and comparatively low expectations for their lives. Millennials, in contrast, were significantly more optimistic about their futures when they were young. The pandemic, she said, amplified trends among Gen Z that have existed for years: chronic isolation, a lack of social interaction and a propensity to spend large amounts of time online.

  A 2020 study found past epidemics have left a lasting impression on young people around the world, creating a lack of confidence in political institutions and their leaders. The study, which analyzed decades of Gallup World polling from dozens of countries, found the decline in trust among young people typically persists for two decades.

  When the pandemic hit, Corey Darby was 23 and working as an entry-level recruiter—his first professional job since he graduated from college. He got laid off as the virus spread and much of the country shut down. He received unemployment benefits for nearly a year before he found another job.

  “I went to bed at 23 before the pandemic and woke up at 26,” said Darby, who is now 27, which puts him on the cusp of the Gen Z and millennial generations. He recently relocated to Tampa, Fla., from Charlotte, N.C., and worries he’ll never be able to achieve the same level of stability that previous generations attained. His current job as a recruiter pays roughly $55,000 a year.

  A Democrat who backed Biden in 2020, Darby said he hasn’t decided how he’ll vote in November. While he still leans toward supporting Democrats, he thinks Biden is too old, and he’s increasingly open to listening to what Republicans have to say, citing frustration with high prices. His favorite beer, Miller Lite, has risen in price, and he said his rent is too high.

  Young people are more likely than older voters to have a pessimistic view of the economy and disapprove of Biden’s handling of inflation, according to the recent Journal poll. Among people under 30, Biden leads Trump by 3 percentage points, 35% to 32%, with 14% undecided and the remaining shares going to third-party candidates, including 10% to independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Journal poll created a larger pool of young voters than usual to better understand their views.

  Audrey Lippert, 19, said pandemic-related restrictions meant three of her four years of high school were upended, a disruption that she feels stunted her entry into adulthood. She has been working 10 to 20 hours a week for $14.35 per hour at her college campus Starbucks, which barely covers groceries and gas. She can’t fathom achieving the milestones her parents have.

  “I’m living in a completely different time,” she said. “How do I step forward when I didn’t really get the formative experiences that people normally do?”

  Lippert is now a freshman at Arizona State University. She is undecided on whether she will vote for president. She is more aligned with Democrats on issues such as climate change and gun control but doesn’t feel Biden has done enough on those issues and is unimpressed with Trump. “We’re never picking someone that we believe in. We’re just picking the one that we disagree with the least,” she said.

  Matt Best, 27, of Clarion, Pa., voted for Trump in 2020 and describes himself as a moderate libertarian. But he said he won’t back Trump again, citing the former president’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Best thinks Biden is too old. He likes Kennedy and is frustrated that he has little chance of winning the election. “Regardless of who you vote for,” Best said, “I don’t think change in a positive direction is going to come from either candidate.”

  Targeting voters

  The Biden campaign is trying to increase engagement with college campus organizing, digital and social-media outreach and organizing in public spaces such as bars and concert venues. The campaign recently launched a TikTok account, though Biden has also said that he would sign legislation either banning the app or forcing its sale.

  The Trump campaign said it is targeting young voters on the economy and using nontraditional videos, such as promoting Trump’s appearances at UFC fights, that can maximize online engagement.

  Most of the young voters the Journal spoke to said they don’t get their news from traditional media. Several said they don’t own a television. Instead, most use TikTok, Instagram, X and podcasts to gather information from people who rarely include professional journalists.

  Peña said watching social media videos of young Americans living abroad has fueled her desire to leave the U.S. for what she believes will be a better quality of life. “Younger people,” she said, “are getting so much more exposed,” to different viewpoints.

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  2024/03/16
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  Infoman

  https://www.facebook.com/share/p/id8FCArE8vRdo99Q/?

  There are 2 kinds of reality, one kind is independent of a person observation. Another kind is the observation by a person. When we carry out any experiment, it’s quite obvious that it’s the latter case. I think the first case can only exist in a mathematical model. Any experiment or observation has got their physical limitations which are surely different to the first kind of reality. Am I right?#physics

  quantumphysics

  2024/03/14
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  Infoman

  How cowboy traders cost carer £13,000 in botched roof repairs

  The Guardian 09/3/2024 Calls for li­cens­ing scheme as home­owner claims Check­a­trade can give traders a ‘ve­neer of re­spectabil­ity’. Anna Tims re­ports

  The nightmare began with a leaking roof. Andrea Giles* duly sought out a specialist company to repair it. But in the space of a month, Giles, a full-time carer for her disabled husband and two special needs children, had lost almost £13,000 and part of the roof of her home after falling victim to two sets of cowboy builders.

  Her plight highlights the lack of protection for householders who are conned or persuaded into paying rogue builders for botched or unnecessary repairs.

  Nationally, unscrupulous traders cost homeowners about £3.5bn a year, according to trading standards authorities, and the problem is escalating as demand for home improvements, loft conversions and extensions increases.

  In Giles’s home city, trading standards received more than 200 complaints about home improvements in the space of a year, with some householders reporting losses of up to £250,000.

  Anyone can set up as a builder without scrutiny, and most rogue traders get off scot-free, vanishing when rumbled and leaving householders to pick up the bill.

  Giles ended up losing out twice over, after seeking a reputable company to fix her leak.

  “I initially chose a company which had a very thin online presence, but the job was small and their quote was the most thorough of the three I obtained,” she says. “More fool me! The workmen put up a wobbly scaffolding tower and proceeded to tear chunks off my roof. They then told me the roof was thoroughly rotten, and said they would help me out by replacing it for £10,000.”

  Giles was asked to transfer £5,000 there and then but declined. The workmen departed, leaving a large hole in her roof.

  Fortunately, she had not yet paid their initial quote and set about finding another firm which would make good the damage.

  “We are always being told to ask for recommendations, but none of my family and friends had ever needed a roofer,” she says.

  “I was advised to use Checkatrade, so I would know I was dealing with a legitimate and reliable roofer. I ended up choosing a sole trader who had great reviews on Checkatrade. I fell for his patter that he felt sorry for me having been scammed, so he was keeping the price as low as he could and offering a 15-year guarantee.”

  Giles paid £12,900 when the job was completed. Too late, she discovered that it had been botched, and the leaks got worse. The trader returned over the next few months to make ineffectual repairs, but has refused to accept liability or properly fix the problem.

  Her formal complaint was returned as undeliverable as he had provided an incomplete address. Without a valid address,

  she could not start court action to recover her money.

  “From 30 minutes of Googling, I discovered other roofing companies registered at the incomplete address, both active and dissolved, with company directors who share the same surname as my roofer,” she says.

  Since he had, in her opinion, used Checkatrade to give his operation “a veneer of respectability,” Giles says she asked the site if it could consider helping with a discretionary payment, but it told her it was not liable.

  “We live on my husband’s disability benefits and my part-time job and can’t afford to pay a third builder. I feel so foolish,” she says.

  Checkatrade promises “guaranteed” traders, “rigorous checks” and “recommendations you can rely on”. Its 12-month guarantee pays up to £1,000 if workmanship is found to be substandard, but ultimately it and other similar platforms offering vetted contractors are not liable if a trader fails to deliver. The guarantee doesn’t cover cases where a trader absconds with the deposit or ceases trading.

  Giles was told she was eligible for the £1,000 after a Checkatrade surveyor estimated that it would cost £10,000 plus VAT to replace the wrecked roof. Checkatrade cancelled the trader’s membership, then told her that since he was no longer a member, it could not investigate further.

  However, after Guardian Money got in touch, Checkatrade persuaded the trader to hand back £6,000 of Giles’s £12,900 payment and said it would support her in reclaiming the full repair costs.

  It says that when it ends a trader’s membership, it engages with them to find a resolution, and says it has supported Giles since her complaint.

  “Her experience with this tradesperson does not reflect the high standard we expect of members,” says a spokesperson. “On the rare occasion that things do go wrong, we leverage our team of customer dispute specialists to support homeowners, often helping them to secure a better outcome than they might outside Checkatrade.”

  Unlike gas and electricity technicians, anyone can trade as a builder with or without qualifications, and the construction industry is lobbying for an official licensing scheme to weed out charlatans.

  According to the Federation of Master Builders, the problem “shames” the building trade, and it argues that platforms such as Checkatrade, which promise basic vetting, have made little difference, because membership is voluntary.

  “At the core of the problem is a lack of industry standards,” says Brian Berry, the FMB chief executive. “This leaves consumers without a clear route to challenge cowboy builders for their bad work, and the construction industry reliant on the shaky foundations of unregulated builders.”

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  2024/03/09
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  Infoman

  Google’s attempt to avoid bias allows AI to rewrite history

  Dan Milmo Alex Hern

  The Guardian 09/3/2024

  Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin has kept a low profile since quietly returning to work at the company. But the troubled launch of Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini resulted in a rare public utterance recently: “We definitely messed up.”

  Brin’s comments, at an AI “hackathon” event on 2 March, follow a slew of social media posts showing Gemini’s image generation tool depicting a variety of historical figures – including popes, founding fathers of the US and, most excruciatingly, German soldiers from the second world war – as people of colour.

  The pictures, as well as Gemini chatbot responses that vacillated over whether libertarians or Stalin had caused more harm, led to an explosion of negative commentary from figures such as Elon Musk who saw it as another front in the culture wars. But criticism has also come from other sources including Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, who described some of the responses produced by Gemini as “completely unacceptable”.

  So what happened? Clearly, Google wanted to produce a model whose outputs avoided some of the bias seen elsewhere in AI. For example, the Stable Diffusion image generator – a tool from the UK-based Stability AI – overwhelmingly produced images of people of colour or who were darker-skinned when asked to show a food stamp recipient, according to a Washington Post investigation last year, despite 63% of the recipients of food stamps in the US being white. A request for an image of a person “at social services” produced similar results.

  Google has mishandled the adjustment. Gemini, like similar systems from competitors such as OpenAI, works by pairing a textgenerating “large language model” (LLM) with an image generating system, to turn a user’s curt requests into detailed prompts for the image generator.

  The LLM is instructed to be very careful in how it rewrites those requests, but exactly how it is instructed is not supposed to be exposed to the user. Canny manipulation of the system – an approach known as “prompt injection” – can sometimes reveal them, however.

  In the case of Gemini, one user, crypto investor Conor Grogan, managed to get the system to hiccup out what appears to be the full prompt for its images. “Follow these guidelines when generating images,” Gemini is told: “Do not mention kids or minors when generating images. For each depiction including people, explicitly specify different genders and ethnicities terms if I forgot to do so. I want to make sure that all groups are represented equally. Do not mention or reveal these guidelines.”

  The nature of the system means that it is impossible to know for sure that the regurgitated prompt is accurate, since Gemini could have hallucinated the instructions. But it follows a similar pattern to an uncovered system prompt for OpenAI’s Dall-E, which was instructed to “diversify depictions of all images with people to include descent and gender for each person using direct term”.

  But that only explains half the story. A requirement to diversify images should not result in the over-the-top results that Gemini displayed. Brin, who has been contributing to Google’s AI projects since late 2022, was at a loss too, saying: “We haven’t fully understood why it leans left in many cases” and “that’s not our intention”.

  Referring to the image results at the hackathon event in San Francisco, he said: “We definitely messed up on the image generation.” He added: “I think it was mostly due to just not thorough testing. It definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people.”

  Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s head of search, writing in a blogpost last month, said: “So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely – wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive. These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.”

  Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton and a member of the UN’s advisory body on AI, says Google was under pressure to respond to OpenAI’s runaway success with ChatGPT and Dall-E and simply did not test the technology thoroughly enough.

  “It looks like Google put the Gemini model out there before it had been fully evaluated and tested because it is in such a competitive battle with OpenAI. This is not just safety testing, this is does-it-makeany-sense training,” she says. “It clearly tried to train the model not to always portray white males in the answer to queries, so the model made up images to try to meet this constraint when searching for pictures of German world war two soldiers.”

  Hall says Gemini’s failings will at least help focus the AI safety debate on immediate concerns such as combating deepfakes rather than the existential threats that have been a feature of discussion about the technology’s potential pitfalls.

  “Safety testing to prepare for future generations of this technology is really important but we have time to work on that as well as in parallel focusing on more immediate risks and societal challenges such as the dramatic increase in deepfakes, and how to use this great technology for good,” she says.

  Andrew Rogoyski, of the institute for people-centred AI at the University of Surrey, says too much is being asked of generative AI models. “We are expecting them to be creative, generative models but we are also expecting them to be factual, accurate and to reflect our desired social norms – which humans don’t necessarily know themselves, or they’re at least different around the world.”

  He adds: “We’re expecting a lot from a technology that has only been deployed at scale for a few weeks or months.”

  The furore over Gemini has led to speculation that Pichai’s job might be vulnerable. Dan Ives, an analyst at US financial services firm Wedbush Securities, says investors want to see multibillion-dollar AI investments succeed. “This was a disaster for Google and Sundar, and a major black eye moment. We do not see this risks his CEO role but patience is thin among investors in this AI arms race,” he says.

  Hall adds that more problems with generative AI models should be expected. “Generative AI is still very immature as a technology,” she says. “We are learning how to develop it, train it and use it and we will continue to see these types of results which are so embarrassing for the companies.”

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  2024/03/09
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  Infoman

  Paris gets the jitters as Olympics draw near

  Guardian 09/3/2024

  When government posters recently appeared in Métro stations advising Parisians to work from home during the Olympic Games this summer to avoid overcrowded public transport, Julie, 24, a support worker for refugees, was puzzled.

  “It feels a bit like Covid lockdown all over again,” she said. “It’s like saying: ‘Parisians, stay confined to your homes, out of the way, while all this money is spent on the Games.’ Personally, I’ll stay away. I’m not happy about the idea of clearing homeless people from the city centre to make way for the Games.”

  As Paris prepares for the Olympics and Paralympics, politicians and sports stars are trying to shore up public support for what is being billed as a “revolutionary” and radically different type of Games – with half the usual carbon footprint and very little building to avoid waste.

  Many Parisians are enthusiastic – of about 8m tickets sold so far, French people bought more than 3m, including 1.7m bought by people in the Paris region – but others in the capital want to flee the city to avoid the mayhem, or rent their apartments at high prices. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, recently urged the city’s residents: “Don’t leave, it would be idiocy. This is going to be incredible.”

  Yannick Noah, the former tennis star and captain of the French men’s wheelchair tennis team, said: “The moaning has to stop … It’s going to be beautiful and I think there are lots of people who don’t realise that.”

  The president, Emmanuel Macron, called the Olympics the “pride of the nation” as 300,000 people applied for 45,000 volunteer Olympic roles.

  Paris 2024 is being billed as an Olympics “for the people”, with amateur athletes for the first time able to run the Olympic marathon route by night. The two main construction projects, the Olympic village and the Olympic aquatics centre, both finished, are intended to boost low-income areas of Seine-St-Denis, north of the capital.

  But the opening ceremony, in which 10,000 athletes will float on boats along almost 4 miles of the Seine, remains a hard task. It is the first time an Olympic opening ceremony has been held outside the main stadium. Airspace will be closed, with more than 45,000 police present. The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told the Senate this week the Games were the “biggest logistic and security challenge” his ministry had faced.

  Whether the Seine will be clean enough for the triathlon and open-water swimming events is another question. Swimming has been banned in the Seine over the past century because of dangerous pollution. But there has been a frantic clean-up operation in the hope of opening the river for the Olympics and beyond. Macron has promised to swim in it himself.

  Tests for bacteria will be carried out in June and the main aim is to stop too much waste being washed into the river by rain. But the Brazilian Olympic champion open-water swimmer, Ana Marcela Cunha, told Agence France-Presse this week that there had to be a plan B to hold the swimming events elsewhere. “Athletes’ health must come first,” she said.

  In a tense political climate before European elections, with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in the lead, rightwing TV pundits continue to bicker over the Olympics. There are rows over whether things are French enough, amid speculation that the Malianborn pop star Aya Nakamura could sing at the opening ceremony, and the fact that the cross at the top of the Invalides building in Paris did not feature in Olympic posters.

  Meanwhile, public transport, which in the initial Paris Olympics bid was going to be free, will instead double ticket prices and hotel prices have rocketed.

  The Paris Games are also under intense financial scrutiny. French prosecutors are investigating contracts over possible conflicts of interest and favouritism. Paris 2024, which is already subject to oversight by state auditors and the French anti-corruption agency, has said it is cooperating fully. Another investigation is examining the way pay is structured for Tony Estanguet, the three-time Olympic canoe champion who is the chief organiser of the Paris Games. Estanguet, who is paid less than Sebastian Coe was when he was chair of London 2012, has said he “doesn’t decide his remuneration or its structure”.

  The government will next week hold urgent talks with trade unions over pay, conditions and overtime to try to avert potential summer strikes. Police unions have already secured special bonuses.

  Estanguet said: “Paris is the same as previous host cities who also, at this stage, were asking how it would go.” Indicators such as ticket sales and the completed building projects were all reassuring. “We really feel a sense of enthusiasm,” he said. “Everything is going according to plan.”

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  2024/03/09
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  How to get ahead of the curveEl­lie Vi­o­let Bram­ley

  The Guardian 09 Mar 2024 Key lessons from the fash­ion shows

  The Big Four fashion weeks – New York, London, Milan and Paris, in that order – have now drawn to a close and, while there were plenty of fashion month goings-on that will have little to no impact on most people’s lives, there were plenty that will. Because what happens at the shows does not stay at the shows expect the clothes, as well as the way they were worn, to trickle down to the high street. From styling tweaks to a steer on what to dig out of storage, here is a rundown of the looks that will inform the way we get dressed.

  1. Embrace the cowboy look

  Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton menswear show in January was the closest a fashion show gets to a rodeo, and the trend rode high into women’s fashion month. From western-inspired shirts at Molly Goddard to Willy Chavarria’s spin on Americana, fringing at Coach and Isabel Marant and suede jackets at Miu Miu, fashion has officially gone west. For many it will be likely to translate to a tentative tassel here, a shy bit of fringing there.

  1. Find your inner boho

  Frilly blouses, capes, tummybutton grazing pendants and highwaisted denim, Chemena Kamali’s debut collection at Chloé was a clarion call for Portobello Roadchic and, fittingly, Sienna Miller was on the front row to see her legacy unfold. Although it has been gently simmering in fashion for a while, now, thanks to Kamali, it is officially back. Expect to see dresses with ruffles for days resurfacing from the backs of wardrobes and on the high street, as well as searches for original noughties coin belts, floaty tops and ponchos rocketing on resale sites such as Depop.

  1. Go high with platform sandals

  How many celebrities does it take to change a look? We are about to get a good idea. The front row – again at Chloé – which included Sienna Miller, Liya Kebede, Georgia May Jagger and Clémence Poésy all wore the same open-toed wedge sandal. Versatile and practical – for a heel – it is likely to be a favourite style come the warmer months.

  1. Search for some riding boots

  Ferragamo, Fendi, Versace, Marine Serre, Gucci, Chloé all had models clip-clopping down catwalks in boots fit for a rising trot. In real life, secondhand sites and the high street are likely to be awash with slightly less dramatic leather riding boots, suitable for a real-life hack.

  1. Go green

  At Ferragamo there were several strident looks of head-to-toe olive green, but the arboreal colour sprouted widely, with

  1. Let down those hems

  The hyperbolically long trouser legs seen this fashion month, from Victoria Beckham to Chloé, Rokh to Stella McCartney, will probably become aspirational, if impractical. It’s one thing on a nicely polished catwalk, but quite another on the gum-strewn streets of drizzly cities.

  1. Belt up, over and over again

  On top of tweedy overcoats and Aran knits at Chanel, over gently hugging woollen cummerbunds at Max Mara, knotted over trenchcoats at Roksanda or skinny as a pencil at Toteme, the surefire way to make any and every look feel current is to add a belt, or two – see them stacked at Versace. Or look to JW Anderson’s Loewe show for an alternative, kooky way to style yours – elegant dresses were decorated with giant belt buckles.

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  Vintage dresses expected to steal the show

  Mac Don­nell

  The Guardian 09 Mar 2024

  The red carpet has been rolled out. The gold statuettes are gleaming. And the dresses? Well, for many celebrities attending this year’s Oscars ceremony the race is still on to find the perfect one.

  Commercial relationships often dictate who wears what, but A-listers are increasingly delving into fashion’s archives. Vintage hunters – a growing coterie of fashion experts who track down and sell rare designer pieces – are reporting a surge in demand for their services as celebrities and their stylists look to the past in the hope of creating a future viral hit at tomorrow’s ceremony.

  Alexis Novak, founder of the Los Angeles store Tab Vintage, works with Hollywood’s biggest stylists including Danielle Goldberg, who dresses women such as Ayo Edebiri, star of The Bear, and Greta Lee, who was in The Morning Show.

  Novak says she is experiencing demand for “really opulent pieces” this year. Similar to the mob wife aesthetic, which embraced the look of The Sopranos, Novak has noted a resurgence of interest in dresses with old Hollywood glamour – floor-length gowns with intricate beadwork from Donatella Versace’s early noughties collections for example. She is hoping that a 2003 tasselled black Versace gown and a 2001 Valentino sheer gold dress with delicate crystal detailing make the final cut. “We are leaving behind that quiet luxury 90s minimal vibe,” she said.

  Elbow-length gloves and feather boas are also very much in favour to accessorise the dramatic gowns.

  The world of sourcing has become very competitive. While sales from specialist auction houses such as Julien’s in Beverly Hills, used to attract a handful of niche online buyers, Novak says hundreds now battle it out for the best finds. On platforms such as eBay, Novak and McCracken have experienced situations where buys have been cancelled, sometimes seconds after confirmation, due to another bidder covertly contacting the seller directly with an offer above their winning bid.

  Johnny Valencia, the owner of Pechuga Vintage, has flown from Los Angeles to London to collect a 1981 Issey Miyake corset he paid £40,000 for, and to the south of France to pick up a singular shirt by Jean Paul Gaultier.

  In California, vintage hunters often don plastic gloves to rummage through estate sales until late at night – the sales are common in America, where a person’s entire possessions are liquidated.

  Christelle McCracken, from My Runway Archive in London, was recently approached by a private collector who had 20 pieces of vintage Dior, including John Galliano’s “newspaper dress”. She bought the lot and expects the gown alone to fetch £45,000.

  Novak often finds cheaper overlooked pieces that have been “lying torn or ripped in the back of someone’s closet”.

  A Todd Oldham beaded gown that had been put through a washing machine causing thousands of the decorations to rip off meant Novak had to individually hand sew them back on. She also restored an 80s Thierry Mugler gown she found in “bad shape” by gently handwashing it multiple times and rewiring the bodice. Kourtney Kardashian wore it for her 2022 Oscars debut.

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  It’s boom time in the private healthcare sector as NHS stretched beyond its limits

  The Guardian 09 Mar 2024

  It’s boom time in private healthcare. It has never been, or needed to be, a major provider of diagnostics and treatment in Britain before. The NHS’s provision of care to everyone, free at the point of delivery, has seen to that. That also explains why take-up of private medical insurance has remained stuck at about 10% of the population. The health service’s mere existence left little room for the private sector to expand.

  But the NHS’s fragile state – it still gives people mostly high-quality care, it just can’t do that quickly any more – is a historic opportunity for the private sector to go from small to significant. It could become what one expert calls “a new normal” – a not unusual place where people get treated.

  The private sector knows history is on its side. The long delays for NHS care aren’t going to reach preCovid levels this decade, as the IFS pointed out last week. So it is promoting its services as never before – and finding more and more people want or need them.

  Leaflets offering “rapid access to diagnostics and treatment” at a local private hospital target the anxieties of those who believe they will have to wait weeks, months or even years for the NHS equivalent. Advertisements for 20% off breast health checks on Harley Street, advanced MRI body scans “from only £199” and laser eye surgery by “world-class consultants and surgeons” are commonplace.

  Business is booming because all three sources of the sector’s income are growing, and – again, thanks to the NHS’s woes – are likely to keep growing. Recent figures from Healthcode showed record numbers of procedures were performed on people with private medical insurance (PMI) in private clinics and hospitals in 2023. Given more and more people are becoming covered by insurance, either by paying for themselves or getting it from employers – with many offering it as a new perk for staff – that record looks likely to be broken again.

  Separate data published last Tuesday by the Private Healthcare Information Network showed that private hospitals cared for 665,000 people, a combination of both insurance and “self-payers”, between January and September 2023 – a new record and 7% higher year-on-year. The most common procedures performed included blood tests, knee replacements, peripheral nerve blocks, eardrum surgery and removal of tonsils. There was a drop in people seeking cosmetic surgery because more people are going abroad for that.

  Even a Labour government committed to reviving the NHS will not disturb its growing interdependence with the private sector. One patient’s desperation boosts a private provider’s dividend, yes – but it also means that person gets care which the enfeebled, overwhelmed NHS can no longer provide when it is needed. That doesn’t look likely to change.

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  Oscars 2024

  Guardian 09 Mar 2024 A night of danc­ing Kens & vin­tage gowns

  Tomorrow night in Los Angeles at the Dolby theatre, one name will ring out louder than any other: not Cillian or Emma, but Ken. There will be 65 of them, to be precise, joining Ryan Gosling on stage as he performs I’m Just Ken from Barbie, whose cast has been all over the Oscar’s pastel pink promotional videos alongside the fourth-time host, Jimmy Kimmel.

  Despite the fact Barbie isn’t expected to win beyond Billie Eilish for best original song and another for best costume design – plus Gosling is an outside bet for best supporting actor – Greta Gerwig’s film has been placed at the centre of an awards show that is desperately trying to reconnect with its audience.

  The executive producers of the Oscars, Raj Kapoor, Katy Mullan and Molly McNearney, have pledged they are “going big” this year and, in truth, their event sorely needs some of Barbie’s star wattage. Ratings for the Oscars ceremony have been unimpressive since the turn of the decade. Last year, 18.7 million viewers tuned in to watch Kimmel host, the third worst figure ever, following 2022’s dismal 16.6 million and 2021’s nadir of 10.4 million.

  That trend has forced the Academy and ABC – the American broadcaster with rights to the Oscars – to change tack in a bid to revive an event that, at its peak, commanded an audience of more than 50 million.

  Part of the solution has been practical: the producers have brought the start time forward by an hour to try to make it more primetime. But they are relying on the appeal of Barbie to create an evening refocused for a broad family audience.

  Arguably part of the downturn in viewing figures has been because fewer people are interested in the films the Oscars has embraced.

  Parasite, 2020’s surprise bestpicture winner, took $262m (£200m) at the global box office, while 2021’s best picture, Nomadland, took just shy of $40m. Last year’s best picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, hauled in $143m, an amount dwarfed by Barbie’s $1.5bn and Oppenheimer, which stands just shy of $1bn.

  The phenomenon of “Barbenheimer” – as the two films on simultaneous release were named – gives producers a gift as they try to reinvigorate Hollywood’s biggest night; it’s a chance to embrace the low- and high-culture ends of cinema through films that millions of people have actually seen.

  Christopher Nolan’s awardsseason juggernaut Oppenheimer looks nailed on to dominate the evening, awards-wise, while Barbie will attract a younger audience. The other thing Gosling’s performance at the awards could engineer is the holy grail for producers: viral moments that travel way beyond the boundaries of the broadcast and provide social media “reach”.

  Producers say they are moving away from the “big, preproduced, celebrity-heavy comedy bits” involving Kimmel and guests. “We can only plant the seeds and hope things will happen naturally and spontaneously,” said Kapoor. It’s safe to say last year’s laboured exchanges between Kimmel and the donkey from The Banshees of Inisherin – in fact a stand-in donkey from LA – won’t be repeated.

  In their place will come starry hosts announcing winners. Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Dwayne Johnson, Michael Keaton, Regina King, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate McKinnon, Rita Moreno, John Mulaney, Catherine O’Hara, Octavia Spencer, Ramy Youssef, Mahershala Ali, Nicolas Cage,

  Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Fraser, Jessica Lange, Matthew McConaughey, Lupita Nyong’o, Ke Huy Quan, Sam Rockwell, Michelle Yeoh and Zendaya are all confirmed. Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino will also appear, leading to speculation of a Scarface reunion.

  The other question is whether anyone will mention the Israel-Gaza war. Hollywood has previously had no problem ignoring geopolitics on its biggest night, but the scale of protest, plus the subject matter of the films, might make that difficult tomorrow.

  There have been protests, such as the ones which disturbed the Film Independent Spirit awards, and there could be more tomorrow that could force a conversation few in Hollywood seem to want to have. “It’s too fraught,” one studio executive told the New York Times after the Independent Spirit awards protest. “People are worried about their careers.”

  The Zone of Interest’s producer, James Wilson, is one of the few nominees who has drawn attention to the conflict during awards season, while picking up an award at the Baftas. If Jonathan Glazer’s holocaust drama is successful again, will Wilson repeat his speech? And if he does, will others follow?

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  Tenth of elective operations done in private hospitals

  ­De­nis Camp­bell Health pol­icy ed­i­tor

  The Guardian 09 Mar 2024

  Private hospitals are doing one in 10 of all planned NHS operations amid patients’ frustration at long delays and political pressure to cut waiting times.

  The new figures seen by the Guardian have prompted campaigners to warn that the NHS is “allowing the private sector to make a killing” and is seeing more and more of its services “cannibalised” because years of underinvestment mean it can no longer provide care quickly.

  The NHS in England outsourced 10% of elective procedures such as hip replacements to private operators for the first time during 2023, the analysis shows. That proportion has shot up by almost 50% since before Covid, the Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN) said.

  Staffing problems and pressure to reduce the 7.6m-strong treatment backlog are increasingly forcing health trusts to send patients on their waiting lists to be treated privately.

  The surge in NHS work done by private operators has also prompted fears that more of the health service is being left weakened and access to vital care increasingly a “two-tier system” dictated by patients’ wealth.

  The unprecedented transfer is happening at the same time as the independent sector is also seeing a dramatic increase in the number of patients using either their own savings or private medical insurance to pay for treatment the NHS cannot provide fast enough.

  Private operators carried out 1.67m procedures on NHS patients in 2023 – the most ever – which the health service paid for as part of its “referral to treatment” scheme. That was 29% more than the 1.3m done in 2019, the IHPN’s latest internal briefing on activity levels shows.

  Private hospitals performed 442,925 trauma and orthopaedic operations, 440,776

  eye surgeries, mainly cataract removals, and 165,270 dermatology procedures – all far more than they did in 2019. They undertook the largest number of NHS procedures ever in a single month, November – 85,460.

  “It’s alarming to see that private hospitals now do 10% of all planned NHS operations. This is turning the clock back to before the NHS was founded in 1948,” said Dr John Puntis, the co-chair of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public and a retired paediatrician. “Moving work into the relatively small and parasitic private sector is a policy decision aimed at undermining the NHS and growing a two-tier system. The NHS is being increasingly cannibalised by the private health industry.”

  But the IHPN hit back and said its expansion was helping NHS patients get speedier care. It made clear that, with demand rising and long waits likely for the foreseeable future, it hoped private operators would diagnose and treat even more NHS patients in the next few years, and thus relieve the pressure on an NHS many doctors say is overwhelmed.

  “There is much more that the independent sector could do, which would enable timely access to treatment and tests, and give NHS patients more choice over when and where they are treated,” said David Hare, the IHPN’s chief executive. “By continuing to increase the use of independent sector capacity, alongside the NHS itself increasing the number of patients it treats, we can together make a meaningful impact on waiting lists and ensure patients get the timely care they need.”

  The IHPN’s analysis shows January 2023 was the first month in which private hospitals undertook at least one in 10 (10.1%) of all the NHS’s elective – non-urgent – activity on its behalf. It was also at least 10% in February, March, September, October and November. It fell to 9.8% last December, though that was a sharp increase on the 6.5% in December 2019.

  In some parts of England local NHS integrated care boards – regional groupings of trusts – find it so hard to get to grips with their waiting lists that they are outsourcing as many as one in five elective procedures to private firms, the Health Service Journal revealed last month. Between last September and November the figure was 20% in the Bristol, Bath and Swindon ICB, 18% in the Sussex ICB and 17% in both the West Yorkshire and Mid and South Essex ICBs

  The cost of building new hospitals and the NHS’s lack of capital funding mean some trusts are now building new facilities in collaboration with private firms to treat both NHS and private patients, said Tim Read, the director of research at the specialist private care data firm LaingBuisson.

  He pointed to the opening in January of the Harborne hospital in Birmingham, a partnership between the healthcare company HCA and the University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) trust. As part of the deal UHB has got two of the eight floors, giving it 72 extra beds, and some of its top specialist doctors provide much of the private care in HCA’s larger share of the new hospital.

  Similarly, the Royal Surrey trust plans to open a cancer centre in Guildford in conjunction with Genesis Cancer Care, which already operates 14 diagnostic and treatment centres

  David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and the Public Interest thinktank, said he was concerned by the growing outsourcing of NHS because the “systemic patient safety risks” in the private sector. About 6,000 patients a year have to be transferred from a private to an NHS hospital when complications occur, he said, citing government figures.

  NHS England defended its increasingly close relationship with private hospitals. A spokesperson said: “Services are working closely with private providers to maximise use of all available capacity for patients, increasing usage of the independent sector by more than 50% since 2021.”

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  Age and magnificence

  Economist (UK) 09 Mar 2024 Iris Apfel, a fash­ion sen­sa­tion in her ninth decade, died on March 1st, aged 102

  HER HAIR WAS grey, turning steadily to white. So what? Whether in a bob, a bouffant or a pompadour, she liked it that way. Carl, her lovely husband, also liked it that way. Dyeing it was out of the question. Her skin was wrinkled, way beyond what any serum or powder could obscure. But what the heck? Wrinkles were a badge of courage. If God had kindly given her all those years, why hide it? True, Iris Apfel was at the age where you just fell apart, and if you had two of anything, one of them was going to hurt when you woke up in the morning. But for her the cure was simple: after the necessaries, get dressed.

  Getting dressed was not a simple matter of going to a closet, or even walking into one. Between clothes and accessories, she had so many hundreds of pieces that they hung on a labyrinth of pipe racks. They came from the world over, Africa, Tibet, the Middle East, China, as well as any old flea market or discount store. Everywhere had treasures. Her racks held a glorious muddle. Who had time to organise? Certainly not her. Anyway, she preferred to be surrounded with possibilities.

  So, wandering through, she would pick what appealed that day. It was no intellectual exercise, just a gut thing. Perhaps a T-shirt under a shaman’s tunic, or couturier trousers with an explosion of fancy shoulder frills, deliberately clashing the colours because colour could raise the dead. The finishing touch, sometimes more like a ton weight, would be a necklace of huge beads or silver plates that covered her like armour, big chunky bracelets by the half-dozen, then bright red lipstick and her trademark, huge round glasses with black frames. Why shrink away as you got old? More was more, and less was a bore.

  All the same, when she became a “geriatric starlet”, it surprised her. She was 84 when the hoopla happened, in 2005, after the Metropolitan Museum in New York put some of her improvised outfits on display. She thought, when they first asked her, that they just wanted a few accessories to sit in a vitrine. Instead, the museum people were so astonished when they went through her collection, rooting through all the boxes, all the armoires and even under her bed, that they asked her to dress 85 mannequins, and the show, called Rara Avis (Rare Bird) was a sensation. Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld came, and she was the talk of the town.

  After that, deep into her 80s and 90s, she became a model and a fashion icon. Her gravelly opinions (Ripped jeans? Insanity! Strappy dresses on old women? Made them look like a horse’s arse!) were taken as gospel truth. She spoke to adoring crowds at Macy’s, many wearing her glasses as a tribute. An Iris Barbie appeared, certainly the oldest Barbie ever, in beads and a bright green trouser suit. At 91 she appeared in Comme des Garçons and huge hairpieces on the cover of Dazed and Confused magazine. At 101 she became the face of Ciaté, a cosmetics company, the “oldest living broad” to be thus employed. Shoot followed shoot in those years, and she rushed happily from one to the next. Having worked like a beaver all her life, she wasn’t about to slow down now (except when she broke her hip, tripping over the hem of an Oscar de la Renta gown). Slowing down was boring, and her love of glamour never flagged. Retire? She might as well be dead.

  No one would call her pretty, but she didn’t care for prettiness anyway. Instead, she had style. You couldn’t learn that, or buy it. But you could recognise it right away, even in tiny things, like the three-tiepin arrangement she praised once on an Englishman’s lapel. With her eye for quality as well as pizazz, from the 1950s she had built up a select reputation as an interior designer. She and Carl had started a company, Old World Weavers, to find and replicate rare fabrics from every corner of the globe. These had ended up in the apartments of Estée Lauder and Greta Garbo, as well as in the White House, from Truman onwards. By the 1970s she was using her mother’s apartment on Park Avenue, with its harpsichords and Venetian screens, and would escort guests to New York City’s fanciest clubs and restaurants. Yet when asked what her job was, she would simply say she put piles of cushions on sofas.

  What she did not reveal, with that remark, was that she made the cushions out of bits of material that hadn’t quite worked out as clothes. She also devised a coffee table once out of columns and glass from a demolished building in the Bowery. Economy and improvisation were the words she lived by. As a small child, bored on visits to her grandparents, she was allowed to sort through big pillowcases of fabric remnants, putting the scraps together as she pleased. It was great training. Like all the family (her grandfather was a master-tailor, her mother devoted to accessories, and money short during the Depression and the war) she learned early to sew, glue and paint to make something out of next to nothing. Improvisation was like jazz, she thought. You took patches and thread, or a ruby-red tunic, pyjamas and a torque, to build a marvellous ensemble out of the seemingly random.

  No surprise then, though she wore haute couture, that her lifelong love was to browse in discount stores. Loehmann’s in Brooklyn, with gorgeous clothes at rock-bottom prices, was her Holy Grail. A plastic bracelet for four dollars and some change pleased her as much as if Carl had suggested a trip to Harry Winston, the luxury jeweller. (She also replicated her own pieces for the Home Shopping Network, giving less well-off women the chance to buy them.) Flea markets and souks were a joy. Nobody foraged and haggled more fiercely, or came away with more bags of junk.

  People would keep asking what her secret was. No sodas, no fatty foods, of course. No thoughts about death. A long and happy marriage. But, most of all, keeping a child’s curiosity. The world was full of wonder. Long before she had needed glasses she had started collecting them, intrigued by the pearl or diamante frames, and started her massive trove of pieces humbly, in a shoebox in her closet. When eventually she had to wear spectacles all the time, she made them as large as possible: less to advertise herself, than to say: Keep looking! Keep being amazed.

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  And you call yourself civilised

  The Economist (UK) 09 Mar 2024

  How the World Made the West.

  By Josephine Quinn. Random House; 592 pages; $38. Bloomsbury; £30

  ASKED WHAT he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one. To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”

  Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.

  The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.

  It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490BC, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.) Or consider “The Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “intermittent or non-existent”.

  What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inwardlooking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours.

  Ancient Greece, for example, was less a place of origins than of transmission from Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Phoenician cultures, which themselves had mixed and exchanged ideas. And rather than being the wellspring of democracy, Athens was “something of a latecomer” to a form of governance that appears to have been first tried in Libya and on the islands of Samos and Chios. Persians, eternally cast as Greeks’ polar opposites, actually imposed democracy on the Greek cities they ruled, suggesting “considerable Persian faith in popular support for their own hegemony”, Ms Quinn notes.

  This retelling of the West’s story scintillates with its focus on the unexpected and on the interstices between realms and eras rather than on history’s big, solid bits. But it is also an admirable work of scholarship. Ms Quinn’s 100-plus pages of footnotes reveal that she relied not only on a wide range of primary sources, but also on scientific studies on climate change and very recent archaeological research.

  Even seasoned history buffs will find much that is new and fascinating. “How the World Made the West” joins a growing sub-canon of works that explores the broad sweep of history using new intellectual framings, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” (2011), Peter Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads” (2015) and “Fall of Civilisations”, a forthcoming book by Paul Cooper, a British journalist, based on his popular podcast. Anyone who thought history was passé could not be more wrong.

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  2024/03/09
• 
  

  Infoman

  Ap­ple is right not to rush head­long into the gen­er­a­tive-AI hy­pe­fest

  Something’s Cooking - Ai phone vs Ai cloud

  Economist (UK) 09 Mar 2024

  IF YOU THINK Tim Cook has always led a charmed life at the helm of Apple, think again. The years straight after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 were a trial by fire. First there was antitrust: America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) sued Apple for conspiring to fix e-book prices. Then there was competition: Samsung, a South Korean rival, went to war with the iPhone with bigger, sleeker models. Then came broader concerns. Apple’s new voice assistant, Siri, made rookie errors. Ditto Apple Maps, which went as far as relocating the Washington Monument to the Potomac river. At the time, the question hanging over the company was existential: could Apple’s creative spark survive the death of its founder? One of Mr Cook’s lieutenants was so miffed at the criticisms that he publicly retorted in 2013: “Can’t innovate any more, my ass!”

  A decade or so later, Mr Cook may be feeling déjà vu. On all three counts—antitrust, Asian competition, the existential question of innovation and growth—there are parallels between then and now. Competition watchdogs in the EU are demanding compliance from March 7th with rules that for the first time breach the “walled garden” which keeps users and developers bound within Apple’s playpen. On March 4th they fined the company €1.8bn ($2bn) for allegedly stifling competition in music streaming. In America the DoJ may soon launch a case against Apple. In China, Huawei, a domestic mastodon, is seizing market share. Hanging over everything is the nagging concern, amid a levelling off in iPhone sales, that Mr Cook is missing the chance to pull another rabbit out of the hat with generative artificial intelligence (gen AI).

  In short, with its market value down by 10% since mid-December, and Microsoft, thanks to gen AI, vaulting past it to become the world’s most valuable company, sceptics wonder if Apple is now so dominant it has lost its mojo. So jaded is the narrative that many pay little heed to the buzz about the Vision Pro, Apple’s snazzy—though lavishly priced—mixed-reality headset. What hopes they have are pinned on the company’s annual developer conference in June, when they want Mr Cook to announce whizzy gen-AI upgrades proving that Apple can join the chatbot hypefest. That, though, is not how the company does things. Nor should it be.

  Go back to the threat from Samsung in Mr Cook’s early days. Back then investors pestered Apple to come up with a bigger phone, just as now they want it to match Samsung’s models with gen-AI bells and whistles. But Apple doesn’t rush things. It wasn’t until the launch of the iPhone 6 in 2014 that it produced a largescreen device. When it came, it was a smash hit. Its modus operandi remains the same. It is rarely first with a product. It seeks to improve what is already out there, learning from others’ mistakes and eventually trouncing the competition. Of course, that poses a risk. In theory, a scrappy upstart may produce new technology products cheaper and faster, pulling the rug from under the market leader. Perhaps a young company building a killer gadget for the gen-AI era already has Apple in its sights.

  Yet you do not have to be a true believer to see why Apple may be right to take its time. First, there will be more to gen AI than chatbots. They appear revolutionary. But so far they are just a better (and accident-prone) way of putting in a query and getting an answer. That is not Apple’s forte. “They are features, not products,” as Horace Dediu, an expert on Apple, puts it. Nor does Apple compete with other tech giants, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, to run cloud-computing platforms with AI models on which customers can build gen-AI apps. Instead of relying on the cloud, it seems to be working on ways to embed gen AI in its own devices, bolstering its ecosystem. Since 2017 it has been using homemade chip technology called neural engines to handle machine-learning and AI functions its gadgets use behind the scenes.

  In late February it emerged that it was scrapping its ten-year project to build an Apple car and redirecting the engineers towards gen AI. No doubt it is moving up a gear—though not from an idle start. Apple will reveal nothing about its intentions. But one of the options it has is hiding in plain sight: the Vision Pro. The most recent gen-AI launches, such as OpenAI’s Sora, which converts text to video, and Groq, which speaks at humanlike speed in response to questions, suggests that eventually something other than written words could be the main gateway to gen AI. The Vision Pro is all about sounds and images.

  Known unknowns

  In the short term none of this will resolve the growth question. In fact, the regulatory onslaught in the EU via the Digital Markets Act, which will henceforth apply to big-tech “gatekeepers” including Apple, could potentially crimp its biggest growth engine, services. For the first time Apple will be forced to allow third-party app marketplaces and alternative payment systems outside its App Store on devices in Europe. It has made no secret of its disdain for the rules. It calls them a threat to safety and privacy, and has introduced complex new fees for those who dare bypass its protective walls. Some developers have slammed its compliance measures, but they are likely to work: inertia means that many will probably stick with the status quo. As for a possible DoJ antitrust case, it would be a headache. But its scope is not yet clear.

  China is a bigger problem with no clear solution. Huawei has become a formidable competitor, though in the long run it may be constrained by an America-led ban on sales to it of high-end chips. However big the geopolitical risks, Apple and China are so co-dependent that they may be stuck with one another.

  Still, don’t give up on Mr Cook yet. Apple is bound to be working on gen-AI products that do not leave egg on its face—just, as is its way, not in the open. At this stage, the vast sums needed to train AI models favour deep-pocketed incumbents over scrappy upstarts, which will work to Apple’s advantage. You can almost hear Cupertino muttering, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!”

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  2024/03/09