Ten-pin bowling enthusiasts are upset at the use of “strings” to retain pins rather than more complex mechanical systems because they change how the pins interact. But they’re cheaper. CC-licensed photo by Ginny on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 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.
ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis • Nature
Miryam Naddaf:
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Researchers have used the technology behind the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim.
In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November1, the authors used GPT-4 — the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs — paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other.
“Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available,” says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy.
The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity. “It was one thing that generative AI could be used to generate texts that would not be detectable using plagiarism software, but the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry,” says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent research-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. “It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments.”
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Yikes. Related: “scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers“. (Paywalled.) (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure • FT
Anjuna Ahuja:
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As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones [committing scientific fraud] who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting”. The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections.
That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity.
It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill”, an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited.
Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7m papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.
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Plus AI content generators helping the churn. But the real drivers of this are two factors: 1) academic institutions requiring publication for reputation 2) science publishers which are motivated by generating the most content, not the best, and which have a natural bias against publishing corrections or negations.
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Bowling, that simple game of our youth, is being turned upside-down by technology • LA Times
David Wharton:
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Bowling alleys across the country are ditching traditional pinsetters — the machines that sweep away and reset pins — in favour of contraptions that employ string. Think of the pins as marionettes with nylon cords attached to their heads. Those that fall are lifted out of the way, as if by levitation, then lowered back into place after each frame.
String pinsetters mean big savings, maybe salvation, for an industry losing customers to video games and other newfangled entertainment. That is why the US Bowling Congress recently certified them for tournaments and league play.
But there is delicate science at play here. Radius of gyration, coefficient of restitution and other obscure forces cause tethered pins to fly around differently than their free-fall counterparts. They don’t even make the same noise.
Faced with growing pushback, the bowling congress published new research this month claiming the disparity isn’t nearly as great as people think. [Keen bowler Kevin] Mills seems dubious on a recent night when he visits a San Fernando Valley bowling alley that has made the switch. “The physics are entirely different,” he says. “It’s a big deal in our world.”
…In the 1960s, the U.S. had about 11,500 bowling alleys, or “houses,” according to industry reports. Such establishments were referred to as “the poor man’s country club.”
Though the sport has remained popular, with about 67 million Americans playing at least once a year, current demand supports only 3,000 or so houses.
“Some of the decline has to do with cost to operate and square footage,” says Chad Murphy, the bowling congress’ executive director. “If [houses] can lower their costs, that’s a good thing.”
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But the pins don’t fall in the same way, of course. Problem is that the old mechanical systems were prone to failure, and upkeep was costly in parts and time. Technology making a sport.. worse?
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X may lose up to $75m in revenue as more advertisers pull out • The New York Times
Ryan Mac and Kate Conger:
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Internal documents viewed by The New York Times this week show that the company is in a more difficult position than previously known and that concerns about Mr. Musk and the platform have spread far beyond companies including IBM, Apple and Disney, which paused their advertising campaigns on X last week. The documents list more than 200 ad units of companies from the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, many of which have halted or are considering pausing their ads on the social network.
The documents come from X’s sales team and are meant to track the impact of all the advertising lapses this month, including those by companies that have already paused and others that may be at risk of doing so. They list how much ad revenue X employees fear the company could lose through the end of the year if advertisers do not return.
On Friday, X said in a statement that $11m in revenue was at risk and that the exact figure fluctuated as some advertisers returned to the platform and others increased spending. The company said the numbers viewed by The Times were either outdated or represented an internal exercise to evaluate total risk.
The advertising freezes come during the final three months of the year, which is traditionally the social media company’s strongest quarter as brands run holiday promotions for events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In the last three months of 2021 — the last year the company reported fourth-quarter earnings before Mr. Musk took over — the company recorded $1.57bn in revenue, of which nearly 90% came from advertising.
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The next question is what pressure that will put on Twitter/X’s debt repayment schedule. Musk is going to have to fund the company rather more than he expected, with no prospect of relief.
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Hacking my filter coffee machine • diziet
Ian Jackson:
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I have a Morphy Richards filter coffee machine. It makes very good coffee. But the display and firmware are quite annoying:
• After it has finished making the coffee, it will keep the coffee warm using its hotplate, but only for 25 minutes. If you want to make a batch and drink it over the course of the morning that’s far too short.
• It has a timer function. But it only has a 12 hour clock! You can’t retire upstairs on a Friday night, having programmed the coffee machine to make you coffee at a suitable post-lie-in time. If you try, you are greeted with apparently-inexplicably-cold coffee.
• The buttons and UI are very confusing. For example, if it’s just sitting there keeping the coffee warm, and you pour the last, you want to turn it off. So you press the power button. Then the display lights up as if you’ve just turned it on! (The power LED is in the power button, which your finger is on.) If you know this you can get used to it, but it can confuse guests.
Also, I’m lazy and wanted to be able to cause coffee to exist from upstairs in bed, without having to make a special trip down just to turn the machine on.
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Necessity of caffeine is the parent of intervention. Remarkable how often coffee features in internet-related inventions.
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‘You can walk around in a T-shirt’: how Norway brought heat pumps in from the cold • The Guardian
Ajit Niranjan:
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When Glen Peters bought a heat pump for his home in Oslo he wasn’t thinking about the carbon it would avoid. Convenience played a role; a fireplace was too much of a hassle – the effort of having to buy, prepare and store the wood – and the wall-mounted radiators are too dusty. “They’re a pain in the ass to clean,” said Peters (who is actually a climate scientist).
But the main factor, according to Peters, who had recently swapped to underfloor heating, was money.
In most of Europe, fitting a heat pump is one of the most powerful actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint. But in Norway, where clean-yet-inefficient electrical resistance heaters have long been common, upgrading to a heat pump is often a purely financial decision – one to which Peters came late. Two-thirds of households in this Nordic country of 5 million people have a heat pump, more than anywhere else in the world.
For many years, Norwegians and their neighbours heated their homes with fossil fuels. But during the 1973 oil crisis, when prices shot up, the country’s political leaders made a conscious choice to promote alternatives, and, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they did not back away from that decision once the crisis eased.
Denmark rolled out an extensive district heating system. Norway, Sweden and Finland moved more towards heating with wood or electricity. They began to price carbon in the 1990s, and a mix of grants and taxes tipped the balance further away from oil long after the crisis was over.
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That phrase “had recently swapped to underfloor heating” is a brisk few words to cover rather a lot of potentially expensive work. Sure, if my house had underfloor heating then I’d think a heat pump could be a great idea. But if I had to dig up every floor.. maybe not.
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Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety finally breaks her silence • WIRED
Lauren Goode managed to track down Del Harvey (the name she goes by, as you’ll read), who used to run the Trust and Safety team at Twitter:
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LG: Do you generally believe the platforms should be arbiters of truth?
DH: I generally feel as though it is impossible and also that they have to try. It’s really true. You are never going to be able to fully succeed. You’re never going to be able to keep all bad things from happening.
I consistently had conversations with people … because people would go into trust and safety because they care, right? You don’t go into trust and safety because you’re like, “I enjoy getting praised for my work.” You really have to want to get into the weird, human, messy issues where sometimes both parties are at fault, sometimes neither party’s at fault, and you still have to navigate all of those.
I would tell this apocryphal story of this little boy who’s walking on the beach and there’s all these starfish that are stranded on the beach, trying to get back to the ocean before they die. And he’s walking along the beach, and every time he comes to a starfish, he’s picking up the starfish and he’s throwing it back in the water. And this guy comes along and asks, “What are you doing? There’s no point in doing that. There are literally thousands of starfish on this beach. You are never going to be able to make a difference here.” And the boy picks up the next starfish and tosses it into the ocean and says, “Made a difference to that one.”
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I knew and liked Harvey through her role at Twitter. It’s a thorough interview, and – as is typical with her – she points out all the nuance and complication around content moderation.
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China engineers complete largest solar farm on Earth in UAE ahead of Cop28 • South China Morning Post
Ling Xin:
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The world’s largest single-site solar power plant – a flagship project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative – has been completed in the United Arab Emirates, ahead of the UN climate change conference Cop28 in Dubai later this month.
The two-gigawatt Al Dhafra Solar Photovoltaic Project covers 20 sq km (12.4 square miles) of desert outside Abu Dhabi and can power about 200,000 households, according to main contractor China National Machinery Industry Corporation.
The company said the plant was expected to help Abu Dhabi reduce carbon emissions by 2.4m tonnes each year – the equivalent of taking more than half a million cars off the road – and take the proportion of clean energy to over 13% of the emirate’s overall consumption.
By mid-November, the solar farm had already produced 3.6bn kilowatt-hours of clean electricity ahead of its official inauguration last Thursday.
…The plant consists of four million solar panels that can capture sunlight on both sides, according to the company, which was responsible for its design, civil engineering, equipment supply, installation and commissioning. It will also provide two years of operation and maintenance.
According to Chinese media reports, the three-year construction contract was signed in October 2020 – with the project team battling the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent supply-chain constraints to complete the project on time.
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Typical CCGT plants in the US are less than 1GW.
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Turn speech into text with Audio Hijack 4.3’s new Transcribe block • Rogue Amoeba
Paul Kafasis:
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Our flagship recording tool Audio Hijack can now act as your own personal stenographer! We’ve just released version 4.3, with a brand-new Transcribe block to turn spoken audio into a written text transcript.
…Transcribe can convert speech from an astonishing 57 languages into text, providing you with a written transcript of any spoken audio. It’s powered by OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system Whisper, and features two powerful models for fast and accurate transcriptions.
Best of all, unlike traditional transcription services, Transcribe works for free inside of Audio Hijack. There’s absolutely no ongoing cost, so you can generate unlimited transcriptions and never again pay a per-minute charge. It’s pretty incredible.
It’s also completely private. When you use Transcribe, everything happens right on your Mac. That means your data is never sent to the cloud, nor shared with anyone else.
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Whisper is open source, so Rogue Amoeba has incorporated it into its Mac app. You can get it to transcribe podcasts, interviews, or whatever is generating sound on a Mac, because Rogue Amoeba has a plugin which can capture sound from any application. Doesn’t need to be live sound either. Real-time transcription? This is very much what journalists have been wishing for for years.
(Fun story: Rogue Amoeba would be long dead if Steve Jobs hadn’t heard that podcasters needed it, and so told the RIAA – which wanted to squash it – to sod off.)
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Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants • Reuters via Yahoo
Sarah McFarlane and Susanna Twidale:
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The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United States primarily to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, are changing quickly, according to Reuters’ interviews with more than a dozen power plant developers, project finance bankers, analysts and consultants.
They said some battery operators are already supplying backup power to grids at a price competitive with gas power plants, meaning gas will be used less.
The shift challenges assumptions about long-term gas demand and could mean natural gas has a smaller role in the energy transition than posited by the biggest, listed energy majors.
In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by US-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor.
Recent cancellations include electricity plant developer Competitive Power Ventures decision announced in October to abandon a gas plant project in New Jersey in the United States. It cited low power prices and the absence of government subsidies without giving financial detail.
British independent Carlton Power dropped plans for an £800m ($997m) gas power plant in Manchester, northern England, in 2016. Reflecting the shift in economics in favour of storage, this year it launched plans to build one of the world’s largest batteries at the site.
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Once gas power plants start to be shunned in favour of renewables, things are really changing.
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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 