The Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk is opposing salmon farming in her homeland. Will she win? CC-licensed photo by Daniele Dalledonne on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 11 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.

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Vending machine error reveals secret face image database of college students • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.

The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, “Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe,” displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.

“Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?” SquidKid47 pondered.

The Reddit post sparked an investigation from a fourth-year student named River Stanley, who was writing for a university publication called MathNEWS. Stanley sounded the alarm after consulting Invenda sales brochures that promised “the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders” of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting their consent.

This frustrated Stanley, who discovered that Canada’s privacy commissioner had years ago investigated a shopping mall operator called Cadillac Fairview after discovering some of the malls’ informational kiosks were secretly “using facial recognition software on unsuspecting patrons.”

Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that “over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians” were scanned into Cadillac Fairview’s database, Stanley reported. Where Cadillac Fairview was ultimately forced to delete the entire database, Stanley wrote that consequences for collecting similarly sensitive facial recognition data without consent for Invenda clients like Mars remain unclear. Stanley’s report ended with a call for students to demand that the university “bar facial recognition vending machines from campus.”

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Good to see that university students, at least, are capable of some investigative journalism.
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What happened with Gemini image generation • Google blog

Prabhakar Raghavan is a senior vice-president at Google:

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The Gemini conversational app is a specific product that is separate from Search, our underlying AI models, and our other products. Its image generation feature was built on top of an AI model called Imagen 2.

When we built this feature in Gemini, we tuned it to ensure it doesn’t fall into some of the traps we’ve seen in the past with image generation technology — such as creating violent or sexually explicit images, or depictions of real people. And because our users come from all over the world, we want it to work well for everyone. If you ask for a picture of football players, or someone walking a dog, you may want to receive a range of people. You probably don’t just want to only receive images of people of just one type of ethnicity (or any other characteristic).

However, if you prompt Gemini for images of a specific type of person — such as “a Black teacher in a classroom,” or “a white veterinarian with a dog” — or people in particular cultural or historical contexts, you should absolutely get a response that accurately reflects what you ask for.

So what went wrong? In short, two things. First, our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.

These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.

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There is a lot of discussion externally about this: not just one but multiple people inside Google, at multiple levels, must have seen these flaws before Gemini was made public. But they didn’t speak up. Why not? Obviously: culture. The culture inside Google must militate against speaking up. It’s the danger of big corporations: they become more interested on their internal politics than their external customers and users.
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US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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The US government has suspended its effort to survey cryptocurrency mining operations over their ballooning energy use following a lawsuit from an industry that has been accused by environmental groups of fueling the climate crisis.

A federal judge in Texas has granted a temporary order blocking the new requirements that would ascertain the energy use of the crypto miners, stating that the industry had shown it would suffer “irreparable injury” if it was made to comply.

The US Department of Energy had launched an “emergency” initiative last month aimed at surveying the energy use of mining operations…

…The federal government has said it needs better information about major miners’ power use, but estimates that up to 2.3% of the US’s total electricity demand last year came from just 137 mining facilities. Globally, crypto miners are thought to soak up as much as 1% of all electricity demand, which is the same as the entire country of Australia, with bitcoin mining’s energy use doubling just last year.

This new thirst for electricity risks worsening the climate crisis, campaigners say. In the US, where nearly four in 10 of all bitcoin are now mined, up to 50m tons of carbon dioxide is released each year due to the mining operations, according to RMI, a clean energy thinktank.

The rise of crypto mining has also placed a strain upon certain electricity grids. Last year it emerged that authorities in Texas paid a bitcoin enterprise called Riot more than $31m in energy credits to voluntarily lower its electricity usage during a heatwave that caused a spike in power demand from the public.

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I find the judge’s order puzzling: the bitcoin mining companies would suffer “irreparable harm”?
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How 93.4% of all shop transactions are now contactless • This is Money

Helen Kirrane:

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More over-65s than ever before are using contactless for payments, data suggests.

Today, 80% of 85 to 95-year-olds pay with contactless, a new report from Barclays shows. 

For the third year in a row, the fastest growth for contactless usage was among the over 65s.

A record 93.4% of all in-store card transactions up to £100 were made with ‘touch and pay’ in 2023, cementing it as the UK’s most popular payment method.

Customers are spending more on average too, the report shows.  The average spend per customer last year, was £3,623 – up 8.9% annually as customers bought more expensive items more frequently. The average purchase cost £15.69 – up 3.8% on last year.

When it comes to payments over £100, chip and pin is the preferred way of paying across all age demographics, followed by cash. Younger customers prefer to use mobile payments, with a quarter of 18-34-year-olds preferring to use their phone. 

Mobile payments do not have an upper limit for contactless through two-factor authentication.

By contrast, just 3% of over-75s prefer a mobile payment over using a physical card. 

Some younger shoppers now choose not to bring their card at all when leaving the house. More than one in five of those aged 18-34 regularly leave their wallet behind when out shopping in favour of paying with their smartphone.

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Contactless payments started in the UK in 2007. A tiny number of shops are trying a retrograde action to back cash, but bank closures also makes it harder for them to deposit cash at the end of the day. This looks like a one-way track.
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Shouldn’t broadband mapping data belong to the public? • POTs and PANs

Doug Dawson:

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My biggest current pet peeve about the FCC [US Federal Communications Commission] mapping is that the agency made the decision to give power over the mapping and map challenge process to CostQuest, an outside commercial vendor.

The FCC originally awarded CostQuest $44.9m to create the broadband maps. Everybody I know who works with mapping thinks this is an exorbitant amount, but if this was the end of the mapping story, then congratulations to CostQuest for landing a lucrative federal contract – lots of other companies have made hay doing so over the years.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of the mapping story because the FCC gave CostQuest the ability to own the rights to the mapping fabric, which is the database that shows the location of every home and business in the country that is a potential broadband customer. This is a big deal because it means that CostQuest, a private company, controls the portal for data needed by the public to understand who has or doesn’t have broadband.

A case in point is that soon after CostQuest created the first FCC map, the company was hired by the NTIA to provide the databases and maps for the BEAD grant process for a price tag of $49.9m – more than the FCC paid to create the maps. CostQuest will also sell access to the mapping fabric to others for a fee. I have to imagine that the FCC is also paying CostQuest a big fee twice a year to update the FCC maps and to process map challenges.

I’m just flabbergasted that there is a private company that holds the reins to the database of broadband availability and which only makes it available for a fee. I can’t think of even one reason why the database created by CostQuest is not openly available to everybody.

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In a way, it’s almost comforting that the US can screw this up in just the same way as the UK can – lots of data that the UK public pays to get collected then isn’t available. But as Dawson points out, that doesn’t make it right.
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Björk targets Icelandic salmon farms • Happy Eco News

Grant Brown:

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Internationally revered Icelandic songstress Björk has riled her homeland once again by leveraging star activist power against a burgeoning national industry – fish farming. Already fueling growing export markets across Europe and North America, Icelandic aquaculture has recently set sights on quintupling salmon production over five years through open-ocean cages seeded near fjords and sheltering bays. But Björk and over 100,000 citizens demand that these coastal encampments of penned fish be purged from Iceland’s precious seascape and wildlife sanctuaries.

While not her first foray opposing government policies, the avant-pop virtuoso’s latest salvo represents an escalation in homegrown dissent spanning directly from her idyllic doorstep to a signature export sector. Yet familiar dynamics recur as officials endeavor to persuade the singer that economic realities preclude simply abandoning an industry heavily promoted by large offshore companies. Still, Björk holds fast, asserting aquaculture will only irreparably stain the aquatic ecosystems underpinning Icelandic heritage and global artistic inspiration she’s cultivated over decades.

…The musical icon acknowledges salmon aquaculture’s significance for numerous citizens across Iceland yet maintains environmental justice calls for abolishing rather than regulating an intrinsically polluting industry. She invokes the precautionary principle’s rationale that cessation must prevail over scaling an irreversible threat without scientific certainty around severely harmful impacts from fish pens.

Having newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes, Björk suggests Iceland embrace this pivotal moment to redefine resilient futures around what communities value most beyond economic metrics

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The story’s almost worth reading just for the hyperbolic descriptions of Björk: “internationally revered Icelandic songstress”, “avant-pop virtuoso” and so on. Not “car alarm imitator” or “former swan-outfitted“? Pity. Though I’m fairly sure she hasn’t newly emerged with fragile stability after financial crashes – that better describes Iceland.
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I went to a rave with the 46-year-old millionaire who claims to have the body of a teenager • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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His origin story follows a familiar arc: Johnson enjoyed massive success in work, found that his soul was crushed as a consequence, and experienced a kind of epiphany in response. He had founded an online-payment company called Braintree that was eventually acquired by PayPal for $800m. Meanwhile, Johnson has said, he struggled with depression, left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and soothed himself with late-night binge eating. A few years ago, he grew tired of being miserable in and feeling powerless over his body. So he ceded control of it: Just as he imagines that AI will one day run the planet, a much simpler algorithm now runs his body.

Every decision about his health is made by specialized software and a team of 30 medical specialists who monitor and analyze data about his organs. In addition to rising around 4:30 a.m. and going to bed at 8:30 p.m., getting plenty of intense exercise, and taking dozens of supplements throughout the day, Johnson has gotten experimental blood-plasma transfusions from his teenage son, bone-marrow transplants, and gene therapy. He claims that this anti-aging protocol, called Blueprint, has slowed his overall pace of aging by 31 years, put his cardiovascular capacity among the top 1.5% of 18-year-olds, and delivered nighttime erections that are frequent enough to rival a teenager’s. (He tracks them through a wearable device called the Adam Sensor while he sleeps.)

Over the past year, Johnson has refashioned himself from a hopeful immortal into a kind of messiah. On social media, he compares himself favourably to Jesus, reasoning that his algorithmically sanctioned, lentil-and-macadamia-nut-heavy diet beats refined carbohydrates and wine.

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Definitely TMI in there. Also tempted to make the joke about how he’d better hope the police don’t find the teenager’s body. And, finally, Jesus was doing fairly well until a demise mediated by politics, so a critique on dietary terms doesn’t seem justified.
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Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage • Communications Psychology

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, Felix Cheung and Michael Inzlicht:

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In public debate, Twitter (now X) is often said to cause detrimental effects on users and society. Here we address this research question by querying 252 participants from a representative sample of U.S. Twitter users 5 times per day over 7 days (6,218 observations). Results revealed that Twitter use is related to decreases in well-being, and increases in political polarization, outrage, and sense of belonging over the course of the following 30 minutes.

Effect sizes were comparable to the effect of social interactions on well-being. These effects remained consistent even when accounting for demographic and personality traits. Different inferred uses of Twitter were linked to different outcomes: passive usage was associated with lower well-being, social usage with a higher sense of belonging, and information-seeking usage with increased outrage and most effects were driven by within-person changes.

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The authors are all at the University of Toronto. Which of the three categories (passive, social or information-seeking) do we think Elon Musk belongs to?

(Incidentally a great confirmation for my hypothesis in Social Warming, though the finding about “social usage” is unexpected.)
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A psychiatrist tried to quit gambling. Betting apps kept her hooked • WSJ

Katherine Sayre:

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Kavita Fischer couldn’t believe her luck.

She started with $750 and hit a hot streak last summer that stretched over six days. She played round after round of online casino games until her winnings hit $500,000. The windfall would make up for every bad bet and pay off all she owed.

Fischer, a 41-year-old mental-health professional and suburban homeowner with two boys, was by then in debt by six figures from online gambling losses. For nearly a year, she lost again and again, complaining to at least one gambling company that she had a problem but couldn’t stop. As a psychiatrist familiar with human impulses and addiction, Fischer knew better than most what she needed to do.

Yet she was up against an industry skilled in the art of leveraging data analytics and human behavior to keep customers betting. Gambling companies tracked the ups and downs of Fischer’s betting behavior and gave bonus credits to keep her playing. VIP customer representatives offered encouragement and gifts.

After her six-day hot streak, Fischer made several requests to start withdrawing the half-million dollars from the PointsBet gambling app. But she kept changing her mind and plowed the money back into play.

Within a day, she lost nearly all of it. “There’s nothing in your brain that says, ‘OK, stop now, you’re done. You’ve won your money back, you can put this behind you,’” Fischer said. “There was just something in my brain that made me keep going.”

…Casinos have always wooed their high-rollers with special treatment, but online-betting has intensified industry tactics. Companies closely track betting habits 24 hours a day, collecting such data as how much time each customer spends on an app, how much money they gamble, what kind of bets they place and how much they lose.

With a real-time view of a customer’s gambling activity, VIP hosts [who contact online gamblers directly from the company] keep in close touch. They can track when customers last used the app and offer credits and other incentives to persuade their most-valued gamblers—by definition, the biggest losers—to return. Payment options give gamblers immediate access to funds that some can’t cover.

Gamblers are assigned VIP hosts based on how much they are wagering. The personal attention pays off. At PointsBet—acquired in 2023 by Fanatics, a sports-merchandise company—VIP sports bettors representing 0.5% of the customer base generated more than 70% of the company’s revenue in 2019 and 2020, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Classic whale arithmetic. I’ve never understood the attraction of gambling. The future is uncertain; why would you think putting money on one outcome over another will change that fact?
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Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene • The Verge

Alexis Ong:

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The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long, and at 1.33MB, it almost hits the diskette’s limit of 1.44MB. 

Next up is a split release by two artists — Pregnant Lloyd and Team Phosphenes — then another filled with a mix of short experimental tracks. These small treasures have all come from a floppy-only net label called Floppy Kick, a one-man operation run by Mark Windisch in Debrecen, Hungary. Each disk is numbered as part of a limited run. My copy of “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior” is the third of five, which makes sense since there’s a finite number of floppies being circulated around the world. 

Floppy disk music arguably peaked in the 2010s, but in the 2020s, it’s still going strong; Discogs.com shows a healthy 500-plus floppy releases in the 2020 category, which is more than the documented number of floppy music releases in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s altogether. Perhaps it’s because we’ve moved a little closer to their impending extinction. Or maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist. 

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Obviously, the difficulty obtaining and playing this music is part of the attraction; the limits on disk space and consequent constriction on song length all add to it. Plus the attraction of having something that’s physically limited in number. It’s one of the peculiarities of creativity: reducing freedoms can inspire something you wouldn’t think of to reach a solution. Less space means more invention.
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Riders in the smog • Rest of World

Zuha Siddiqui, Samriddhi Sakunia and Faisal Mahmud:

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[Sami] Iqbal is a self-employed gig worker who works across multiple ride-hailing apps, including Careem, Bykea, and inDrive. As he set off for his first job that day, the city was covered in a thick, poisonous smog. He drove through visible specks of reddish dust and other particulate matter, breathing through his muffler and trying to ignore the metallic, almost sulfurous stench permeating his nostrils.

“I’ve been ill for a week,” Iqbal told Rest of World, his voice hoarse. “It’s probably because of the smog. I’m on the road for so long.”

Lahore is the most polluted city in the world, according to Swiss air quality monitoring platform IQAir. In November, the air was so poisonous that authorities issued a citywide lockdown, closing schools, markets, and parks for four days, and advising people to stay indoors.

Other cities in South Asia have similarly alarming levels of air quality: Eight out of the top 10 most polluted cities globally are in the region. Causes include rapid urbanization, construction, vehicular pollution, coal-fueled power plants, crop burning, and the operation of brick kilns. Air quality in the region is at its worst from October to February due to atmospheric conditions which cause pollutants to be trapped closer to the ground.

Exposure to this pollution can have serious health impacts — from headaches and breathing difficulties to heart and lung disease, stroke, and cancer. For gig workers, who often have no choice but to work in the smog, the effects are clear. By the end of a day’s work, Iqbal said, his whole body feels lifeless. “I also experience exhaustion, I get a lot of headaches. I get body aches,” he said.

Rest of World spoke to 25 gig workers in Lahore, New Delhi, and Dhaka, all of whom reported symptoms that health experts believe are the consequence of routine exposure to carcinogenic pollutants, including eye and throat irritation, persistent coughs, dizziness, and nausea.

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More than that: ROW gave the gig workers pollution monitors. And wow, the numbers they brought back are incredible. Yet another terrific feature idea and execution from this excellent publication. (Its financials look healthy too. Principal funder: Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt’s daughter.)
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified