Issue #151 - The Spaces in Between
Issue #151 - The Spaces in Between
Late Houses
It was so lovely and warm last night, walking back to the car it almost felt like summer. There are snowdrops by the front door and kids outside on bicycles. I know better than to think spring is on the way, there’ll be a kicker just before the end of March, and probably before that the temperatures will dip with maybe even more snow on the way.
I hope that you’re all well and the week has been good. It’s been another tough news week. The earthquake in Turkey and Syria has been awful and we donated to Medicins sans frontiers as part of the disaster relief effort. It is devastating, watching buildings crumble and so much suffering, I hope that help is there and people are being looked after.
This week I’ve been mostly at home looking after one of the boys who has strep throat. I’ve only been in to teach my lessons and then head back to look after him. He’s on antibiotics and feeling okay, and we’ve had a nice time, hopefully he’ll be able to return on Monday and catch up with the work that he’s missed. It’s been nice hanging out together though, lots of chats over lunch and I’ve enjoyed seeing him flex his Lego skills and build cars and engines, which seems to have been his theme this week.
Stephan
Teaching & Learning
This week we enjoyed a visit from my brilliant colleague Dr. Uju Anya who talked about systemic racism and how redlining in the 30’s and 40’s, and then the disastrous housing policies after the end of the second world war have left a lasting legacy of inequality in wealth distribution, labor and education. During the war, factories went into overdrive producing munitions, guns and machinery. Housing projects were quickly built to accommodate workers who had moved to cities like Pittsburgh to support production.
Initially, new housing estates were mixed, white, Black and non-white families lived together and worked in the factories, but soon after the war ended, new houses were built in the suburbs that only white families were allowed to move to. Racist policies supported the unequal distribution of housing grants, bank loans and real estate companies. As house prices increased in these new suburbs and homes in the projects lost their value, and as contractors refused to pay for the upkeep, many services such as schools and health centers closed; a massive wealth gap opened up that the US has never recovered from. Schools here are paid for by local property taxes, so of course wealthier white neighborhoods are able to pay for their teachers, care for school buildings, build basketball gyms, football stadiums, pay for computers, busses and subsidised school meals.
If you want to know what systemic racism is, then there is no better example than to look to the education sector, how schools have become segregated along racial lines, and how Black, Hispanic and non-white students are the minority in many US suburbs. This is the result of anti-Black racism specifically, denied access, opportunity and resource.
I am learning about the legacy of racist policies, and how inequalities in so many policy areas, from workers’ rights to education, to city planning, climate change, health and care stem from systemic racism. It is terrifying, as I’m understanding that the culture wars really are designed to whitewash over these inequities, to ensure nothing changes.
Lost and Found
I found a great collection of photos entitled Brutal North by Simon Phipps (affiliate link), depicting the brutalist buildings constructed in Britain in the 1960’s particularly those in Yorkshire, Lancashire, The Midlands and Merseyside. There are few remnants left, some in London, the South Bank Center, the Barbican, but seeing those tower blocks and concrete complexes, I remembered the Tricorn in Portsmouth which was torn down in 2004, one of the few remaining brutalist shopping centers which housed a Virgin Megastore and a couple of pubs.
I haven’t tried Google’s Bard AI but it seems it is already getting into trouble. Just like chat GPT, it is also based on a large language model. As I’ve had them explained to me, the AI is trained on millions of pages from books, texts, articles etc and is essentially the same as predictive text on your phone, but on a much larger scale. The AI constructs answers to questions based on the probability that these words or sentences might appear in text written about a particular subject or area. It can do this with a high degree of probability because it has read a great deal, and is consuming everything that is fed in. It can also create context around specific questions, so you can ask it to create lists, tables, answer in the style of, write code, essays, summaries, you name it... However, all it is doing is repeating what it has read, back to you, just like a parrot. It doesn’t know what it is saying, words don’t have any meaning to the Ai, it is just good at repeating them.
In fact, this is the issue that researcher Timnit Gebru and her colleagues highlighted in their paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 that is openly accessible at the ACM Digital Library. Gebru highlights the potential dangers of language models that are too large. It argues that such models, like GPT-3, may perpetuate harmful biases and stereotypes found in training data and calls for increased transparency, accountability, and ethics in the development of language models to prevent unintended consequences. Gebru was fired from Google shortly after the paper’s publication.
AI’s are insinuating themselves into all areas of academic research. I sent this article to my colleagues in Hispanic Studies this week, about an AI trained to search through archives to match uncredited, unpublished and incomplete work to various authors. It seems to have uncovered a lost play by Lope de Vega who was a contemporary of Cervantes and Velázquez by matching the style of the author to the manuscript.
Thank you
The thread that is running through this issue was also spoken about in the State of the Union address that I watched on Tuesday evening. Even though it isn’t seen by as many people now as it used to be, it is an extremely newsworthy event and parts of the speech will be edited into smaller chunks and published via social media and appear in the news and other media outlets. It was interesting to contrast with the Queen’s speech which I think is the closest equivalent in the UK parliament, which is all pomp and ceremony, and pretty awful. I enjoyed the event though, it was a fascinating snapshot of US politics. Although fully expected, it was still shocking when one half of the house didn’t stand or applaud when Biden talked about increasing pay for school teachers, or capping the cost of Insulin. Really?
I managed to take advantage of the nice weather this week, heading up the Highschool to help as an Assistant for the newly formed Blue Devils Girls Rugby Team. It’s great to play and pass the ball, the players were fun and very coachable, we played some games, learned some techniques. I hope to be able to help out more.
Okay, let’s finish there. I hope everyone is well, thank you for lovely messages and emails that I got during the week, you’re a bunch of superstars you know. See you next week.