The Chinese company BYD has morphed from smartphone battery maker to world’s biggest EV maker. How big can it get? CC-licensed photo by Rutger van der Maar on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Never heard it coming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
2023 confirmed as world’s hottest year on record • BBC News
Mark Poynting and Erwan Rivault:
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The year 2023 has been confirmed as the warmest on record, driven by human-caused climate change and boosted by the natural El Niño weather event.
Last year was about 1.48ºC warmer than the long-term average before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the EU’s climate service says.
Almost every day since July has seen a new global air temperature high for the time of year, BBC analysis shows.
Sea surface temperatures have also smashed previous highs.The Met Office reported last week that the UK experienced its second warmest year on record in 2023.
These global records are bringing the world closer to breaching key international climate targets.
“What struck me was not just that [2023] was record-breaking, but the amount by which it broke previous records,” notes Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University. “The margin of some of these records – which you can see on the chart below – is “really astonishing”, Prof Dessler says, considering they are averages across the whole world.
<img src="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/62BB/production/_132257252_global_temp_lines_ribbon_prev_high_640-nc-2x-nc.png.webp" width="100%"
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As the BBC Environment Editor also pointed out, even with everything we know, 80% of the world’s total energy still comes from fossil fuels. 2023 won’t be the last record-breaking year for so many environmental records, none of them good.
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Mr Bates vs The Post Office depicts one of the UK’s worst miscarriages of justice: here’s why so many victims didn’t speak out • The Conversation
Grace Augustine, Jan Lodget and Mislav Radic are professors of management and social sciences:
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Today, we know the Post Office wrongly prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters for theft, false accounting and related charges because of technical faults in the Horizon IT system, and these accusations persisted for 16 years – from 1999 to 2015, which equates to an average of roughly one person charged each week.
By and large, most sub-postmaster victims did not speak out about the injustice they faced. Some took years to come forward, and many still prefer to remain anonymous. As depicted in the drama, the first journalist to help break the story, who was from Computer Weekly, was only able to identify and vet seven victims for her story – and it was published ten years after the Post Office began falsely accusing sub-postmasters of various crimes. So where were the other victims?
Based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of transcripts from the public inquiry and interviews with sub-postmasters across the UK, our ongoing research has enabled us to identify the four main barriers that the victims of this scandal faced when it came to speaking out.
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Briefly: they were told they were the only ones; they were stigmatised in their communities where they were seen as thieves; they couldn’t defend themselves (because the Post Office, bringing the prosecution, denied them a fair trial); the Post Office was (incredible as it now seems) the nation’s most trusted brand, selling stamps which had the Queen’s head on; and the computer systems were treated as infallible.
There’s a lot of whistleblowing to come on this. But it speaks to something deeper in corporate culture: of nobody challenging what is wrong despite suspicions.
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The “10,000-hour rule” was debunked again in a replication study. That’s a relief • Vox
Brian Resnick:
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This week, the journal Royal Society Open Science published a replication of an influential 1993 study on violin players at a music school in the journal Psychological Review.
The original finding was simple, and compelling: The very best, expert players — those who were considered elite — were the ones who had practiced the most. The conclusions implied that deliberate practice was the most important ingredient needed to achieve elite status, more important than inborn characteristics like genetics, or personality.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this. The idea was then popularized in the book Outliers by journalist Malcolm Gladwell. He dubbed it the “10,000-hour rule.” “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness,” Gladwell wrote, drawing on anecdotes from famous success-havers (like Bill Gates and the Beatles), but also on the 1993 paper (which according to Google Scholar has been cited more than 9,800 times).
The replication — conducted by Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra of Case Western Reserve University — included a somewhat larger sample size and tighter study controls, and was preregistered (meaning that the scientists locked their methods and analysis plans in place before they collected any data, preventing them from retroactively changing their premise to fit their findings).
It finds that practice does matter for performance, but not nearly as much as the original article claimed, and surprisingly, it works differently for elite performers.
“In fact, the majority of the best violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists,” the authors write. Practice still mattered: It accounted for 26% of the difference between good violinists and the less accomplished students. But the original study claimed that practice accounted for 48% of the difference.
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You’re surely familiar with this: people in the same pursuit as you who are simply better at it, apparently effortlessly. Genetics? Something in early childhood? Both?
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Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform • Platformer
Casey Newton:
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Substack is removing some publications that express support for Nazis, the company said today. The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.
As part of the move, the company is also terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week.
The company will not change the text of its content policy, it says, and its new policy interpretation will not include proactively removing content related to neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. But Substack will continue to remove any material that includes “credible threats of physical harm,” it said.
In a statement, Substack’s co-founders told Platformer:
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If and when we become aware of other content that violates our guidelines, we will take appropriate action.
Relatedly, we’ve heard your feedback about Substack’s content moderation approach, and we understand your concerns and those of some other writers on the platform. We sincerely regret how this controversy has affected writers on Substack.
We appreciate the input from everyone. Writers are the backbone of Substack and we take this feedback very seriously. We are actively working on more reporting tools that can be used to flag content that potentially violates our guidelines, and we will continue working on tools for user moderation so Substack users can set and refine the terms of their own experience on the platform.
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Substack’s statement comes after weeks of controversy related to the company’s mostly laissez-faire approach to content moderation.
In November, Jonathan M. Katz published an article in The Atlantic titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” In it, he reported that he had identified at least 16 newsletters that depicted overt Nazi symbols, and dozens more devoted to far-right extremism.
Last month, 247 Substack writers issued an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies. The company responded on December 21, when Substack co-founder published a blog post arguing that “censorship” of Nazi publications would only make extremism worse.
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The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that [claims it] can use your apps for you • The Verge
David Pierce:
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Rather than build a bunch of APIs and try to convince developers to support the R1, though, Rabbit trained its model on how to use existing apps for itself. The large action model, or LAM, was trained by humans interacting with apps like Spotify and Uber, essentially showing the model how they work. The LAM learned what a Settings icon looked like, how to know when an order was confirmed, and where the search menus are. All that, Lyu says, can be applied to any app anywhere.
The R1 also has a dedicated training mode, which you can use to teach the device how to do something, and it will supposedly be able to repeat the action on its own going forward. Lyu gives an example: “You’ll be like, ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Grab your photos here. Make a lasso on the watermark and click click click click. This is how you remove watermark.’” It takes 30 seconds for Rabbit OS to process, Lyu says, and then it can automatically remove all your watermarks going forward.
How all of this actually works in practice, though, is the real question. You’ll be able to do some things on the R1 itself, and there’s a web portal called Rabbit Hole through which you log in to all your various services. And if you want to, say, teach the device how to use Photoshop, you’ll be able to boot one of Rabbit’s virtual machines and teach it there rather than using your own device and software. But how that will work with lots of users, on lots of devices and platforms, will be tricky to get right.
Rabbit’s approach here is pretty clever. Getting anyone to support a new operating system is tough, even if you’re a tech giant, and the LAM way subverts that by just teaching the model how to use apps.
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Really need to see this in action. It seems like an abstraction device: do we need to abstract across Photoshop and phones when good integration could mean that you just use the appropriate platform whenever you want?
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US moves closer to filing sweeping antitrust case against Apple • The New York Times
David McCabe and Tripp Mickle:
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Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple’s payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said.
Senior leaders in the Justice Department’s antitrust division are reviewing the results of the investigation so far, said two of the people. The agency’s officials have met with Apple multiple times, including in December, to discuss the investigation. No final decision has been made about whether a lawsuit should be filed or what it should include, and Apple has not had a final meeting with the Justice Department in which it can make its case to the government before a lawsuit is filed.
The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition.
The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products.
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The DoJ is going to get nowhere unless it can show that Apple has effective monopolies in those markets which would necessitate providing public APIs. Watch? Maaaybe. iMessage? Nope. Payments? Perhaps. But none is a slam dunk. Lina Khan might like antitrust lawsuits, but she has a poor record so far.
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How BYD grew from a phone battery maker to EV giant taking on Tesla • CNBC
Arjun Kharpal and Evelyn Cheng:
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Elon Musk dismissed BYD in 2011 by laughing at their products during a Bloomberg interview.
“Have you seen their car?” Musk quipped. “I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong. And BYD as a company has pretty severe problems in their home turf in China. I think their focus is, and rightly should be, on making sure they don’t die in China.”
BYD did not get wiped out. Instead, BYD dethroned Tesla in the fourth quarter as the top EV maker, selling more battery-powered vehicles than its US rival.
“Their goal was to be China’s largest auto manufacturer and put China manufacturing on the map,” Taylor Ogan, CEO of Snow Bull Capital, said of BYD’s long-standing ambition.
So how did the Chinese company, which began by making phone batteries, become an electric car giant?
While BYD is now known as an electric car giant, its tentacles stretch into many areas from batteries to mining and semiconductors, which is a large reason behind its success.
Chemist Wang Chuanfu founded BYD in 1995 in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, China’s massive tech hub. It was founded with 20 employees and 2.5 million Chinese yuan of capital, or $351,994 at today’s exchange rate.
In 1996, BYD began manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, the type that are in our modern day smartphones. This coincided with the growth of mobile phones. BYD went onto supply its batteries to Motorola and Nokia in 2000 and 2002, respectively, two of the mobile phone industry’s juggernaughts at the time.
In 2002, BYD listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, riding the wave of its success in lithium-ion batteries. It wasn’t until 2003 that BYD acquired a small automaker called Xi’an Qinchuan Automobile.
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As Benedict Evans points out, there’s a lot here which resembles the story of China and smartphones: started out with Americans thinking they could do it all, then thought that Chinese products were just junk (see also: Japanese cars v Americans), then saw China come in and eat up the low end.
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Scientists discover 100 to 1,000 times more plastics in bottled water • The Washington Post
Shannon Osaka:
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A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were “nanoplastics” — particles measuring less than one micrometer (less than 1/70th the width of a human hair).
For the past several years, scientists have been looking for “microplastics,” or pieces of plastic that range from one micrometer to half a centimeter in length, and found them almost everywhere. The tiny shards of plastic have been uncovered in the deepest depths of the ocean, in the frigid recesses of Antarctic sea ice and in the human placenta. They spill out of laundry machines and hide in soils and wildlife. Microplastics are also in the food we eat and the water we drink: In 2018, scientists discovered that a single bottle of water contained, on average, 325 pieces of microplastics.
But researchers at Columbia University have now identified the extent to which nanoplastics also pose a threat.
“Whatever microplastic is doing to human health, I will say nanoplastics are going to be more dangerous,” said Wei Min, a chemistry professor at Columbia and one of the authors of the new paper.
Scientists have also found microplastics in tap water, but in smaller amounts.
Sherri Mason, a professor and director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pa., says plastic materials are a bit like skin — they slough off pieces into water or food or whatever substance they are touching.“We know at this point that our skin is constantly shedding,” she said. “And this is what these plastic items are doing — they’re just constantly shedding.”
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First plastics: 1869. Will the last ones be made before 2069? Or are we just going to live with them as a sort of nano-sized global warming?
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Asking people to “do the research” on fake news stories makes them seem more believable, not less • Nieman Journalism Lab
Joshua Benton:
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There sure seems to be something about opening up a new tab to research a false story that makes it seem more believable, at least to a meaningful share of people.
Why would that be the case? One potential culprit is data voids. That term was coined by Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski in 2018 “to describe search engine queries that turn up few to no results, especially when the query is rather obscure, or not searched often.”
Fake news stories, especially their wilder variants, are often spectacularly new. Part of their shock comes from presenting an idea so at odds with reality that their key words and phrases just haven’t appeared together online much. Like, before Pizzagate, would you have expected a Google search for “comet ping pong child rape pizza basement hillary” to turn up much? No, because that’s just a nonsense string of words without a bonkers conspiracy theory to tie it all together.
But imagine that, in 2016, someone heard that conspiracy theory in some remote tendril of the web and — seeking to SOTEN! [search online to evaluate news] — went to Google and typed those words in. What results would it have returned? Almost certainly it would have shown links to pro-Pizzagate webpages — because those were the only webpages with those keywords at the time. The bunkers always have a time advantage over the debunkers, and data voids are the result.
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This isn’t a short piece (and this part seems to me the nub of it) but the ramifications are important: research doesn’t necessarily quash fake news.
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Why do we work so much? • Psychology Today
Peter Gray:
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in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes (1930/1963) predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, because of automation, the average workweek would be about 15 hours. That, he predicted, would be sufficient to produce everything we need for a comfortable life. In one sense he was right: Automation has greatly reduced the amount of human work, whether physical or mental, required to produce everything we reasonably need. But he was wrong in his prediction that we would work less. The average work week for most today is little different than it was a hundred years ago. Why?
…We live in a world where less work is needed, but we have not adapted our economic system in a way that permits less work for most people. We still have a system of work for wages as the means of distributing what people need, and we still have wages set at a level that, for many people, necessitates many hours of work to support themselves and their family. The powers at the top of our economic hierarchy (the so-called “job creators”) have no interest in increasing wages (for anyone other than themselves), so most people still need to work about 40 hours a week to support themselves and their family.
Instead of reducing work, our approach has been to continuously create new jobs. Some of these jobs are useful, with social value, but many are not. In fact, as anthropologist David Graeber has argued in his book Bullshit Jobs (2018), many add no social value or are even harmful to society and the environment (see my previous post for examples).
We could, if we had the political will, reduce through legislation the hours people must work, thereby improving lives and, at the same time, benefiting the environment. We could increase the minimum wage and decrease the workweek gradually, over time, in steps that would not dramatically disrupt the economy, eventuating in something close to the 15-hour week predicted by Keynes.
Or we could, as some have proposed, provide a universal basic income, paid for by increased taxes on the very rich.
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The puzzle of why there’s so much work about continues to puzzle economists too.
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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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