Unfortunately it has become necessary to explain once more that solar farms can coexist with farmland. CC-licensed photo by Solar Trade Association on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Explain it again? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Why an ‘AI health coach’ won’t solve the world’s chronic disease problems • The Conversation
Jathan Sadowski: is a research fellow at Monash University:
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Whether you are “a busy professional with diabetes” or somebody without “access to trainers, chefs and life coaches” — the only two user profiles the pair [Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington] mention — the Thrive AI Health coach aims to use behavioural data to create “personalised nudges and real-time recommendations” to change your daily habits.
Soon, supposedly, everybody will have access to the “life-saving benefits” of a mobile app that tells you — in a precisely targeted way — to sleep more, eat better, exercise regularly, be less stressed and go touch grass with friends. These “superhuman” technologies, combined with the “superpowers” of incentives, will change the world by changing our “tiny daily acts”.
Despite claims that AI has unlocked yet another innovation, when I read Altman and Huffington’s announcement I was struck by a sense of déjà vu.
Why did Thrive AI Health and the logic behind it sound so familiar? Because it’s a kind of thinking we are seeing more and more in the insurance industry.
In fact, in an article published last year I suggested we might soon see “total life insurance” bundled with “a personalised AI life coach”, which would combine data from various sources in our daily lives to target us with prompts for how to behave in healthier, less risky ways. It would of course take notes and report back to our insurers and doctors when we do not follow these recommendations.
…Altman and Huffington say AI-enabled “hyper-personalisation” means this time will be different.
Are they right? I don’t think so. The first problem is there is no guarantee the AI will work as promised. There is no reason to think it won’t be plagued by the problems of bias, hallucination and errors we see in cutting-edge AI models like ChatGPT.
However, even if it does, it will still miss the mark because the idea of hyper-personalisation is based on a flawed theory of how change happens.
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As Apple’s VR headset reaches Europe, will VR ever hit the mainstream? • BBC News
Zoe Kleinman:
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Up until now, the Vision Pro has only been on sale in the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift fewer than 500,000 units this year. Meta, which has been in the market longer, does not release sales data for the Quest either but it’s thought to have sold around 20 million worldwide.
VR headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, let alone mobile phones. And it gets worse – George Jijiashvili, analyst at market research firm Omdia, said of those devices sold, many are abandoned.
“This is largely due to the limited in-flow of compelling content to keep up engagement,” he said.
But of course lack of content leads to reduced interest – and a reduced incentive for developers to make that content in the first place. It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.Alan Boyce, the founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro would have to “be patient” while more content arrived.
That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.
And IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we should not be too quick to write off a slow start for Apple’s new product.
“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every single product will sell in the millions straight away, there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.
But the reality is even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a huge number of buyers. According to Melissa Otto from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became mainstream when the App Store “started to explode with apps that added value to our lives”.
“When people start to feel their lives are becoming better and more convenient, that’s when they’re willing to take the leap,” she said.
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The longer it takes Apple to come up with compelling content for this, the closer it comes to dying.
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Factcheck, August 2022: is solar power a ‘threat’ to UK farmland? • Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief Staff:
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ground-mounted solar panels currently cover just 0.1% of all land in the UK.
Even government plans to significantly scale up solar in line with its net-zero target are expected to bring this up to just 0.3% of the UK land area. This is the equivalent to around 0.5% of the land currently used for farming – and roughly half of the space taken up by golf courses.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief assesses some of the statements made by UK politicians about solar power in recent months, how land is used in the UK and the concept of “agrivoltaics” – systems in which farmland is effectively combined with solar power.
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This has become relevant because the new (Labour) secretary of state for Net Zero has overruled objections and granted permission for three big new solar farms. This has led to wails from former MPs and current Tory MPs, which means that.. nothing. The plans will go ahead.
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European Union says X’s blue checks are deceptive ‘dark patterns’ that breach its social media laws • Associated Press
Kelvin Chan:
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The European Union said Friday that blue checkmarks from Elon Musk’s X are deceptive and that the online platform falls short on transparency and accountability requirements, the first charges against a tech company since the bloc’s new social media regulations took effect.
The European Commission outlined the preliminary findings from its investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA is a sweeping set of regulations that requires platforms to take more responsibility for protecting their European users and cleaning up harmful or illegal content and products on their sites, under threat of hefty fines.
Regulators took aim at X’s blue checks, saying they constitute “dark patterns” that are not in line with industry best practice and can be used by malicious actors to deceive users.
Before Musk’s acquisition, the checkmarks mirrored verification badges common on social media and were largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts. After Musk bought the site in 2022, it started issuing them to anyone who paid $8 per month for one.
European Union accuses Facebook owner Meta of breaking digital rules with paid ad-free option
“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified” status’ it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” the commission said.«
The complaint has three points – “verified users” are just paying users, there isn’t the required transparency on advertising, and there isn’t access to public data for researchers. The “verified users” point seems weak, but the other two are solid.
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China’s Transsion sued by Qualcomm and Philips as IP woes mount • FT
Josh Gabert-Doyon and James Kynge:
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Shenzhen-listed Transsion, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, is being sued by Qualcomm and Philips for alleged intellectual property violations.
Transsion, which has a 48% market share for smartphones in the African continent and is rapidly expanding across the global south, is facing intensifying legal and commercial pressures from large US and European technology companies.
Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against Transsion, the manufacturer behind the Tecno, Itel and Infinix brands, in India earlier this week and has filed claims in Europe and China over alleged patent infringement. Philips has also sued Transsion in India, according to court filings.
Nokia, the Finnish telecoms company, is also pressuring the Chinese company to start making payments for patented technologies used in Transsion phones, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ann Chaplin, Qualcomm’s general counsel, told the Financial Times on Friday: “Transsion […] has declined to accept a licence from Qualcomm for the majority of its mobile products, so we are pursuing litigation to enforce our rights”.
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Either Transsion’s profits are going to drop substantially or the price of its phones is going to rise. What fun that smartphone patent litigation is still a thing.
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Would you survive 378 days of team bonding? Nasa takes the test • FT
Emma Jacobs:
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The end of a journey can be the hardest part. Researchers who study long voyages in space and at sea have described a third-quarter phenomenon in which workers feel their mood lowering as they pass the halfway mark — something I experienced in only week two of the Covid lockdown.
Lengthy missions are interesting because they show how people cope with working in extreme conditions — which is crucial in preventing accidents. But they also illuminate the universal features of work, including petty irritations with colleagues.
Kate Greene, a science journalist, wrote of living in a white geodesic dome on the Hawaiian volcano of Mauna Loa in 2013 as part of the first Hi-Seas project, which recreated some conditions of a Mars mission. “The cadence of a crewmate’s hard-soled sandals galloping down the stairs, remarkably consistent and always so loud. I also wondered why one of my crewmates kept swinging her crossed leg under the table at every meal so as to ever-so-gently tap me in the shin with her fuzzy slipper.” A fellow inhabitant “complained of another’s frequent throat clearing”.
In another year-long Hi-Seas mission in 2015, Sheyna Gifford, the health science officer, described the way her shrunken world became stridently utilitarian: “There is neither money nor anywhere to spend it, value is based almost solely on usefulness.”
Extreme colleaguing experiments show that success depends not just on talent and effort but also on good workplace relations. Planetary exploration might require scientific expertise but knowing when to zone out of a co-worker’s interminable anecdote must count for something.
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Bird flu presumed in three Colorado poultry workers, CDC says • The Washington Post
Justine McDaniel:
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Three people who worked with infected poultry in Colorado are believed to have contracted avian influenza, state health officials said Friday, potentially bringing the number of U.S. cases identified in humans since April to seven.
The workers contracted mild symptoms after culling infected poultry at a farm with a commercial egg operation and tested presumptive-positive for the flu, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will confirm the testing and will send a team to Colorado to investigate how the workers might have contracted the virus, the agency said Friday. The CDC will also analyze the virus sequences to determine whether the virus has mutated.
The virus — which has caused outbreaks in dairy cattle and poultry this spring and summer — has posed a low risk to the general public because it’s unlikely to be spread from person to person. It could pose a higher risk if it mutates to spread easily between people, however, so the virus has a “pandemic potential” that makes human cases concerning, the CDC said.
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*strained voice* Just a watching brief. (Thanks to Joe S for the link.)
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Further thoughts on Lucy Letby • The Snowdon Substack
Christopher Snowdon:
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Letby’s defenders are not all headbangers and I can understand why they have their doubts about the conviction. Her text messages at the time and her statements under interrogation are all consistent with her being a conscientious and caring nurse. Even the “I killed them on purpose” note has to be read in the context of her other notes protesting her innocence and her deteriorating mental health. It would not be the most surprising thing in the world if she turns out to have been the victim of an extraordinary set of circumstances.
Nevertheless, it would be quite surprising, and if you’re going to spend your time trying to free her, I beseech you to familiarise yourself with the case. Part of the problem is that there is no easy way to fact check the various claims and counter-claims. When I said in the previous post that I have not read the 7,000 page court transcripts, some people took it as a self-own, but the transcripts are not available online and, as far as I know, never have been (the author of the New Yorker article claims to have read them but I am not sure how). The transcript of the appeals court judgement is available online and should be read by anyone who is interested in the case. It gives a very different impression to that given by the three articles [New Yorker, Guardian, Telegraph] mentioned above.
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This is a good followup to an earlier piece which explains, with detail from the doctors, why Letby became a suspect, and why there isn’t good reason to doubt her convictions: you’d need to believe an utterly incredible set of coincidences.
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Joe Biden’s cynical turn against the press • The New Yorker
Jay Caspian Kang:
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The reason that so many politicians—not to mention athletes, business leaders, and movie stars—blame the media for everything nowadays, as though journalists can change the course of history and the hearts of every person in the country with a few headlines, is precisely because we can’t do any of that. You don’t fight the media and call the press a bunch of fake-news losers when the media is strong, and can shape opinion in a meaningful or threatening way. You attack when it’s weak.
…On the political beat, the news that does get broken by dedicated reporters tends to be the sorts of scoops that people will only tell reporters anonymously, which is why so many of today’s big political stories involve unnamed sources and officials. This makes those stories particularly vulnerable to attack. The past decade or so has seen the rise of a shambolic and democratic but ultimately cloistered form of media criticism that feeds off screenshots of headlines, the pathologizing of reporters, and constant accusations of corruption.
The intense scrutiny that the social-media commentariat places upon every headline and paragraph of every story, combined with the shrinking and increasingly compromised leverage that journalists can place upon people in power, has turned the media into a convenient whipping boy for anyone getting bad press. In an emergency, just say some version of “fake news,” point out that all the sources are unnamed and therefore probably made up—or, at the very least, feckless and self-interested—and cite the litany of things that the media has got wrong in the past.
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An excellent analysis of the current state of affairs: the media is the whipping boy, even when it tells the truth and correctly points out failings. Though talking about Biden all feels a bit redundant now, doesn’t it.
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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 