Claiming to be carbon-neutral is easy – but proving it is a lot harder, as a new report challenges Apple to do. CC-licensed photo by Mountain/\Ash on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet [note: subsequently retracted] • WIRED
Megan Gray:
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I was attending the [DOJ-Google antitrust] trial out of long-standing professional interest. I had previously battled Google’s legal team while at the Federal Trade Commission, and I advocated around the world for search engine competition as an executive for DuckDuckGo. I’m all too familiar with Google’s secret games and word play. With the trial practically in my backyard, I couldn’t stay away from the drama.
This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.
…Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
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Wired has now taken this article down. Google says the piece has “serious inaccuracies“. Google also shared the slide referred to. It certainly makes the case even stronger for the trial being much, much more open..
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New report casts doubt on Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products • The Verge
Justine Calma:
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Apple needs to disclose more information about its suppliers to back up claims about its first carbon-neutral products, says a new report by an environmental organisation that had previously given the company high marks.
Apple has backtracked when it comes to transparency about its supply chain emissions, the new report says. That makes it difficult to see how Apple is able to market its products as carbon neutral, meaning the company didn’t produce more carbon dioxide emissions than it could capture or offset while making the device.
“We believe there is a need for full disclosure and explanation of how Apple achieves carbon neutrality of its products, given the increase in carbon emissions from some of its suppliers,” the report says. The report was published by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Beijing that was founded by former investigative journalist Ma Jun.
Apple released its latest Apple Watch models last month and said that “select” combinations of cases and bands make them carbon neutral. To reach carbon neutrality, Apple says it cut down emissions from materials, electricity, and transportation — with the help of suppliers who use clean energy. Any remaining pollution was then offset through nature-based projects like restoring forests so that they could capture more CO2.
…Apple stopped requiring that its suppliers publicly disclose data on their greenhouse gas emissions this year, according to the report. And based on data IPE was able to gather in the past, the math isn’t quite adding up…
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Tricky thing, claiming carbon neutrality.
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OVO to offer heat pumps at lower cost than gas boilers • BusinessGreen News
Michael Holder:
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OVO Energy is offering to halve running costs for heat pumps in order to make them cheaper than operating a conventional gas boiler, as fierce competition among energy suppliers to offer consumers more affordable low carbon heating options continues to intensify.
The energy supplier today announced its new Heat Pump Plus, promising to provide the cheapest rate for low carbon heating on the market and making it £500 a year cheaper to heat the average home compared to a gas boiler, while also slashing domestic greenhouse gas emissions.
By offering a separate rate of 15p per kilowatt hour for electricity specifically used to power heat pumps, alongside the standard rate for the rest of a home’s electricity usage, OVO said it hoped the new tariff would encourage more households to swap out their gas boiler for an electric-powered alternative.
Moreover, OVO said it was partnering with installer Heat Geek to deliver heat pump installations at an upfront cost of just £500 for one of the appliances when including the government’s £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month announced the grant available through the Boiler Upgrade Scheme would increase by 50% to £7,500.
…The government has set a goal for 600,000 heat pumps to be installed in the UK each year by 2028, but experts have repeatedly warned that without urgent action, more funding and ambitious policy support, the target is likely to be missed.
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Don’t know how they would know which electricity is used specifically for the heat pumps, unless they run at exactly the same rate all the time so that there’s a base load.
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How Michael Lewis got snowed by Sam Bankman-Fried • Los Angeles Times
Michael Hiltzik is a business columnist at the LA Times:
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Journalism schools will be able to use “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” Michael Lewis’ new book about the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the fall of its boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, as a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism.
To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.
The result is what amounts to a defense brief for Bankman-Fried for his fraud trial in New York federal court, which [opened] Tuesday — coinciding, as it happens, with the publication date of Lewis’ book.
Fortunately, readers interested in the story of the cryptocurrency scam and Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall can turn to a much more convincing (and more entertaining) book. That’s “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall,” by Zeke Faux, a financial investigative reporter for Bloomberg.
Faux demonstrates his incisive grasp of the story with the very first words of his prologue: “‘I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me,” he writes. “That was a lie.”
Lewis, by contrast, opens his book with an anecdote about a long hike he took with Bankman-Fried in the hills above Berkeley in which he listened to his subject spin wild yarns about all the money he was making in crypto, “all of which, I should say here, turned out to be true.”
Well, no. Not really.
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It is so interesting how Lewis couldn’t see that crypto was an utter scam. There’s also a fascinating long read in The Guardian, in which Samanth Subramanian takes plenty of time to talk to Lewis, and does challenge him about SBF:
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Lewis’s habit of falling in love with his characters is so ingrained that he really doesn’t judge them. In Going Infinite, that can make him seem credulous – and that’s even before we know if Bankman-Fried has committed any crimes.
Lewis was keen to investigate this response of mine. He thought Bankman-Fried hadn’t lied to him at all – or at least, that he’d only lied by omission, not commission.
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But do read it all.
Meta plans to charge $14 a month for ad-free Instagram or Facebook • WSJ
Sam Schechner:
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Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook—but on desktop?
That is what Meta Platforms wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don’t agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators.
The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.
Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too.
Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan—which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads—in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.
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Hard nope for both proposals from me. I’m pretty confident I don’t consume $14 per month worth of ads on Instagram. But I don’t see that that obligates me to agree to be tracked. Plus, would people find VPNs for a little less and appear to be in the US?
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Social media traffic to top news sites craters • Axios
Sara Fischer:
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Traffic referrals to the top global news sites from Meta’s Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, has collapsed over the past year, according to data from Similarweb.
Website business models that depended on clicks from social media are now broken.
Regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information, leaving the public more susceptible to misinformation ahead of the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, news companies are scrambling to find business solutions while simultaneously fighting to protect their work in the AI era.
While the news industry has known this day would come, many are still unprepared. A slower ad market and less reliable traffic contributed to a record number of media job cuts this year. Efforts to reach voters with trusted information are becoming more difficult as tech platforms lean into viral trends, instead of quality news.
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According to the data, Facebook referrals have fallen from nearly 120m per month in August 2020 to 21.4m in August 2023; for Twitter, from a peak of nearly 80m in January 2021 to 22.6m in August 2023. Collectively, now less than referrals from either back in August 2020. (Of course, that was the midst of an election.)
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How common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children • The Economist
Natasha Loder:
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It was a sunny day in September 2007 when Garrett Pohlman, then seven years old, came home from school. Crying, he warned his mother that radiation was coming out of the house’s electrical sockets. If they went outside, he said, birds would peck them to death. These pronouncements were accompanied by odd facial movements. The boy would stick his tongue out and jerk his arms and legs. The day before, Garrett had been a normal boy. Both the paranoia and the tics had come out of the blue, but they proved to be the start of a horrifying mental decline.
In the end, Garrett was lucky. A hospital scan three months later revealed a bacterial sinus infection. A course of antibiotics cured the infection and brought about a striking improvement in his psychiatric symptoms. Garrett had been suffering from pandas, which stands for Paediatric Autoimmune-Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus.
Many other children are not so fortunate; some have suffered long-term damage. In plain English, Garrett’s unsettling behaviour was the result of an immune system gone haywire following an infection with group A Streptococcus, a common bacterium. (A similar illness, triggered by other infections, goes by the acronym pans, for Paediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome.)
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The role of bacteria and viruses in psychiatric illness is largely unknown, but we’re starting to understand them as having key roles in illnesses that had previously been thought idiopathic. Loder writes about PANDAS at greater length on her Substack.
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Book review: ‘Extremely Online,’ by Taylor Lorenz • The New York Times
Clay Shirky:
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[The six-second video app] Vine’s rapid success and sudden implosion encapsulate most of the book’s themes: the creators who understand a new platform better than its inventors do; the competing interests of talent, agents, advertisers, audience and owners; the particular hostility directed at successful women online. Vine closed in 2017, in part because of poor relations with its star creators; as Lorenz dryly notes, “The company’s only problem was itself.” Vine’s demise fueled rather than dampened the fervor for short-term video and autobiographical content, sending experienced creators to other platforms, especially TikTok.
Lorenz has a beat reporter’s eye for detail, which can occasionally be overwhelming. Explaining the rise of online gossip sites and “Dramageddon,” a falling-out among a friend group of YouTube-famous makeup artists, she introduces six gossip sites and 13 creators in four pages. (To be fair, “Dramageddon” was also exhausting to witness firsthand.)
But “Extremely Online” aims to tell a sociological story, not a psychological one, and in its breadth it demonstrates a new cultural logic emerging out of 21st-century media chaos.
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As much as anything, it’s nice to see Clay Shirky writing again. He used to be one of the most influential voices on the web, about 15 years ago; then got a promotion at NYU and effectively vanished.
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Official stop and search figures published with ‘dodgy’ warning • BBC News
Daniel Wainwright is a data journalist at BBC Verify:
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The Home Office has released one of its most politically sensitive datasets with a note attached describing some of the figures as “dodgy”.
The note, spotted by BBC Verify, was on a Home Office spreadsheet about the number of people arrested after being stopped and searched by police. It said: “Reason for arrest data is dodgy so maybe we shouldn’t publish it.” The note was removed after we contacted the Home Office.
The data was about the number of people stopped and searched in England and Wales under Section 60. This means that police do not need to have reasonable suspicion to carry out a search. The orders give the police powers to stop people within a designated area, such as the Notting Hill Carnival.
The arrests were broken down into those “for offensive weapons” or those “for other reasons”. Attached to the offensive weapons column was the note from an “author” asking whether the figures should be published.
…Dr Simon Harding, director of the National Centre for Gang Research, says different forces have different ways and procedures for recording their data. “There is data coming in from 43 different constabularies and there are varying levels of quality,” he said. “These things ought to be ironed out before they get to the Home Office.”
We showed the note to Habib Kadiri, director of StopWatch, a campaign group which focuses on police stop and search and the “overpolicing of marginalised communities”. He said: “The comment in question is indicative of a long history of questionable recording practices by police forces.”
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Now you start to understand why the government is so keep to publish data as PDFs.
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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