Am I about to be shot down in flames again?

Several years ago I posted Dartington Hall School and thinking outside the Educational Box and earlier this week I post the following to the privaate school Facebook page abot the hazzards of thinking outside the box.

One thing Dartington taught me was that the establishment view was not always right.

But has it been a good idea to ask awkward questions? Or would I have had an easier life If I had forgotten what I learnt at Dartington and sheepishly gone along with the crowd? Now in my 80s I am about to stick my head over the parapet yet again …..

A Possible Evolutionary Neural Net Model of Turing's Child Brain

From now on posts relating to my research on CODIL , and the evolution of intelligence, will be on the blog An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence but the more inportant ones will be cross-referenced here.

I have just posted a report (and detailed draft paper) on my Evolutionary Blog, linking CODIL to Neural Nets, entitled:

A Possible Evolutionary Neural Net Model of Turing's Child Brain

The Times today reports

Ten hottest years have occurred since 2002

and quoting the Met Office says:
The top ten hottest years are (in order from the hottest): 2014; 2006; 2011; 2007; 2017; 2003; 2018; 2004; 2002 and 2005. The coldest years in the record are: 1892 (the coldest); 1888; 1885; 1963; 1919; 1886; 1917; 1909; 1887 and 1962.

Depressingly many climate deniers posted comments which demonstrated their inability to understand what is actually going on and I decided to post my view:

Remember the London Smogs? I do. They were the local result of burning coal and something was done when people started dying.  A hundred years earlier the Victorians laid pipes bring fresh water and built sewers because people were dying because of the way human excrement was just dumped into the environment. We humans are very good at creating pollution and the problem with too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that:

(1) the effects are very slow to appear - and for the same reason will take a long time to disappear if we stop creating excess gas

(2) you can’t see carbon dioxide so it is easy to dismiss it

(3) When people start to die due to lack of food, lack of water, or high daily temperatures the areas first affected will not be the UK - so it is easy for people reading The Times to bury their head in the sand.

About 30 years ago I worked on climate change in Australia where, because large areas are already very hot and dry, the effects of global warming are more serious. There is no doubt that scientific research is genuinely highlighting the dangers and I am sad when I read the ill-informed comments of those who try to deny what is increasingly obvious to those who study what is happening in detail.

Philosophy & Technology --- and Computers

I am currently doing a Futurelearn course  "Philosophy of Technology and Design: Shaping the Relations between Humans and Technology."

It is run by the University of Twente and promises 

"The course focuses on the relations between humans and technologies. You will learn how philosophy can help us understand the social implications of technologies."\

Clearly many of the problems I have had with CODIL arise because the philosophy of the approach I have taken - which is that humans live in a complex and uncertain world - is very different from the regimentally predefined computer systems in common use. 

I find such courses are a good way to stimulate new ideas and will post anything of note either as a comment to this post or as a separate blog post. Maybe I will even meet some of you on the course!

CODIL & the Leo Computer Society Archives at Cambridge

A couple of weeks ago the LEO Computer Society had a reunion in London where the members celebrated the 70th anniversary of the start of work on the LEO I computer.  The LEO I construction followed the design of Cambridge University's EDSAC computer and it is recognized to be the first computer ever built for purely commercial use. The pioneering engineer who led the project was John Pinkerton, and what has been described as the first corporate systems analyst was David Caminer.

My experience of bullying at Universities

Following a report on BBC News, The Guardian has just published an article "UK universities must break their silence around harassment and bullying". It appears that UK Universities have spend at least £87 million on gagging orders in the last 2 years. Many academics said they were "harassed" out of their jobs and forced to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) by their university after making complaints about inappropriate sexual behaviour or bullying by more senior staff.

I'm springing into Action for Easter

Those of you who have read the dedication on my "Genealogy in Hertfordshire" Website (In memory of my daughters, Belinda and Lucy) will not be surprised that I need to control my stress levels and sometimes I have to lie back and let the world roll by.

Usually this is only for a day or two but last year my stress levels rocketed, in part at least because I found the chaos surrounding Brexit very unsettling. As a result the recent period of relaxation has lasted many months - during which time I have posted very little online - neglecting this blog..

In fact when I am in maximum relaxation mode I still need to keep my mind active by doing some kind of research.  On this occasion I decided to track down an artist who had produced comic cards for the Crown Publishing Company of St Albans in about 1908. Rather than just sitting and watching the TV much of my time has been spent trawling through thousands of comic postcards on ebay. The research has been most entertaining and proved very complex (and so a stimulating mental challenge). It took much longer than expected but I have now established that the card fragment on the left was drawn by a well know comic card artist called Fred Spurgin [ See details of the research]

As I am now more relaxed I have decided to restart posting on this blog, and will use it for general comments - and also for my further work on CODIL and the Evolution of Human Intelligence - as trying to split the CODIL related posts off was one of the causes of stress.

[I will post this on my other blogs - in each case saying how "springing into action" will affect future activity.]

How far are ordinary people's imagination trapped by their experience

The British Psychological Society Research Bulletin this week has an article entitled New evidence that the "Chaotic Mind" of ADHD brings creative advantages based on a paper Thinking Outside the Box: Unconstrained Creative Generation in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Students (some with ADHD) were asked to draw alien fruits that did not resemble any fruits that they knew - and the above was the result.

While the size and nature of the group tested may make generalizations about the average ADHD suffer unreliable my reaction is that the experiment confirms how difficult it is for the average person to think outside the box formed by their experiences.

How Homeopathy can help reduce the plastic mountain

About 25 years ago I purchased a bottle of Harrogate Spa Water. 

When it was nearly empty I decided to test out the principles of homeopathy - which claims that the properties of something are preserved when you dilute it. so when the bottle was nearly empty I topped it up with tap water and put the bottle back in the fridge. If homeopathy is true the contents are still effectively Harrogate Spa Water - as it clearly still said on the label. 

Nearly every night since then I have taken the bottle from the fridge and poured a glass of cold Harrogate Spa Water for a final drink before I go to bed.- topping the bottle up every time it is nearly empty. 

So far the water has been diluted 10-fold on about a thousand occasions and I guess that not one of the original molecules of Harrogate Water remains in the bottle - but each night I still enjoy a lovely cool drink. By now not one atom of the original contents remain ... 

Perhaps I should write a review saying how wonderful Harrogate Spa Water is and how its excellence has lasted 25 years - and perhaps my review would be republished as a recommendation from a satisfied customer in an advert .

But wait. The label is starting to disintegrate. Perhaps the bottle is embarrassed and is trying to tell me that homeopathy does not work, and it no longer wants to be seen carrying a misleading "Harrogate Spa" label.  

But do I care what the bottle thinks about the effectiveness of homeopathy?  Of course not. By repeatedly diluting the original water I have avoided having to throw away 999 plastic bottles (and saved myself a lot of money).

So if you want to help save the planet may I suggest that everyone should start drinking homeopathic water - just buy one bottle and keep it topped up from the tap.

Captured by the Camera - Relaxing Ripples

Relaxing Ripples at College Lake

Home affairs have been rather busy recently, and to give a flavour of the problems just one of the distractions from posting here has been the need to try and get a stair lift installed by Christmas. In such circumstances one of my top priorities has been to spend some time relaxing at College Lake, or one of the many other rural spots a few minutes drive from home.

One of the pleasures this year has been that the resident pair of swans have succeeded in rearing two cygnets - when in previous years they have been unsuccessful - possibly due to predation by mink.

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

I have just posted a summary of a paper "An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence"  together with some notes on future research plans, which will normally be reported on my new blog - although key updates will be cross-reported here.

Will robots outsmart us? by the late Stephen Hawkins

There is a interesting article, "Will robots outsmart us?" in today's Sunday Times Magazine. While I don't accept all Stephen's predictions I was most interested to read:

When an artificial intelligence (AI) becomes better than humans at AI design, so that it can recursively improve itself without human help, we may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. When that happens, we will need to ensure that the computers have goals aligned with ours.

Later he says:

In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants. 

Of course we know what happened last time a super-intelligence came into existence. About half a million years ago the Earth was populated by a great variety of animals of a comparatively low intelligence. All the higher animals had brains that worked in roughly the same way, and how much they could learn was limited because everything they learnt was lost when they died. Then one species, which we call Homo sapiens, discovered a way to recursively increase its own intelligence. It was already good at making tools but for several million years the cost of trail and error learning had limited what it could do. But then it invented a tool to boost intelligence, which we call language.  Language not only made it possible to make better tools, but also it made it possible to recursively build a better language generation by generation. So some 5000 generations later the Earth is home to a super-intelligent species ...

And are the goals of this species aligned with the the goals of the millions of other species? Of course not. Billions of animals are kept as slaves to be killed and eaten, while the homes of countless more have been, or are being, destroyed. 

If we invent a super-intelligent AI system why should it treat us with more respect than we have  shown for our animal relatives.

A new book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," by Stephen Hawkins is published later this week

For the background to my observation see 

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

How plans for a user-friendly computer were rubbished 50 years ago

In 1968 David Caminer and John Pinkerton (who were responsible for the world's first business computer, the LEO I, and who were directors of English Electric Computer) decided to fund research into a project to build inherently user-friendly computers and it was estimated that the market for such systems would be several hundred million pounds a year.

However, as a result of the government inspired merger to make the UK computer industry more competitive, ICL was created, and the project was closed down with no serious attempt to assess the successful research into CODIL which had already been carried out.

This was, of course, about 10 years before the first personal computers, and it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the research had not been so rudely interrupted. Perhap the UK based idea would have been successful and the first personal computers would have been inherently friendly. This would have meant that there would have been no need for the hard to use MS-DOS operating system - and no one would have heard of Microsoft.

An account of what happened has been prepared for the archives of the LEO Computer Society

The EEC ICL Story

To see how the idea of a user-friendly computer originated read

The Unlikely Origins of my current Evolutionary Research

In fact the research was restarted on an unfunded basis for a number of years and a recent reassessment suggests that the original proposal was actually modelling how the human brain works. For more inrormation see:

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

Captured by the Camera - A Real Nut Case

Three Conkers in bed together

Are computers making too many decisions about us?

In today's Times Edward Lucus writes "Tech Giants must come clean with us - Too many decisions  about our careers, love-lives and credit-worthiness are being made by secretive online algorithms."

He is right to point out that the use of computers, particularly by very large of powerful companies, to make decisions which affect our lives needs watching - but on the online comments page I have pointed out that decisions made by humans may not be any more reliable. I wrote:

But are humans any more reliable? We all have biases and make generalizations which have little or no foundation in reality.

To give an example. Before I retired I worked in a university teaching Computer Science on a sandwich course basis - which meant that the department regularly had to find about 90 placements for students for "on the job" training with mainly local firms. Almost invariably the last 10 or 20 to be placed included a disproportionate number of students who either had foreign-sounding surnames or were not white anglo-saxon in appearance - irrespective of how well they were doing on the course.

One of my personal first year tutees, who had just failed an interview for a job working with a computer in a sales department with a small firm, asked me whether there might have been racial discrimination. What seems to have happened in the interview was that the computer manager realised that the student was no familiar with commercial English (for example the difference between "invoice" and "statement") - and probably assumed (wrongly) that as he looked foreign he did not understand English. While of course the manager might have been directly discriminating on the grounds of race it was far more likely that he had not realised how little the average 18 year old knew of commercial jargon, and jumped to an inappropriate conclusion.

A very different example, where I nearly acted on an inappropriate "racist" assumption. 50 years ago we lived in a small town where the population was almost exclusively white. We went to a family wedding in London, taking with us our 2 year old daughter. We took it for granted that on one side of the aisle nearly everyone would be of european origin - and on the other side nearly everyone would be of asian origin. As everyone was waiting for the bride (who was five minutes late) my daughter suddenly stood up in the pew and pointed towards the people on the other side of the aisle and shouted "Look Mummy, look." I looked to see where she was pointing to see what she had seen to make her get excited. All I could see was the crowd of asians and before I could grab her and put my hands over her mouth to stop her making a raciest comment she shouted out "There's Mary with baby Jesus." What was new and exciting to her was that she had never been in a Roman Catholic church before!

While I am concerned with "Black box" computers making decisions it is likely that those decisions reflect the biases of the programmers who designed the system OR are based on the statistical analysis of "Big Data" and are likely to be more reliable than a human. As I see it the problem is that the computer systems making the decisions are "black boxes" and cannot explain what it is doing in a way that those can understand.

(In any case, if someone make a racist comment to you - would you ask them why they said it - and would you really expect an honest reply in every case.)

Mission Statement

We are all, both individually and as a society, trapped by boxes - some physical, some mental. Some of these boxes are built from our childhood experiences, some from the customs and beliefs of the society in which we live, some are imposed by the technology we use, and ultimately we cannot escape the planet on which we live. 

The aim of this site is to look creatively at some of the issues involved and present them in an educational and educational way. So I will include posts about ways that technology (and particularly computers) affect our lives and also the social and political issues that limit our actions. In addition I plan to continue my Science Limericks and post pictures I find attractive or thought provoking under the heading "Trapped by the Camera."

The big change is that in future posts relevant to the evolution on human intelligence, and the computer language CODIL, will be posted on the blog "A Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence"

Trapped by the Camera

Laying a new gravel path in Wendover Woods.

.I was attracted by the black and white pattern (faintly touched with colour) that was created as a new path between the trees was being constructed in Wendover Woods, near Chesham, Bucks.

[Significant changes are taking place in the central area in Wendover Woods. A large new car park has been opened, and the existing "Cafe in the Woods" is to be replaced with a much bigger cafe with a striking view over part of the Chiltern Hills.]

For pictures of the changes see my photographs on Geograph.

We live in a Wonderful World.

Libby Purves writes an article in today's Times "Aggressive Atheism denies Culture and History" and this attracted a lot of comments. My contributions included my reply to the idea that that if you didn't believe in god it took all the mystery out of life. I responded:

Recently I was walking in some National Trust woodland and decided to sit down and admire the view. I turned to someone sitting nearby and said how wonderful it was to be there and observe nature at work.

He replied "It's wonderful and its all Gods' work" and it was clear he had no idea how wonderful it really is, when seen by an atheist who understands science. To me nature is fully of partly explored mysteries and there is alway room for creative imagination in trying to understand the underlying science - and the evolutionary implications.

The ideas of looking at the wonders of nature and having only one answer "God did it" would seem boring, boring, boring to me. To him there was no mystery and no need to think creatively - one meaningless and unsupportable answer and you can sit back and let your mind stagnate.

Religious people who hide their lack of imaginative thinking behind a screen of ancient myths may find it satisfying - I am more interested in actively exploring the wonders of the real world."

Keep young by learning

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80.

Anyone who keeps learning

is young

Henry Ford

I have just started on the FutureLearn course "Psychology and Mental Health" being run by the University of Liverpool and decided I would mention it on this blog - because not only is it interesting - but I find it personally invigorating to be in a learning situation interacting with lots of other students, of very different backgrounds.



The first thing I did was to select the above quotation - and almost immediately I got a new email - it was the British Psychological Society Research Digest.

And what was the headline article - a blog post "Do people with a high IQ age more slowly." The blog relates to a paper behind a pay wall which I can't access entitled "Higher IQ in adolescence is related to a younger subjective age in later life: Findings from the Wisconsin Longditudinal Study."

I particularly like the observation "Perhaps a higher IQ, which helps us to process complex information more easily, also increases our curiosity about the world, and it’s that sense of wonder and excitement that can make us feel more youthful."

This really sums up why I enjoy doing FutureLearn courses and while, at 80, I am still actively interested in research. If I ever loose my sense of curiosity  or fail to get excited when I learn something new I am sure I would loose the will to live.

In prison for being mentally ill?

An article "Research into the Mental Health of prisoners, digested" in today's British Psychological Society Research Bulletin interested me because it is clear that many people in prison have mental health problems and there is a real danger that if someone who is mentally ill is put in prison punishing them it will not help anyone if they are treated in a way that makes their mental illness worse.

 

The subject interests me because there is a link to the picture in the heading of this blog which shows someone trapped behind the screen of a laptop trying to break out. It is meant to represent the way that we are all becoming trapped, in one way or another, by the way that computers control the way that society works. However it also is a personal reminder of what happened to my daughter Lucy, In 1984 she spent some time as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after her discharge, but still an outpatient, she became hyperactive, and was asked to stop attending the rehabilitation class as she was disturbing the others, Shortly afterwards her behaviour became so extreme that it came (rightly) to the attention of the police, Because a doctor ruled she was "not mentally ill" she ended up on remand in "The Muppet House" in Holloway prison. She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, badly damaged by the experience, shortly after the Court of Appeal had ruled, in the case of the young mentally ill lady in the next cell, that the NHS should not use prisons as a dumping ground to save money. Lucy killed herself a year after her arrest thinking that she must be really wicked to have ended up being treated so abominably. I was shattered by these events - and my post traumatic stress disorder was one of the main reasons why I abandoned my CODIL research.