AI reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe

If you’re putting a show on at the Edinburgh Fringe, the thing everyone looks for is a good review.  In the performing arts, the star system starts where the Michelin Guide runs out of steam.  Three stars for a show is just run of the mill.  Four stars means it’s a “must see”, while five stars indicates that you may need to kill to get tickets.  Except it’s all got rather devalued.

Go back thirty years and there were two gold standards – the Scotsman and The Stage.  Each had a team of professional reviewers who awarded stars in their daily reviews.   A few other printed publications like The List joined in, but everything changed when Broadway Baby burst on the scene in 2004 with online reviews.  The Scotsman was outraged and railed against non-professional reviewers, but an increasing number of online review sites appeared.  Audiences were encouraged to comment on Twitter and post reviews on the Edfringe.com website.

The result was that it became a lot easier to get a four or five star review from somewhere – sometimes the Edfringe.com ones even appeared before the show opened.  Productions now plaster their posters and flyers with the stars in large font and the source in diminishingly small font.  What’s important seems to be how many sets of stars you have.  That’s been going on for several years.  What is ruffling feathers this year is the accusation that some reviews are being written by AI. 

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Reclaiming NIMBY – Nuclear in my Back Yard

What do Plymouth, Weymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth have in common?  They’re all South coast towns in England, and for the past fifty years they’ve all been happy to host small nuclear power plants within a few miles of their town centre.  In the not very distant future, they might be joined by a lot more British towns and cities as nuclear enters a new phase of rolling out SMRs – Small Modular Reactors.  That could be the best energy decision any Government has made for the last seventy years.

The small nuclear reactors these towns host aren’t connected to the grid – they’re the ones that power the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines which visit these and other ports.  The concept behind an SMR is to scale these small reactors up to a level where they can be manufactured cost effectively as standard power plants which can be located wherever a baseload electricity generator is needed.

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Today is the centenary of the loudspeaker

It’s hard to imagine that it’s only 100 years since the loudspeaker was invented.  On April 1st, 1925, Edward Wente, of the Western Electric Company, New York, filed patent no 1,812,389 for a practical moving coil loudspeaker, although the patent only refers to it as an “acoustic device”.  I doubt that he was aware of just how revolutionary that would be.  Within a year, amplifiers with his design of loudspeaker would be on sale, allowing everyone in a room, or even a theatre to hear the same recording, film or radio broadcast.  Up until then, everyone had been forced to huddle around horns to listen to their records or the radio. 

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Marketing Net Zero

I wonder how many UK householders know that part of their electricity bill is a payment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?  It won’t be immediately obvious to most electricity users why they are paying them, but it’s a royalty payment for the use of Einstein’s image in the rather crass adverts which the Government uses in an attempt to persuade everyone to have a smart meter fitted.  It’s only one of an increasing number of invisible charges added to electricity bills to persuade users that they should support the Government’s fast-track approach to net zero. 

The campaign’s not working very well, which should be worrying Mr Miliband and his band of merry net zero mandarins at DESNZ (the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero).  So far, the Smart Metering marketing campaign has spent about £500 million trying to persuade us to do something which is free.  If the UK is going to meet the Government’s decarbonisation targets for home energy, their next task is to persuade us all to sign up for something which will cost millions of home owners tens of thousands of pounds each.  The prospects are not looking good.

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How HP valued Humane

Last week HP announced that they were acquiring the patents and key staff from Humane for $116 million.  A few years ago, I wrote an article questioning the value of patents for startups (of which more later), so it seemed a good opportunity to try to dissect the purchase price to see if it’s possible to put a value on Humane’s patent portfolio.

Humane’s not your average startup.  From the start it was viewed as a potential unicorn.  Its first product – the AI Pin, which turned out to be its downfall, had high ambitions.  Although few reviewers appeared to notice it, if it had succeeded, it would have been the first nail in the coffin of the smartphone.  The product failed to meet that promise, and the company appeared to be heading for a fire sale.  Fortunately for the core team, HP saw their value and snapped them up for the bargain price of $116 million.  Let’s look at how they might have worked out that purchase price.

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EPCs and Net Zero Coercion

If you live in the UK and own or rent a property, you’ll know about EPCs.  Their official name is an Energy Performance Certificate, although most people are more likely to consider them as Entirely Pointless Certificates.   They were introduced by the UK Government in 2007 to give anyone buying or renting a property a guide to its energy efficiency, rating houses in much the same way as electrical appliances on a scale of A (good) to G (worst).  The letter signifies how much carbon dioxide your property is likely to produce each year.  EPCs also provide guidance of how you could “improve” your home, with suggested measures to reduce the CO₂ emissions, along with an indicative cost of doing it.

If you sell or rent your home you have to obtain an EPC.  Currently you are not allowed to rent a property unless it has an A to E rating.  There were proposals to tighten this to an A to C rating, but those proposals have been pushed back.  However, many owners feel that EPCs are likely to be used as a stick to force them to make changes to meet net zero targets.  Although that has been consistently denied, a recent survey by the Social Media Foundation titled “Whose energy transition is it anyway?” shows that concern is still real.  That is reinforced by a new Government consultation on Reforms to the Energy Performance of Buildings Regime, which implies that EPCs may be turned into a net zero coercion tool.

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