New research suggests that curly hair keeps your head cooler than other styles. CC-licensed photo by Ralf Steinberger on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Yes, hello to you, too. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Draft EU plans to allow spying on journalists are dangerous, warn critics • The Guardian
Lisa O’Carroll:
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Draft legislation published by EU leaders that would allow national security agencies to spy on journalists has been condemned by media and civic society groups as dangerous and described by a leading MEP as “incomprehensible”.
On Wednesday, the European Council – which represents the governments of EU member states – published a draft of the European Media Freedom Act that would allow spyware to be placed on journalists’ phones if a national government thought it necessary.
Unusually, the council did not take the step of holding an in-person meeting of ministers responsible for media before the draft was published.
The Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld, who has overseen the European parliament’s investigation into the use of Pegasus spyware on journalists and public figures, said the claim that permission to spy on the press was needed in the interests of national security was “a lie”.
“I think what the council is doing is unacceptable. It’s also incomprehensible. Well, it’s incomprehensible if they are serious about democracy,” said In ‘t Veld.
The first draft of the act – originally tabled by the European Commission to strengthen protections for the independence of journalism in countries where it is under threat such as Poland and Hungary – had included strong safeguards against the use of spyware.
The draft must be agreed by the European parliament before it becomes law.
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You can read the proposed legislation: search on “spyware” and it says it’s not to be used.. except on a case-by-case basis where it’s justified on national security. No chance at all that would ever be abused, no sirree.
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Curly hair keeps the head coolest • Smithsonian Magazine
Victoria Sayo Turner:
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Scientists have long wondered why humans’ scalps are covered in hair even though we are far less hairy elsewhere. A new study published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests these strands coming out of our heads may have evolved to stop our ancestors’ large brains from overheating, with curly hair cooling more.
Shielding the head from heat could have been crucial for early hominid ancestors living in Africa under the equatorial sun. “The brain is a large and very heat-sensitive organ that also generates a lot of heat,“ says Tina Lasisi to National Geographic’s Tom Metcalfe. “So we figured, evolutionarily, this could be important—especially in a period of time when we see the brain size of our species growing.”
To better understand how hair affected the temperature of the head, Lasisi and her colleagues placed three different wigs or no wig on a research manikin, called a “thermal manikin.” The manikin was heated to a body temperature of 95ºF, according to National Geographic, and placed under hot lights in a climate-controlled wind tunnel. The scientists measured the temperature on the manikin’s head when covered with no wig and human hair wigs that had straight strands, loose curls or tight coils—which were similar in thickness and color.
Under a simulated sun beaming down at 86ºF, the starkest difference in heat was between no hair and hair. The manikin head always became hotter, but adding the straight-haired wig cut that heat gain by more than half compared to a bare head. The moderately-curled wig made the scalp area less hot than the straight-haired wig, and the tightly-coiled wig led to the coolest head.
…Another experiment aimed to simulate sweat on the head by wetting the manikins. In this case, bald heads cooled the most through evaporation of water. But cooling with sweat might not be that helpful overall. Having hair lowered the amount of sweat required to balance the sun’s heat, according to New Scientist.
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Possibly the curls trap cooler air; though nobody’s quite sure. But it would make sense. The next question would be why our hair lost its frizz when we left Africa.
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Joseph Dituri: Florida scientist ‘Dr Deep Sea’ resurfaces after breaking record for living underwater • CNN
Ashley R. Williams, writing on June 11, following a story first noted here back in March:
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An associate university professor in Florida has completed his research mission and set a new world record in the process: living 100 days beneath the ocean’s surface.
On Friday morning, Dr. Joseph Dituri felt the sun’s rays for the first time since retreating to a subaquatic compound 22 feet below the waters of Key Largo, Florida, on March 1.
Dituri, 55, a biomedical engineer who teaches at the University of South Florida and calls himself “Dr. Deep Sea,” spent just over three months at the bottom of the Emerald Lagoon in Jules’ Undersea Lodge, the only underwater hotel in the United States, according to the hotel’s website.
The research project, Project Neptune 100, was organized by the Key Largo-based Marine Resources Development Foundation and focused on ocean conservation research and studying how compression affects the human body, according to Dituri’s website.
The US Navy veteran said he’s already noticed one impact: The water pressure seems to have shrunken his stature by half an inch. Dituri stood at 6 feet 1 inch tall before starting his mission, the University of South Florida stated in a news release.
The scientist began the project with a hypothesis that increased pressure could help humans live longer and prevent aging-related diseases, the news release said. Dituri said he hopes his underwater research will benefit the treatment of a variety of illnesses, including traumatic brain injuries, according to the release.
Dituri also used the project as an educational experience for youth.
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So that was June 11, while we were all away. You can only imagine how Dituri felt, having achieved his largely unremarked underwater record, at the events of the Titan submersible last week, which have definitely been an educational experience for a lot of youth, who will be freaked out at the idea of going Deep Diving.
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Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human • The Verge
Josh Dzieza:
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Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.
For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.
The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.
The current AI boom — the convincingly human-sounding chatbots, the artwork that can be generated from simple prompts, and the multibillion-dollar valuations of the companies behind these technologies — began with an unprecedented feat of tedious and repetitive labor.
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It’s always the same story. As this piece points out, the same was true for image recognition systems: enormous amounts of low-paid work to create a colossal amount of residual value.
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Spain will generate over 50% of power from renewables in 2023 • PV-Tech
Simon Yuen:
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Spain will generate more than half of its power from renewable sources this year, according to Rystad Energy.
In a recent study, Rystad Energy said Spain is on track to become the first of the top five European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and the UK, by power demand to generate more than half of its power from renewable sources.
The cumulative installed capacity of solar PV is expected to reach 27.4GW in 2023, jumping from 20.5GW in 2022. Therefore, the installed capacity of solar and wind in Spain will be 58GW this year, increasing by 8.2GW year-on-year.
PV Tech reported that the EU will add 69GW renewables capacity in 2023 recently. Figures from the EU showed that Spain installed around 5.9GW of renewable capacity last year, bringing the total to 67.9GW in 2022. Of the renewable capacity installed that year, 4.5GW was solar, increasing from 3.6GW in 2021.
…However, Spain’s growth in renewable power generation may be disrupted by France’s demand for energy. According to Rystad Energy, France struggles with low nuclear power generation this year, forcing it to turn to Spain for power imports. Currently, average power prices in France are 34% higher than those in Spain due to the Iberian country’s renewable energy transition.
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Netflix subscriptions jump as US password-sharing crackdown begins • WSJ
Isabella Simonetti:
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Netflix’s long-awaited crackdown on password-sharing in the US delivered a windfall of new subscribers in its earliest days, according to new data, a sign that the move is bearing fruit despite being unpopular with many users.
According to streaming analytics company Antenna, the streaming giant amassed more new subscriptions in the US between May 25 and 28, shortly after Netflix notified users of the limits, than in any other four-day period since Antenna began compiling such data in 2019.
The change, which is upending years-long password-sharing arrangements between families and friends, is critical to Netflix’s growth: The streaming giant and its rivals are struggling to bring in new subscribers, particularly in the US market, where consumers can choose from a range of services that are easy to turn on and off.
Netflix has said more than 100 million people around the world watch its content using borrowed passwords.
The password-sharing crackdown, which started going into effect in the US and more than 100 countries and territories on May 23, forced users who share an account outside the same home to pay an additional $7.99 a month to watch. It also limited the number of extra members customers could add to their account, depending on the tier of service they pay for.
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More empirical evidence that in fact, people will pay for a service if you oblige them to. Obviously some people won’t. But at the margin, there are people who want to watch Netflix content and will pay. This picks that low-hanging fruit.
The next question is how – next year? – Netflix is going to keep growing once it has got everyone paying. It’s already got an ad-supported version. What else is there but to raise prices?
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AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are on the rise • The Washington Post
Drew Harwell:
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Thousands of AI-generated child-sex images have been found on forums across the dark web, a layer of the internet visible only with special browsers, with some participants sharing detailed guides for how other paedophiles can make their own creations.
“Children’s images, including the content of known victims, are being repurposed for this really evil output,” said Rebecca Portnoff, the director of data science at Thorn, a nonprofit child-safety group that has seen month-over-month growth of the images’ prevalence since last fall.
“Victim identification is already a needle-in-a-haystack problem, where law enforcement is trying to find a child in harm’s way,” she said. “The ease of using these tools is a significant shift, as well as the realism. It just makes everything more of a challenge.”
The flood of images could confound the central tracking system built to block such material from the web because it is designed only to catch known images of abuse, not detect newly generated ones. It also threatens to overwhelm law enforcement officials who work to identify victimized children and will be forced to spend time determining whether the images are real or fake.
The images have also ignited debate on whether they even violate federal child-protection laws because they often depict children who don’t exist. Justice Department officials who combat child exploitation say such images still are illegal even if the child shown is AI-generated, but they could cite no case in which someone had been charged for creating one.
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Pretty sure they’d be illegal in the UK. The real problem is that as image generation apps go open source and local, there’s nothing to stop the creation of this stuff. And if they share the prompts, not the image, is that legal?
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Camera review site DPReview finds a buyer, avoids shutdown by Amazon • Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham:
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Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.
But then, something odd happened: the site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was “nothing to share,” which wasn’t much to go on but also didn’t make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.
On June 20, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its “current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]” were acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of June 20.
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A rare piece of good news in the whole “wiping content off the internet” sagas.
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Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? • Café Lob-On
“Bloonface” says there’s been a big exodus from Mastodon:
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As it exists at the moment, Mastodon functions essentially as Twitter did in about 2008. In some ways, that’s nice. The userbase is calmer, the Discourse™ does not get spun up as easily.
But the thing is, functionality-wise, Twitter in 2008 existed in 2008. We are now in 2023, where someone can use the Twitter of 2023. From a functionality standpoint, Twitter in 2023 is quite good, with some of the alternative Twitter-style frontends (e.g. Misskey and Calckey) being at about parity.
So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation. This brings me to the first thing that might piss off a lot of Mastodon users:Decentralisation is not a selling point for 99% of people
Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:
• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.«
People are allegedly on BlueSky. I’ve tried it, and it’s OK, but it still isn’t Twitter. Unfortunately.
Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto • MIT Technology Review
Adam Popescu:
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This is a pivotal moment for Africa’s oldest protected park. After four years of disease outbreaks, pandemic lockdowns, and bloodshed, Virunga [National Park in eastern Congo] badly needs money, and the region badly needs opportunities. The Congolese government provides around just 1% of the park’s operating budget, leaving it to largely fend for itself. That’s why Virunga is betting big on cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin, though, isn’t usually associated with conservation or community development. It’s often known for the opposite. But here it’s part of a larger plan to turn Virunga’s coveted natural resources—from land to hydropower—into benefits for both the park and locals. While operations like this mine may be unconventional, they’re profitable and they’re green.
Proceeds from the sale of Bitcoin are already helping to pay for park salaries, as well as its infrastructure projects like roads and water pumping stations. Elsewhere, power from other park hydro plants supports modest business development.
This is how you build a sustainable economy tied to park resources, de Merode says, even though the mine itself is something of a happy accident.
“We built the power plant and figured we’d build the network gradually,” he explains. “Then we had to shut down tourism in 2018 because of kidnappings [by rebels]. Then in 2019, we had to shut down tourism because of Ebola. And 2020—the rest is history with covid. For four years, all of our tourism revenue—it used to be 40% of park revenue—it collapsed.”
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Possibly the only bitcoin mine that really is 100% powered by green energy. Internet connectivity is a challenge, though. Also the armed militia.
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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
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 