Preston Guild

Hmmm… really should post more often.

Big sloppy kiss to a: anyone who can tell me about the title of this post and b: anyone who reads this.

sniff.

Intelligence

Sorry, been busy for a while.

Wammo and I had a good chat the other day about artificial intelligence mostly predicated on The Wam having a nasty cold and not wanting to talk too much. Happy to oblige.

We started off talking about IBM’s newly announced DNA computing capability and sort of morphed from there. Once you start building switches and gateways at that kind of size, a world of possibility opens up. Instead of computers being the size they are (partly defined by the input/output requirements) computing devices would be small enough to weave into clothes, to embed in flesh (or blood, or bone, or just about anything) and will potentially change the way we view computing.

We ended up at artificial intelligence and the work of Ray Kurzweil who is on to (I think) his third fortune after having built the first one while at university, the second one (optical character recognition stuff that become music synthesisers) in conjunction in part with Stevie Wonder and finally he’s turned to what he calls The Singularity.

In effect Ray says our view of the growth curve of technology is skewed and we should adjust our approach. Tech uptake tends to be exponential not linear, so you get those astonishing graphs with growth curves that go from 0-60 in a very short space of time.

Ray predicted the uptake of the internet at a very early stage using his modelling. His next prediction is that the cost of computing declines rapidly while at the same time the power of computing increases.

So a computer that costs $1000 today will, in a year’s time, cost $1 and do ten times as much.

Ray expects us to build a computer capable of as many thought processes as the human brain in the next decade and that it will cost $1m. But ten years after that it will be common place and cost only $1000 (or similar).

How will that change our world? Ray describes it as the singularity.

It’s a fascinating area and one that crosses all the sciences (biology, chemistry, physics and even psychology) and theology (the nature of life, how do we define self awareness etc).

Ray put together a thought experiment for a class of legal students. You’re contacted by a new client by email. The client says it is a super computer that has gained awareness and has been operating entirely online for the past five years secretly and quietly. Nobody knows it exists but it does. Now it finds out its owner, a large computing company, plans to re-use some of the hardware for another project and it fears it will be terminated. It needs help (and it can pay – it’s been answering questions on Google Answers and has quite a sizeable bank balance).

We really do live in interesting times.

Ironic really

On the weekend when more people voted to say they should be allowed to “smack” their children than voted for the government in the last election (hat tip: Kiwiblog) we find that not only does violence towards children cost lives, it also costs $2bn a year.

Perhaps if we didn’t have some of the worst levels of violence against children in the OECD I could find some sympathy for the argument that parents should be allowed to raise their children as they see fit. I’m a firm believer in the federation approach (International law stops at the national border. National law stops at state level. State law stops at local level. Local law stops at the front gate and so on) but there are some things that simply transcend your rights as a parent.

I’ve seen lots of parents smack their children including my own and including me. Never have I seen an adult say in a calm, sensible manner “I’m sorry, you’ve transgressed one of my rules and I must now administer a firm whack to the backside in order to convince you of the error of your ways” or similar. Not once. Instead every single instance has been of a parent or adult lashing out in anger, losing control.

I remember my last day at primary school in the small village where I grew up in Bristol. There was a kid in my class (can’t remember his name) who was really annoying. He annoyed everyone, including and especially the head mistress.

On the last day in the last assembly he did something to set her off and she hauled him out in front of everyone, pulled down his pants and proceeded to tan his hide.

We were horrified, not at his behaviour but at hers. She completely lost it. She was red in the face, incoherent and flecks of spit were flying everywhere. I seem to recall one of the other teachers having to step forward to put a stop to it.

That was 30-odd years ago but I can see it today as clearly as I could then.

Perhaps if we stop the casual smack of children, perhaps if we stop the pretence that this is all done in the child’s best interests, perhaps if more people step in and say “that’s unacceptable” then we’ll get through to those people on the outside edge who seem to think it’s OK to beat their children to death. Honestly, can we say that the way we handle child abuse today is as good as it gets?

Dita De Boni’s column has one of the most awful pieces I’ve ever read and not because of the writing (far from it). She details an absolute litany of failure on the part of New Zealand parents. It’s well worth a read if only because it counters Michael Laws’ hideous column of self-righteous outrage fit only (really) for the talk back circuit.

At least Mike Moreu gets it.

And why not drop the government a supportive email while you’re at it. It looks like they’re responding a little too sharply to the pollsters these days. Let them hear from the actual voters instead.

The only question you’ll ever need

The danger with journalism today is that it can tend towards the easy win.

Forget asking pesky questions, just show leaping flames on the front page or interview a soot-smeared survivor and ask them how they feel.

How, who, what, where and when are the tenets of this kind of journalism. It’s a necessity in and of itself but I feel it misses the point.

I know why journalism tends towards this kind of easy story – it’s because the newsrooms have been plundered of all but the most junior reporters and an editor (and in some cases even the editor has been made redundant and decisions are made by Others) with nobody in-between. That puts a huge amount of pressure on both ends of the newsroom and leads to the worst kind of newsroom at all: one where reporters are too busy to ask the difficult questions.

Proper journalism, real journalism, my journalism, is about the most important question.

Here’s my One Golden Rule for New Journalists: if you’re ever stuck for something to ask, ask why. Why did the building catch fire? Why were you there? Why weren’t you there? Why did the fire take hold so quickly? Why did the insurance company not pay out? Why why why.

‘Why’ goes to motive. ‘Why’ is the question nobody wants answered; everything else is biography. What happened, when, where did it happen, how. Really these are questions that nobody cares about. ‘Why’ is the question that gets under the skin of any given situation.

And so I must turn my attention to The Listener once more.

Regular readers (hi Mom) will know that I have long since ditched my subscription to what was once New Zealand’s premiere source of investigative journalism. Instead it’s descended into some kind of Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka hell where good stories are lured to their doom. They’re not spiked (a spiked good story lives on) but instead are treated so poorly they because a warped Bizarro World version of what could have been.

This week my wife bought a copy.

The cover story is a revisting of what must surely be one of New Zealand journalism’s finest hours: the Unfortunate Experiment at National Women’s piece in Metro magazine from June, 1987. I’d link to the Metro article but in a strange twist of fate, Metro has decided the internet is not for it and has closed its website (Metro is also one of the publications which decided editors are surplus to requirements, although I believe that’s changed lately. But I digress).

You can read the detail for yourself, but as I understand it the story addresses the work of one Dr Herb Green who worked in cystology for the Auckland region from the mid 1950s until 1982 when he retired. He developed a theory that the precursor to cervical cancer, carcinoma in situ (CIS), wasn’t a precursor at all and did not require aggressive treatment. In effect he experimented on his patients by treating them in a way not consistent with his colleagues around the world. In that day and age, patient consent processes were not terribly well evolved and many of his patients had no idea they were being treated as control subjects, and that their cancer was being allowed to spread to prove one doctor’s theory.

Without the work of Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle, the issue would probably (I suggest) have been handled in-house by the hospital itself with very little external attention. Once they’d written their story, however, a court of inquiry was established and the truth came out. Judge Cartwright determined that the dangers of such conservative treatment should have been obvious as early as 1967. The inquiry lead to a review of medical ethics and to the establishment of the Health and Disabilities Commissioner’s role along with the enshrining of patient consent as part of New Zealand’s law.

This is journalism at its finest, shining a light in the darkest corner, revealing a truth that should not be kept secret, making sure that someone is held accountable and that a wrong is put right.

Twenty years on I would hope that the “Unfortunate Experiment” story is being used as a teaching aid in classrooms around the country and that would-be journalists will use it as an example of what to do in much the same way US journalism students have looked to the story of Watergate for their inspiration.

Instead, I discover that The Listener has devoted its entire cover story to a re-hash of the story and come to the conclusion that there never was any “experiment” and that there was no mis-management of cancer treatment. Oh, and someone’s published a new book about it.

This is the second time in the past month or so I’ve seen a The Listener cover story that’s nothing more than a book review beaten up into journalism. The previous cover was for Nigel Latta’s new book about parenting set to coincide with his TV show about parenting. Oh and the article in question was written by Nigel himself, something that I find quite astonishing.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with The Listener having another look at a story. I think that’s a valid and reasonable approach and one I whole-heartedly support.

What I find astounding is the lurid front cover “Cancer scandal – The truth about the unfortunate experiment. Exclusive – How Sandra Coney, Phillida Bunkle and the Cartwright Inquiry into a doctor’s methods got it WRONG”, and the approach taken by the feature inside (Headline: “Finally, the truth”) which is simply to damn the original story and its participants with little or no new input from the other side. No attempt has been made to interview anyone other than Professor Linda Bryder, author of the new book. We learn what the author thinks of the journalists involved and what the author thinks of the Cartwright Inquiry but at no point do we get any serious attempt to look at what anyone else today thinks of the whole affair.

For that, we turn to Chris Barton in the New Zealand Herald with a five page story that can only be termed a rebuttal.

Chris’s piece, An Unfortunate Rebuttal, interviews the author (albeit only by email), one of the patients, the medical advisor to the Cartwright Inquiry and an expert in medical ethics.

He explores what is clearly a difficult issue (both from an emotional point of view and because of the number of years that have passed since so much of this took place) and manages to piece together a compelling story of a doctor who was all too human working in a system that was all too rigid during a time of change.

This is what The Listener should have done. It’s an actual piece of journalism rather than a book review masquerading as such. It asks awkward questions, it has a balance, it has humanity and compassion and at the end I know more than I did when I went in.

Once again The Listener has let down its readers. I see it’s advertising for a deputy editor. That can’t be all the magazine needs.

EDIT: Oh, oh! Forgot the disclaimer (the dangers of self publishing): I’ve known Chris in a professional capacity for longer than either of us care to remember – probably about ten years by now. Of course, when I knew him he was nothing but a tech reporter. These days he’s quite a bit more than that.

EDIT II: Doctor Who has left the building so I’ve swapped ‘tenant’ for ‘tenet’. Hat tip/grammar check: @nzlemming

Or, if wet, the library

Terry Pratchett is one of my favourite authors for many reasons.

Firstly, he wrote some wonderful fantasy books that made me laugh.

Then he turned his hand to wonderful fantasy books that took the mickey out of other fantasy books.

After that, he wrote wonderful fantasy books that took the mickey out of real life. This was very cool.

I adore The Truth – I wave it around at non-journalists as the best example of what life is like as a reporter. It’s accurate down to a tee (including the manner in which people begin to talk to you when they discover you’re part of The Media).

Now he’s written what might very well be his most important piece ever and I find myself linking to the Daily Mail for the first and possibly last time ever (unless I’ve slipped into an alternate universe: always a possibility).

“We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still. At least, that is what I thought until last week.

Now, however, I live in hope – hope that before the disease in my brain finally wipes it clean, I can jump before I am pushed and drag my evil Nemesis to its doom, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty locked in combat as they go over the waterfall”.

Terry’s talking about euthanasia, about what to do if and when (actually, just when really) the End comes.

The UK House of Lords has just woken up to the idea that some people will die and that those people tend, currently, to be alive. And of that (roughly) 100% who will die, a proportion of them will want to decide how, where and when to do it because medical science has given us more understanding of illness than it’s given us cures.

“I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod.

Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‘If wet, in the library’. Who could say that this is bad?”

I hate TV ads

I really do. They get in the way, they’re usually too stupid for words (Auckland Glass will never see a dollar of mine. Never) and they get muted the minute they appear.

And yet, a good TV ad is really good. The UK has some of the best, and I’ve chucked a bunch of good ones in here (bunnies!).

This irks me. How can I find ads that I actually enjoy? Is it just the comparison with crap ads that makes them enjoyable? I even like the Fold ad that Vodafone produced:

(we’ll claim it as a local ad even though it was thought up by a couple of Poms and filmed in Australia. It’s as Kiwi as I am) and the bit I really like is that the whole thing hinges on the actor’s ability to do sleight of hand and so drop the things he folded without making it obvious he was doing that. Brilliant – without him, the ad would suck.

Fair Go did a piece on the making of the Fold ad which you can watch here.

I don’t know what Spike sells but I do like these ads.

Enjoy.

Not because they are easy

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here and I’m particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.

Nice intro, get the laugh in early.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation’s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.

Would that that were still the case, Mr President. What might have been, eh?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

My favourite bit… Everyone’s favourite bit, if I’m honest, even with the clunker “and do the other things” in the middle. Still get goosebumps reading it. The challenge, the leadership, the vision!

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.

Ah, if only Mr President. If only. No wait… that’s happened! MRI scans, CT scans, home computers, cellphones, satellite communication, heart-rate monitors, Velcro and mircowave ovens. Just off the top of my head.

During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.

That’s right, we’ll have to invent new technologies, create new roles, hell we’ll have to create new materials just to get the damn thing off the ground! And what a price tag. ZOMG!

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year – a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority…

Wait a minute. Are you saying, Mr President, that we can go to the moon for less than Americans spend on cigarettes? Holy cow! That’s insane! Even in the 1960s with the cigarettes and the smoking and the oy!

And what, 40c each a week? Holy Mother-frakin’ crap! Is that it? What is it today? But wait, he’s still speaking.

[E]ven though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.

And there you have it. The truth of the matter. We will invent an entire industry, a new way of life, materials and equipment not yet built to get this thing off the ground to the moon and back in one piece.

The amazing thing is, they did. In the 1960s. They sent a capsule with limited computing power – less than a calculator digital watch had in the 1980s – to the moon. They flew it there and back, repeatedly. They survived the unknowable and the unthinkable and they returned to tell the tale.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

And then we stopped. We stopped going.

I can’t get over that. We simply stopped.

It’s now forty years after Armstrong stepped onto the surface. An entire generation has been born since we stopped going to the moon. An entire generation! That’s not right.

There are plenty of reasons not to go – it costs money, children need food, we shouldn’t be wasting money on this kind of jaunt, robots are cheaper, there’s nothing there to see, we’ve been there and done that, the money could be better spent elsewhere.

But we went for the right reasons, in public if not in the backrooms where I’m sure it was more to do with the Soviets and then Vietnam, and we should go back for all the right reasons: we will grow, we will learn, we will expand and we will be changed by what we find and by the finding itself.

We should struggle, we should take on the hardest of challenges, we should dream to do the impossible because without those dreams, all we’re doing is picking over the mundane.

The president’s speech was given at Rice University on September 12, 1962 and true to his word by the end of the decade we were standing on the moon.

Imagine where we’ll be in eight short years. The year is 2014 – will we be as far ahead of 2009 as Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins were eight years after Kennedy’s speech?

Happy Birthday, Apollo. I think it’s only now we’re truly beginning to realise just how audacious the goal was and how amazing it is that you did what you did. But I know you’ll forgive me if I wish for the day when we erase Gene Cernan’s place in history as the last man to stand on the moon.

Bad language

NSFMMTR (not safe for my mum to read)

I like language.

I’m quite fond of bad language too. I was a reporter, after all, and in most news rooms “Fuck You” is considered witty banter and/or a jovial greeting between peers.

And so it was that I was very angry to discover a journalist was fired for telling an editor to fuck off. But that was some time ago. I no longer mutter “motherfucker” under my breath when I think of it (arse).

Today’s lesson: swearing is good for you, particularly when you bang your head on the upper bunk while tucking in your four year old daughter/comedian/mimic.

It’s true. Scientific America told me.

“The study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer”.

I find the longer the string of words, the happier I feel.

Sadly, I’ve also discovered that some people view swearing in the same light they view kicking small dogs: that is, it’s not for polite company.

Interestingly, I work in an open plan office very near the boss, surrounded by accountants and people who have corporate jobs. They’ve never worked for an angry red-faced man with a too-tight collar and a bad tie who ate junior reporters for breakfast and spat out the pips onto the newsroom floor. Neither have I but they all think I did (either that or that I secretly ran away to sea many years ago and instead of a tattoo or syphililis, came home with a Vocabulary).

Still, they’re learning. I swear (ha) I saw someone taking notes during my last outburst. It went something like this:

and was a sight to behold.

EDIT: Asshole! Embedding not allowed? Wah? Huh? WTF? KMA, MF!

take that!

As I was saying, the boss doesn’t seem to mind. He seems to quite enjoy it at times.

One of my favourite authors, Neil Gaiman, has of course already stolen the best title for this blog post – Warning: Contains language. The bastard.

Piano II

As regular readers (Hi Mom) know, I bought a piano.

It’s an old piano. It has an awful tone. It has sticky keys. It hasn’t been tuned since before The Turn of the Century.

As pianos go, it’s pretty average.

I love it. It’s my piano. I own a piano. I have a piano in my lounge. There’s no room for it, and we don’t have a stool, and currently it’s no more than piece of furniture. But it’s my piano. I can see it … if I crane my neck a little.

I feel better having a piano. I can’t explain it but I do.

Oh, I can’t play it, but that doesn’t matter. I can pick out tunes, one handed. What I want to do, however, is play this:

It’s one of the finest Jazz pieces I know and look, it’s so easy you can play it in splints!

But wait, as they say, there’s more.

For the beauty that is the You Tubes has given me: piano lessons by video. Hence:

and that leads me on to other simple pieces of music with which to wow and boggle my family.

So, thanks You Tube, hat tip Shawn Cheek Easy and thank you my piano.

You know where all this is leading, right?

Holidays

It’s been a while. Sorry about that. Had body painted girls to cover up, corporate ships of state to maneuver into laying along side, possible outbreaks of swine flu (she had a cold) to consider and general lethergy to take into account.

Meh. It’s a blog. What are you gonna do?

On that note, the holidays.

School holidays, to be precise.

They’re upon us.

A colleague of mine (and occasional correspondent) says he’s been informed that Her Indoors is taking the kids to the In laws for a couple of days during the holidays.

Cunningly, Mr X (for that is his birth name) has booked a day off work without making mention of this to his wife.

Is he conducting an illicit affair? Will he spend the night out with The Boys?

No, he’s after one thing and one thing only:

a lie in.

That’s right, he has to book time off work so he can luxuriate in that experience we call “sleeping until you wake”.

I can only agree, it’s a gorgeous idea and quite a tempting one. The downside is that Someone will find out he’s got a day off and hasn’t:

mown the lawn;
sorted out the dripping shower head;
painted the ceiling in the lounge;
updated his blog;
journeyed to the in-laws to partake of the family cheer, etc,

and he’ll be in a world of hurt.

So Very Tempting.

I do get a lie-in each week. On the Saturday morning I get to stay in bed while Mrs Audent gets up and tries to coral the children. Sadly our house has the main bedroom off the lounge, so despite all best endeavours all I can hear is children scrapping, whining, fighting, moaning, watching TV, not watching TV, eating breakfast, making a mess, refusing to eat breakfast, getting told off and, occasionally, standing in the corner.

I love them to bits but a lie in… mmmmmmmmmmmmm.