The solar storm that produced amazing auroras around the world at the weekend has also screwed up GPS-guided tractors in the US. CC-licensed photo by Chad Davis on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Spaced out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Solar storm knocks out farmers’ tractor GPS systems during peak planting season • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States [and other parts of the world – Overspill Ed.] this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.
One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years.
“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”
Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with “Real-Time Kinematic” (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere “StarFire” receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating “correction” data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.
According to updates from Landmark Implement, which owns John Deere dealerships in Kansas and Nebraska, the solar storm ruined the accuracy of RTK systems for many farmers using John Deere tractors. Similar systems in other brands of tractors have also been compromised, the dealer and farmers I spoke to said.
“Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic,” the dealership told farmers Saturday morning. “When you head back into these fields to side dress, spray, cultivate, harvest, etc. over the next several months, we expect that the rows won’t be where the AutoPath lines think they are. This will only affect the fields that are planted during times of reduced accuracy. It is most likely going to be difficult—if not impossible—to make AutoPath work in these fields as the inaccuracy is most likely inconsistent.”
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Give it a few months and we can expect something about crop failures due to this, can’t we?
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What I wish I’d known before my smartphone was snatched • Financial Times
Claer Barrett:
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London is the epicentre for phone theft. Many people never report this crime, but based on Metropolitan Police data from those who have, a phone is stolen every 10 minutes in the city. There was a 33% increase in reported mobile phone theft from the person in the year to January 2024, and over one-third of offences took place in Westminster.
The statistics don’t tell us how phones are stolen, but from my anecdotal conversations with victims, bike swiping is rife, since it’s easy to hire an e-bike or scooter for a fast getaway. As a woman, I could have made an easier target.
“Criminals want to make sure when they grab a phone, it’s unlocked, otherwise they’re going to end up with just a phone,” says Tony Sales, a reformed fraudster who founded the crime prevention consultancy We Fight Fraud.
A locked handset could have a street value of a few hundred pounds if it’s a recent model, he says. But if unlocked, it could generate multiple thousands of pounds if criminals can get into the settings, change passwords and compromise other security features: “You’re locked out, and then they start to monetise your data.”
Look up and down any London street, and huge numbers of people walk around with their phones unlocked in their hands, openly on display. They might have their headphones in and not be aware of their surroundings — but the criminals are paying close attention.
“It’s predatory behaviour,” says Sales. “They are like lions stalking prey, and unfortunately, women make easier targets than men. It’s very unlikely a woman will try to punch you, and a man has more strength to grab someone.” The cleaner the snatch, the less likely it is that a screen lock will be activated.
Women are only marginally more likely to be victims of phone theft according to ONS crime survey and police data. However, the data does not drill down into the different methods criminals use, and many crimes of this nature go unreported.
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I knew someone who had their phone snatched while walking over Waterloo Bridge on Friday. It’s a huge thing, which is strange given how iCloud locking etc was meant to make it so much harder.
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Will AI dream up the hit TV shows of the future? • BBC News
Stephanie Power:
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I logged into an AI chatbot, and typed in what I was looking for. I wrote: “I am trying to think up a new TV format. A series with contestants. “Maybe they would be learning a new skill, like dancing, or perhaps they are trying to compete in communities to have the most sustainable environment. Can you help me with some ideas?”
The AI confirms that this could be an exciting endeavour, and instantly comes up with six ideas. I like its first suggestion – Skills Mastery Showdown – where contestants would be paired with skilled mentors, and have a limited time to master a specific new skill, such as dancing, cooking or painting.
But what do TV industry experts think about the use of AI in coming up with future content? I ask Dan Whitehead, who is a senior consultant at K7 Media, a Manchester-based research firm that reports on the TV business.
“The idea of a machine that you can type a request into, in normal conversational language, and have it spit out something close to what you asked for, still feels pretty magical,” he says. “So it’s understandable that people are drawn to it.
“Can something like [AI chatbot] ChatGPT generate ideas for a TV show? Of course, but then ideas for TV shows have never been in short supply. The big problem for most production companies is the uncertainty – which ideas are best, which ones are worth investing in?”
Mr Whitehead argues that AI can give people false confidence, giving them the sense that if it – with access to billions of data points – can come up with these ideas, they must somehow be better.
…Mr Whitehead says that AI is better used in a much more nuanced, background way.
“The BBC’s Springwatch and Winterwatch use a bespoke AI system that monitors live camera feeds, and has been trained to recognise, record and log different species of animals and birds as they appear in the frame,” he says. “It can then tell the production team how often they appear, give behavioural insights, and generally do something that would eat up hours of human production time.”
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At least someone’s actually using it sensibly.
Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ • The Guardian
Josh Taylor:
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More than half a million [Australian pension fund] UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.
Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.
The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google’s cloud service as the issue.
In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”. They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.
“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said. “This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”
While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.
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Read verrrry carefully, and you’ll realise that this was a mistake by UniSuper: someone zapped its account by misake. But Google took the blame rather than put it on the customer (and lose the business).
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The death (again) of the internet as we know it • Noahpinion
Noah Smith:
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Anecdotally, when I meet people in their early to mid 20s, they don’t want to connect over Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger, like young people did in the 2010s. They just exchange phone numbers, like people did in the 2000s. Everyone is still online all the time, but “online” increasingly means group chats, Discord, and other small-group interactions. As a society, we are re-learning how to center our social lives around a network of people we know in real life, rather than around a performative feed in which we broadcast our actions and thoughts to a bunch of strangers.
Good.
But I suspect there are some additional trends driving young people off of the public internet and into more private spaces. In just the last few years, a number of trends have transformed both social media and the traditional Web. Some of these trends are making the experience of the public internet more boring, while others are turning it into something more akin to television. Here are a few of the trends I see:
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They are: adverts everywhere, algorithmic (antichronological) feeds, state propaganda, AI-generated junk, deepfakes/AI fakery. Quite the collection. (Though he’s wrong about “eternal September”, which he mentions high up in his piece: that came when AOL first expanded, in the late 1990s.)
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Apple will revamp Siri to catch up to its chatbot competitors • The New York Times
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz:
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Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
…Apple executives worry that new AI technology threatens the company’s dominance of the global smartphone market because it has the potential to become the primary operating system, displacing the iPhone’s iOS software, said two people familiar with the thinking of Apple’s leadership, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. This new technology could also create an ecosystem of AI apps, known as agents, that can order Ubers or make calendar appointments, undermining Apple’s App Store, which generates about $24 billion in annual sales.
Apple also fears that if it fails to develop its own A.I. system, the iPhone could become a “dumb brick” compared with other technology. While it is unclear how many people regularly use Siri, the iPhone currently takes 85% of global smartphone profits and generates more than $200bn in sales.
That sense of urgency contributed to Apple’s decision to cancel its other big bet — a $10bn project to develop a self-driving car — and reassign hundreds of engineers to work on AI.
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1) it took weeks of testing ChatGPT to realise it made Siri look antiquated?
2) don’t Google and Alexa already make Siri look antiquated?
3) this is quite a long gestation – though typically Apple not to rush it.
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Hydrogen Heating Town pilot: letter to Gas Distribution Networks – update • GOV.UK
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The government has decided not to progress work on a hydrogen town pilot until after 2026 strategic decisions on the role of hydrogen in decarbonising heat.
This follows careful consideration of the future of the work in light of the decision in December 2023 not to proceed with the hydrogen village trial in Redcar.
We believe that low carbon hydrogen may have a role to play in heat decarbonisation, alongside heat pumps and heat networks, but in slower time in some locations. We plan to take a decision in 2026 on whether, and if so how, hydrogen will contribute to heating decarbonisation.
We will assess evidence from our wider research programme, the neighbourhood trial in Fife and similar schemes across Europe, to take this decision.
We would like to thank the Gas Distribution Networks for their work on their applications. The evidence they provided will be helpful in informing 2026 decisions.
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Translation: hydrogen is off the table and won’t be replacing gas in gas distribution networks.
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Which music stands the test of time, and which does not? A statistical analysis • Stat Significant
Daniel Parris:
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Using a dataset of Spotify streaming stats assembled by our friends at The Pudding (an excellent data culture magazine I highly recommend), we can track listenership for Billboard-charting works as a function of age.
When we graph average Spotify streams by song age, we find an exponential decay function. Pop music quickly exits the mainstream within a decade of its debut; then, this decline stabilizes to a steady, linear rate.
This fast-moving cultural amnesia is highly unique to music. In a previous piece, I analyzed online movie review volume (a proxy for film watching) in the period following a project’s debut. Ultimately, we see film consumption fade from collective memory at a linear rate, a significant departure from music’s exponential decline.
Several factors contribute to the varying cultural longevities of movies and music:
• Music Abundance: there is simply more music in the world, providing ample opportunity for stylistic experimentation and evolution. On the other hand, movie production and distribution are heavily resource-constrained, leading to a smaller sampling of films across time
• Breadth and Depth of Consumption: movies are generally watched once and then set aside, leaving you to search for a new film. Music, on the other hand, can be played ad naseum, sometimes to the point of sonic torture. I listen to The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” nearly every week—two decades after its debut. Most consumers watch a wide range of movies infrequently while playing a smaller selection of songs repeatedly
• Music Preference is Heavily Context Dependent: music taste is heavily tied to adolescent identity formation and the context during which we hear a song (a high school dance, a wedding, a Bar Mitzvah, etc.). After a certain age, music discovery largely stagnates. In contrast, most movie consumers are in a perpetual state of discovery, seeking new releases and revisiting older works.Although popular music uniquely fades from the mainstream, its longitudinal consumption patterns are highly predictable. Using this baseline, we can measure a song’s streaming activity against the average for its release year.
For example, we project that a 28-year-old song would receive roughly one million streams (in our dataset). Meanwhile, our data indicates that ABBA’s “Money Money Money” generated ~2.8 million plays 28 years after its debut and is, therefore, 193% above expected listening volume.
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I think this slightly overstates the popularity of artists v songs or albums (Celine Dion, Fleetwood Mac), but interesting nonetheless.
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Map of the web • Henry Nguyen
Nguyen scraped 50,000 blogs from Resonant.live and displayed them as a graph. “There are clusters of sites that all link closely together, with topics like rationality, tech, crypto, Canada, and even postgres.” This is a little of what Google and other web indexers see.
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Concerns about data integrity across 263 papers by one author • ScienceDirect
Jeremy Nielsen, Madeline Flanagan, Lyle Gurrin, Jim Thornton and Ben Mol:
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We identified 263 papers claiming to have enrolled 74,667 participants between January 2009 and July 2022, 190 (72%) of which reported on studies that recruited from the Assiut Women’s Health Hospital in Assiut, Egypt. The number of active studies per month was greatest between 2016 and 2019, with 88 ongoing studies in May 2017. We found evidence of data integrity concerns in 130 (49%) papers, 43 (33%) of which contained concerns sufficient to suggest that they could not be based on data reliably collected from human participants.
Conclusion: our investigation finds evidence of widespread integrity concerns in the collected work of one author. We recommend that the involved journals collaborate in a formal investigation.
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The papers cover all sort of treatments in gynaecology – IUD insertion guides, treatments for anaemia, FGM effect on sexual function. And this team reckons the results are all faked.
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• 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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified