Good news (perhaps): VAR decisions in Premier League will this season be aided by an array of iPhones all around the ground. CC-licensed photo by Footy.com Images on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Welcome back, hope it was good for you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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The Verge has independently confirmed screenshots of the clause in this year’s Team Pixel agreement for the new Pixel phones, which various influencers began posting on X and Threads last night. The agreement tells participants they’re “expected to feature the Google Pixel device in place of any competitor mobile devices.” It also notes that “if it appears other brands are being preferred over the Pixel, we will need to cease the relationship between the brand and the creator.” The link to the form appears to have since been shut down.

The Verge obtained a link to the survey, but it appears to have since been shut down. Screenshot: The Verge
When asked, Google communications manager Kayla Geier told The Verge that “#TeamPixel is a distinct program, separate from our press and creator reviews programs. The goal of #TeamPixel is to get Pixel devices into the hands of content creators, not press and tech reviewers. We missed the mark with this new language that appeared in the #TeamPixel form yesterday, and it has been removed.”

Those terms certainly caused confusion online, with some assuming such terms apply to all product reviewers. However, that isn’t the case. Google’s official Pixel review program for publications like The Verge requires no such stipulations. (And, to be clear, The Verge would never accept such terms, in accordance with our ethics policy.)

So then, what is Team Pixel, exactly? Officially, it’s a program handled by PR agency 1000heads that seeds early units to influencers and superfans to drum up interest as brand ambassadors. While Google partners with 1000heads, it doesn’t directly run the program, and there are distinct differences from the traditional reviews program. For example, journalists and influencers in the official reviews program often get briefed and given products under embargo before or during an event. Team Pixel participants get the devices shortly after launch but before the public — all in exchange for some coverage on social media. For smaller creators, this can be a big leg up in terms of access.

“I joined the program over five years ago because it was a great way to get a phone and either relatively early or on time, which, in the review world, is big,” says creator Adam Matlock, who reviews tech on his TechOdyssey YouTube channel.

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Which goes to show how much one should trust influencers, I suppose. (Never saw this reviewing Apple products, and as with The Verge, would have ignored it. That’s different from an embargo on when the review can be published, though.) I bet all the folk at Humane (struggling with mountains of returns) are realising they missed a trick.
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Delay of gratification and adult outcomes: the “Marshmallow Test” does not reliably predict adult functioning • Wiley Online Library

Jessica Sperber, Deborah Lowe Vandell, Greg Duncan, Tyler Watts:

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This study extends the analytic approach conducted by Watts et al. (2018) to examine the long-term predictive validity of delay of gratification. Participants (n = 702; 83% White, 46% male) completed the Marshmallow Test at 54 months (1995–1996) and survey measures at age 26 (2017–2018). Using a preregistered analysis, Marshmallow Test performance was not strongly predictive of adult achievement, health, or behavior.

Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

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You have no idea how long I’ve waited for the Marshmallow Test to be shown to be hooey. (Yes, that’s a joke.) Unusual, of course, for a negative result to be published in this way, but it’s an important one.
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I, for one, will mourn Twitter • New Statesman

Jonn Elledge:

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The argument against Twitter is becoming overwhelming. The social media network, to which I still refuse to refer using Elon Musk’s embarrassing rebrand “X”, has always had its dark side. It has been described, by its most loyal users, as “the hellsite” for literally years. It’s been a transmission mechanism for nasty far-right politics to reach the political mainstream before, too, playing no small part in the unlikely transformation of a failed real-estate mogul and reality-TV star into the once and perhaps future president of the United States.

But since Elon Musk acquired it, possibly by accident, back in 2022, the voices of racist, misogynistic or homophobic trolls have become louder and more prominent. Moderation policies have been weakened; banned accounts belonging to the likes of Andrew Tate or Alex Jones reinstated. Misinformation abounds, and the loss of reputable advertisers has made noticeably less reputable ones more visible.

Even that era now looks like a lost golden age compared to these last few weeks. Musk has tweeted about “two-tier Keir” – a reference to a right-wing conspiracy theory that the reason violent anti-immigration rioters have been policed more harshly than protesters supporting left-wing causes is the politics, not the violence. He’s agreed with Nigel Farage that the Prime Minister is the “biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”. He’s even used his platform to predict civil war in the UK. If Twitter was a new social media network, the News Agents’ Lewis Goodall has argued, we’d treat it like Truth Social or Gab – an outpost of the alt right – not the world’s “public square”. If your politics aren’t on the nasty right, the case for leaving is increasingly unarguable.

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On Twitter, I don’t follow Musk, and have zero interest in what he has to say; but it’s clear there’s a huge number of people who do, and do. It’s also clear that his decision to let people who pay to be there be amplified (and be paid for that) has a seriously bad effect on behaviours and outcomes.

Threads, however, is really boring. BlueSky I find more interesting.
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Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries • SPARC

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MIT has long tried to avoid vendor lock-in through big deal contracts and, in 2019, maintained individual title-by-title subscriptions to approximately 675 Elsevier titles. In 2020, they took the significant step of canceling the full Elsevier journals contract – all 675 titles – leaving users with immediate access to only pre-2020 backfile content. Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2m each year, and the Libraries provide alternative means of access that fulfils most article requests in minutes. 

After laying the groundwork with faculty and university administrators, the transition has been relatively seamless with minimal push back from researchers. Most faculty have been supportive of the Libraries in taking a principled stand in line with MIT values and are finding alternative means of  access to needed research without an Elsevier subscription. Four years out, the faculty who continue to be most challenged by lack of immediate access are in the life sciences.

The experience has highlighted the extraordinary difference between what MIT had been paying (with pricing based on historic spend) to subscribe to Elsevier journal content and what it actually costs the Libraries to provide users with read access to what they need. On the publishing side, MIT’s analysis demonstrates that there were no financial economies of scale offered by Elseiver’s read and publish proposal. While local institutional context varies, MIT librarians believe others could likely benefit from a similar move. They are interested in collaborating with others to make collective investments in open publishing using their savings.

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We might be moving towards a new model of scientific publishing: preprints on Arxiv, discussion on blogs and Arxiv, revision and publication in a jointly-funded open publication journal.
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‘It made me cry’: photos taken 15 years apart show melting Swiss glaciers • The Guardian

Ajit Niranjan:

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A tourist has posted “staggering” photos of himself and his wife at the same spot in the Swiss Alps almost exactly 15 years apart, in a pair of photos that highlight the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

Duncan Porter, a software developer from Bristol, posted photos that were taken in the same spot at the Rhône glacier in August 2009 and August 2024. The white ice that filled the background has shrunk to reveal grey rock. A once-small pool at the bottom, out of sight in the original, has turned into a vast green lake.

“Not gonna lie, it made me cry,” Porter said in a viral post on social media platform X on Sunday night.

Porter and his wife had taken the original photo from a viewpoint by a “Wes Anderson-style” hotel that has since shut, and hung it up in their kitchen. Eager to return to the mountains and let their teenage daughters Maisie and Emily see the glacier, they took a camper van trip across Europe and set out to recreate the picture.

“But obviously the circumstance of this photo was drastically different,” said Porter. Helen Porter, a nurse, added: “I thought it was really unbelievable.”

The carbon pollution released by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature has heated the planet 1.3C since preindustrial times. In Europe, which has warmed twice as fast as the global average, hotter summers have forced people in mountainous regions to see slow-moving glaciers melt before their eyes.

Switzerland has lost one-third of its glacier volume since 2000, according to official statistics, and 10% has disappeared in the last two years alone.

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The photographs really are striking.
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The English Premier League will ditch its hated VAR offside tech for a fleet of iPhones • WIRED

Ben Dowsett:

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When you watch this year’s English Premier League soccer games, there’s a high chance you may get mad at some of the offside calls. However, unlike past seasons, your anger won’t be because the call, or the lack thereof, was obviously lousy. That’s because the League’s new offside-detection system is apparently able to spot a player’s position on the field, and call them offside, with more accuracy than ever—and it’s all powered by iPhones.

The League’s rollout of this new semiautomated offside tech later in the 2024–25 season won’t just provide long-awaited placation for players and fans frustrated by years of problems with previous video-assistant referee (VAR) systems, from extensive delays and human process errors to concerns about the precision of in-game calls due to limitations of the existing technology.

Genius Sports and subsidiary Second Spectrum, known for years of optical tracking and data-based work in NBA basketball, will be debuting this smartphone-based system known internally as “Dragon.”

The system utilizes dozens of iPhones, using the cameras to capture high-frame-rate video from multiple angles. Dragon’s custom machine intelligence software supposedly allows the smartphones to effectively communicate and work together to process all the visual data collected by the multiple cameras.

What’s more, in addition to its use in soccer games, it could also serve as a driver of new motion-capture and artificial-intelligence models across many other sports. WIRED obtained exclusive access to Dragon’s development and imminent deployment in the EPL.

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The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but it can’t be worse than the previous VAR. Can it?
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Online sports betting hurts consumers • Slow Boring

Ben Krauss and Milan Singh:

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In 30 states, as well as DC and Puerto Rico, everyone over the age of 21 is effectively walking around with a mini sports casino in their pocket. 

We’ve both written pieces warning that the widespread and mostly unregulated push towards legal mobile sports gambling could have dangerous consequences. At the time, we knew that total sports wagers had grown to well over a hundred billion dollars annually and states with legalized mobile sports gambling had seen a corresponding rise in calls to addiction hotlines. We also knew that previous forms of legal gambling (state lotteries) had disproportionately hurt the financial well-being of poor Americans, and that the extra tax revenue from legalized gambling likely wasn’t worth the cost of addiction. But we lacked data that proved mobile sports gambling led to widespread financial hardship in the states that legalized it. 

Now, we have it. 

This past month, two research teams released papers showing how legalized mobile sports gambling negatively impacts bettors’ financial health. While most gamblers wager responsibly, a concerning minority do not. Large samples of individual financial data show that legalized sports gambling decreases credit scores, increases debt loads, and substitutes positive investment activities. These effects are particularly prevalent among low-income men.

Legislators in states with legalized sports betting — and those considering it — need to take these harms seriously, and reconsider if the mobile sports betting boom is truly worth the tax dollars it provides.

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Harms credit scores, leads to more personal bankruptcies, more credit card delinquencies.. but I bet the tax dollars are thought worth it. Also there’s the difficulty of preventing people doing illicit betting given they have a casino in their pocket and neither Google nor Apple will block it.
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Fusion power might be 30 years away but we will reap its benefits well before • The Guardian

Stuart Clark, in a roundup piece about various ways in which fusion power might – might – be able to provide useful technologies for other applications:

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At present, the biggest spin-out project for Focused Energy is a contract with the German government to build the first laser-driven neutron source for examining nuclear waste containers.

Having shut down its last remaining nuclear power plants in 2023, Germany must now deal with the waste, which has been piling up for decades. Focused Energy’s imaging system will determine the contents of the barrels, and what condition the waste is in, so that they can be safely and finally stored.

Across the Atlantic, Shine is planning to take this one step further. Instead of using neutrons to image the waste, if the neutron beam can be made more intense, it can transform the waste into less harmful substances. For example, traditional nuclear reactors split uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to produce energy. The waste product is iodine-129, with a half-life of more than 15m years. However, if it could be bombarded with a high-intensity neutron beam, it would be transformed into iodine-128, which has a half-life of just 25 minutes.

“You can be rid of this 10 million-year problem in a day,” says Piefer.

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At this point you, like me, are saying “Wow! This is a solution that we’re crying out for.” (Though I’m not confident that iodine is the only waste product.) Now read on:

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It turns out that the kind of neutrons necessary to do this will be made in abundance in many fusion power plants. So the reactors of the future will not only solve the world’s energy problems, but can be harnessed to help clean up the dirty legacy of the first nuclear reactors.

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Oh, so we first have to build the impossible machine, and then we can perform a bit of magic to solve our current challenges. (Thanks Steve for the link.)
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Why I finally quit Spotify • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

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Through Spotify, I can browse many decades of published music more or less instantly; I can freely sample the work of new musicians. Yet it has become aggravatingly difficult to find what I want to listen to. The uppermost menu now offers three options, each given equal real estate—Music, Podcasts, and Audiobooks—and the Music tab is filled with rows of playlists, autoplay “radio” stations, and algorithmically generated mixes. The only option for browsing full albums is a small item in the lesser Library column, to the right of yet more buttons for Playlists and Podcasts. With the upgrade, it became clearer than ever what the app has been pushing me to do: listen to what it suggests, not choose music on my own. In 2012, Spotify launched its slogan, “Music for everyone.” Now it may as well be “Be grateful for whatever music we give you.”

I’m hardly alone in my souring on Spotify. When I posted about my annoyance with the interface on X, I heard from dozens of other unhappy users. “It’s harder just to enjoy music,” Kyle Austin, a marketing executive in Boston who responded to the post, told me. He’s noticed that the home-page interface emphasizes only what you’ve played recently; if you don’t want to continue listening to the same playlist or set of albums, you have to scroll past rows of recommendations or click out of the Home window. Diving deep into a particular artist’s discography—say, in Austin’s case, that of the prolific singer-songwriter Zach Bryan—requires scrolling through “Popular” tracks, “Artist Picks,” and “Popular Releases.” “It’s teaching you to not do that,” Austin said. Michael Toohey, an accountant in Chicago, told me that on Spotify “the entire concept of an album feels more like a hindrance than anything.”

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Chayka’s argument is that Spotify is now not interested in helping you find the music you want; much more the content it wants to push at you. Of course, you’re wondering what alternatives there would be..
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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