John Mullan in The Guardian:

A few years ago in a panel discussion at a literary festival I was asked to name a recent British novel that readers and critics would still be talking about in a hundred years’ time. On the spur of the difficult moment I plumped for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Only as I tried to explain my choice did I realise why I had given this answer. It was not just a novel I enjoyed and admired, it was also a novel that enacted something elementary and elemental: a human’s need to imagine his or her origins. The Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last year attention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right. While the choice has come as a surprise to some – Ishiguro at 62 is relatively youthful; he was not on the list of bookies’ favourites being touted in the press – in literary fact it is not. The Nobel prize for literature, according to the official wording, is for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Translated from the original Swedish, it is an awkward phrase, but does suggest something important: that the prize should reward universality rather than topicality, literature about the way we always live, not just the way we live now. Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times.

How brilliant it is that Never Let Me Go opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. Similarly, the novel that made him famous, The Remains of the Day, took a character familiar from a hundred English books and films – the butler in a country house – and gave him a narrative of painstaking evasiveness. For all the teasing period detail, it was a novel about human self-denial and self-deception at any time and in any place.

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Raphael Mostel in Architectural Record:

Steven Holl frequently seeks ideas in the Architectonics of Music, and as a composer I consulted on the Lewis Arts Complex.

Visiting the finished building now, I see the ideas of Morton Feldman’s music everywhere in Steven’s magnificent realization—and not just in the rugs of the Music Building that reproduce the graphic notation of Feldman’s early works. Steven’s architecture embodies the spirit of Feldman’s expansive and mystical late works.

Although written in conventional notation and with great precision, Feldman’s late compositions direct attention away from the tick-tock that keeps most music earthbound. They likewise eschew amorphousness. Likewise Steven’s designs disdain both quotidian regularity and deliberate disorientation.

Feldman achieves a ‘tapestry of sound’ not only in the multi-layered terms of harmony, but also in the more profound sense as a totally integrating force of expanding self-referential relationships, weaving and knotting ever widening loops, through sequences with repetitions and near-repetitions. Each note always in relation to many others, and the group relation always clearly related to a larger perspective, and an even larger perspective in turn. By this musical alchemy every individual note gains an almost physical presence and sense of integrity as a participant in emergent patterns and then patterns-in-patterns, even with altered positioning in these patterns.

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Morgan Meis in The Easel:

To grasp the excitement (positive and negative) produced by Jasper Johns’s flag and target paintings of the mid- to late 1950s, you have to consider the situation of American painting at the time. That means thinking about Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1950s, Barnett Newman was still making his zips. Willem de Kooning was churning out shake-and-bake canvases filled with his signature dancing shapes and colours. Jackson Pollock, alas, was dead by 1956, but his all-over-the-canvas drip paintings had become standard-bearers for what ‘serious painting’ should look like. The Ab Exers more or less held sway.

They held sway partly because they were producing visually stunning work, and partly because they were able to express, in both words and paint, a powerful sense of artistic urgency. Abstract Expressionists were given to asking big questions like: what does painting do? Is painting about itself? Should painting reproduce what we see in the world, or does it, rather, ‘express’ something in the mind or soul of the painter? Does painting reach beyond the visual into the fundamental building blocks of reality, be those mental, physical, or spiritual?

Painting in America in 1955 was, in short, a heady affair. To be a painter was to have accepted a kind of ideological calling. In 1943, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman wrote a short manifesto in the form of a letter to the art editor of the New York Times in which they claimed: ‘to us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.’ They also wrote: ‘It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.’¹ Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman wanted serious painting to fly in the face of everyday perception. Standing in front of one of Newman’s imposing zips, one is inclined to feel that the painting hovers at the very edge of what the mind can grasp.

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Tim O'Reilly at Edge.org:

The thing I've been struggling with is understanding the relationship of technology and the economy. There's a narrative today about AI eliminating human jobs, and it's pretty clear to me, based on history, that it's wrong. History teaches us that if we use technology correctly, we increase productivity. The fundamental questions that we're facing today are not about how technology will inevitably put people out of work, they're questions about how to distribute the fruits of that productivity, and what we have to do differently in order to get a different outcome than the one we’re facing now.

We seem to be in the throes of technological determinism. The future is determined by the choices we make. If you look at the history of how we've dealt with past technological revolutions, there's been a social conscience that arose where we decided to change the way our society works.

I'm trying to figure out how to change the rules of the game and get people to think differently about the future. It's pretty clear to me that there is plenty of work to be done that technology can help us with, huge problems to be solved. What's keeping us from putting today's technology to work on those problems and instead forcing us to spend time on so much triviality? In particular, I'm thinking a lot about the kind of advice I as a technologist could give to policymakers, people in Washington, or Brussels, or China—to say, "Here's what you ought to be doing; here's what the real path of technology teaches us; here are the choices that you should be setting up for our society; this is the kind of leadership that you should be exerting."

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Harvey Silverglate at the website of WGBH:

Are you as confused as I am by what passes for political commentary and analysis? Is there anybody who understands the current political mood of the nation, much less is able to figure out who is on what side? Why is the tension between left and right so vicious, so disorienting and disabling? Why do members of Congress have such difficulty “crossing over the aisle,” something that was so common as recently as the 1980s when Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, Jr., famously dined and joked together regularly? Does it all make any sense?

It makes perfect sense if one abandons the long-outmoded notion that the nation is divided into Democrats and Republicans or into liberals and conservatives. In fact, the body politic these days is divided into no fewer than four general sectors – five, if one deems the libertarians to be a discrete category.

The impact of this division is best understood by examining the warring camps in an actual case that has set left against right – the struggle over whether transgender students should be allowed to use the school restrooms of their chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificates.

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Mathieu Malouf at Artforum:

In accordance with his deep and well-documented admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer and Auguste Comte, Houellebecq says that his visual art, like his novels, is an attempt to “tell the truth about the world.” Once past the almost complete absence of ambiguity in his work, the viewer may find something very refreshing in his overbearingly earnest, intently reactionary craft as an artist, which serves as a severely executed extension of his poetry in the visual realm. The photographs of crumbling highway exchanges, rotted-out monuments, and monumental office towers in Houellebecq’s visual art become fully sincere Baudelairean signifiers of a European civilization in decline, expressions of a soul in deep pain and in search of meaning; he has referred to their effect as “visual electricity.”

The first gallery of “French Bashing” was lit only by framing projectors illuminating individual aluminum-mounted digital prints. A lot of what was on display here looked like badly plotted airport ads, but the presence of these works in a gallery setting evoked that strain of contemporary art in which Photoshop looms large, Simon Denny’s mass-produced canvases being among the most obvious examples. Mission #001, 2016, reassembles an oversize printout of a Tumblr meme dripping with teenage angst. VOUS N’AVEZ AUCUNE CHANCE (You don’t stand a chance), reads a sentence superimposed on a grim, grayscale view of a small town from a plane window. CONTINUER? Underneath, a solitary OS X–style “OK” button seals the deal. Life must go on despite the fact that it is painful, albeit less painful than finding the strength to kill yourself.

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Antonio Melechi at the TLS:

Contrary to the heroic folklore served up by Ernest Jones, Anna Freud and the other faithful apparatchiks, psychoanalysis had rarely, if ever, involved any kind of attentive listening on Freud’s part. In fact, as Frederick Crews convincingly demonstrates in Freud: The making of an illusion, the talking cure was from its very beginnings deaf to its clientele. The inconvenient “rabble” that made their way to Berggasse 19 impinged on Freud’s time to write and theorize, reaffirming his misanthropic contention that “few patients are worth the trouble we spend on them”.

One of America’s foremost critics and essayists, Crews fell under the sway of psycho­analysis in the late 1950s. Once Henri Ellenberger and other psychiatric historians began to unpack the founding myths of psychoanalysis, showing Freud’s breakthrough “self-analysis” to be as questionable as his proprietary attitude to “the unconscious”, Crews’s position – and register – shifted. Aligning himself with Adolf Grünbaum’s anti-inductivist critique of psycho­analysis, he threw his hat in with the small band of academics whose critical assault on Freud was revitalized by the publication of his most disarming correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess.

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Edward White at Paris Review:

During her several months of training, Litvyak took every opportunity to assert her individuality. First, she refused to have her light brown curls cut short like all the other recruits. When she finally relented, she got hold of peroxide to bleach her hair white-blonde. When handed her standard-issue uniform, she customized it with a glamorous fur collar, an offence for which she was, briefly, arrested. It may seem odd that Litvyak felt so free to express her sense of agency given that she was forever being watched, not only by her military superiors, but by agents of party and state. Yet, despite the horrors it brought, many Soviet citizens experienced the war as an oasis of (relative) freedom, when one could speak and act without worrying about toeing the party line. “To think,” the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam acidly remarked to her friend Anna Akhmatova, “that the best years of our life were during the war when so many people were killed, when we were starving, and my son was doing forced labor.” Ivakina branded Litvyak “a swanky, flirtatious, aviatrix.” It was meant to be a lacerating indictment, but if she’d been asked to describe herself in three words, Litvyak might’ve plumped for the same ones.

Despite Ivakina’s reservations, Raskova felt that Litvyak’s obvious flaws were outweighed by her instinctual brilliance in the air. It was a rare gift that no amount of training could provide. Nothing threatened Litvyak’s place in Air Group 122, not even the revelation that she had lied on her application form and grossly overstated her experience as a pilot .

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Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum in Nautilus:

During World War II, a radar operator tracks an airplane over Hamburg, guiding searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in relation to a phosphor dot whose position is updated with each sweep of the antenna. Abruptly, dots that seem to represent airplanes begin to multiply, quickly swamping the display. The actual plane is in there somewhere, impossible to locate owing to the presence of “false echoes.” The plane has released chaff—strips of black paper backed with aluminum foil and cut to half the target radar’s wavelength. Thrown out by the pound and then floating down through the air, they fill the radar screen with signals. The chaff has exactly met the conditions of data the radar is configured to look for, and has given it more “planes,” scattered all across the sky, than it can handle. This may well be the purest, simplest example of the obfuscation approach. Because discovery of an actual airplane was inevitable (there wasn’t, at the time, a way to make a plane invisible to radar), chaff taxed the time and bandwidth constraints of the discovery system by creating too many potential targets. That the chaff worked only briefly as it fluttered to the ground and was not a permanent solution wasn’t relevant under the circumstances. It only had to work well enough and long enough for the plane to get past the range of the radar.

Many forms of obfuscation work best as time-buying “throw-away” moves. They can get you only a few minutes, but sometimes a few minutes is all the time you need. The example of chaff also helps us to distinguish, at the most basic level, between approaches to obfuscation. Chaff relies on producing echoes—imitations of the real thing—that exploit the limited scope of the observer. (Fred Cohen terms this the “decoy strategy.”²) As we will see, some forms of obfuscation generate genuine but misleading signals—much as you would protect the contents of one vehicle by sending it out accompanied by several other identical vehicles, or defend a particular plane by filling the sky with other planes—whereas other forms shuffle genuine signals, mixing data in an effort to make the extraction of patterns more difficult. Because those who scatter chaff have exact knowledge of their adversary, chaff doesn’t have to do either of these things.

TrackMeNot, developed in 2006 by Daniel Howe, Helen Nissenbaum, and Vincent Toubiana, exemplifies a software strategy for concealing activity with imitative signals.

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Natalie Wolchover in Quanta Magazine:

Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures and help make scientific discoveries, they have also confounded their human creators, who never expected so-called “deep-learning” algorithms to work so well. No underlying principle has guided the design of these learning systems, other than vague inspiration drawn from the architecture of the brain (and no one really understands how that operates either).

Like a brain, a deep neural network has layers of neurons — artificial ones that are figments of computer memory. When a neuron fires, it sends signals to connected neurons in the layer above. During deep learning, connections in the network are strengthened or weakened as needed to make the system better at sending signals from input data — the pixels of a photo of a dog, for instance — up through the layers to neurons associated with the right high-level concepts, such as “dog.” After a deep neural network has “learned” from thousands of sample dog photos, it can identify dogs in new photos as accurately as people can. The magic leap from special cases to general concepts during learning gives deep neural networks their power, just as it underlies human reasoning, creativity and the other faculties collectively termed “intelligence.” Experts wonder what it is about deep learning that enables generalization — and to what extent brains apprehend reality in the same way.

Last month, a YouTube videoof a conference talk in Berlin, shared widely among artificial-intelligence researchers, offered a possible answer. In the talk, Naftali Tishby, a computer scientist and neuroscientist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, presented evidence in support of a new theory explaining how deep learning works. Tishby argues that deep neural networks learn according to a procedure called the “information bottleneck,” which he and two collaborators first described in purely theoretical terms in 1999. The idea is that a network rids noisy input data of extraneous details as if by squeezing the information through a bottleneck, retaining only the features most relevant to general concepts. Striking new computer experiments by Tishby and his student Ravid Shwartz-Ziv reveal how this squeezing procedure happens during deep learning, at least in the cases they studied.

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