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Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Being bitten is not so painful. Can’t say the same for the treatment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on December 3, 2025| 3 Comments »

I owe regular readers a word of explanation for the recent silence in this space. I was bitten by a dog.

This is not, in the great scheme of things, a big deal. People are being starved in Gaza, massacred in Sudan, arrested in Hong Kong. My problem was minor. But it wasn’t minor for me.

In the first place, for a while I could not type. In fact I had for a week a taste of what my father (his right side paralysed by a stroke) had to put up with for two decades. The hand I usually do things with was not available (I am left-handed) and the other one turned out to be incompetent. Even eating was an embarrassment.

The actual experience of being bitten – small teeth sinking into my hand – was not that traumatic. As a promiscuous petter of other people’s dogs I have always known that something like this was possible. The person walking the dog, who was not the owner and had not been warned about his charge’s homicidal propensities, was more upset than I was.

The treatment is another matter. My local GP sent me to the Chinese U hospital, which for some obscure reason they prefer to call the Chinese University Medical Centre. It has an Emergency Medicine Department. Is there something behind this preference for different labels? Do they not want accidents?

Anyway the standard treatment for dog bites these days involves keeping the wound open for a week or two until any chance of infection can be excluded. I do not dispute the medical justification for this, and indeed it has worked as intended. But if you judge the efficacy of a medical procedure by the amount of pain involved then this one really gives you your money’s worth.

Every day I was wheeled into the ominously numbered Room 13, where a nurse (you only get a doctor for the needlework) would squirt disinfectant into my holes, wipe them with the surgical version of those sticks with a cotton bud on the end which people stick in their ears, and stuff them with lint, which would be pulled out at the beginning of the next day’s session and examined for evidence of corruption.

The nurses were all skillful professionals who were kind, careful and as gentle as the circumstances permitted. They were all women young enough to be my grand-daughters. So etiquette, at least for males of my vintage, demanded that a stoical indifference to pain should be deployed, or at least simulated.

Post-operative recovery was aided by a fun fact about the CUMC: it has a super coffee bar. If you’re down that way it’s “worth a detour”, as the Michelin people used to say.

Long-term consequences? My left hand is now fully functional, though it still has some interesting scars. I have noticed that at some sub-conscious level I no longer feel so confident around dogs. Some furry friend I have been fondling for months will come bouncing up and my hand twitches a bit, and avoids his mouth. This may pass, I hope.

It would be unfair to blame a whole breed for the actions of one individual but I am avoiding him and his relatives anyway. I am confirmed in my suspicion that pedigree dogs, like thoroughbred racehorses and Hapsburg emperors, are often inbred and consequently may land on the mental health scale somewhere between “highly strung” and “barking mad”.

Adopt an interesting local mixture from one of Hong Kong’s many dog rescue organisations and you will not get an entry in the canine Almanach de Gotha, but you will also not finish up with a psychopooch.

Happily I am still on cuddling terms with the lovely Lemon:

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Education and Chat GPT: time for a return to the bad old days?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 26, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Happily I retired from the university teaching scene before Chat GPT and his mates came along, because it has apparently made life rather difficult.

Generally the most subtle assessment method, at least in the humanities, is the essay. You set the topic, send the student away, and assess the resulting masterpiece a week later.

People in other necks of the woods have other choices, of course. Mathematicians can be asked to tackle a problem on the spot. Subjects which consist primarily of absorbing a lot of memorable material can be tested with multiple-choice questions, which have the additional advantage that they can be graded by a computer.

The most picturesque assessment method was applied to trainee aircraft engineers. The class assembled at 9 am and each member was presented with a small engine. At 1 pm the examiner returned, by which time the engine had to be dismantled entirely into its component parts. The class then had lunch, then reassembled to reassemble their engines.

At 5 pm the examiner returned and tried to start each engine. If it started first time you had passed, and if not…

But I digress. The problem with setting essays now is that you do not know if the result was partly, or indeed wholly, written by artificial intelligence. This has in turn produced a lot of interest in detection, which is sometimes possible. The person who told me about this problem recalled a case in which the essay included the word “albeit”.

This is not the sort of word which comes up often in sociable chat so the writer was asked what it meant… and could not answer.

Clearly though there is going to be an ongoing arms race here between AI users and programmers, trying to produce ever more convincing forgeries, and teachers and other detectives looking for ways to spot traces of computer composition.

The answer, I fear, is going to be a return to the primitive practices of the past.

When I took my first degree, half a century ago, there was no continuous assessment, multiple choice was regarded as simplistic, and computers were monstrous machines which had to be fed punched cards.

We wrote essays at least once a week and these had to be submitted and discussed, but they were not part of the assessment. There was also a small examination each term intended to reassure your personal academic adviser that you were still alive and working, but this was not part of the assessment either.

After three years of this regime you encountered an ordeal more like the old Chinese civil service exam (in which candidates were locked up for a week and, according to legend, invited to write down everything they knew) than modern gentle testing methods.

Starting on Wednesday we had three-hour exams each morning and afternoon until Sunday, when you had a day off, a relic of the days when universities were mainly intended to train clergymen. The ordeal resumed on Monday and ended at lunchtime on Tuesday, at which point there was an understandable tendency for the survivors to get resoundingly drunk.

The actual examination was quite Spartan. You were allowed (times had changed) to use a Biro. The paper was white and completely blank. People were agitating for lined paper, to help authors whose writing tended to diverge gradually from the horizontal as they got down the page. This came eventually, but too late to help me.

There was a list of about a dozen questions, of which in your three hours you were expected to attempt four. As the marks available were divided equally between your four answers it was an elementary point of exam technique to get to four somehow.

There were no “open books”, bringing in notes of any kind was cheating, and the examiners were not – with rare exceptions – the people who had taught you. We were not asked our opinions of the teachers, but because the examiners were applying consistent standards, the outcomes of individuals and groups could be compared.

This was a stressful system and I would not recommend copying it in all its details. It favoured glib bullshitters and people who could write quickly. It was a great preparation for journalism, which is perhaps not a recommendation.

But as AI tramples its way across the academic landscape it may be time to rediscover the merits of putting the students in a room with paper, pen, questions and a time limit. At least you know who has written what.

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An economist on education: if it don’t make you rich it’s a waste of time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 17, 2025| 1 Comment »

The newspapers are full, as is customary at this time of the year, of stories about local kids who have done well in the school-leaving exams. It seems that most of the stars of this show want to become doctors, which shows a touching faith in the inability of AI to take over the routine parts of medicine.

For a discordant note readers could turn to The Economist, which printed a long piece lamenting the fact that, as a subsidiary headline put it, “the bottom has fallen out of the graduate job market”.

The primary evidence for this comes from America, where graduates in their 20s have been found in one study to have higher unemployment rates than the general population. Things are apparently moving in a similar direction, but much more slowly, outside America.

Graduates – again from the evidence we are back in the USA – find jobs harder to come by and also less satisfying than they used to. Very good international example from the BBC on Thursday: mainlander with degree from Oxford and PhD from Singapore university is working … as a food delivery driver.

The Economist’s writer dismisses as an unsatisfactory explanation claims that many graduates of American universities are ill-educated and in some cases actually illiterate. These stories may be true, but the brightest and best are also finding employment elusive.

Some formerly entry-level jobs are certainly falling to AI. A more original suggestion is that people used to go to university to achieve digital literacy; now everyone gets it from their smart phone so for many button-pushing jobs a degree looks unnecessary.

The writer concludes that many American students are now deciding that university is not worth it: the time… the debt … the disappointment. This is not happening in Europe where, as our scribe puts it, “”Governments are subsidising useless degrees, encouraging kids to waste time studying.”

What do we mean by “useless degrees”? “Outside America, the share in arts, humanities and social sciences mostly grows. So, inexplicably, does enrolment in journalism courses. If these trends reveal young people’s ideas about the future of work, they truly are in trouble.”

Really? Underlying this lament appears to be the unspoken assumption that the main or only reason for any form of study is to increase your future income. Education of any other kind amounts to “encouraging kids to waste time.”

I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s lament that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” This might usefully be adapted. Economists – and The Economist – know the price of everything and erroneously suppose that the value is the same thing.

“Until recently,” says our author, “the obvious path for a British student hoping to make money was a graduate scheme at a bank.” But making money is only one of the things people hope to find in a job. Some British students would rather shovel sewage for a living than work in a bank and I was once one of them.

Only a Philistine society will limit its educational offerings to subjects with an immediate practical application, or indeed an ironclad promise of future wealth attached to them.

Indeed there are some areas of human activity where the attainment of the highest standards requires that many are tested, most of whom will fail. Training for air traffic controllers is a notorious example. Thousands apply, hundreds are accepted, tens actually complete the course and get into a control tower, some of whom drop out later when they find the work too stressful.

Many of the more demanding military specialities have similar attrition rates. In university programmes this is obscured by the fact that every student who makes a reasonable amount of effort will get the degree. But in general music grads do not become musicians, Eng Lit grads do not become novelists, philosophy grads do not become professional philosophers and the only graduate archaeologist I ever met was teaching in a primary school.

This brings us to the “inexplicable” attraction of journalism courses, which I flogged happily and successfully for nearly three decades. It was a platitude among teachers of journalism that most of our students were not going to be journalists, or if they became journalists would not stay that way.

At one time there was a spirited debate in the journalism education business about whether we should continue to design courses on the basis that the graduate would be able to meet the requirements of the trade (art, craft, science, con trick or disease, whichever you prefer) or we should accept that we were teaching non-journalists and adapt courses accordingly.

Generally we concluded that the practical aspects of a journalism programme were one of the things which students liked, even if they were not going to be practitioners themselves. Most of my students never became journalists. A surprising number (at least to me) became police people. Journalism may be (as Max Hastings puts it) a pursuit for “cads and bounders”, but it still has a whiff of adventure around it that you are not going to get in the Business School. But if you really want to be rich … your choice.

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Why do govt press releases read as if they were written by a computer?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Malcom Gladwell is a great populariser of scientific obscurities, so we now all know that in order to achieve proficiency in almost any worthwhile pursuit you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice. Or alternatively, it now appears, you can outsource the grunt work to a computer and just claim the credit.

This has led to much discussion in the places on the internet where writers gather – that is real writers who produce novels, not mere scribblers like me. The question is how much help can you get from Artificial Intelligence and still regard the resulting output as your work.

Having done my 10,000 hours long ago I have resisted the temptation to dabble in AI-aided composition. But I see there is a tricky question here. If I ask the computer to – say – write an epic poem in the style of Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” on the recent ownership of Chelsea Football Club, and the result is a resounding success, who deserves credit? Clearly the piece has not been written by Dryden. He died in 1700. But it hasn’t been written by me either.

A similar dilemma arises with blame. If you invite ChatGP to write a piece in the style of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” about the recent history of Hong Kong, it is quite possible that a national security judge will consider the resulting work to be subversive. But he can’t jail the software.

These are extreme cases, I suppose. What bothers the writers is the intermediate case in which the author has had some help, and the question is how much is acceptable before the participation of AI has to be acknowledged on the cover.

After all even dinosaurs like me accept some help. I tune out or switch off comments on my grammar or sentence length. But I pause for a moment after writing words with tricky spelling like accommodation, embarrassment, or Philippines, to see if the tell-tale red line appears to indicate that I have missed a double consonant somewhere.

This certainly does not call for specific acknowledgement. We all know the spell-checker jokes. Serious publishers still employ human editors. What about a detailed plot line and story structure, passed to the computer with instructions to flesh it out as a racy romantic potboiler fresh from the desk of Betty Bodiceripper?

And would it then be another new novel if you fed in the same materials but told the computer you wanted a serious exploration in the style of Albert Camus of the dilemmas of the human condition in the 21st century?

The problem for most of us (as opposed to writers) in all this is that it is becoming difficult to read anything published after 2013 without the lingering suspicion that much – or even all – of it is the product of an agile microchip.

This brings me to a particularly interesting literary form, Hong Kong government press releases condemning some outrageous comment made by a politician or newspaper overseas.

Anyone who has wrestled with our government’s efforts to provide services over the internet will happily dismiss the thought that our leaders have developed sufficient digital fluency to outsource the production of these little masterpieces to a computer. It is, though, perhaps a problem that they so often look like the output of an AI programme urged to produce a “Hong Kong government press release rejecting foreign interference in the style of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference in Beijing”.

Anyone who reads all of these things will be unable to suppress the suspicion that the unnamed “spokesman” responsible is getting in a bit of a rut. The language is always the same: “slander and smear” “lies and hypocrisy”, “government will resolutely discharge its duty”, “violation of international law”, “bound to fail”.

You may wonder if we are here in the presence of a standard PR technique, writing a press release by digging out an old one and updating the names. This does not seem to be the case. On the other hand the consistency of the tone, bitter resentment and anger, is very striking. The “spokesman” seems to be making a conscious effort to sound as if he is purple in the face, with steam coming out of his ears.

It may be a problem that in the old colonial days the government spokesman wrote his rebuttals and refutations in English, and they were then translated into Chinese. Now, it appears, they are written in Chinese and then translated into English. The result comes across as rather blunt.

Chinese writers are much less influenced than Western ones by the desire for “elegant variation”, which leads even eminent publications like the Economist to inflict “the black stuff” on readers because it does not wish to use “oil” twice in the same paragraph.

This may in turn be due to differences in culture and education. In cultures with alphabetic languages, like this one, words are regarded as a substitute or symbol for an elusive underlying idea. In cultures with ideograms, like Chinese, the ideograms are the idea. So in a European university asking the student to report Saint Augustine’s views on virtue in her own words is a test of learning. Asking a Chinese student to report Confucius’s views on the same topic in her own words would be sacrilege. Who are we to improve on the words chosen by the Master? Learning was traditionally demonstrated by the ability to recite the Analects from memory.

The rather limited vocabulary employed in official corrections may have a more mundane explanation. Although printing with movable type was a Chinese invention the Chinese language presents serious problems for printers, because so many characters have to be available. Putting a piece together while picking from thousands of characters is hard work and writers were expected not to to make it harder by choosing from a wide range of words.

Nowadays the computer has solved this problem but English newspapers are still following conventions inherited from the old printing methods and so perhaps other people are too.

Anyway the point which our spokesman may consider worth pondering is that turning on the extreme indignation every time eventually becomes ineffective, and even risible. It may be too much to ask that you consider the possibility that some criticisms may have merit, but could we at least try to be – shall we say – more Harris and less Trump?

One might also wonder whether every criticism needs the same response, or indeed any response at all. I realise that you may fear that silence in the face of fierce attacks will be mistaken for indifference, or even assent, but surely there are some quarrels not worth picking? It is very regrettable that the New York Times was not impressed by the new National Security Exhibition Gallery. But if you hadn’t replied, would anyone have noticed? The same might be said of the British Foreign Office’s six-monthly report on Hong Kong. We all know what this is worth by now.

And you might have waited a bit before taking aim at the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office Certification Act, after it passed the US House of Representatives. Despite its name this is not a law. It is what we call a Bill: a piece of proposed legislation which still has to go through a long and arduous process before it becomes law. On average the proportion of proposed laws which make it through the US legislative process to the statute book ranges between two and nine per cent, with the lower figures coming when, as now, the two houses are controlled by different parties. Figures here.

Clearly the US legislature is not at all like ours.

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