A new scheme is injecting radioactive substances into rhinos’ horns so poaching can be detected at Customs. CC-licensed photo by .waldec on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 9 links for you. Not horny. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Brussels follows up Apple charges with Meta ‘pay or consent’ case • FT
Javier Espinoza:
»
The EU has charged Facebook’s parent Meta with breaking the bloc’s landmark digital rules, only a week after it pressed a similar case against Apple.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is exercising new powers granted by the Digital Markets Act — legislation aimed at improving consumer choice and opening up markets for European start-ups to flourish. The tech giants had to comply from March this year.
In preliminary findings issued on Monday, Brussels regulators said they were worried about Meta’s “pay or consent” model. Facebook and Instagram users can currently opt to use the social networks for free while consenting to data collection, or pay not to have their data shared.
The regulators said that the choice presented by Meta’s model risks giving consumers a false alternative, with the financial barrier potentially forcing them to consent to their personal data being tracked for advertising purposes.
The Financial Times was first to reveal the commission’s move earlier on Monday.
Under the bloc’s new digital rules, tech giants must gain consent from users “when they intend to combine or cross-use their personal data across different core platform services”, the EU said in March, when it opened compliance investigations against Meta and other Big Tech groups.
The EU executive said that Meta “users who do not consent should still get access to an equivalent service which uses less of their personal data, in this case for the personalisation of advertising”.
«
In October last year I wrote about how Meta’s proposed charges were about four times higher than was justified by their advertising revenue in the EU. However, that doesn’t seem to be the basis of the EU’s complaint; it simply wants a free service but with less data collection. Basically, challenging Meta to accept lower profits (if we presume that profits are directly dependent on amount of personal data collected).
unique link to this extract
Laid-off tech workers advised to sell plasma and personal belongings • SF Gate
Ariana Bindman:
»
Nina McCollum has been laid off so many times that the 55-year-old is basically an unofficial expert. That’s how she describes herself, at least.
The marketing writer, who went viral in 2019 for documenting how she submitted over 200 applications during her two-year unemployment period, eventually landed her dream job at a major human resources tech company in the Bay Area. But then, in March 2023, she was let go — and suddenly back at square one.
McCollum is not alone. Over the past two years, major tech companies in the Bay Area have haemorrhaged high-salaried workers, sending a chill throughout an industry that once seemed untouchable. Meta has let go of at least 21,000 workers, while Google has handed pink slips to hundreds of employees across San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Though the state government boasts about California’s growing economy and low unemployment rate, multiple people who spoke with SFGATE painted a bleak picture.
…When tech recruiter Irene Nexica was laid off in March 2023, she was “immediately transported to the world of being poor,” she told SFGATE. Since then, she’s worked a variety of “survival jobs,” ranging from catering to online retail. She also works as a career coach at a federally funded program that helps people train for employment. Anyone who makes under $35 an hour qualifies, she said. “We’re seeing a flood of tech people come in because they are super desperate now,” she continued.
Companies, sensing their desperation, are now taking advantage of it. When Nexica applied for a nonprofit recruiting job, she found that 1,400 people had applied already — and for significantly less money than the role usually pays. Instead of a salary of around $125,000, this one was offering between $80,000 and $90,000. She also found that the people in charge of hiring for roles would message her about so-called opportunities, only to ghost her without explanation.
«
Alzheimer’s scientist indicted for allegedly falsifying data in $16m scheme • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
»
A federal grand jury has indicted an embattled Alzheimer’s researcher for allegedly falsifying data to fraudulently obtain $16m in federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health for the development of a controversial Alzheimer’s drug and diagnostic test.
Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences. Wang’s research and publications provided scientific underpinnings for Cassava’s Alzheimer’s treatment, Simufilam, which is now in Phase III trials.
Simufilam is a small-molecule drug that Cassava claims can restore the structure and function of a scaffolding protein in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s, leading to slowed cognitive decline. But outside researchers have long expressed doubts and concerns about the research.
In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee “found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations,” the report states.
The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn’t conclusively prove the images were falsified “due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place.”
«
At least with this sort of (alleged) fraud you can see the motivation: all that funding. Though if it’s faked research, won’t the failure of the therapy become clear in the trials? Perhaps in that inevitability one just says “oh well, didn’t work” and drives back to the laboratory in the Ferrari.
unique link to this extract
Supreme Court protects the future of content moderation • The Verge
Lauren Feiner:
»
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, two consequential cases about the future of speech on the internet. The court explicitly extended First Amendment protections to how social media platforms organize, curate, and moderate their feeds, drawing a comparison between internet content moderation and “traditional publishers and editors.”
The decision elaborates that the compilation and curation of “others’ speech into an expressive product of its own” is entitled to First Amendment protection and that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.”
The NetChoice cases concern a pair of similar laws in Florida and Texas that aimed to limit how large social media companies could moderate content on their sites. The legislation took shape after conservative politicians in both states criticized major tech companies for allegedly exerting bias against conservative viewpoints. Tech industry groups NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association sued to block both laws. Appeals courts in each state came to different conclusions about whether the statutes could be upheld, setting up the Supreme Court to make the final call.
The Supreme Court vacated both of the appeals court decisions, ruling that neither court adequately analyzed “the facial First Amendment challenges” to the laws — that is, whether the social media content moderation laws in Florida and Texas would always be unconstitutional in all applications. The court sent the cases back down to the lower courts to reconsider.
Under the new Supreme Court decision, content moderation is generally protected by the First Amendment.
«
Hurrah, democracy is save–oh, really?
unique link to this extract
Florida man charged after shooting at Walmart delivery drone • USA Today
Saleen Martin:
»
A Florida man is facing multiple charges after authorities say he shot at a Walmart delivery drone.
The shooting happened in Clermont, about 26 miles west of Orlando. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office received a complaint about the ordeal Wednesday, the office said in a Facebook post. According to the caller, a bullet hole was found in the payload the drone was carrying.
Witnesses pointed authorities to 72-year-old Dennis Winn, who interviewed with officials and later admitted to shooting at the drone one time with a 9mm pistol, the sheriff’s office said.
In police bodycam footage, Winn told police he tried to shoo the drone off and it didn’t go away, so he shot at it. “I fired one round at it,” he said in the footage. “They say I hit it so I must be a good shot, or else it’s not that far away … I’m going to wind up having to find a real good defense lawyer.”
He was taken into custody and charged with shooting at an aircraft, criminal mischief damage over $1,000 and discharging a firearm in public or residential property, according to the sheriff’s office.
«
He tried to “shoo off the drone”? And he’s younger than both the contenders for the US presidency. What a country.
unique link to this extract
Do be a quitter! How I broke my exercise streak – and smashed my fitness goals • The Guardian
Phil Daoust:
»
that is nothing compared with my boneheadedness 13 or 14 years ago, when I lived in the mountains and used to swim in a long, chilly lake. It was usually just two lengths, and I took them slowly, but it added up to about 3-4km – say 150 lengths of a typical leisure-centre pool. The season was short, and I usually stopped once the temperature began to drop. But this time I got in the water well into autumn. I didn’t own a wetsuit, and this was not the kind of place that had lifeguards. Even in summer, I was sometimes the only person in the water.
After 2-3km, breaststroking my way back to where I had left the car, I began to shiver. I know now that this is one of the first signs of hypothermia. The sensible thing would have been to get out of the lake and walk, but that didn’t even occur to me. It wasn’t in the plan, and perhaps the cold was getting to my brain too. So I swam on for another 40 or 50 minutes, trembling all the way. I survived (obviously), but the more I think about it, the more I see how lucky I was. If I had got into trouble, no one would have seen me, let alone saved me.
Now that I have realised that sometimes the best thing to do with a plan is to ignore it, I have been delighted to discover a lot of experts feel the same. They just don’t make a fuss about it. Take Michael Ulloa, an Edinburgh-based performance nutritionist and personal trainer. “We’re constantly told that if we can’t stick to a plan 100%, then we have somehow failed,” he says. “This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is messing people up. When we deviate from a plan, we shouldn’t overthink it. We should ask why this deviation happened and what we can do to limit the chances of it happening again. Did we try to take on more than we can chew? Are we not enjoying our current training programme? Or maybe we were just tired and we needed to give ourselves a day or two.”
“It’s easy to overanalyse and be over self-critical, but there really is no need,” he says. “Most of us are not professional athletes, we are simply everyday people doing our best – and sometimes we need to take a day when it feels too much.”
«
Giving yourself “permission to quit” turns out to be very wise. Quite possibly there’s survivor bias in it. Which means it’s a good thing, not a bad one.
unique link to this extract
Generative AI is not going to build your [software] engineering team for you • Stack Overflow
Charity Majors:
»
It is really, really tough to get your first role as an engineer. I didn’t realize how hard it was until I watched my little sister (new grad, terrific grades, some hands on experience, fiendishly hard worker) struggle for nearly two years to land a real job in her field. That was a few years ago; anecdotally, it seems to have gotten even harder since then.
This past year, I have read a steady drip of articles about entry-level jobs in various industries being replaced by AI. Some of which absolutely have merit. Any job that consists of drudgery such as converting a document from one format to another, reading and summarizing a bunch of text, or replacing one set of icons with another, seems pretty obviously vulnerable. This doesn’t feel all that revolutionary to me, it’s just extending the existing boom in automation to cover textual material as well as mathy stuff.
…People act like writing code is the hard part of software. It is not. It never has been, it never will be. Writing code is the easiest part of software engineering, and it’s getting easier by the day. The hard parts are what you do with that code—operating it, understanding it, extending it, and governing it over its entire lifecycle.
A junior engineer begins by learning how to write and debug lines, functions, and snippets of code. As you practice and progress towards being a senior engineer, you learn to compose systems out of software, and guide systems through waves of change and transformation.
Sociotechnical systems consist of software, tools, and people; understanding them requires familiarity with the interplay between software, users, production, infrastructure, and continuous changes over time. These systems are fantastically complex and subject to chaos, nondeterminism and emergent behaviors. If anyone claims to understand the system they are developing and operating, the system is either exceptionally small or (more likely) they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. Code is easy, in other words, but systems are hard.
«
First radioactive rhino horns to curb poaching in South Africa • Phys.org
Zama Luthuli:
»
South African scientists on Tuesday injected radioactive material into live rhino horns to make them easier to detect at border posts in a pioneering project aimed at curbing poaching.
The country is home to a large majority of the world’s rhinos and as such is a hotspot for poaching driven by demand from Asia, where horns are used in traditional medicine for their supposed therapeutic effect.
At the Limpopo rhino orphanage in the Waterberg area, in the country’s northeast, a few of the thick-skinned herbivores grazed in the low savannah.
James Larkin, director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s radiation and health physics unit who spearheaded the initiative, told AFP he had put “two tiny little radioactive chips in the horn” as he administered the radioisotopes on one of the large animals’ horns.
The radioactive material would “render the horn useless… essentially poisonous for human consumption” added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at the same university.
The dusty rhino, put to sleep and crouched on the ground, did not feel any pain, Larkin said.
The radioactive material’s dose was so low it would not impact the animal’s health or the environment in any way, he said.
In February the environment ministry said that, despite government efforts to tackle the illicit trade, 499 of the giant mammals were killed in 2023, mostly in state-run parks. This represents an 11% increase over the 2022 figures.
«
What a brilliant idea. Especially if you could persuade the poachers that the radioactivity is dangerous.
unique link to this extract
Influencers aren’t getting famous like they used to • Glamour
Stephanie McNeal:
»
It used to go like this: An influencer or content creator would spend anywhere from a very short to a respectably decent amount of time building up their content and fan base. Maybe they were family vloggers, or prank YouTubers like the Paul brothers, or makeup artists or fashionistas. Then, there’d be a tipping point. Suddenly, these people were being written about in mainstream media like People and Us Weekly, landing roles in movies and on television shows, and attending high-class events.
Remember in 2021, when influencers like Chamberlain and Rae attended the Met Gala and everyone freaked out? This year, Chamberlain attended the Met again (she’s actually become somewhat of a fixture and works the red carpet for Vogue), but the rest of them have dried up. And even if Anna Wintour wanted to invite a fresh crop of internet talent, who would she choose? Can you name anyone in the past year who has ascended in a major way?
The last true influencer to truly “make it” in this way was Alix Earle, who became a household name seemingly overnight in early 2023 and has done quite well for herself. That’s not just my opinion. Sophie, who runs a business consulting on social media called Pretty Little Marketer, identified Earle as the most recent to “blow up” as well.
“I’d say she’s exceeded well past the title of influencer to global celebrity status,” she says.
This doesn’t mean that people aren’t doing well on social media. The problem is that too many people are doing well on social media. It’s not unique these days to have hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of followers, to have an agent, or to get lucrative brand deals. But with a huge pool of creators who are hard to differentiate from each other, the hard part seems to be standing out at all.
“There are many influencers who still make it ‘big’ in terms of opportunity and following, but we’ve seen fewer boom into mainstream media as we have in the past,” Sophie says.
«
Influencing’s too popular? It’s a weird world.
unique link to this extract
| • 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 