vivweb01blog

In view of the current reflections on AI and what its consequences are likely to be, I couldn't resist revisiting an early blog I'd written on the subject early last year....  Could it be that AI is already evolving - without us realising it ? Enjoy.... Travelodge and the ‘Escapist’ Robot – Is it cleverer than we think ? An entertaining news story took my eye last week and brightened things up somewhat amidst the anticyclonic gloom of late January in UK…. Apparently a cleaning robot being used by the Travelodge hotel in Cambridge went AWOL, and was later found under a hedge nearby. ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60084347 ). Having checked my calendar to ensure I hadn’t managed to hibernate without realising it,   thus missing February and March this year and landing on 1st April, I then verified that other news outlets were also reporting the story. After reading a couple of them, I wiped my eyes and started writing… As you can imagine, much mir...

  The expression ‘The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread’ seems to be on everyone's lips in the UK media nowadays, and has even been adopted as the title of a documentary radio series on Radio 4.  Whenever I hear it used to describe yet another ‘wonder-product’, I have to ask myself where on earth it came from…. As it stands, the phrase implies that the process of slicing bread during its manufacture really does represent an improvement over ‘prior art’ (presumably this would have been un -sliced bread). The nearest I’ve come to an explanation for this somewhat inexplicable enthusiasm in the past for sliced bread as a ‘new and revolutionary' product is that housewives* in the 1950s were so fed up with having to slice their loaves themselves that they couldn’t wait for someone else to do it for them. To my mind, slicing bread as part of its manufacturing process has some notable disadvantages – let’s take a look at a few of them: 1)       1)  The slicing ...

  A new Covid sub-variant responsible for a surge of infections in India is giving rise to concerns that it could also lead to a significant rise in hospitalisations and deaths in the UK this autumn. Research indicates that the new variant, named Arcturus, could be significantly more infectious than previous sub-variants in the Omicron series, which are still predominant throughout Europe and the USA. Also known as Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.16, Arcturus was first identified in January and has been monitored by the World Health Organisation (WHO) since 22 March, which upgraded it to a “ variant of interest ” in mid-April. WHO reports suggest that Arcturus doesn’t so far appear to be producing symptoms any more severe than the prevalent Omicron variants.   It has only one additional mutation in the spike protein, but lab investigations so far have confirmed it does exhibit increased infectivity over the other Omicron B variants, as well as the potential for increased patho...

  I’ve often wondered what might have happened to the UK’s fortunes if David Cameron hadn’t decided to hold a referendum on EU membership in June 2016. Given his obvious desire to see us stay in EU, and the adverse public opinion on immigration and its effect on jobs in particular at the time, I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering why on earth he did…. The Background Although he had promised a referendum in the 2015 manifesto, to be held some time during the lifetime of the parliament, Cameron had plenty of wriggle room and could easily have ‘kept his powder dry’ until much later in the parliamentary term, which he had already fixed at a full 5 years. Although the precise reasons why he went so early in the parliament aren’t 100% clear, I suspect a large part of the impetus was his failure to gain significant concessions on free movement from Brussels by early 2016. A detailed examination of the issues thought to have led to his decision can be viewed here . Some commentato...

  ASDA recently joined the other majors and the discounters in reducing the price of milk and there has been much hype in the media about this.  However what has not yet been extensively reported is an important policy change on price reductions which, I suspect, they were hoping to introduce ‘by stealth’ while consumer focus was diverted elsewhere. This move will have a far greater effect on some of the prices we pay than a few pence off the price of a ‘pinta’ – read on to find out why… Some Background I recently revised an article which was first published last autumn on supermarket food. This was a time when the cost-of-living crisis was beginning to hit us all hard. The article was primarily aimed at highlighting food waste and what we could do to reduce it, thereby saving ourselves money and helping protect the environment. What emerged at the time was that many people were already finding it necessary to use food banks to feed their families adequately, and those ...

In case anyone is still trying to figure out how to insert links to other items within a single blog, try this remedy. No guarantees, of course, but it worked for me.... A.       Inserting an internal cross-reference using anchor points If you are someone who occasionally authors quite long blogs as I do, it can be helpful to your readers to provide links within the blog to other paragraphs or footnotes.  I haven't so far found an option for creating internal links with the current Blogspot offering – the only option available seems to be creating links to external sites via their full URLs (I may have missed something, so please let me know if you have found one).  You can, however, insert appropriate HTML code to create internal links yourself, since Blogspot does allow access to the HTML version of your blog directly via the 'Compose/HTML' toggle switch (mid-left of the display). This may seem daunting if you haven't handled HTML code before your...

  Recent events in China have confirmed that chairman Xi’s decision to go for ‘Zero Covid or bust’ was the wrong one, as suggested in my blog ‘ China and Covid’ back in March.  The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA-n variants are now virtually unstoppable, due to their extreme infectiousness, and any attempt to eradicate the virus entirely from a population was always doomed to failure. If there were any remaining question in the minds of our epidemiologists about the impossibility of eradicating a coronavirus with this degree of infectiousness, China’s 3-year 'experiment' has now effectively proven the case beyond reasonable doubt.... The widespread prediction earlier this year that the Chinese population would eventually rebel against perpetual lockdowns is already coming to pass – the only question is how far the population will be prepared to go to achieve its aims - and how nasty it will get. This will be determined largely by how the CCP attempts to deal with it. One thing is c...

  Pondering last week’s story about the closedown of the world’s largest online eBook library  by the US authorities led me back to the question asked increasingly often nowadays:   “Where has all our common sense gone ?” This might be a good opportunity to take a light-hearted 'tongue-in cheek' look at the logic (or lack of it) underlying human behaviour. What is it ? First of all, what is ‘common sense’ – and how do we define it ? To start with, here's a bit of personal history to put things in context. I can well remember from my early childhood the frequent exhortations I received from my parents in response to what I thought was perfectly reasonable behaviour: ‘…for goodness sake lad, just use your common sense for change...’. And I'm sure plenty of my contemporaries will have experienced the same thing. At the time, I really had no idea what this strange commodity might be, whether I actually had any, or if not, where I might be able to get some. Which w...