Does the relative scarcity of lefthanded people stem from a sort of social pressure? New research offers clues. CC-licensed photo by Alex Lewis on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Dexter and Sinister. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
TechScape: here’s four ways a new Labour government could use tech to boost Britain • The Guardian
Alex Hern:
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In March 2006, back when the Guardian technology section was a physical supplement in Thursday’s newspaper, we ran a campaign to “free our data”. We wrote about government-owned and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey, the UK Hydrographic Office and the Highways Agency collecting data on our behalf. We asked: “Why can’t we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps?”
The campaign was, over the years that followed, a mixed success. Across the public sector, a new norm was created that government data should generally be made available to the public when possible. It almost certainly influenced the direction of the gov.uk project, putting open data at the heart of the state’s digital footprint, and a glance at the top-level data.gov.uk website shows how much work has been done to that end.
Someone born on the day of that campaign’s launch will be voting for the first time on Thursday. Yet some of the most valuable pieces of our digital infrastructure are still locked up, behind restrictive terms or expensive paywalls.
The Postcode Address File (PAF) is one example. It holds 1.8m postcodes and almost 30m postal addresses, and is the ground truth for how we navigate the country. It was privatised along with Royal Mail, but remains tightly controlled by the state, with access charges regulated by Ofcom and a unique license for the public sector to use it at a flat cost.
Freeing our data is the right thing to do, but successive governments have viewed it as expensive: giving up a valuable revenue stream, in the name of abstract concepts. But a Labour party looking for growth and state renewal over the next few years should recognise that if a government dataset is valuable enough to be worth charging for, it’s even more valuable if it can be built on, improved and reused.
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The sale of the PAF was a disgrace – but as the article points out, there are lots of big potential wins which can spark growth through making more data available on non-restrictive licences. Free Our Data lives! And it’s old enough to buy drinks!
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Google Search ranks AI spam above original reporting in news results • WIRED
Reece Rogers:
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As reported by 404 Media in January, AI-powered articles appeared multiple times for basic queries at the beginning of the year in Google News results. Two months later, Google announced significant changes to its algorithm and new spam policies, as an attempt to improve the search results. And by the end of April, Google shared that the major adjustments to remove unhelpful results from its search engine ranking system were finished. “As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these changes. You’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, a director of product management at Google, in a blog post.
Despite the changes, spammy content created with the help of AI remains an ongoing, prevalent issue for Google News.
“This is a really rampant problem on Google right now, and it’s hard to answer specifically why it’s happening,” says Lily Ray, senior director of search engine optimization at the marketing agency Amsive. “We’ve had some clients say, ‘Hey, they took our article and rehashed it with AI. It looks exactly like what we wrote in our original content but just kind of like a mumbo-jumbo, AI-rewritten version of it.’”
At first glance, it was clear to me that some of the images for Syrus’ blogs were AI generated based on the illustrations’ droopy eyes and other deformed physical features—telltale signs of AI trying to represent the human body.
Now, was the text of our article rewritten using AI? I reached out to the person behind the blog to learn more about how they made it and received confirmation via email that an Italian marketing agency created the blog. They claim to have used an AI tool as part of the writing process. “Regarding your concerns about plagiarism, we can assure you that our content creation process involves AI tools that analyze and synthesize information from various sources while always respecting intellectual property,” writes someone using the name Daniele Syrus over email.
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Google News has had a longstanding problem with recency bias: a more recent but purely rewritten article will rank higher than the original, despite adding nothing to it. Now AI is making it worse.
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Cleanview: see the energy transition in real time
Michael Thomas built this site, which tracks energy installs across the US and provides lots of interesting data:
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Cleanview crunches millions of data points and tracks thousands of projects each month so you don’t have to.
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Wind, solar, battery, plus all the other energy installations. It’s a fascinating resource for tracking how things are changing – because they are changing: just look, for example, at battery installation in California.
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AI Overview study for 8,000 keywords in Google Search • Advanced Web Ranking
Philip Petrescu with the TL;DR on the new AI stuff when you do a Google query:
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• The average AI Overview is 169 words and 912 pixels long
• Only 12.4% of the analyzed keywords display an AI Overview
• A Featured Snippet is showing on 17.6% of the analyzed keywords
• On average, AI Overviews appear alongside Featured Snippets in 7.4% of cases. For the Health niche, they show up together the most often (34.9% of queries)
• AI Overviews contain 7.2 links on average when expanded
• 33.4% of AI Overview links rank in that query’s top 10 organic results
• 46.5% of the URLs included in AI Overviews rank outside the top 50 organic results
• Five-word queries trigger an AI Overview most frequently
• Keywords from the Health and Safety niches are more likely to trigger AI Overviews
• No AI Overviews show up for brand related queries
• Navigational intent keywords are less likely to display AI Overviews
• Google Ads are displayed in 28.3% keywords that trigger AI Overviews
• From all the keywords that trigger AI Overviews, Ads at the top of the SERP appear for 8.7% of keywords. Ads at the bottom are displayed for 19.5% of these keywords
• Shopping Ads are almost never seen together with AI Overviews and when they are, they always appear below the AI Overview.«
There’s much more if you want the in-depth version. One other point from lower down: “Do AI Overviews impact the visibility of the first organic result?”
And the answer is: yes, they do. Significantly.
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Google emissions jump nearly 50% over five years as AI use surges • FT
Camilla Hodgson and Stephen Morris:
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Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of its data centres that underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to “net zero” by 2030 in doubt.
The Silicon Valley company’s pollution amounted to 14.3mn tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, a 48% increase from its 2019 baseline and a 13% rise since last year, Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday.
Google said the jump highlighted “the challenge of reducing emissions” at the same time as it invests in the build-out of large language models and their associated applications and infrastructure, admitting that “the future environmental impact of AI” was “complex and difficult to predict”.
Chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt said the company remained committed to the 2030 target but stressed the “extremely ambitious” nature of the goal.
“We do still expect our emissions to continue to rise before dropping towards our goal,” said Brandt.
She added that Google was “working very hard” on reducing its emissions, including by signing deals for clean energy. There was also a “tremendous opportunity for climate solutions that are enabled by AI”, said Brandt.
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Wait, though – Google didn’t start introducing its AI search until earlier this year, surely? If this is what happens when it’s just gearing up for wide use of AI, which we know consumes far more energy than normal search, it’s a really troubling sign.
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Northvolt: the battery company seeking to make batteries with salt • Climate Home News
Martin Gelin and Meli Petersson Ellafi:
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In recent years, concerns have grown over the social and environmental harms of extracting and refining battery minerals. Reserves of lithium, nickel and cobalt are concentrated in a handful of countries, making them prone to geopolitical and trade disruptions, and subject to intense competition. Meanwhile, China dominates the lithium-ion battery supply chain, controlling 70% of global lithium refining capacity.
Sodium-based batteries offer a solution to the electric battery supply chain challenges, particularly for Western countries seeking to reduce their dependence on China for cleantech.
According to 2023 analysis by BloombergNEF, sodium batteries could displace 272,000 tonnes of lithium demand by 2035, equivalent to about 7% of the overall market projected for that year.
“The real value of sodium-ion batteries is the potential to build a European supply chain,” said Iola Hughes, research manager at London-based battery consultancy Rho Motion. “In the US and the EU, there is growing pressure to decouple from China and to build domestic supply, and sodium-ion batteries could have strong potential in that transition.”
In January, the European Investment Bank backed the company with over $1bn in financing, citing Northvolt’s ability to create the first fully integrated circular lithium-ion battery production facility outside Asia.
At the time, EU Commission Vice President Maroš Šefčovič, in charge of the European Green Deal, said the battery industry was of “strategic importance and a key battleground for global competitiveness”.“Northvolt, our battery pioneer, showcases that the EU has what it takes to build an innovative, sustainable and globally competitive battery ecosystem,” he said.
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Sodium is plentiful (available at a sea near you), which makes it very attractive for batteries where size isn’t an issue.
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Figma disables AI app design tool after it copied Apple’s Weather app • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app.
Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make a “weather app” produced several variations of apps that looked almost identical to Apple’s default weather app.
“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config,” Figma CEO Dylan Field said on Twitter. Config is Figma’s annual conference where it showcased Make Design. “I have asked our team to temporarily disable the Make Design feature until we are confident we can stand behind its output. The feature will be disabled when our US based team wakes up in a few hours, and we will re-enable it when we have completed a full QA pass on the underlying design system.”
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Wonder how that “QA pass” is going to work, exactly. The AI is, one presumes, a generative AI system, which means you have to tear up its entire learning matrix in order to take even one app out. And you’d want to take a fair number of apps out. Which would probably only leave the bad ones. Which you don’t want to have in.
One hopes this is a free upgrade.
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Why most of us are right-handed, and prefer to view faces on the left • Science Museum Blog
Roger Highfield:
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Once upon a time, scientists thought biases in behaviour were unique to humans and reflected differences in the dominance of the left and right brain hemispheres, each of which controls the opposite side of the body.
But, as has so often been the case, research in recent decades has shown plenty of handedness in other creatures and the way that they behave.
Studies conducted on animals suggests that brain hemisphere biases evolved because they allow the two sides of the brain to simultaneously do different things without the animals becoming muddled, or the two hemispheres conflicting.
So being right- or left-handed free up some brain power to make animals more efficient at finding food and, in general, surviving, for instance turning the right way to stay in a shoal or a flock to cut the risk of being picked off by predators, so they can pass their genes on.
The museum’s Live Science residency allowed the team to use museum visitors to study associations between the degree of hand bias and performance as well as direction of biases and social ability that had already been studied in animal research.
The team measured handedness using a timed colour-matching pegboard task, along with images of faces expressing different emotion (such as surprise or anger) presented on the right- or left-hand side of a screen.
People with mild to moderate strength hand bias (left or right) placed more colour-matched pegs correctly than those with a strong or weak bias, showing that, in humans, extremes of handedness may limit our flexibility, unlike wild animals.
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The full study, based on 1,600 experiments on live humans (visitors to the Science Museum) is published in Nature.
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Apple rumoured to be working on camera-powered AirPods • Gizmodo
Harri Weber:
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Apple is reportedly bringing cameras to AirPods, ear hairs be damned.
The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo. The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.
Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike. For example, “if users turn their heads to look in a specific direction, the sound source in that direction can be emphasized,” said the analyst.
For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo. The IR module could be similar to the receiver that powers Apple’s facial recognition feature, FaceID.
The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.
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Seems a pretty weird idea. The Ming-Chi Kuo piece contains a paragraph saying “The IR camera can detect environmental image changes, potentially enabling in-air gesture control to enhance human-device interaction. It is worth noting that Apple has filed related patents in this area”. Still seems weird. But also a long way off.
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Three million iOS and macOS apps were exposed to potent supply-chain attacks • Ars Technica
Dan Goodin:
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Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.
The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on. When developers make changes to one of their “pods”—CocoaPods lingo for individual code packages—dependent apps typically incorporate them automatically through app updates, typically with no interaction required by end users.
“Many applications can access a user’s most sensitive information: credit card details, medical records, private materials, and more,” wrote researchers from EVA Information Security, the firm that discovered the vulnerability. “Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”
The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods. The developer entered the email address associated with their pod. The trunk server responded by sending a link to the address. When a person clicked on the link, they gained access to the account.
In one case, an attacker could manipulate the URL in the link to make it point to a server under the attacker’s control. The server accepted a spoofed XFH, an HTTP header for identifying the target host specified in an HTTP request. The EVA researchers found that they could use a forged XFH to construct URLs of their choice.
…CocoaPods maintainers disclosed and patched the vulnerabilities last October. At the time, they said they weren’t aware of any active attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities. They did, however, confirm that the scenarios described by the researchers were plausible.
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The food chain of code packages really does mirror the complexity of life. But with code, of course.
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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 