Coffee and learning

What is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug in the world? Coffee. 

Hardly surprising but what effect does it have on your performance, memory or in preventing demenitia and Alzheimers? Beyond this does it have any other benefits? What was and is its role in learning?

 

Coffee and memory

We are still not entirely clear about how it works on the brain but a paper this month suggests that regular coffee drinking improves the signal-to-noise ratio during information encoding, in other words it improves memory and therefore retention.

 

In fact, there is now lots of evidence that coffee improves short-term memory and reaction times by acting on the pre-frontal cortex. Researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, in a group of 15 volunteers given 100 mg of coffee, then scanned and tested, showed distinct improvements in memory in the caffeine fuelled group, "those who received caffeine had significantly greater activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe… These areas are involved in 'executive memory', attention, concentration, planning and monitoring."

 

A study from the University of Arizona, published a trial in Psychological Science, showed that in 40 participants, given 250 mg of coffee or decaffeinated coffee, the group that were given caffeine showed no decline in memory across the day in contrast to the decaffeinated group who showed significant decline.

 

In another French study researchers compared women aged 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day with those who drank one cup or less per day. Those who drank more caffeine showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period. The study, published in the journal of Neurology, raises the possibility that caffeine may also protect against the development of dementia.

 

Indeed, a trial from the University of Florida showing that coffee, more accurately caffeine, both prevents and reverses symptoms of Alzheimers in mice. Sure, mice trials don’t always transfer to humans, but these mice had the relevant human genes transferred. It suggests that caffeine both blocks and attacks the plaque that causes Alzheimers and memory loss. The University of Florida used 55 mice and gave one half doses of caffeine, similar to around five cups a day for humans, and the other half water. What was astonishing is that after two months the dementia mice had recovered their memories and were the same as the mice who showed no signs of dementia. The results were astonishing. What’s more, these mice had a 50% reduction in the beta-amyloid protein, which forms the plaque that causes brain dementia.

 

Coffee shops and learning

Since that first Yemeni goatherder observed his goats frolicking after eating coffee beans, coffee grew in popularity in the Middle East. It allowed Islamic Sufis to get through long nights of prayer and Islamic students found they could keep awake to recite and learn the Koran. The port of ‘Mocha’ eventually opened trade in the 16th century, through Constantinople, into Europe. As a habit of hospitality, it encouraged meeting socially and conversation, especially in an Ottoman Empire that did not drink alcohol.

 

Trade across the British Empire into the Levant, led to the first London coffee shop in 1652, right by the Royal Exchange. It was an immediate success and within ten years there were 83 coffee houses in London, fuelled by Puritan attitudes, where alcohol was frowned upon. By the late 17th century coffee shops charged a penny a cup and were called ‘penny universities’, as they were such powerful places of cross-disciplinary debate. Drinkers sat around one long table, so you sat next to and opposite people, which encouraged conversation. Pamphlets and newspapers were also available. By 1739, London had 551 coffee shops, many hives of intellectual and business activity. 

 

They became hothouses of political debate, which is why Charles II wanted to shut them down. Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop became Lloyds of London. Jonathon’s Coffee House in 1698 listed stock prices, which eventually became the London Stock Exchange. Similarly in New York, a coffee house became the New York Stock Exchange. Coffee houses were also seen as sharpening the wit. The Tatler (1709) and Spectator (1711) link the periodical with the coffee house, drawing content from that source. So we have then coffee stimulating thought and cultural output. Pepys goes to coffee house three or four times a day. Voltaire drank 40 cups a day!

Revivals

Urban, corporate coffee chains, and now more artisanal small coffee shops, constitute a global revival. Starbucks and its imitators, picked up on the digital revolution, popular mobile laptop workers and students, offering free wifi. They have now become focal points for meetings and working. Many have people deep in thought, writing, coding, emailing and doing their jobs, stimulated by coffee and the general social environment of a warm and inviting place. WiFi in coffee shops has given them a real lease of life.

 

Quick and easy to make, with psychoactive qualities, coffee was also incorporated into the workplace, as a break from work but also a method of keeping awake and getting through the working day. At conferences we stop for coffee breaks, a social ritual which encourages social networking.

 

The drink of a coffee in the morning as a wake-up experience, then after meals to combat post-prandial lethargy, is now an established social ritual. Espressos, an Italian habit, came with the machine compression of water through coffee, making it quick. The in-out coffee culture developed because there was a tax on service, hence service at the bar, standing up.

 

Conclusion

Coffee has long fuelled learning, whether it be through the direct stimulation of the brain, increasing attention, improving memory, preventing dementia or providing a social context for debate and work. Coffee has more recently re-colonised the world, through a global coffee shop culture, in the workplace and at home. Fascinating drink, fascinating culture.

Education not a universal ‘good’

In the British Library yesterday, I spent a few hours in their superb Taking Liberties exhibition which had a section on the clash between religious belief and freedom of speech. Iwent upstairs to see their collection of early Bibles, Korans and Torahs, one of the best collections of early books in the world. It set me thinking. Books such as Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Mill’s On Liberty and Paine’s The Rights of Man have led to a largely secular view of rights and liberties. I can’t say the same for the Bible, Torah and Koran. 

Education is usually seen as a universal ‘good’. But recent world events suggest that education is not necessarily a ‘good’ in itself, and may in fact, be a horrifically destructive force. An educational battle of titanic proportions is taking place in many parts of the world. It is rarely discussed but continues to have a profound effect on world history. I’m talking about the impact of fundamentalist Islamic, Jewish and Christian teaching and methods on the minds young people in theist schools, using religious texts as the ultimate authority. Education, as practiced in fundamentalist Islamic, Jewish and Christian places of learning are, in my view, damaging, leading to intolerance and political conflict. Interestingly, in all three there is a similar focus on the powerful recitation and repeated readings of a basic book. This, the three Abrahamic religions have in common. We needn’t be surprised at this, since the three religions are entwined with each other through their books. The Torah, five books of Moses, are included in the expanded Old Testament of the Christians and The Koran draws from the Torah, regarding it as the word of Allah given to Moses. The Koran refers to Mohammed as the prophet mentioned in the Torah.

What I’m saying here is that the educational power of recitation, repetition and memorisation is massively effective and therefore massively limiting and destructive in terms of critical thinking and tolerance. Education without critical thinking has immense destructive power.

Islamic education – conviction and recitation 

Koran means ‘recitation’. In Islamic teaching, everything stems from the pages of this one book. It was meant to be read aloud to promote recitation and memorising of the book, through repeated spoken readings, has always been highly prized in the Islamic world. But this comes at a price. This repeated repetition is massively effective in learning and results in the deep processing and retention of the text, and the unshiftable, dogmatic convictions that come with deeply held knowledge and belief. In short, it is an educational recipe for dogmatic fanaticism.

It is impressive and common to witness the devotional prayers in Muslim countries, from mass attendances in Mosques to single musilms praying on any available spot. It’s a five times a day ritual, but worrying to think that this lifelong example of spaced practice, may squeeze out learning that is incompatible with the precepts of the Koran. It is an example of successful learning that, in itself can prevent further learning. Wherever I go in the Islamic world I see the rise of religious and regressive educational systems. Education is gradually becoming politicised by active religious believers, and inept and ineffective governments. The educated elite continue to educate their children abroad, while populations turn to religious schools that encourage conformity, not critical analysis.

The teaching in fundamentalist Islamic schools teaches that God passed his thoughts through the archangel Gabriel directly to the illiterate Mohammed over a period of years, as the final prophet to mankind, the final expression of God’s will. It is a text ridden with the primitive beliefs of its age and, at times, downright primitive in its prescriptions against women and non-believers.

Philip Hitti’s classic the History of the Arabs has an excellent chapter on the history of Islamic education. Schools were, and are going back to becoming adjuncts of the Mosque with the entire curriculum being base on the Koran. Memory work is particularly emphasised. Even today there are high rewards for children who manage to memorise the Koran. Interestingly, the teacher was not highly regarded in Islamic history, often a low status figure, even figure of fun. More recently we have seen the massive increase in the number of schools that are primarily religious. Organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas are often the only organisations to provide adequate education for the poor, as the governments are often too corrupt and uncaring to do it properly.

Jewish education – chosen conviction 

Torah means ‘teaching’, ‘instruction’ or ‘doctrine’. Its 613 commandments, split into 365 negative and 248 positive moral imperatives. Again, like the Koran, it is believed to have been written by divine revelation, this time by Moses. Reading the Torah aloud is central to Jewish ritual. As with Islam and the Koran, the repeated and cyclical recitation leads to deeply processed knowledge and beliefs. Orthodox believers take every word literally, something they have in common with Islamic fundamentalist believers. There is a deep split in Israel between orthodox and other schools and a battle currently raging to defend religious Torah-based schools. Half of all students in Jerusalem attend ultra-Orthodox ‘heredi’ schools. 70% of ultra-Orthodox men don’t work as it interferes with their religious studies. This is a group that, like their Islamic and fundamentalist Christian believers abhor homosexuality and have been known to attack women who they deem to be improperly dressed. Unlike most secular countries, this religious power reaches right up into government, especially in the settler communities. The majority of the illegal settler communities are ultra-Orthodox or Religious Zionists, all driven by the belief that their land rights are given by God, as if he were some sort of racially motivated real estate agent. Land ownership is not a covenant from God.

The problems in the Middle East focus on Israel and peace agreements are almost impossible to complete because of the extremists on both sides. If you’ve ever travelled in Israel you will have experienced the aloofness ultra-orthodox Jews. That’s fine. I have no problem with people doing their own thing, but when it comes to illegal settlements, stealing other people’s land, bulldozing their properties and bombing them into submission with tanks and artillery, on the grounds that ‘God gave them the right’, it is downright obscene. Religious learning results in convictions about land occupation that has resulted in millions spending their entire lives in refugee camps.

Christian education – Christ and conviction 

It may now be possible to become President of the USA if you’re black, brown, yellow or a woman. But if you don’t believe in God, or more particularly, you’re not a Christian – forget it. It will be interesting to observe whether Obama dares to avoid using explicitly Christian language in his inauguration speech.

Fundamentalist Christian education is on the rise and it’s squeezing into our schools through anti-evolution, homophobic, anti stem-cell research, pro-life stances that take us backwards not forwards. We’ve had a Bush presidency that has been arguably the worst in US history, sure of their religious supremacy to the level of waging war on those who don’t. Its disdain for international law, the legitimisation of torture and hostility towards the United Nations, was, in part, driven by fundamentalist religious believers.

American has recently been, in many ways, a theocracy. American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips warned in 2006 of Bush’s preacher-ridden, debt-bloated regime, if left unchecked, would become untenable. Boy did he get than one right! At the core of the Bush regime is militant religion, a growing fundamentalist and evangelical movement that has waged a ‘thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam’. Its megachurches, televangelism and the fact that 1 in 4 Americans is affiliated with a conservative Protestant church.

Things are a little different in the more secular Europe, but in the UK, and in Northern Ireland and Scotland, the existence of segregated schools continues to generate antagonistic values that have led to decades of murders and bombings. Then there was the horrors of the Balkans.

NOT Islamophobia, Anti-semitism or Anti-Christian 

This is not an exercise in Islamophobia, anti-semitism or anti-Christian. In fact the most extreme forms of these phenomena come from each of the sets of three fundamentalists attacking each other, not secular groups. I have spend more time travelling in Islamic countries and love the art, architecture, cultures and people. What I don’t admire is the crippling effect of fundamentalist education. At its worst they kill school teachers and deny girls and women the basic right to education, but even at the moderate level it seems to deaden real inquiry and critical thinking. The fundamentalists may win because they understand that education is the key to long-term success. This is the clear strategy of the smarter political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas. They, in turn, are reacting to the hideous beliefs of Jewish settlers who stole their land and confine them to fenced in camps. I have also been to Israel and witnessed the brutality of an occupying force towards people in Gaza and the West bank, people who did little more than resist when the land they had occupied for centuries was stolen. Fundamentalist Judaism is frighteningly racist. My experience in the US is perhaps greater than that of the other two. I studied at a US Ivy League university, worked there and have travelled there more times than I can remember, over a period of thirty years. The televangelism, megachurches and obsessions with homophobia, abortion and creationism, still shock me. US fundamentalists funded and supported Bush in his maniacal support of Israel and firestorms in the Middle East. Let’s hope that Obama keeps his ambiguous religious beliefs out of politics. 

To conclude..... 

Any school or teacher who professes belief in the literal truth ofreligious texts, revealed through divine revelation, is in my view, a danger. I believe in secular education and don’t like religious schools in any guise. I was brought up in a highly divided society in Scotland, where segregated schools are still the norm, much to Scotland’s shame. Watching today's events in Gaza is even more depressing and the US abstaining on the UN resolution, perhaps the last evil last gasp from Bush's cronies a matter of deep shame. Keep education secular.

Head, Hand and Heart by David Goodhart

My favourite Tweet of this plague year?

“There was never any lockdown. There was just middle-class people hiding, while working-class people brought them things.” 

It hit a Covid nerve because the people doing all the heavy lifting were the low-paid carers, nurses, supermarket staff, cooks, bin-collectors, bus and delivery drivers. Goodhart has written an unusual book, that should be read by all educators, at all levels – schools, colleges, Universities and workplaces - that exposes the straight-up hypocrisy behind an economic system that rewards knowledge workers at the expense of all others. Educational stratification has not created a better world, it has divided us and rewarded people unfairly. Inequalities have stretched societies to breaking point.

His is a plea for something I’ve fought for all my life, the rebalancing of society, economics and rewards away from the Head (cognitive work) towards the Hand (making and manual work) and Heart (health and care work). We have reached what he calls 'Peak Head' (which shouts out for metaphorical use!), the focus on funnelling everyone towards University degrees on a single route towards a single, cognitive elite. Many of the innovations in our past, such as the spinning jenny and steam engine were not driven by the University system. Entire economies in the east, China, South Korea and Taiwan, were built, not on a University system (they came later) but by a more rounded approach to development. 

It is not as if this elite has served us well. We saw their disastrous foray into Iraq, the financial crisis that nearly ruined us all, Brexit, Trump – we’re witnessing the fall-out. The danger he sees, is that this elite will suffer badly when technology replaces their work, quicker than it may replace the refuse collector or child-carer. What he recommends is policy built around the Heart, Hand and Head triumvirate.

Our educational system is hopelessly lop-sided towards the University sector. I spent years as an unpaid Director in The University for Industry trying to deliver basic skills, set up a £55 million charity for vocational learning, was a Trustee of City & Guilds, sponsored a youth football team and have always felt an affinity towards the talent that is squandered through straight snobbery and self-interest. It’s one of the reasons I voted for Brexit.

Goodhart explains how this hideous hostage taking of society, property and money has evolved and backs up arguments by Caplan in education, that too much money is completely wasted on signalling in Universities and that alternatives have to be found, even just on the basis of avoiding social unrest. Trump, Brexit, the gilets jaunes; all show that there is deep dissatisfaction among people who did not go to ‘Uni’. This deification of HE has been at the expense of the majority who do not go there. In my travels around campuses, here and abroad, you don’t have to walk far to find homeless people sleeping in the doorways of student accommodation. 

As we emerge from Covid, at last we have a book that has some ideas about the future. I don’t agree with everything he says, and would be much more radical, demanding blended learning and blended working as the default. But he’s pretty much on message for me. Note that this is not a page turner. It’s well written but analytic.

His The Road to Somewhere was a precursor to this book and one of the few books that actually explained why Brexit happened, naming the University system as one of the problems. This second book asks us a much more serious question. What are we going to do when Covid is over? Back to school with the same old satchels? Back to slabbing out lectures in exchange for crippling debt? Back to inhuman commutes and boxy offices? Back to flying here there and everywhere? Or a better sense of the common good?

He contrasts the centrifugal forces of hyper-globalisation stretched supply chains and the free movement of goods and capital, with a more centripedal set of ideas around the local, social stability and solidarity.

We seem to have lost the ability to create our future differently and fairly. It’s all groundhog day nostalgia for a past that was now clearly dysfunctional. Head, Heart and Hand – remember those three words when you put your bins out, buy something in a shop, order a takeaway and go out into the world, especially when you vote. I know, it's all a bit polemical but in serious times, you need to do some serious reading. 

Page & Brin – Google search… G Suite and many other tools for teaching and learning…

Larry Page and Sergei Brin met at Stanford, in 1995, yet their business, Google, has become one of the most significant global businesses of our times. Their search engine has transformed the way we search for information and has changed our very relationship with knowledge, making it a significant contribution to learning. As the world’s most successful search engine it has become an indispensable tool for learning and research.

Education

Brin was born in Russia and educated in the US, Page is from Michigan.

Like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them, they both attended Montessori schools. Indeed, they both credit their Montessori education for much of their success. It was the Montessori experience, they claim, that made them self-directed, allowing them to think for themselves and pursue their real interests.

Google Search and learning

Their mathematical approach to search problems at Stanford led to a search engine that ranked sites by popularity. Their scalable model looked at links, so the larger the web became the better their engine became. Famously based on a spelling error (Google should have been Googol), Google's mission is to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Specialist searching of text, images, video, books, academic papers, Universities, news, maps and prices, have given the ordinary user unparalleled access to knowledge stored in different media. It is the speed and efficiency of such search that has accelerated our ability as learners to identify relevant knowledge. Learners of all ages and abilities see the web as a useful source of knowledge. Researchers, from schoolchildren with projects to advanced researchers in educational institutions, often find Google an indispensable tool.

Google Scholar is a free, search service for scholarly literature. It contains most academic journals, books and other academic literature. Search is weighted towards citations and the ability to choose a citation format is a strong feature. Other search for images, news and so on have also been useful in education.

Google tools in Education

G Suite is a cloud-based set of educational tools, launched in 2006. It includes Gmail (email), Hangouts (comms and collaboration), Calendar, Drive (storage), Docs, Sheets, Forms and other tools for shared resources and collaboration. As ac loud-based solution your data is stored securely and backed up effortlessly. Tens of millions use the service in education. Blogger provides free blogging software to tens of millions of bloggers and there is a large community of education and training bloggers. This has proved useful in, for example, CPD (Continuous Professional Development).Google Books, Google Earth, Google Translate and Google Assistant are just some of the free services that have also contributed to education.

Google and digitisation

Google’s work to digitise the contents of some of the world’s great libraries is also contributing to the storage and dissemination of knowledge. The aim is to make the contents of books (text and images) searchable and available, while being sensitive to the ‘in and out of print’ issues along with the ‘copyright and public domain’ restrictions. They are looking at millions of books available over and above the existing Google Books program with publishers. This takes Google beyond searching to the creation of online resources for searching.

Criticism

Google’s presence in schools has been seen as a way of getting their brand into the heads of younger people, for future exploitation. There is also the issue of tax avoidance where, by not paying fair amounts of tax in many countries, notably the notorious “double Irish” loophole to avoid paying tax in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, has come under fire. A similar arrangement exists in Singapore for the Far East. Thomas Picketty has described this literally as the ‘theft’ by one country from many others.

Influence

Page and Brin have created a toolset that has already revolutionised access to knowledge. Their organisation continues to revolutionise learning and to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. The scale of this task is enormous and on-going. Few organisations now have the tools and financial muscle to make it possible. It is truly an example of technology making a huge impact on the efficacy of learning.

Mohammed (570AD –632AD) - Recitation

It is claimed that Mohammed was illiterate and the Koran literally the word of God, transcribed by others from his revelations. Mohammed is therefore a prophet and teacher but in reality a mouthpiece for the absolute message of God.

Koran and education

In Islam, books, especially the Koran, are held in the highest regard and mosques functioned as repositories of books. One even had to wash before touching the Koran. This reverence for the ‘book’, especially the Koran, is paramount. Indeed it was almost immediately made into a ‘codex’ (book form), as they had acquired paper technology from captured Chinese sailors in 751AD.

The dominant role this one book, of similar length to the Christian Gospels, on education in the Muslim world cannot be underestimated. For five centuries after its emergence in the 7^th century, the so called ‘Golden Age’ of Arabic culture, flourished in centres of learning in Damascus, Bagdad and Cairo. Their libraries collected and distributed Greek and Roman classical texts and made advances in mathematics, science, philosophy and law.

Recite and repeat

Prayer is one of the five pillars of Islam, recommended five times a day, so the repetition of recitation, known to be effective for embedding knowledge in long term memory, becomes an ingrained habit, as does listening attentively, especially at Friday prayers and also through the attentive reading of the Koran. Koran means ‘to recite’ and the text was originally meant to be read aloud. It has been argued that this has led to a dependence on rote learning. Some argue that this focus on recitation and repetition tends to infect studies across all subjects and education in the Islamic world has been criticised for its dependence on simple recitation at the expense of critical analysis.

Memorisation

Islam literally means ‘submission’ and it has been argued that this also affects the way learners and teachers approach education. In Sura 75:15–18 attentive reading is specifically mentioned and, in particular, memorisation of the Koran, an act which has been admired for centuries in the Muslim world. Those who manage to learn the entire Koran are greatly respected. With traditional paternalism, authority of the state and dominance of religion, some argue, comes a lack of questioning, passive learners and didactic teaching. Obedience and compliance, not unusual in other educational systems, arguably can be much more embedded in Islamic countries. The time spent on religious studies also squeezes out time available for other subjects. This may be another reason for the low levels of original research and patents in countries where Islamic education is dominant.

Koran and writing

With a foucus on reading came writing. Writing, not only through the Koran, but in other expository texts, is a strong feature of Islamic education. Sura 96 urges believers to ‘recite’ but also explains that God taught man through the ‘pen’, namely writing. Writing, especially calligraphy is regarded as a high art form, as it is in the Far East, but never was in in the West.  The double-edged sword is that the power of the pen is seen as the power of God’s absolute religious knowledge, not the freedom to write critically. Indeed, writing, even drawing, has led to death threats ‘fatwas’, on novelists and cartoonists. Islam, like Christianity, has supported the extremes of rigorous scholarship and education but also bans on education, especially for women. Such are the advantages and disadvantages of religion in general, in education.

Places of education

The madrasa goes back to the time of Mohammed, who was a teacher and had followers and students. These provided education on a scale at all levels for centuries. Places of higher learning, with teaching, libraries, even observatories, appeared as early as the 9^th century and some argue that these were the proto-Universities we saw emerge in Europe. They certainly provided a depth of learning and a reverence for books from the ancient world. Many that survived and helped create the Renaissance (rebirth) owe their existence in the modern world to these Islamic institutions.

Influence

For all its educational qualities, the focus on one book, its absolute truth and primitive recitation, repletion and memorization, often seem like primitive pedagogies, leaving little room for active and critical thought. Islam, like the extremes of Christianity and Judaism, can be seen as a return to an absolute form of belief, where young minds are locked down before they have had a chance to reflect or choose. This is an anathema to secularists who believe that education should open young minds not close them down. On the other hand, let us not forget that the Islamic world encouraged learning, scholarship and intellectual endeavour, gifting the world those texts of the Classical world we now so admire.

Bibliography

DawoodJ.  (Transl. 1956, revised 2000) The Koran Penguin Classics

Lyons M (2011) The Book Thames & Hudson

Hitti P.K. (1936) History of the Arabs MacMillan

Whitaker B (2009) What’s Wrong with the Middle East

Drones - why they really do matter....

Drones are an underestimated technology. As they whizz about, quietly revolutionising film making, photography, archaeology, agriculture, surveying, project management, wildlife conservation, the delivery of goods, food, post, even medicines and into disaster zones, we will be seeing a lot more of them.

This year I've been in Kigali, Rwanda chairing an event an E-learning Africa on drones, as their use in Africa clearly benefits from the ‘leapfrog’ phenomenon – the idea that technology sometimes gains from being deployed where there is little or no existing service or technology. Rwanda and other African countries are already experimenting with drones in everything from agriculture to medical supply delivery. I also spoke at the Battle of Ideas on drones in November.
Like any technology they are a force for good but also have a downside. Like cars, we all drive them, but 1.3 million people die gory deaths every year in car crashes and that figure doesn't include the injured. Almost all tech has a downside.
So it is with drones. They saves lives in Rwanda by delivering blood but are used to kill in the Middle East and disrupt entire airports for days, as in Gatwick.

Drones and AI

What makes them  interesting is the intelligence they now embody. First their manoeuvrability. My friend is a helicopter pilot and he rightly describes a helicopter as a complex set of moving parts, every one of which wants to kill you. A drone, however, has sophisticated algorithms that maintain stability, can set it off on a mission and return it back to the spot it left from at the press of a button.  But it is the autonomy of drones that is really interesting. Navigation and movement are being aided by image recognition of the ground and other objects, to avoid collision. Even foldable, consumer drones now have anti-collision sensors on all sides, zoom lenses. They are the self-driving cars of the air. 

MIT is even using VR environments to allow drones to learn to fly without expensive crashes. They literally fly in an empty room filled with VR created obstacles and landscapes. Drones can not only learn to fly using AI, it can use AI in many other tasks. It can take different forms of AI into the sky – image recognition, route calculation. (Think about this for a moment. Drones can fly autonomously. This makes them incredibly dangerous, when used by people who want to cause chaos or do harm.)

Drone abuse

Image recognition also enables surveillance. A $200 drone can hover, shoot video of a crowd and use AI to identify potential and actual violent poses, such as strangling, punching, kicking, shooting, and stabbing. These are early systems but their use and abuse by police-forces and/or authoritarian regimes is a cause for worry.

Google recently gave into pressure from its own employees not to use its AI (Tensorflow) in Project Maven – image recognition from military drones. And let’s not forget that drone industry is, at present, largely part of the military industrial complex. The IBOT (Internet Battle of Things) is a thing. The military are already envisaging battles between autonomous battle objects – drones and other autonomous vehicles and robot soldiers.

On the delivery side, drones are also a pretty effective drug mules into prisons. This has become a real problem, turning jails into markets for drugs, where the prices are x10 higher. And for a truly petrifying view of payloads drones in warfare, watch Slaughterbots. With use comes abuse.

In developed world?
First, it is doubtful that drones will be used to deliver anything in complex, urban environments.  It is certain that flying taxi drones will not take off. On drone taxis, as Elon Musk says, we already have them, they're called helicopters. You need a big beast of a drone to carry people and the physics of this means lots (and I mean lots) of noise - that's why they're a non-starter. The social acceptance problem is huge. However, for specific line of sight uses by firefighters, police and so on the uses are clear.
Drones are not integrated into the airspace and that airspace is getting pretty full in the developed world. Pizzas and Amazon books are not going to be delivered to your home any time soon. There is safety, regulatory and social issues to overcome. Technology is always ahead of sociology and regulations. In the case of drones the lag is enormous.
Technically drones can deliver things safely and never collide. However, the potential for problems is through the roof. They are limited to 'close to pilot' uses. Think of them as flying mobile phones, as they use much the same tech. They have not come from the world of aviation. In terms of regulation, we still see drones over crowd (illegal) and close to roads (illegal).
So what about irresponsible pilots? Those with ill-intent can interfere with drones, not only blocking signals but even falling them into thinking they're somewhere else. The potential for interrupting normal business is huge as it the potential for delivering harmful payloads - think Scripal, think dirty bombs.... We may have spent £100 billion on Trident but our air traffic can be brought to a standstill by the mere presence of a £200 drone.
One solution is to demand that drones have internal intelligence that keeps them safe - that they cannot go near airports/planes,  crash into crowds (find safe place if fault) and so on. Sound good but this is not easy. Drones, like your car, or aircraft, uses GPS. That's fine when there's a driver or pilot but in a drone it doesn't work. GPS can be jammed, and drones even told that they're somewhere else. You can build one for tens of dollars from YouTube videos.
Of course, what many don't realise is that almost all commercial airliners are, in effect drones. They fly and land autonomously with the pilots doing mostly monitoring. There may be a future of autonomous drones, but it's way off without failsafes.
In the developing world? 

There two main uses of drones:

1. Imaging

2. Delivery

Although some other niche uses are being developed, such as delivery of internet access and window cleaning, the main uses are as an eye in the sky or dropping stuff off.

Action shots of skiing, surfing, mountain biking, climbing and many sports has changed the whole way we see the events. So common are drone shots, that we barely notice the bird’s eye view. Action shots that used to require expensive helicopters are now much easier and you can do things with drones that no one would have dared do in a helicopter. Even for ground action shots, a drone can add speed and sensation. In an interesting turn of events, Game of Thrones producers have had the problem of too many drones. In addition to their own drones for shots, they’ve had to content with snooper drones trying to get previews. But let’s turn to real life…

Already used in crop spraying, there are other obvious applications in imaging to show irrigation, soil, crop yield, pest infestations. Drone imaging can see things on scale, which the normal eye cannot see, with it spectral range. This should help to increase yields and efficiency. The Global Market for agricultural drones is expected, in one report, to reach $3.69 billion by 2022.

Animals close to extinction in areas too large to keep them safe from poachers. Drones are being used to track and look out for these animals. Tourist companies are using drone footage to encourage Safari holidays. In general, environmental care is being helped by being able to track what is happening through cheap drone tech.

Large building projects or mines are being managed with the help of drones that can help survey, plan, then track vehicles, actual progress and build. It’s like having a project management overview of the whole site whenever it is needed with accurate realtime data. When built, drones are also being used to inspect roofs and even sell properties.

Collision tolerant drones are being used, not in the open air, but in confined spaces, such as tunnels, to inspect plant and pipes. They are small enough to get to places that are too tight or dangerous for humans.

Delivery drones

Amazon, Google, DHL, FedX and dozens of other retailers have been experimenting with drone delivery. All sorts of issues have to be overcome for drone delivery to become feasible, including: reliability, safety, security, theft, cost, training, laws and regulations. But there seems to be an inevitability about this, especially if they become cheap and reliable. That reliability depends very much on AI in terms of flight, locations and actual delivery.

In healthcare, medicines, vaccines, blood, samplescan all be delivered by drone. Defribrillators with live feeds telling individuals nearby how to operate them have been prototypes in the Netherlands and the US. A company in the US has already delivered FAA approved water, food and first aid kit in Nevada. Switzerland are creating a drone network for medical delivery and

Zipline, in Rwanda, have partnered with the government to deliver blood and other medical supplies to 21 facilities. The benefits in term of speed, cost, accurate delivery and saving lives is enormous. Sudden, unexpected disasters need fast, location specific drop-offs of medical supplies, food and water.

The delivery of ordered items is already being trialled with pizzas, books and everything else that is relatively small, light and can be dropped off at a specific location. The Burrito Bomber, Tacocopter and Domicopter deliver fast food. IBM even have a patent for delivering coffee by drone.

Delivering the post by drone makes sense and trials have been done in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore and Ukraine. Again speed, reliability and cost are the appealing factors.

Conclusion

Tech can be used and abused. Drones are the perfect example, already killing machines, they also have the potential to save lives. The good news, is that in Africa, the attention is on the latter. In the developing world, safety, social and regulatory environments mean that little is possible commercially.

Janesville - a town that explains Trump and also why you shouldn't judge or blame people for being poor

Want to know why working America is pissed and rolling with Trump? Read this book. Told with compassion but realism, through the lives of real people in a real town.

Here's a town that implodes when the car plant closes down and 9000 people lose their jobs. GM was a mess – incompetent management, old models, a company that failed to innovate. As if that wasn’t enough Janesville is hit with Biblical levels of rain (climate change?). Journalism at its best, by a Poulitzer-winning writer, Amy Goldstein, written from the perspective of the people affected. 

For over 100 years they had produced tractors, pick-ups, trucks, artillery shells and cars. Obama came and went, the financial crisis hammered them deeper into the dirt but while the banks were bailed by the state, the state bailed on the people. On top of this a second large, local employer, Parker Pens, outsourced to Mexico but the market for upmarket pens was also dying. The ignominy of being asked to extend your wages by a few weeks to go down to Mexico to train their cheaper labour was downright evil.

Then the adjunct businesses started to fail, the suppliers, trades, shops, restaurants, nurseries – then the mortgage and rent arrears, foreclosures, house prices fall and negative equity. As middle-class jobs disappear, they push down on working class jobs and the poor get even poorer.

“Family is more important than GM” this is the line that resonated most with me in the book. In this age of identity politics, most people still see a stable family and their community as their backstops. The left and right have lost focus on this. The community didn’t lie down – they fought for grants, did lots themselves to raise money, help each other – but it was not enough. Grants for retraining were badly targeted, training people for reinvention is difficult with monolithic, manufacturing workforces. Some of it was clearly hopeless, like discredited Learning Style diagnosis, overlong courses of limited relevance to the workplace or practice. Problems included the fact that many couldn’t use computers, so there was huge drop out, more debts and little in the way of workplace learning. Those that did full degrees found that what few jobs there were had been snapped up while they were in college – their wages dropped the most, by nearly half. One thing did surprise me, a curious offshoot that was anti-teacher hostility. People felt let down by a system that doesn’t really seem to work and saw teachers as having great holidays, pensions and healthcare, while they were thrown out of work. Teachers and trainers were perceived as benefitting from their misfortune. The whole separation of educational institutions from workplaces seems odd.

Jobs didn’t materialise. What jobs there were, existed in the public sector – in welfare charities and jails. A start-up provided few jobs, many commuted huge distances to distant factories. Even for those in work, there was a massive squeeze on wages, in some cases a 50% cut, sometimes more. In the end jobs came back but real wages fell. Healthcare starts to become a stretch. But it is the shame of poverty, using food banks, homeless teenagers and a real-life tragedy that unfolds that really shocks you.

The book ends with the divide between the winners and losers. This is the divide that has shattered America. Janesville is the bit of America tourists, along with East and West coast liberals, don’t see. The precariat are good people who are having bad things done to them by a system that shoves money upwards into the pockets of the rich. Looked down upon by Liberals, they are losing faith in politics, employers, the media, even education.

Wisconsin turned Republican and Trump was elected. The economist Mark Blyth attributes the Trump win to their wages squeeze and fall in expectations, even hope. People got a whole lot poorer and don’t see a great future for their kids.

A more relevant piece of work than Hillbilly Elegy, with which it is being compared. Final thought –why are journalists in the UK not doing this? Answer – they’re bubble-wrapped in their cozy London lairs, part of the problem and too lazy to get out and do their jobs… writing the same stories about why they don’t like social media, failing to see that they are the purveyors, not so much of fake new but inauthentic news, irrelevant news, news reduced to reporting on shadows within their own epistemological cave…

Philosophy of technology - Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger - technology is not a black box

Greek dystopia

The Greeks understood, profoundly, the philosophy of technology. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, when Zeus hands Prometheus the power of metallurgy, writing and mathematics, Prometheus gifts it to man, so Zeus punishes him, with eternal torture. This warning is the first dystopian view of technology in Western culture. Mary Shelley called Frankenstein ‘A Modern Prometheus’ and Hollywood has delivered for a nearly a century on that dystopian vision. Art has largely been wary and critical of technology.

God as maker

But there is another more considered view of technology in ancient Greece. Plato articulated the philosophy of technology, seeing the world, in his Timaeus, as the work of an ‘Artisan’, in other words the universe is a created entity, a technology. Aristotle makes the brilliant observation in his Physics, that technology not only mimics nature but continues “what nature cannot bring to a finish”. They set in train an idea that the universe was made and that there was a maker, the universe as a technological creation.

The following two thousand year history of Western culture bought into the myth of the universe as a piece of created technology. Paley, who formulated the modern argument for the existence of God from design, used technological imagery, the watch, to specify and prove the existence of a designed universe and therefore a designer - we call (him) God. In Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, he uses an argument from analogy to compare the workings of a watch with the observed movements of the planets in the solar system to conclude that it shows signs of design and that there must be a designer. Dawkins titled his book The Blind Watchmaker as its counterpoint. God as watchmaker, technologist, has been the dominant, popular, philosophical belief for two millennia. 

Technology, in this sense, helped generate this metaphysical deity. It is this binary separation of the subject from the object that allows us to create new realms, heaven and earth, which gets a moral patina and becomes good and evil, heaven and hell. The machinations of the pastoral heaven and fiery foundry that is hell  revealed the dystopian vision of the Greeks.

Technology is the manifestation of human conceptualization and action, as it creates objects that enhance human powers, first physical then psychological. With the first hand-held axes, we turned natural materials to our own ends. With such tools we could hunt, expand and thrive, then control the energy from felled trees to create metals and forge even more powerful tools. Tools beget tools.

Monotheism rose on the back of cultures in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, who literally lived on the fruits of their tool-aided labour. The spade, the plough and the scythe gave them time to reflect. Interestingly our first records, on that beautifully permanent piece of technology, the clay tablet, are largely the accounts of agricultural produce. The rise of writing and efficient alphabets make writing the technology of control. We are at heart accountants, holding everything to account, even our sins. The great religious books of accounts were the first global best sellers.

Technology slew God

Technology may have suggested, then created God, but in the end it slew him. With Copernicus, who drew upon technology-generated data, we found ourselves at some distance from the centre of the Universe, not even at the centre of our own little whirl of planets. Darwin then destroyed the last conceit, that we were unique and created in the eyes of a God. We were the product of the blind watchmaker, a mechanical, double-helix process, not a maker, reduced to mere accidents of genetic generation, the sons not of Gods but genetic mistakes.

Anchors lost, we were adrift, but we humans are a cunning species. We not only make things up, we make things and make things happen.

We are makers

Once God was dead, in the Nietzschean sense of a conceptual death, we were left with just technology. Radovan Richta’s theory of Technological Evolution posited three stages – tools, machines and automation. We got our solace not from being created forms but by creating forms ourselves. We became little Gods and began to create our own universe. We abandoned the fields for factories and designed machines that could do the work of many men. What we learned was scale. We scaled agricultural production through technology in the agricultural revolution, scaled factory production in the industrial revolution, scaled mass production in the consumer revolution. Then more machines to take us to far-off places – the seaside, another country, the moon. We now scale the very thing that created this technology, ourselves. We alchemists have learned to scale our own brains.

Maker destroy the Little Gods

Eventually we realized that even we, as creators, could make machines that could know and think on our behalf. God had died but now the Little Gods are dying. Gods have a habit of destroying their creators and we will return to that agricultural age, an age of an abundance of time and the death of distance. We, once more, will have to reflect on the folly of work and learn to accept that was never our fate, only an aberration. Technology now literally shapes our conception of place and space. With film, radio, TV and the web. As spiders we got entangled in our own web and it now begins to spin us.

Technology not a black box

Technology is not a ‘black box’, something separate from us. It has shaped our evolution, shaped our progress, shaped out thinking - it will shape our future. It may even be an existential threat. There is a complex dialectic between our species and technology that is far more multifaceted than the simplistic ‘it’s about people not technology’ trope one constantly hears on the subject. That dialectic has suddenly got a lot more complex with AI. As Martin Heidegger said in his famous Spiegel interview, “Only a God can save us”. What I think he meant by this was that technology has become something greater than us, something we now find difficult to even see, as its hand has become ever more invisible. It is vital that we reflect on technology, not as a ‘thing-in-itself’, separate from us, but as part of us. Now that we know there may be no maker God, no omnipotent technologist, we have to face up to our own future as makers. For that we need to turn to philosophy – Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger are a good start….
The postscrip is that AI may, in the end, be the way forward even in philosophy. In the same way that the brain has limits on its ability to play chess or GO, it may also have limits on the application of reason and logic. Philosophical problems themseleves may need the power of AI to find solutions to these intractable problems. AI may be the God that saves us....

What does Brexit mean for EdTech?

I know of four successful EdTech entrepreneurs who voted for Brexit. Surprised? Maybe not! I was one of them. Steve Rayson, another, made the point that people in this position like to do detailed analysis, weigh up the risks and make their choice. We were not swayed by Boris and co, and tended to see this as a long-term play, not a proxy general Election. Steve's point was that we are not scared of risk. We rehearsed the arguments openly, online, over several months and made up our minds. For all of us, I suspect, it was marginal. There was also some reflection around what it means for our sector.

The Brexit vote has produced lots of angst around business. Die-hard anti-capitalists have suddenly found a new interest in the stock market and currency trading. They worry about tariffs and trade deals. But for those of us who have been travelling and trading abroad for many years, it’s not such a great problem.

1. Addressable markets

EdTech companies tend to look towards the English speaking market – the US, Australia etc, for the obvious reason that we speak the same language. The EU market is linguistically diverse, compared to the largest, single EdTech market in the world, the US. This is why investment money tends to look for UK companies with a US angle. Content, technology and services are always easier to deliver in one language. Indeed, if one were to look for new, hgh growth markets, it’s not Europe but the US, Middle and Far East that you would turn. So in terms of growth, it’s business as usual.

2. M&A

Most of the M&A business is not investments from Europe or in European entities but in the US, Australia and elsewhere. Similarly, a lot of investment is to and from the US. This has been true for decades and is unlikely to be much affected by Brexit. Every single deal I've been involved in over the last ten years has had nothing to do with Europe.

3. Services

There are no tariffs on services, so it will not make much difference. At present, few in EdTech experience any real differences between selling to EU and other countries. If anything, Ireland, which is in the EU, is the most difficult, as they subtract tax at source, which has to be reclaimed, with some difficulty. So no difference here.

4. Education is devolved

Education is a devolved responsibility in Europe. Pan-European attempts at integration and sharing, Bologna and many others, failed, as countries are, in reality, fiercely independent in education, with funding regimes that encourage institutions not to share students and qualifications. Being in or out, therefore, makes little or no difference.

5. Research

Little has emerged in EdTech from EU research funding. Many business people who have been involved in such projects complain about their bureaucratic and stifling nature and lack of impact. As they have had no significant impact, despite vast sums of money being spent, I don’t see this as something to worry about. Indeed, the country saves large sums if wasted research cash, rather than being spent on diffuse, collaborative, CityBreak research projects, get spent on closer working relationships between researchers and our own UK-based EdTech companies. The EdTech sector in the UK has not grown on the back of University research, it has grown through the efforts of investors, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

6. Outsourcing

Few outsource from the UK to EU countries, as Indian or other countries are cheaper, and often have higher level skills. Even if one does outsource to Eastern Europe, things are unlikely to change.

7. Data regulation

Benedict Evans thinks that the EU is moving towards heavyweight regulation around data (and AI) that will stifle technology company growth, leading to inaction by buyers. The UK has pushed back against this but have been outvoted Post-Brexit, the EU may get worse, while the UK remains relatively light in such over-bearing restrictions. Being out may be an advantage.

8. OER

Wikipedia, Duolingo, Khan Academy, MOOCs, and most successful OER projects, are largely international phenomena, not EU specific. Indeed, despite the huge spend in the EU, the most successful examples of OER seem to come from the US. One wonders whether the steady flow of annual grants has simply stifled innovation. I suspect so.

9. Currency

This is a swings and roundabouts issue. A weak pound makes things difficult if you’re buying from abroad but also makes you cheaper and more competitive to those abroad. As our EdTech industry is a net exporter, this is fine.

10. Education

I covered this in another post but some analysis of the effects of Brexit on the education market as a whole, shows no real, significant change. When it comes to the ededucaytion market, the effects are insignificant.

Conclusion

So not much change then. If anything, a few advantages. One clear advantage for me, is that we’ll rely less on the crutches of EU grants and focus on real businesses and projects that effect real change in terms of better efficiency and outcomes in the EdTech sector. We have the largest and most successful EdTech market in Europe, it is more likely to grow as a result of this vote.