Archive for January, 2024

My father’s story (as told by my brother) ….

January 25, 2024

My father was a Japanese prisoner-of-war after the fall of Singapore in 1942. He was the first Allied Officer to escape and make his way back to India. He was awarded the Military Cross for that. My previous posts about him are given below. He died in 1988 leaving a handwritten manuscript. It was my mother who saw to it that it was converted into a Word document which could be considered for publication. However, this was not easy since his debriefing files were marked “Secret” and were not to be released for 50 years until 1992. The original documents had been distributed to all the Allied countries in 1942 but they all had the 50-year secrecy classification. In any event we eventually found the debriefing report in 2005 in a Singapore archive of Australian War documents.

My Army brother (Ravi) finally managed to get the manuscript published by Lancer in 2010. I think this publication represented a “mission completed” for my mother who died in 2013.

First Allied POW escape from Singapore in 1942

Remembering an escape from Singapore — 75 years on

Mark Pillai

However my Navy brother (Sampath) has put together the back story with maps and the context surrounding my father’s exploits into a fascinating talk he gave at the Bangalore International Centre in May 2022.

So here is my father’s story, as told by my brother Sampath.

Three Thousand Miles to Freedom

This is a an escape story. It is the story of escape from a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Singapore to India across coastal waters and Malayan and Burmese jungles.

Capt Mark Pillai was a Bombay Sapper officer in Malaya when Singapore fell and the Allies surrendered. This is the story of his escape from the Changi POW camp in 1942. He was 31 years old at the time and he was accompanied by an Indian medical officer and an Indian civilian acquaintance.

It is an inspirational story of escape. Escape stories frequently tend to chronologically list events without adequately conveying the fears and apprehension or the anxiety and the hardships that soldiers endure, nor the will and inspiration they galvanise in doing so. This is a compelling story, simply told, which brings to life the meaning of escape from captivity in enemy territory in an age long gone.

It is a story of understated bravery and gallantry, where three Indians made a daily tryst with destiny over a protracted period of time, attempting as it were to do their duty as they saw it, in an effort to live to fight another day when both the big picture and the tactical situation seemed hopeless.

It is a story of hope which reveals the stubborn spirit of humanity and courage that epitomizes good soldiers anywhere when they turn adversity into opportunity and inspire others to do the same.

Mark Pillai was awarded the Military Cross by Field Marshal Archibald Wavell for his gallantry.

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Barbarous times

January 24, 2024

Back in 2015 I wrote a post about Execution by Nitrogen which now seems to have been adopted in Alabama.

Execution by Nitrogen – ktwop 18 March 2015

In power plants nitrogen is often used for pressurising, purging, cooling or protection. I first came across a death caused by nitrogen in the 1970s when a maintenance worker entered a pulverised coal storage silo which had been blanketed with nitrogen for explosion protection during a shut-down. It was not a pressurised silo and therefore not seen as being a high risk area. By accident, he had entered the silo without a companion being present and without his breathing equipment. He was only found hours later inside the silo and it became clear that his asphyxiation had happened so fast that he had had no time to struggle, let alone call for any assistance. Of course the death was not so much caused by nitrogen as by the lack of oxygen and the resulting hypoxia. Nitrogen asphyxiation is not unknown as an industrial cause of death. Through the 1980s and 1990s, I came across another 4 accidental deaths at power plants where workers had inadvertently entered a nitrogen atmosphere. Just in the US, there were 80 industrial deaths and 50 injuries due to nitrogen asphyxiation between 1992 and 2002.

…..

In this modern, civilised, 21st century, firing squads, beheadings, stoning, being pushed off a roof-top, being poisoned (gas, lethal injection), hanging, electrocution and asphyxiation are all in use or proposed as methods of execution. Not so very different from the barbarous times of the Middle Ages.

Barbarous times indeed but not just barbarous states. Don’t fool yourself in thinking that human behaviour is any “better” now than it has ever been since we became “human”. The range of possible human behaviour is set by our genes and the worst possible behaviour has not changed in over 10,000 years.

Since humans are genetically capable of being barbarous, then, in the appropriate circumstances, they are brutal and barbarous. Single individuals can be brutal and so can all members of conflict-based organisations. Members of Hamas, or ISIS, or all para-militaries, and all military personnel from all countries in the world – in the appropriate circumstances – can, and do, exhibit the most barbarous possible behaviour. “Being civilised” does not change the genetic nature of humans.

Can the Holocaust happen again? Of course it can.

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Harvard, diversity, incompetence and fraud

January 23, 2024

The Claudine Gay diversity-causes-incompetence affair has hardly been put to bed before I saw this article this morning.

A prominent cancer center affiliated with Harvard said it will ask medical journals to retract six research papers and correct dozens of others after a British scientist and blogger found that work by some of its top executives was rife with duplicated or manipulated data.

The center, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment and research facilities, moved quickly in recent days to address allegations of faulty data in 58 studies, many of them influential, compiled by a British molecular biologist, Sholto David.

In many cases, Dr. David found, images in the papers had been stretched, obscured or spliced together in a way that suggested deliberate attempts to mislead readers. The studies he flagged included some published by Dana-Farber’s chief executive, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, Dr. William Hahn.

The Harvard Crimson also has this story:

David, who holds a doctoral degree in biology from Newcastle University, alleged that three papers authored by Glimcher, 12 by Hahn, 10 by Ghobrial, and 16 by Anderson contained “data forgery,” including five co-authored by both Anderson and Ghobrial. As is typical for scientific research, all of the papers referenced by David have several co-authors, though his post focused on the four DFCI researchers.

The papers, published between 1999 and 2017, most commonly have duplications of blots, bands, and plots within images, David alleged. In a Saturday interview, David said he used a combination of artificial intelligence image analysis software ImageTwin and manual detection to look for errors in the papers.

Another case of scientific fraud with researchers manipulating data to support a desired result is in itself nothing new. The publish or perish ethos has led globally to the exponential increase of not just data manipulation but also of data “creation” where desired data points or images are just invented. Data forgery is prevalent even at the most prestigious institutions and is not just in the social “sciences”. The social “sciences” in the last 40 or 50 years have been known to have been plagued by data manufactured to support pre-determined political conclusions.

Academic cheating is as old as academia. “Positive discrimination” to combat discrimination (whether for affirmative action in the US or with reservations in India) has been misused to favour the undeserving (and thereby disfavouring some of the worthy). What is new is that the false wokeism god of diversity is not only being used to cover up for incompetence, it is also downplaying competence as a criterion for selection. And, it would seem, diversity is also used to cover up for or to excuse fraud.

Claudine Gay got her job because she was black and female. Those attributes overrode any requirements not to have plagiarised or any requirement to be competent in front of a congressional committee. I would not be very surprised to learn that Glimcher was appointed primarily because she was female. And did that allow her greater licence in manipulating or creating data?

I see all around me in Europe, cases where a religious adherence to “diversity” is allowing and even promoting greater levels of incompetence in many fields. I see it in entertainment (with TV presenters and news readers, with actors, with scripts and even musicians). I see it in media with reporters and presenters and “fact checkers” and “research staff”. I see it in academia (though my exposure here is limited). My point is that being “diverse” has become more important in selection for any post than the competence required for that post. But it is getting to the stage where being “diverse” now even compensates for a lack of competence.

And that, of course, gives us the modern versions of freak shows.

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Just auto-complete or the beginnings of intelligence when chatGPT says ” two plus two is four”

January 7, 2024

When a five-year old says “two plus two is four” we take it as proof of the growing intelligence of a child. In reality it is not that the child understands the abstract concept of numbers and where they come from to represent identities in our physical world. It is just the child applying its own language model to predict the best next word. This is based on the data it has been fed and the supervised and unsupervised  learning it has received from its trainers. The child is merely going through an auto-complete process with its “best” guess for the next word. based on what knowledge it has been fed and the training it has received.

Chomsky does not like chatGPT and dismisses it as being a glorified auto-completer using statistics and probability to estimate the “best” next word. But I think he’s got it wrong again. Whereas human brains may not exclusively use just a large language model, we certainly do use language when we choose the “best” option for the next word we use (speak, write or even think). We may also use logic, or what we call reason or even other languages to judge what the next word ought to be. This includes all forms of mathematics and specialised languages with esoteric symbols or hieroglyphs. Language is overwhelmingly the method of communicating output from a human brain. We use a variety of processes in our brains to ultimately choose the next word we use. Just like chatGPT, the input is the previous word and the output is the next word.

In judging whether a brain (or a neural network) is intelligent, what is critical is what is generated rather than how it is generated. The process by which a brain for a human, or a neural network for a chatbot, generates the next word based on the previous word(s), is irrelevant in judging whether the brain or the neural network is intelligent. The fundamental problem is that we cannot define intelligence. We cannot, as humans, define what we mean when we say we understand something. We cannot tell what process takes place in our brains when we claim we understand addition or subtraction or some other mathematical or logical process.

It seems to me then that if in the future, a chatbot eventually does do mathematics in practice and is always correct, then it is irrelevant if its neural network got there by calculating probabilities of occurrence of the next most likely word or did it in some other way. If it does mathematics then our assessment of its understanding mathematics becomes moot. If it does generate useful and correct code then its understanding of the objectives is irrelevant. Moreover, we cannot say it does not understand when we cannot determine what understanding means for us, let alone for it. We cannot either impose on an AI chatbot a definition of its understanding when we cannot define it for ourselves.

Perhaps understanding is nothing more than weightage numbers in a network of neurons whether in a human brain or in an AI’s neural network software.

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