Weeknotes: things we don't know, hackathons, tech solidarity, law, food, objects
An eye-opening Twitter thread about a range of things the UK has done in response to the pandemic, which (most?) people don't seem to have commented on. The surprising level of openness of the 'lockdown' compared to similarly-named things elsewhere, or the total lack of official advice on how to care for someone with Covid-19 at home, for instance. (I'm less sure on whether the Nightingale hospitals were wasteful - not using reserve capacity is not necessarily a bad thing, but if they really don't have the equipment necessary for treatment, that seems very poor.)
Via Imran Khan, Fiona Fox writing for the Science Media Centre about whether pandemics need a different kind of journalism. I like the hashtag here - #humilityneeded
Via Jenny Molloy, Dale Dougherty on hackathons - a clear case which some of us have tried to articulate for some time, but without the force or examples:
But Dale's overall points are spot on.
Vox describes some of the possible long term effects of Covid-19,
in case you didn't realise that nasty pneumonia-like viruses aren't
just for a couple of weeks in many cases, or that there's lots we don't
know about this one.
Via Imran Khan, Fiona Fox writing for the Science Media Centre about whether pandemics need a different kind of journalism. I like the hashtag here - #humilityneeded
My main insight from this vantage point is that, despite four months of intensive research by many of the world’s cleverest scientists, there are still fundamental things we don’t understand about the new coronavirus. I know lists are terrible in articles, but as this is my own blog, please indulge me. Here’s my incomplete list of what we don’t yet know about this virus:...There are some straightforward political questions that demand answers, and I have no desire to let the government off the hook here. The failure to put established pandemic preparedness plans in place early enough and the slow response to the WHO’s ‘test, test, test’ mantra are just two examples of questions rightly put to politicians. But many of the big decisions still rest on our progress in understanding the virus and frankly none of us yet fully understand it.
- How it behaves in the human body
- How it affects our immune defences
- Why it has such a different impact on different age groups
- Why it has such a disproportionate impact on BAME groups
- Why some people are asymptomatic but others end up in critical care or worse
- Whether children get enough of the virus to infect adults
- Whether face masks play a role in reducing infection
- If the two metre social distancing rule is sufficiently evidence based
- Exactly how the virus is passed from one person to another – whether the virus is airborne or only transmitted by coughs and sneezes
- Whether those infected will develop immunity and, if so, how long it will last
....One good thing that could come out of this nightmare would be a better understanding of the way science works, including the fact that scientists regularly disagree and evidence grows by knocking down theories and improving on previous findings. But that will not happen if journalists used to looking for splits in Cabinet start looking to disagreements amongst scientists for a new ‘angle’. This approach doesn’t work on many levels. Right now, we all really need the best scientists to be testing each other’s evidence more robustly and rigorously than ever, not worrying that every comment they make will be snatched for the next news bulletin as further proof that something has gone wrong.
Many people have shared Kim Stanley Robinson's article in the New Yorker about imagination and coronavirus. I particularly liked the stuff on time horizons:
On a personal level, most of us have accepted that we live in a scientific age. If you feel sick, you go to a doctor, who is really a scientist; that scientist tests you, then sometimes tells you to take a poison so that you can heal—and you take the poison. It’s on a societal level that we’ve been lagging. Today, in theory, everyone knows everything. We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling.
... When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.
....So this epidemic brings with it a sense of panic: we’re all going to die, yes, always true, but now perhaps this month! ... But to have that feeling in your ordinary, daily life, at home, stretched out over weeks—that’s too strange to hold on to. You partly get used to it, but not entirely. This mixture of dread and apprehension and normality is the sensation of plague on the loose. It could be part of our new structure of feeling, too.
....People who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.
And yet: “Flatten the curve.” We’re now confronting a miniature version of the tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people. It’s harder to come to grips with the fact that we’re living in a long-term crisis that will not end in our lifetimes. But it’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon.
Via Jenny Molloy, Dale Dougherty on hackathons - a clear case which some of us have tried to articulate for some time, but without the force or examples:
I’m seeing one announcement after another for design challenges or hackathons for COVID-19, many of them aimed at makers and all online. I’m also seeing the innovation coming from the maker community in response to this crisis. It got me wondering what these challenges hope to accomplish and if they were part of Plan C, the civic response. Frankly, the more I looked, I find many of them to be full of empty promises and poorly thought-out problem statements. Are they even useful or helpful?Dale goes on to note hackathons which were announced to design solutions (where numerous designs were already shared online), to open source tech for those in need (where this was already happening), and so on. I am slightly more forgiving of the EU example --
Look at the “EU vs the Virus Challenge,” which asks “can you hack it?”because actually convening these very different groups might be useful. Bringing together diverse communities ad hoc is not easy - there are few bridging people, and (as I've noted before) often not enough community management happening in the response groups derived from hacker and maker communities.
The European Commission, led by the European Innovation Council and in close collaboration with the EU member states, will host a pan-European hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners and investors across Europe in order to develop innovative solutions for coronavirus-related challenges https://euvsvirus.org/
But Dale's overall points are spot on.
I just can’t see the connection between these groups and hacking of any kind. It looks more like “business as usual,” like a startup competition, because the “business case” for the project is one of four criteria for judging. The biggest challenge we have is that there is not a business case for solving some of the toughest problems. We can’t keep believing that the business case will emerge.The tear-down of the UNDP challenge in particular is depressing.
Go look at what is happening in the maker community and it will overwhelm you — the number of projects, the levels of production, the networks and organizations being built in a few days time, with great urgency. What is underwhelming is the lack of funding and the lack of supplies for these grassroots efforts. It’s not a lack of ideas, action or innovation. .... The real challenge is having enough materials and supplies and then having the cash to buy them in large enough quantities to solve a growing problem. What’s really needed are ways to flash-fund good projects, not organizations and contests.
Which brings me to OpenCollective - arguably (part of) the solution here, just one that isn't well enough known. This week's Open.Coop webinar was about OpenCollective, and the support for UK projects from the Social Change Agency which can act as a fiscal sponsor for projects without a bank account. Oli Sylvester-Bradley also pointed out that you can use an OpenCollective project page in lieu of a proper website whilst you are getting started - there's a template for About Us and a way to post updates too. There's no fees for using the Social Change Agency if you are running a coronavirus response. Someone also suggested using an OpenCollective as a way to organise, say, a specialist freelancer group - clients could bring their commission to the collective, who work out which member will take the contract; all members could be vetted and could draw on the resources of the wider supportive community.
Dale concludes:
If you want to help grassroots efforts, build paths for them to follow and connect your ecosystem to open ecosystems where your organization is not at the center. Create interfaces for exchanging information. Just make it easier for self-organizing groups to help you.
The grassroots organising for UK PPE distribution continues, but perhaps at a slower pace (or perhaps I am seeing less, because I'm less active here). We've started to talk about doing a retrospective to capture what was learned in the early, rushed phase, before it's all forgotten. Things I've noted in the last couple of weeks, which may not be universally obvious: clinicians want different features in their PPE; one size does not fit all; government coordination hasn't had great communications. I seem to be looking more at digital tools (dare I say contact tracing) this week, although not with the focus, scope or skill of the many useful commentators on that area (Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale in particular).
Via Mike Kenny, Andy Westwood on Britain's industrial capacity
Lots of people shared Tim Bray's post about leaving Amazon. Fewer people (in my circles) shared the riposte from Brad Porter. Mark Hurst compares them -
CoFarm trustee colleague Sue Pritchard has exciting news - the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (formerly of the RSA) is on its way to becoming an independent charitable organisation. They are also working on a new project - the Road to Renewal - asking how are the food and farming sectors adapting and what effect is the pandemic having on rural communities? What will change and what will remain the same post-crisis? And what can we do now to shape policy responses in the future? I'm excited to see what they learn, and what they do next. At CoFarm we've got some grant proposals in and have been doing exciting admin related to bank accounts, and planning what can be done on the land when we can actually do things there.
Explore radio from around the world http://radio.garden. HT Tim Hayward.
I'm looking forward to festivals too - most imminently, How the Light gets in [tickets] in a couple of weeks, with music and philosophy. I'm interested as ever to see how they handling mingling. This week's online mingling tool discovery - not yet tested in anger - is https://theonline.town/
In ‘Cities and the Wealth of Nations‘, the US urbanist Jane Jacobs describes how the most successful cities and nations should constantly grow their own capabilities, products and services in order to become less reliant on goods and services from elsewhere. ... But writing in the 1980s, this was an unfashionable idea during accelerating globalisation, international trade and (at least in the US and UK) policymakers’ preference for open, networked economies.
These ideas have also looked out of step in the consensus promoting global supply chains, ‘just in time’ procurement and ‘lean’ management practices as part of the ‘new public management’ of public services. According to Chris Cook writing on Tortoise (‘The NHS at Capacity’, 30th March), the Coronavirus pandemic has exposed some significant weaknesses in the British policy model, notably the prizing of efficiency over resilience...
We might conclude that ‘little platoons’ or ‘small boats’ aren’t always enough or that they aren’t always in time. And neither are the supply chains or markets especially when many countries are trying to expand supplies and capacity at the same time. So what might ‘national self sufficiency’ or a post Covid-19 industrial policy look like?I was pleased to see the third sector getting a mention too:
...But any objective for ‘national self sufficiency’ should quickly stretch to other parts of the public and private sector too. Given the importance of manufacturing, it would make sense for more support going to firms or for inward investment in this sector. An industrial strategy might also be rather less blasé when manufacturing firms are struggling or when they are successful and the subject of takeover bids from abroad.
...Returning to Jane Jacobs, there are strong arguments to think about more local levels too. Increased capacity needs to be distributed around the country and more effectively to the various health and care systems that make up the NHS. This thinking extends to other areas of industrial strategy. ...In China 83% of confirmed cases were in the Hubei Province.
....Procurement, such as for PPE, is typically organised through ‘best value’ via global contracts based on delivery at massive scale. Smaller national or local suppliers that don’t make it into these supply chains have to look elsewhere for business. It is the same with many different supply chains whether in manufacturing or retail and food production. Firms either innovate and move up the value chain or they disappear. If it is the latter then local jobs and income are lost. In turn this reduces capacity and resilience at national and local levels.
The trick will be to ensure that increasing capacity and cost does not come with lower quality or standards. ... So ‘reshoring’ and relocalising supply chains must still prioritise high standards of product design, adaptability and innovation amongst other things. Firms will still require ‘absorptive capacity’ — defined as the ‘ability to recognize the value of new information and technologies, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends’. In turn this will require high levels of skills, good networks, more R&D and a policy and business environment that supports them.
All of this thinking should extend to the third sector too. It might not have been quite so dependent on global supply chains or just in time procurement, but its role should not be underestimated or undervalued when rethinking industrial strategy and industrial capacity. Jane Jacobs is also remembered for her thinking about social capital, the importance of trust and of different types of people coming together in public spaces with common interests and shared values.
...So a refreshed industrial strategy should bring a focus of increasing industrial and strategic capacity across the UK economy. This starts with ‘national self sufficiency’ in health and manufacturing but then rapidly broadens out to other sectors. ... All come with a higher price than debates about efficiency and value for money have allowed in the past. It is a matter of fact that it is more expensive to pay for equipment, facilities and people that you may not need. But it is also a fact that we should pay more for the sectors and occupations that have proved their value during the crisis.
But there is value in doing so and on an industrial strategy focused on rebuilding manufacturing and other sectors can deliver more political, social and economic benefits at the same time.
Adam Minter offers some worrying insights into secondary effects on supply chains:
When stay-at-home orders shuttered offices across the U.S. last month, one industry was especially hard hit: toilet-paper makers. Just as consumer demand for their product surged during the lockdown, they lost access to the cheap recycled office paper that’s typically used to make toilet rolls. That induced some of the world's biggest makers to switch to pulp sourced directly from trees, adding significant costs and harming the environment.
It was one small example of the widespread disruption that the virus is causing for the recycling business, and thus for the entire economy. ... for many critical industries — including food, packaging and e-commerce — recycled goods are irreplaceable parts of the supply chain.
...Nowadays, recycled material is integral to almost every aspect of the consumer economy. Even leaving the environmental benefits aside, companies prefer such inputs because they save money and energy. About 40% of the world's raw-material needs are now met via recycling. More than half of all U.S. steel is made from scrap, while the average aluminum beverage can contains 73% recycled material. Manufacturers, paper mills, even glass makers increasingly depend on such content to make cheap and reliable goods.
...The cans, bottles and packaging that land in a home recycling bin tend to be dirtier than what's sorted at commercial sites like offices, retailers and restaurants. They’re also more expensive to collect (think trucks stopping at hundreds of households rather than a few businesses), and to sort into commodity-grade packages. That’s why, pre-coronavirus, commercial generation of recyclables accounted for well more than half of the total U.S. market.
...In normal times, California recycles about 20 million cans a day. Now, that figure is down by 80%, making it harder for can manufacturers to make new products from their usual mix of raw materials, even as demand for canned goods has soared during the pandemic.
....There are no easy solutions in a crisis like this. Recycled paper pulp is made via a different process than virgin paper pulp. Even switching between different kinds of recyclables is difficult.
And that's the end of the stuff about what Tony Hirst usefully calls the Thing.
Some ideas from Geoff Mulgan to break out of the usual meeting habit (as much for face to face as remote meetings). People worry far too much about the technology, when actually it's the social side of meeting design that matters most.
A lovely post, via Matt Juke's public service jobs list, about clearly setting out what is OK (say, in a work context).
Nathan Matias asks whether any researchers other than Donald Knuth offer rewards for people who find errors in their peer reviewed papers. This is a great question - and the thread describes some reasons why some researchers might not take this path. But it would be interesting to explore some more.
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| https://twitter.com/natematias/status/125775244705919795 |
Lots of people shared Tim Bray's post about leaving Amazon. Fewer people (in my circles) shared the riposte from Brad Porter. Mark Hurst compares them -
Porter wrote in a LinkedIn post: "Amazon has responded more nimbly to this crisis than any other company in the world." Which had me wondering: did Porter read Bray's note? This isn't about comparing Amazon's agile process to, say, Walmart's. It's about the unfair treatment of workers.Tone policing is in, this week, thanks Matt Hancock. So there's also:
To wrap things up with a final word of indignation, Porter writes that Bray's resignation note was... not just "offensive." And not just "deeply offensive." Instead, Bray's note was - deeply offensive to the core. Porter is really showing some spark here. Just one problem, though: once you take the language to eleven, it's hard to take it any further.
Because there's more outrage coming for Porter.
I'm interested to see what happens when Porter finds out that nine U.S. senators have asked Amazon for more details about its firing of whistleblowers...
In all seriousness, I want to grant that Brad Porter probably believes in the truth of what he's writing. He sees that he has good intentions, he's worked incredibly hard on improving warehouse operations (largely on the robots that will replace the workers, but still), and his success measurements of efficiency and scalability are tracking nicely. So for a fellow engineering VP to resign - that causes pain (hint: cognitive dissonance) and thus causes feelings of being hurt and offended (hint: defense mechanism).
I really mean no offense to Porter. If anything, I'm inclined to see his perspective, given our similar backgrounds: same alma mater, same major, same tenure in the tech industry, and a number of mutual acquantainces.
But the stakes right now are too high for me not to say something in defense of Tim Bray and the fired whistleblowers. Amazon is too powerful right now, and it's threatening workers, independent entrepreneurs, and the competitive marketplace - as well as the very idea of free democratic society.
Via Dave Birch - maybe we need a 'lawlash' more than a 'techlash'? Elizabeth Renieris writes in Wired:
If we look closer, we might find that it’s not the “tech” we’re angry about. We like a lot of these tools and appreciate the value they add to our lives, maybe even more so now. Just as employee activists at Google weren’t railing against G Suite but were objecting to unfair practices such as forced arbitration clauses in their employment contracts, the recent backlash against Amazon and Instacart is about retaliation for workplace organizing and the unfair classification of employees, respectively. Likewise, Zoom’s users aren’t criticizing the platform’s functionality, which has managed to scale despite the overwhelming pressure on its capacity; they are decrying its unfair and deceptive practices, such as misleading claims about encryption, that are not reflected in the company’s commercial terms and consumer-facing privacy notices.
In other words, the underlying issues at play are not about the tech, as the techlash framing would suggest. Legal scholars like Neil Richards and Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, and others have long advocated for abandoning the legal fiction of user “consent” or control as the one-size-fits-none basis for all of our digital interactions. Tech worker activists like Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker have tirelessly rallied against unfair contractual terms and labor practices inside the giants. And civil society continues to push back as companies like Clearview AI try to transfer elemental rights like free speech from people to corporations. But it’s not enough.
...
This means it’s time we confront the underlying problem―the absence of effective legal frameworks to rein in the practices that we find so objectionable. This is not just about new or more regulation. We need more public interest lawyers and better consumer education and literacy about our rights. But we also need to hold all lawyers, including and especially corporate lawyers, to their civic obligations and remind them that they are “public citizen(s) having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” Maybe it’s not that the “techlash” is dead; maybe it’s time for a #lawlash instead.
Hmm:
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| https://twitter.com/F_Kaltheuner/status/1258423913098301440 |
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| https://twitter.com/rachelcoldicutt/status/1258429579980668929 |
Moving swiftly on to some vivid descriptions of the energy behind hyperscale data centres behind big tech brands, in In Abeyance.
Renewable energy magazine features the first wooden wind power tower (in Sweden).
CoFarm trustee colleague Sue Pritchard has exciting news - the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (formerly of the RSA) is on its way to becoming an independent charitable organisation. They are also working on a new project - the Road to Renewal - asking how are the food and farming sectors adapting and what effect is the pandemic having on rural communities? What will change and what will remain the same post-crisis? And what can we do now to shape policy responses in the future? I'm excited to see what they learn, and what they do next. At CoFarm we've got some grant proposals in and have been doing exciting admin related to bank accounts, and planning what can be done on the land when we can actually do things there.
I turned down the offer of some free ducks this week. I also roleplayed as a maitre'd, bitter about no longer being an agronomist. As ever in these interesting times, life revolves more than usually around food.
Try some different online theatre! The Stage recommends some European shows. HT Harriet Truscott.
Explore radio from around the world http://radio.garden. HT Tim Hayward.
I'm looking forward to festivals too - most imminently, How the Light gets in [tickets] in a couple of weeks, with music and philosophy. I'm interested as ever to see how they handling mingling. This week's online mingling tool discovery - not yet tested in anger - is https://theonline.town/
The Observational Practices Lab is collecting photos for an Atlas of Everyday Objects for the age of global isolation. You can submit your own. I'm going to collect some objects later. HT Hillary Predko.