This Technology Review piece about the inventor of backpropagation in neural networks crystallises some important issues about the current AI boom. Advances (or supposed advances) in AI are often held to put our view of ourselves in question. Its failures are held, by anyone who pays attention to them, to put our view of intelligence…
Read More It was called a perceptron for a reason, damn itThe NHS is in the news, so it’s probably time to promote the hell out of this awesome blog I found! Point the first: There is no relationship between “rising demand” for A&E treatment and waiting times. Also, a large majority of people waiting in A&E need to be admitted, so there is no point…
Read More You should be reading Matt Black’s fantastic NHS blogIt turns out that 10% of the world’s surviving pagers are in the NHS and apparently we could save some money (not very much money, but maybe more meaningful in the context of an NHS trust telecoms budget) by replacing them with an app. I’m really not so sure about that. As Geoff Hall, of…
Read More PagersThat Tory after-action report (one, two, three) is quite the thing. Something that sticks out for me is that the 2017 election might have been the moment when the shrinking Tory membership finally caught up with them. This is something that has been promised for getting on for decades, but if it can’t go on…
Read More 2017: The ultimate development of the modern British campaignI don’t know about you, but this seems worrying. Wednesday’s Derby Telegraph: When Toyota announced plans to invest £240 million in its Burnaston plant, the car giant called for continued tariff- and barrier-free access between the UK and Europe. Mr Leroy expressed his concerns about the Government’s approach to Brexit in an interview with Reuters…
Read More Very real very real concerns: Derby, Ellesmere Port, and LutonThe case of Google bullying the New America Foundation into sacking the Internet regulation team has gone a million miles around Twitter and the world by now, but I thought I’d share something from the vault, the TYReserve if you will. This POLITICO piece, with its attendant technical appendix, was always meant to be followed…
Read More TYRchive! on Google’s European lobbying blitzHere’s a fascinating, long Mediapart piece on Syria. Among much else, you’ll learn that the Russian exit strategy was meant to be a general ceasefire but ended up being scaled down to local arrangements. Also, a major obstacle to it was that Assad wouldn’t accept any restriction of violence – even proposed by the Russians.…
Read More Five links on SyriaWill Davies writes about immigration, politics, and what he calls the “collapse of statistical reason”: The macro-economic case for immigration – that it is a net positive for both public finances and economic growth – was integral to New Labour’s tacit, occasionally explicit, support for high levels of immigration. This was a broadly neoliberal type…
Read More If statistical reason collapsed, it was a while backAlex Massie has long served as “that guy on the Spectator it’s OK to like”, but this post of his serves as an excellent demonstration of a point made here. When this magazine endorsed Brexit, it did so in typically trenchant and elegant fashion. ‘Out and into the world’ we said. The central thesis of…
Read More a hurricane, after all, is a lot of hot air moving in the same directionIt’s fairly well known that a lot of the productivity gap between the UK and other industrial countries is accounted for by a long tail of unusually unproductive small businesses (see ONS data here). This fascinating piece in the FT covers a project to do something about that by getting them management advice. An interesting…
Read More Where do UK SMEs get technology advice?