The company that picked the symbols and colours for ski run difficulty was.. Walt Disney? Yes it was. CC-licensed photo by Shinya Suzuki on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Going downhill faster. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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Pornhub has disabled its website in Texas following a court ruling that upheld a state law requiring age-verification systems on porn websites. Visitors to pornhub.com in Texas are now greeted with a message calling the Texas law “ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.”
“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” Pornhub’s message said.
Pornhub said it has “made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”
The same message was posted on other sites owned by the same company, including RedTube, YouPorn, and Brazzers. Pornhub has also blocked its website in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia in protest of similar laws. VPN services can be used to evade the blocks and to test out which states have been blocked by Pornhub.
The US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the Texas law in a 2–1 decision last week. The 5th Circuit appeals court had previously issued a temporary stay that allowed the law to take effect in September 2023.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last month sued Pornhub owner Aylo (formerly MindGeek) for violating the law. Paxton’s complaint in Travis County District Court sought civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each day since the law took effect on September 19, 2023.
“Sites like Pornhub are on the run because Texas has a law that aims to prevent them from showing harmful, obscene material to children,” Paxton wrote yesterday. “We recently secured a major victory against PornHub and other sites that sought to block this law from taking effect. In Texas, companies cannot get away with showing porn to children. If they don’t want to comply, good riddance.”
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“We can’t find a way to comply with the law except by not being here” is straightforward enough, I guess.
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I used ChatGPT as a reporting assistant. It didn’t go well • The Markup
Jon Keegan:
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The example story I used for this exercise was the train derailment in East Palestine, OH in February 2023, a major story that involved various kinds of data that I could ask ChatGPT to help analyze. To be clear, this wasn’t a story I had reported on, but I wanted to try using ChatGPT in a way that a data journalist might when covering it. I spent a LOT of time chatting with ChatGPT as part of this exercise and, frankly, sometimes it was exhausting.
…Based on my interactions, by far the most useful capabilities of ChatGPT are its ability to generate and debug programming code. (At one point during the East Palestine exercise, it generated some simple Python code for creating a map of the derailment.) When responding to a request to write code, it typically explains its approach (even though it may not be the best one), and shows its work, and you can redirect it to follow a different approach if you think its plan isn’t what you need. The ability to continually add to the features of your code while the AI agent retains the context and history of what you have been discussing can really save you a ton of time, avoiding painstaking searches for posts about a similar problem on StackOverflow (one of the largest online coding communities).
The NICAR exercise left me with concerns about using generative AI tools for the precise work of data journalism. The fact that a tool as powerful as ChatGPT can’t produce a “receipt” of exactly how it knows something goes against everything we are trained to do as journalists. Also I worry about small, understaffed newsrooms relying upon these tools too much as the news industry struggles with layoffs and closures. And when there is a lack of guidance from newsroom leadership regarding the use of these tools, it could lead to errors and inaccuracies.
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So.. I wonder if, when presented with a list of connected events in non-time-sequential order (“The policeman is in hospital” “A woman was robbed at knifepoint” “A policeman tackled the robber”), ChatGPT or others could assemble them into a news story? It’s a classic exercise for would-be journalists. If it can’t do that, what actually is it good for in journalism?
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Nearly half of UK families excluded from modern digital society, study finds • The Guardian
Clea Skopeliti:
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Almost half of UK families with children lack the online skills or access to devices, data and broadband required to participate in today’s digital society, research shows, with an expert saying this divide is an “amplifier of other exclusions”.
Research shared exclusively with the Guardian found that 45% of households with children did not meet the threshold. Families from low socioeconomic backgrounds in deprived areas and households outside London were among those who were less likely to meet it. Households from minority ethnic backgrounds and those with disabled parents were twice as likely to fall below it.
The research was led by experts at the University of Liverpool, Loughborough University, and the digital inclusion charity the Good Things Foundation, with input from other universities. It used a series of focus groups to develop a “minimum digital living standard” that measures households’ digital abilities and their access to goods and services.
“For the first time, we have a benchmark – defined by the public – about what families think is ‘enough’ to feel included in our digital society today,” said Emma Stone, the director of evidence and engagement at the Good Things Foundation.
“Government, businesses and service providers are driving ahead with digital transformation assuming that families are equally able to engage online. Today’s research shows this is not true.”
The lead researcher, Prof Simeon Yates, of the University of Liverpool, said the high proportion falling below this benchmark was disappointing but unsurprising. “People may be surprised, because in every show from crime to romance, people are living a digital life – but we know that a very large number of people don’t live in that world.”
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I am surprised – I thought that the saturation of smartphones would mean that at least one member of every family would have sufficient skills.
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The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud • The MIT Press Reader
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate:
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According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, if the entire Cloud shifted to hyperscale facilities, energy usage might drop as much as 25%. Without any regulatory body or agency to incentivize or enforce such a shift in our infrastructural configuration, there are other solutions that have been proposed to curb the Cloud’s carbon problem. Some have proposed relocating data centres to Nordic countries like Iceland or Sweden, in a bid to utilize ambient, cool air to minimize carbon footprint, a technique called “free cooling.” However, network signal latency issues make this dream of a haven for green data centres largely untenable to meet the computing and data storage demands of the wider world.
As a result, the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data centre can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centres collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centres accounts for 0.3% of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2% of global carbon emissions.
Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centres are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centres are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data centre is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6% to 12% of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.
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Lawsuit opens research misconduct report that may get a Harvard prof fired • Ars Technica
John Timmer on a lawsuit filed by Prof Francesca Gino against the Data Colada blog and Harvard University, which investigated some of her work on accusations of data fabrication:
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the Data Colada team had initially noted some oddities in the results reported from Gino’s work [about honesty]. In one case, they reported that they had found a spreadsheet of some of the original data, and it had a number of rows that appeared to be out of order. These rows contained some of the strongest effects seen in the experiment, and the editing history preserved in the Excel document format suggested these rows had been moved in from a different experiment.
The Harvard investigators, by contrast, got access to data on the computer systems used for surveying participants, copies from Gino’s hard drive, and raw data from the researchers who had collected them. And that record, the investigators conclude, made two things clear: Data Colada’s suppositions about which data was suspect were largely on target, and the data as published was different from what had originally been collected.
The report characterizes Gino’s response as twofold. One is to suggest that all of the problems on four separate papers represent “honest errors,” either by herself or her research assistants. The report doesn’t really dismiss this but does note that data handling that is “reckless” would also fit Harvard’s definition of research misconduct.
The second defense that Harvard’s investigators say Gino offered is that people conspired to plant evidence of fraud on her computers. At various points, the report indicates she accused either a former collaborator or the Data Colada team themselves of pursuing this plot. The investigators did not find this credible, noting that the issues involved “anomalies and/or discrepancies within or between study datasets accessed from one or more of the following sources: the Open Science Framework (“OSF”) website, where publicly available versions of study data can be posted by researchers; the sequestered hard drive of Professor Gino’s computer; Professor Gino’s Qualtrics account; and the RA who collected the data.”
Anyone maliciously manipulating this data, the investigators conclude, would have had to access lots of computers, identify the right files on them, and modify them at critical times during the preparation of the research papers. This, they felt, made the explanation unlikely.
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Unlikely is certainly one word for it. The feasibility of examining the creation of a paper like this is a big advance for science: it does let us find out in the first place whether papers are worth trying to replicate at all.
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New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter • Phys.org
Bernad Rizk:
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The current theoretical model for the composition of the universe is that it’s made of normal matter, dark energy and dark matter. A new University of Ottawa study challenges this.
A study, published today in The Astrophysical Journal, challenges the current model of the universe by showing that, in fact, it has no room for dark matter.
In cosmology, the term “dark matter” describes all that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field, or that can only be explained through gravitational force. We can’t see it, nor do we know what it’s made of, but it helps us understand how galaxies, planets and stars behave.
Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the Faculty of Science, used a combination of the covarying coupling constants (CCC) and “tired light” (TL) theories (the CCC+TL model) to reach this conclusion.
This model combines two ideas—about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved.
This discovery challenges the prevailing understanding of the universe, which suggests that roughly 27% of it is composed of dark matter and less than 5% of ordinary matter, remaining being the dark energy.
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The paper has the snappy title of “Testing CCC+TL Cosmology with Observed Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Features”, but if it gains traction then it could upend lots of how we think about the universe.
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Walt Disney’s everlasting effect on North American ski resorts • Inside the Magic
TJ Muscaro:
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Before he passed away in 1966, Walt Disney set out to build or buy his own ski resort. One of the proposed locations was Mineral King in California’s Sequoia National Park, but environmentalists reportedly blocked it. Obviously, Walt’s plans for a ski resort would never come to be, and if you take the “Keys to the Kingdom Tour” at the Magic Kingdom, you’ll learn about how the architecture of his ski resort lives on in the log cabin style of Frontierland.
But before the plans for a ski resort completely shut down, Disney already established its proposed trail signage.
That trail signage would survive and become the adopted method of the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) in 1968 and is still in use today.
According to Signs of the Mountains, the modern trail rating system is as follows:
• Green Circle: The easiest; usually wide, open trails with a grade from 0-25%. (A 100% grade would be a 45-degree angle.)
• Blue Square: Intermediate; generally the most prevalent rating across a mountain, with a grade between 25–40% and often groomed.
• Black Diamond: Most difficult; steeper than 40%, likely ungroomed and therefore covered in moguls and/or the freshest snow.
• Double Black Diamond: Experts only! Very steep and narrow, with extra hazards and obstacles like exposed rock and drop-off cliffs.
• Orange Rectangle, horizontal with rounded edges: Terrain park; this is where you’ll find rails and boxes, professionally shaped jumps and half-pipes.Now, each mountain and resort have their own subjective grading systems, but they are all based on this scale. For instance, Big Sky Resort in Montana offers triple black diamond routes, and Steamboat Spring in Colorado has Blue-Square-Black-Diamond to signify a run whose difficulty sits between the two standard ratings.
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The Disney company had actually tested how people reacted to the colours and shapes. Though this doesn’t explain how Europe has the Red grade in between the Blue and Black.
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Hundreds rescued from love scam centre in the Philippines – BBC News
Virma Simonette and Kelly Ng:
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Hundreds of people have been rescued from a scam centre in the Philippines that made them pose as lovers online.
Police said they raided the centre on Thursday and rescued 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals.
The centre, which is about 100km north of Manila, was masquerading as an online gambling firm, they said.
South East Asia has become a hub for scam centres where the scammers themselves are often entrapped and forced into criminal activity.Young and tech-savvy victims are often lured into running these illegal operations, which range from money laundering and crypto fraud to so-called love scams. The latter are also known as “pig butchering” scams, named after the farming practice of fattening pigs before slaughtering them. These typically start with the scammer adopting a fake identity to gain their victim’s affection and trust – and then using the illusion of a romantic or intimate relationship to manipulate or steal from the victim. This often happens by persuading them to invest in fake schemes or businesses.
Thursday’s raid near Manila was sparked by a tip-off from a Vietnamese man who managed to flee the scam centre last month, police said. The man, who in his 30s, arrived in the Philippines in January this year, after being offered what he was told would be a chef’s job, said Winston Casio, spokesman for the presidential commission against organised crime. But the man soon realised that he, like hundreds of others, had fallen prey to human traffickers running love and cryptocurrency scams.
Those trapped in the Bamban centre were forced to send “sweet nothings” to their victims, many of whom were Chinese, Mr Casio said – they would check in on their recipients with questions about their day and if and what they had eaten for their last meal. They would also send photos of themselves to cultivate the relationship. Mr Casio said those running the scam centres trapped “good looking men and women to lure [victims]”.
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Good to see crypto fraud moving up to join those old favourites of money laundering and love scams. (The industrial nature of this scheme becomes clear from the picture accompanying the article.)
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When product markets become collective traps: the case of social media • U of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute for Economics
Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Christopher Roth:
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The authors begin by measuring the amount of money that users would accept to deactivate their accounts for four weeks, while keeping constant others’ social media use. They next measure how much users value their accounts when other students at their university are asked to deactivate their accounts as well. Finally, the authors measure users’ preferences over the deactivation of accounts of all participating students, including themselves. They find the following:
• Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts
• Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Accounting for consumption spillovers to non-users reveals that 64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Participants who do not have accounts would be willing to pay $67 and $39 to have others deactivate their TikTok and Instagram accounts, respectively
• Taken together, these results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media
• The authors use these results to quantify the role of network effects on social media, or the extent to which users value social media platforms more when their peers use them. They find positive and quantitatively significant network effects: users value TikTok and Instagram 33% and 24% more, respectively, when their peers are on the sites compared to when they are not.«
I always find these studies fascinating, though the proof of the pudding really is in the eating: you need to actually offer real money and get people to carry through on the deactivation. Anything less is just indicative.
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US probes Hamas’s use of crypto before Oct. 7 • WSJ
Ian Talley and Angus Berwick:
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The US Treasury Department is investigating $165m in cryptocurrency-linked transactions that may have helped finance Hamas before the militant group’s Oct. 7 attack against Israel, the agency said in a report to Congress.
Treasury officials say the U.S.-designated terror group’s increasing use of digital financing underscores the need for Congress to approve new powers to oversee cryptocurrency as Hamas’s access to traditional sources of funding is hit by Western sanctions.
But the drive to expand regulations has sparked pushback. Crypto advocates and lawmakers who support the industry have attempted to minimize the role of digital currencies in terror financing and other illicit activities.
The estimate of Hamas’s involvement in crypto-related transactions is contained in a Treasury report on the group’s use of digital currencies that was sent to Congress late Tuesday, the first formal US assessment of its use of cryptocurrencies.
“We continue to assess that Hamas and other terrorists have a preference for the use of traditional financial products and services, but I remain concerned that as we cut off their access to traditional finance these groups will increasingly turn to virtual assets,” deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a letter to lawmakers accompanying the report.
…Hamas collects about $100m a year from Iran, its chief international supporter, and raises revenue from a $500m global investment portfolio, according to Western officials. Israel’s military operation since last October has disrupted the roughly $600m a year the group collected in taxes in Gaza, its biggest source of funding, those officials say. But Hamas has been diversifying both its sources of funds and the methods it uses to move them, they add.
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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 
There’s quite a bit in the Harvard case which just doesn’t add up to me. It’s a True Crime story where there isn’t a neat resolution, and no matter what the official verdict, there’s a bunch strange aspects to it. Some of the raw data which is alleged to be fake, looks so crudely faked, that I kept trying to figure out if there was a way it could be an accident. But I couldn’t make any sense of it. Sure, not everyone is a master forger. Smart people sometimes do stupid things. Still, I can’t shake the feeling there’s some missing element. Maybe that’s over-matching on my part.