Reducing pollution from ships has cut the clouds they produce – which is helping to warm the planet faster, unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by NASA Earth Observatory on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
China considers limiting kids’ smartphone time to two hours per day • Engadget
Jon Fingas:
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China might put further limits on kids’ smartphone use. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has proposed draft rules that would cap the phone time of children under 18 to a maximum of two hours per day. That’s only for 16- and 17-year-olds, too. Youth between eight and 15 would be limited to one hour per day, while those under eight would have 40 minutes.
The draft would also bar any use between 10pm and 6am. Phones would need to have an easy-to-access mode that lets parents restrict what kids see and permit internet providers to show age-appropriate content. Children under three would be limited to songs and other forms of audio, while those 12 and up can see educational and news material. There would be exceptions for regulated educational content and emergency services.
As with previous measures, the proposal is meant to curb addictive behaviour in children. The Chinese government is concerned prolonged use of mobile devices, games and services may be detrimental to kids’ development. The country already limits young people to three hours of online video game time per week, and then only on weekends and public holidays.
The draft is still open to public consultation and isn’t guaranteed to pass. There are also questions about implementation.
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Google can now alert you when your private contact info appears online • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search.
All this takes place from Google’s “results about you” dashboard on mobile and web, which it first rolled out last September. With the update, you can find your information on Google without actually having to conduct the search yourself. Once you input your personal information, the dashboard will automatically pull up websites that contain any matches, letting you review each webpage it appears on and then submit a request to remove it.
This marks a pretty big improvement, as Google previously required you to search for your personal information yourself and then manually request its removal.
If you’re concerned about your information popping up on Google in the future, you can also enable push notifications that will alert you to any new results that appear — something it first announced it would do last year. You can also track your requests from Google’s hub, which shows your in-progress, approved, denied, and undone requests.
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Helpful. Though of course it implies you telling Google all your private contact information. However it’s only available in the US – probably for privacy reasons.
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Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses fail to catch on • WSJ
Salvador Rodriguez and Joanna Stern:
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The Ray-Ban smart glasses launched by Meta Platforms almost two years ago have struggled to catch on with owners, many of whom appear to be using the devices infrequently, according to internal company data.
Less than 10% of the Ray-Ban Stories purchased since the product’s launch in September 2021 are used actively by purchasers, according to a company document from February reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta sold a total of 300,000 of the wearable devices through February, but the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users.
The device, an important part of Meta’s hardware strategy, allows users to take photos and listen to music with the frames of their glasses, among other features. It has experienced a 13% return rate, according to the document.
Among the top drivers of poor user experience were issues with connectivity, problems with some of the hardware features including battery life, inability for users to import media from the devices, issues with the audio on the product and problems with voice commands for the smart glasses, according to the document.
“We’ll also need to better understand why users stop using their glasses, how to ensure we are encouraging new feature adoption, and ultimately how to keep our users engaged and retained,” the document said.
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Like you, I’m thinking: Ray-Ban smart glasses? Sold by Facebook/Meta? Indeed: September 2021. Effectively a copy of Snapchat’s Spectacles, which also haven’t set the world on fire.
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‘We’re changing the clouds’: an unforeseen test of geoengineering is fuelling record ocean warmth • Science
Paul Voosen:
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“This year it’s been crazy,” says Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The obvious and primary driver of this trend is society’s emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat that the oceans steadily absorb. Another influence has been recent weather, especially stalled high-pressure systems that suppress cloud formation and allow the oceans to bake in the Sun.
But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulphur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulphate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule “is a big natural experiment,” says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re changing the clouds.”
By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It’s as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University.
The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action—although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond’s view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. “It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could,” he says.
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Argh. We reduce pollution from ships and it makes things worse?
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Norway projects a cautionary tale about carbon capture and storage, report says • The Straits Times
David Fogarty:
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Big CCS [carbon capture and storage] projects are planned around the globe, including in Malaysia and Indonesia, while Shell Singapore said in 2022 that it was exploring shipping CO2 captured from its operations in the Republic to Brunei for storage.
The renewed focus on CCS has angered climate activists and climate-vulnerable developing nations, who say it is a false solution because it will still lead to higher CO2 emissions, accelerating climate change. Burning fossil fuels is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions heating up the planet.
Mr Hauber [of the IEEFA think tank] looked at the Sleipner and Snohvit offshore CCS projects in Norway, which capture CO2 from natural gas production and pipe it back underground.
Sleipner began in 1996 and is the world’s longest-running CCS project, while Snohvit began in 2008. Together, they have sequestered about 22 million tonnes of CO2 since they started operation.
Both have proven to be major challenges for Norwegian energy firm Equinor, which runs them.
At Sleipner, CO2 is injected more than 1km under the seabed. In 1999, CO2 unexpectedly began migrating in large amounts into a previously unknown upper layer. A thick layer of rock prevented the gas from leaking to the surface.
Snohvit’s problem was different. Within 18 months of its operation, the target storage area proved unable to take the projected amount of CO2. Equinor had to find new CO2 storage areas and in 2016 invested in another injection site.
“Even after extensive sampling and study, geological realities can be different from engineering plans,” said the report.
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There was a time when I had high hopes for CCS. It wasn’t that long ago, geologically speaking.
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Under-30 South Korea survey: 85% bought Android as first phone; now 53% on iOS • Counterpoint Research
Sujeong Lim:
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About 85% of South Korean smartphone users aged less than 30 used Android phones such as Samsung and LG as their first smartphones, according to a consumer survey conducted by Counterpoint Research among 1,000 users in the first half of 2023. However, about 53% of them said that they were currently using an iPhone, suggesting that many Android phone users had switched to iPhones during replacement.
The reason why Android phones account for a very high proportion of first-time smartphone purchases in South Korea is that most users in that age group, particularly adolescence, give priority to the preference of those with real purchasing power, such as parents, when buying their first smartphone. During the survey, the largest number of respondents opted for “Recommendation from family or friends” when asked why they used an Android as their first smartphone.
As for the reason for switching from an Android phone to an iPhone, respondents cited “Performance” (32%) and “Brand image” (31%) as the first and second priorities. In particular, in terms of performance, satisfaction and expectation with the camera had the greatest impact on the purchase decision.
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South Korea, in case anyone’s forgotten, is Samsung’s home; its fortress. The idea that significant numbers of the under-30s are defecting to iOS is, frankly, a bit astonishing. But it shows that Apple’s focus on camera performance keeps paying off. The smartphone wars feel a long time back; but Apple seems to be winning all the ongoing skirmishes.
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Advertising has reached a new low in the age of podcasts • Financial Times
Jemima Kelly:
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In his recent softball interview with [Ron] DeSantis, [Russell] Brand interrupted to plug a particular brand of men’s underwear. “It’s getting hot out there, and I don’t know about you Ron, but I’m getting pretty hot down there,” Brand said. “Summertime is not an issue if you wear Sheath underwear . . . There’s something for everyone’s testicles and penis.” He then proceeded to give his followers a very special 20-per-cent-off code.
This is by no means the most egregious recent example of this type of advertising I have come across. Unlike the conventional adverts made by advertising agencies, these “host-read” adverts are delivered by the presenter of a given podcast or YouTube channel, and so usually have a chatty, improvisational feel to them. This makes them particularly effective, and also means that they are often virtually indistinguishable from the content they are inserted into.
At the beginning of a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, an in-person interview with Tel-Aviv-based thinker and writer Yuval Noah Harari, the host talked solemnly about some of his experiences during his trip. “I’ve travelled to some very difficult areas of the Middle East over the last two days,” he said. “It’s been a real challenge — emotionally, psychologically, physically, just all of it. The reality of war and peace, cruelty and hope, all of it together is just sobering. Sobering.”
Fridman had already read out adverts for five different podcast sponsors, and we were now eight minutes into the podcast. “If I wasn’t already grateful it makes me truly grateful to be alive, to be healthy, to have the people I love in my life,” he continued. “Anyway as part of that difficult journey it’s nice to have little tokens of home with me and AG1 is certainly that.”
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Very definitely what the 30-second skip-forward button was designed for. (The article’s free to read.)
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AudioCraft: A simple one-stop shop for audio modeling
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Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or an indie game developer populating virtual worlds with realistic sound effects and ambient noise on a shoestring budget. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest Instagram post with ease. That’s the promise of AudioCraft — our simple framework that generates high-quality, realistic audio and music from text-based user inputs after training on raw audio signals as opposed to MIDI or piano rolls.
AudioCraft consists of three models: MusicGen, AudioGen, and EnCodec. MusicGen, which was trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music, generates music from text-based user inputs, while AudioGen, which was trained on public sound effects, generates audio from text-based user inputs. Today, we’re excited to release an improved version of our EnCodec decoder, which allows for higher quality music generation with fewer artifacts; our pre-trained AudioGen model, which lets you generate environmental sounds and sound effects like a dog barking, cars honking, or footsteps on a wooden floor; and all of the AudioCraft model weights and code.
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It does this from text. Scroll down the page for a few examples. It’s going to be harder and harder to trust anything we hear without time-coded footage.
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IBM open sources the largest NASA AI model on Hugging Face • IBM Research Blog
Kim Martineau:
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Climate change poses numerous risks. The need to understand quickly and clearly how Earth’s landscape is changing is one reason IBM set out six months ago in a collaboration with NASA to build an AI model that could speed up the analysis of satellite images and boost scientific discovery. Another motivator was the desire to make nearly 250,000 terabytes of NASA mission data accessible to more people.
To further both goals, IBM is now making its foundation model public through the open-source AI platform, Hugging Face. It’s the largest geospatial model to be hosted on Hugging Face and the first open-source AI foundation model NASA has collaborated to build. And, it can analyze geospatial data up to four times faster than state-of-the-art deep-learning models, with half as much labeled data, IBM has estimated.
A commercial version of the model, part of IBM’s AI and data platform watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.
“AI remains a science-driven field, and science can only progress through information sharing and collaboration,” said Jeff Boudier, head of product and growth at Hugging Face. “This is why open-source AI and the open release of models and datasets are so fundamental to the continued progress of AI, and making sure the technology will benefit as many people as possible.”
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This seems like something important, but the scale of it feels beyond me.
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LK-99 is fuelling a DIY superconductivity race • WIRED
Gergory Barker:
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All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but also an essential one, if McCalip was going to realize his dream of making a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the next week. It required four ingredients, and so far he had access to three.
His followers on X (that is, Twitter, post-rebrand), offered ideas: He could melt down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or try to buy it in pure form off Etsy, where the DEA might not be looking. Others offered connections to Eastern European suppliers. They were deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had learned about a possible superconductor called LK-99 earlier that week through a post on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint in which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, in their words, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was among those racing to replicate it.
[Explanation of superconductivity cut. You know, don’t you.]
…On X and Reddit, large language models went by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets were spun up (the odds: not particularly good). Anons with a strangely sophisticated knowledge of electronic band structure went to war with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an apparent resurgence of technological progress.«
Good backgrounder on what it takes to try to replicate a superconductor.
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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 