Cat hairs found at a crime scene can be key evidence for convictions of owners, via new forensic methods. CC-licensed photo by *^ ^* Sherry on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Humane’s AI Pin costs $699 and $24 a month with OpenAI and T-Mobile integration • The Verge
David Pierce:
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Humane has been teasing its first device, the AI Pin, for most of this year. It’s scheduled to launch the Pin on Thursday, but The Verge has obtained documents detailing practically everything about the device ahead of its official launch. What they show is that Humane, the company noisily promoting a world after smartphones, is about to launch what amounts to a $699 wearable smartphone without a screen that has a $24-a-month subscription fee and runs on a Humane-branded version of T-Mobile’s network with access to AI models from Microsoft and OpenAI.
The Pin itself is a square device that magnetically clips to your clothes or other surfaces. The clip is more than just a magnet, though; it’s also a battery pack, which means you can swap in new batteries throughout the day to keep the Pin running. We don’t know how long a single battery lasts, but the device ships with two “battery boosters.” It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and uses a camera, depth, and motion sensors to track and record its surroundings. It has a built-in speaker, which Humane calls a “personic speaker,” and can connect to Bluetooth headphones.
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Dead on arrival. This is not how you supplant the smartphone.
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The new Twitter is changing rapidly — study it before it’s too late • Nature
Mike Caulfield:
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Last month, my team at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public in Seattle looked at data from X (formerly Twitter) to find the most influential voices in the discourse surrounding the Israel–Hamas war.
…What we found was extraordinary. A small group of seven accounts, many unknown a year ago, were racking up hundreds of millions of views each day, out-performing standard news accounts by an order of magnitude and exercising significant influence on the discourse around the war. X’s owner, Elon Musk, had interacted with or explicitly recommended six of those posters, potentially bringing them to the attention of his 162 million followers. Reporting that built on our work revealed some of the apparent identities behind these accounts: a London teenager who has posted antisemitic content, a US soldier in Georgia who seemed to have pulled at least some news from pro-Russian propaganda channels, and a right-wing news group in Poland.
Twitter was always a mix of credible and less credible sources — but our research supports the notion that X is changing dramatically, in ways that are not fully apparent even to researchers who have followed the platform for years. The influence of this new group of accounts, previously unknown to us, had skyrocketed shockingly quickly. In my more than ten years in this field, I’ve never seen an almost entirely new set of accounts come to dominate a major platform in less than a year.
… Our work on last year’s US midterm elections showed that, even before the worrying changes at X, the platform was able to disseminate election conspiracy theories broadly and with remarkable efficiency. We feel that X will play that part in next year’s US elections — including the presidential race — as well as in dozens of others around the world in what is shaping up to be a very important year.
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But, but, but: Twitter’s importance and trustworthiness are cratering. It was never used very much by average people; the word is getting out that it’s now just a mess.
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Solar-plus-storage outperforms diesel in military survivability analysis • PV magazine USA
John Fitzgerald Weaver:
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Analysis by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) demonstrated that solar energy systems, when paired with 14-day duration energy storage (LDES), outperform military grade emergency diesel generators (EDGs) in both survivability and financial viability in military applications.
Historical data comparing the failure rates of EDGs to solar plus LDES technologies demonstrates that, over a 14-day standard military uptime evaluation, solar plus LDES’ survivability probability exceeds 95%, while the diesel generators’ survivability hovers around 80%.
The study also suggests that a more strategically sized solar-plus-storage system could achieve nearly perfect reliability, with uptime approaching 100% over a two-week period. NREL differentiates between the 95%+ ‘Intermediate’ Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), which is currently available for field testing and provides a 38% round-trip efficiency, while the 100% ‘Goal’ BESS, still in the conceptual phase, is expected to provide a 48% round-trip efficiency and cut the energy storage system costs in half. However, since the ‘Goal’ BESS is currently under development, future costs may deviate from these projections.
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Rather puts the kibosh on the claim shown here the other day that the military totally absolutely must have diesel and that renewables can’t fill any sort of gap.
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One regulation could have stopped a nationwide car theft wave. Why doesn’t the US have It? • Vice
Aaron Gordon:
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The U.S. is dealing with an unprecedented wave of car thefts as thieves target some nine million Kias and Hyundais manufactured between 2011 and 2021. People who bought those vehicles had no idea they were buying cars with built-in vulnerabilities. Many have had their cars stolen multiple times, which causes real hardship in both stark monetary terms and also psychological trauma. Those who cannot afford to absorb tens of thousands of dollars in losses to buy a different car are stuck with one that’s easy to steal, and even those who own models not directly affected are seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket for simply owning a car made by the same brand.
None of this is happening in Canada, despite many of the same Kias and Hyundais being sold north of the border. This is because, in 2005, Canada enacted a simple regulation that made all cars harder to steal.
As part of Motherboard’s ongoing coverage of the Kia-Hyundai theft issue, involving more than 125 public information requests and interviews with victims and experts, I’ve been trying to answer what I hoped would be a simple question: Why doesn’t the United States have a similar regulation? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any satisfying answers. Instead, I found bigger questions about why the U.S. has no serious anti-theft regulations and how its regulatory agencies think about crime prevention—which is to say, in some cases, not at all.
The story of what is happening with Kia andHyundai thefts in the U.S., and what is not happening in Canada, is as clear a case you will find illustrating what good regulations can do and what intelligent, thoughtful crime prevention actually looks like when it involves a holistic government effort rather than a narrow and singular focus of policing and incarceration.
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The Canadian regulation since 2007: requiring an immobiliser. To British ears, this is incredible: new cars sold in the UK must have an immobiliser since October 1998. (Old ones quickly got them too. I had one fitted on a secondhand car in 1996 or so.)
Like American banking, this is astonishingly retrograde. A little regulation which could improve so many people’s lives.
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Revenue from click-to-message ads in India has doubled, says Zuckerberg • The Economic Times
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Meta said [last] Thursday its revenue from click-to-message ads in India doubled year on year in the third quarter ended September as the company continues to push WhatsApp business messaging in the country, which is its largest market.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated that business messaging will be the next major pillar of the social media giant’s business. “More than 60% of people on WhatsApp in India message a business app account,” he said. “Now, I think that this is going to be a really big opportunity for new business AIs that we hope will enable any business to easily set up an AI that people can message to help with commerce and support,” he added.
In February 2023, Zuckerberg had said click-to-message ads had reached a $10bn revenue run-rate globally. India is the biggest market for WhatsApp with over 500 million users.
Speaking of the business sense that it made, Zuckerberg said most commerce and messaging is in countries where the cost of labour is low enough that it makes sense for businesses to have people corresponding with customers over text. And in those countries like Thailand or Vietnam, there is a huge amount of commerce that happens in this way, he said.
“But in lots of parts of the world, the cost of labour is too expensive for this to be viable,” he added. “But with business AIs, we have the opportunity to bring down that cost, and expand commerce and messaging into larger economies across the world. So, making business AIs work for more businesses is going to be an important focus for us into 2024.”
Last month Zuckerberg said “India is leading the world in terms of how people and businesses embrace messaging”.
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There’s also a longer background piece (though it feels unfocused) about WhatsApp at the NY Times.
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DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs • cabel.com
Cabel Sasser:
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As a kid, I didn’t really read sci-fi novels, I’ve never read a single word of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I mostly used the encyclopedia to look up funny words.
What I did read as a kid, over and over again, were game/computer magazines… and the DAK Catalog.
(I know this says a lot about me. We don’t need to discuss it any further.)Now, I’ve written about this particular catalog back in 2012, but back then I only scratched the surface.
To explain DAK, let’s both look at the Summer ’83 issue.
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“DAK”, as in the catalog(ue), was produced by DAK Industries Incorporated, which was run by Drew Alan Kaplan. Hence the acronym. He wrote much of the copy – and there’s a LOT of copy – that accompanied the items on sale, bubbling with enthusiasm for each and every one. (“Experience the thrill of total phone freedom as you roam throughout your home, yard or even a neighbor’s house. You’ll never have to ‘run for the phone’ again.”)
Older Britons will find themselves thinking of the long-dead Innovations catalogue, except DAK’s things might have been useful.
More observationally: these date to a time when manufacturing and microchips and miniaturisation were all accelerating together, so that imaginary things could become real within a few months. It feels as though things have slowed down, certainly on the hardware front.
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We need more USB-C cables with bandwidth and USB versions on them • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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Elgato hasn’t just made an excellent teleprompter, it’s also made a great USB-C cable that ships with it. Professional audio engineer Matt “Spike” McWilliams spotted that Elgato’s latest USB-C cable has the bandwidth and USB type imprinted on the connector, and now I wish all manufacturers did this.
I recently spent too many hours sorting my USB-C cables into ones that are high speed, ones that can deliver fast charging, and ones that can do both. None of them had any marker to let me know the speed or type of USB-C cable without me having to test them. It’s a common issue for people switching to USB-C right now, and even a small indicator like Elgato’s can certainly help. The writing on Elgato’s cable tells me it’s USB 3.0 compatible and can support up to 5Gbps in bandwidth.
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Back in 2021 there was the suggestion of colour coding for USB-C (nobody seems to be taking it up, sadly) but this would be the next best thing. Sorting cables! Fun times in the Warren household.
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Cat-ching criminals with DNA from pet hairs • Phys.org
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Around 26% of UK householders own a cat and with the average feline shedding thousands of hairs annually, it’s inevitable that once you leave, you’ll bear evidence of the furry resident. This is potentially useful in the forensic investigation of criminal activity.
While a human perpetrator may take pains not to leave their own DNA behind, transferred cat hair contains its own DNA that could provide a link between a suspect and a crime scene, or a victim.
In a paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics earlier this month, researchers at the University of Leicester describe a sensitive method that can extract maximum DNA information from just one cat hair.
Emily Patterson, the lead author of the study and a Leicester Ph.D. student, said, “Hair shed by your cat lacks the hair root, so it contains very little useable DNA. In practice we can only analyze mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mothers to their offspring, and is shared among maternally related cats.”
This means that hair DNA cannot individually identify a cat, making it essential to maximize information in a forensic test.
However, a new method identified by the researchers enabled them to determine the sequence of the entire mitochondrial DNA, ensuring it is around ten times more discriminating than a previously used technique which looked at only a short fragment.
Dr. Jon Wetton, from the University’s Department of Genetics & Genome Biology, co-led the study. He said, “In a previous murder case we applied the earlier technique but were fortunate that the suspect’s cat had an uncommon mitochondrial variant, as most cat lineages couldn’t be distinguished from each other. But with our new approach virtually every cat has a rare DNA type and so the test will almost certainly be informative if hairs are found.”
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Not certain, but the “previous murder case” seems to be State of Missouri v Henry L Polk Jr, of a 2004 murder with a 2009 verdict.
AI negotiates legal contract without humans involved for first time • CNBC
Ryan Browne:
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In a world first, artificial intelligence demonstrated the ability to negotiate a contract autonomously with another artificial intelligence without any human involvement.
British AI firm Luminance developed an AI system based on its own proprietary large language model (LLM) to automatically analyze and make changes to contracts. LLMs are a type of AI algorithm that can achieve general-purpose language processing and generation.
Jaeger Glucina, chief of staff and managing director of Luminance, said the company’s new AI aimed to eliminate much of the paperwork that lawyers typically need to complete on a day-to-day basis.
In Glucina’s own words, Autopilot “handles the day-to-day negotiations, freeing up lawyers to use their creativity where it counts, and not be bogged down in this type of work.”
…In the demonstration, the AI negotiators go back and forth on a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, that one party wants the other to sign. NDAs are a bugbear in the legal profession, not least because they impose strict confidentiality limits and require lengthy scrutiny, Glucina said.
…“This is just AI negotiating with AI, right from opening a contract in Word all the way through to negotiating terms and then sending it to DocuSign,” she told CNBC in an interview.
“This is all now handled by the AI, that’s not only legally trained, which we’ve talked about being very important, but also understands your business.”
Luminance’s Autopilot feature is much more advanced than Lumi, Luminance’s ChatGPT-like chatbot.
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We’ve gone from humans writing contracts with clauses nobody will read unless they absolutely have to, to computers writing contracts where only computers will read them.
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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. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 