Researchers think they have identified five areas around the world where people live longer than anywhere else. But it’s a mirage. CC-licensed photo by WabbitWanderer on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Not getting any younger. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Gannett is shuttering site accused of publishing AI product reviews • The Verge
Mia Sato:
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Newspaper giant Gannett is shutting down Reviewed, its product reviews site, effective November 1st, according to sources familiar with the decision. The site offers recommendations for products ranging from shoes to home appliances and employs journalists to test and review items — but has also been at the center of questions around whether its work is actually produced by humans.
“After careful consideration and evaluation of our Reviewed business, we have decided to close the operation. We extend our sincere gratitude to our employees who have provided consumers with trusted product reviews,” Reviewed spokesperson Lark-Marie Antón told The Verge in an email.
But the site more recently has been the subject of scrutiny, at times by its own unionized employees. Last October, Reviewed staff publicly accused Gannett of publishing AI-generated product reviews on the site. The articles in question were written in a strange, stilted manner, and staff found that the authors the articles were attributed to didn’t seem to exist on LinkedIn and other platforms. Some questioned whether they were real at all. In response to questions, Gannett said the articles were produced by a third-party marketing company called AdVon Commerce and that the original reviews didn’t include proper disclosure. But Gannett denied that AI was involved.
…But an investigation by The Verge into AdVon showed that the company has spammed the web with marketing content, some of which former employees say was indeed AI-generated. Ben Faw, CEO and cofounder of AdVon, has for years used his connections in media to land contracts with news outlets, often setting up elaborate marketing schemes to enrich himself.
AdVon’s marketing content appeared everywhere from small blogs to outlets like Us Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. In response to The Verge’s reporting, Faw said in an emailed statement that the company “generate[s] affiliate revenue which publishers use to fund newsroom operations and salaries.” He also said AdVon offers “human-only, AI-enhanced, and hybrid solutions” to customers hiring the firm.
Antón didn’t offer a reason for shutting down Reviewed.
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Ever so suspicious, particularly because review sites with affiliate links are one of the few remaining certain ways to make money from content.
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An experiment in lust, regret and kissing • The New York Times
Curtis Sittenfeld (who is the author of seven novels):
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This summer, I agreed to a literary experiment with Times Opinion: What is the difference between a story written by a human and a story written by artificial intelligence?
We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going head-to-head with the machine would give us real answers about what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how big a threat it is to human writers. And if you’ve wondered, as I have, what exactly makes something a beach read — frothy themes or sand under your feet? — we set out to get to the bottom of that, too.
First, we asked readers to vote on which themes they wanted in their ideal beach read. We also included some options that are staples of my fiction, including privilege, self-consciousness and ambivalence. ChatGPT and I would then work using the top vote-getters.
Lust, regret and kissing won, in that order. Readers also wrote in suggestions. They wanted beach reads about naps and redemption and tattoos gone wrong; puppies and sharks and secrets and white linen caftans; margaritas and roller coasters and mosquitoes; yearning and bonfires and women serious about their vocations. At least 10 readers suggested variations on making the characters middle-aged. One reader wrote, “We tend to equate summer with kids,” and suggested I explore “Why does summer still feel special for older people?”
So I added middle-age and another write-in, flip-flops — because it seemed fun, easy and, yes, summery — to the list and got to work on a 1,000-word story.
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There are two stories, nice and short: see if you can figure out which is the result of human labour, and which the result of gulping down and regurgitating The Internet.
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Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, is part of broad investigation in France • The New York Times
Aurelien Breeden, Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur:
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Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the arrest was part of an investigation opened on July 8 “against person unnamed” on a raft of potential charges, including complicity in the distribution of child pornography and selling of drugs, money laundering, and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement.
The investigation is being handled by cybercrime and anti-fraud specialists, Ms. Beccuau said. “It is within this procedural framework that Pavel Durov was questioned by the investigators,” she said.
It was unclear whether any of the charges listed by Ms. Beccuau would be held against Mr. Durov.In France, complex criminal cases are handled by special magistrates who have broad investigative powers and can place defendants under formal investigation, charging them when they believe the evidence warrants it.
But the magistrates can later drop charges if they do not think evidence is sufficient to proceed to trial, and cases can take years.
Mr. Durov’s arrest has become a point of contention in the debate about free speech on the internet. President Emmanuel Macron of France on Monday dismissed accusations from supporters of Telegram that the arrest was an example of government censorship.
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Mr. Macron said in a statement posted on X. “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
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The “blue zone” distraction • Cremieux Recueil
Cremieux:
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One major distraction for life extension advocates is geographical peculiarity. That is, regions of the globe that supposedly contain lots and lots of extremely old people, making those regions worthy of study to figure out precisely what allows them to harbor so many of the world’s longest lived individuals. The most notably peculiar geographical regions are known as blue zones. [They’re in Loma Linda in the US, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Sardinia in Italy, Icaria in Greece and Okinawa in Japan.]
When the discover of the five blue zones—Dan Buettner—was developing the case that they were worthy of special scholarly attention, he claimed they showed the oldest people were:
• Remarkably inactive. They didn’t tend to be heavy exercisers, or even to exercise at all. Instead, these people tended to garden, knead dough, and use tools, because movement was a part of their daily lives rather than something they sought out.
• Ritualistic. Blue zone inhabitants pray, they venerate their ancestors, they take siestas, and they drink at happy hours, regularly, to reduce the stresses of life.
• Purposive. Blue zone inhabitants supposedly live more meaningful lives and know what their goals for living are.
• Winos. Well, not exactly winos, but they apparently tend to drink wine or a bit of other alcohol regularly.
• Plant-based. Apparently 95% of 100-year-olds eat only plant-based diets, with a heavy emphasis on being bean-based. It never was clarified if this is why they lived so long or a consequence of being so old, but that’s neither here nor there.
• Thin eaters. The oldest old create strategies to preclude themselves from gorging on food and drink, and in the blue zones, people eat large breakfasts, smaller lunches, and minuscule dinners.
• Lovers. Centenarians supposedly put a lot of work into their relationships and their kids often regard them as sources of wisdom to be kept in their lives.
• Community-oriented. Blue zone inhabitants tend to live in faith-based communities and their religiosity is supposedly part of their exceptionally long lives.
• Selective. Blue zone inhabitants cut unhealthy people out of their lives and curate healthy social circles filled with individuals who are unlikely to get them to do unhealthy things—they like thin, non-smoking, limited-drinking, socially connected, and happy people.So there we have it: Buettner looked at blue zones, found things that made them unique, and now we’re all going to be able to live another three decades, right?
The problem is that blue zones are fake.
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Why? Typically because recordkeeping was terrible – but also because there are perverse (financial) incentives to keep someone old “alive”, even if they’re not actually breathing any more.
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Experts puzzled as Finland pine trees die off • Agence France-Presse via MUSER PRESS
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Staggering numbers of dead pine trees have been reported in southern Finland this summer, with researchers linking the phenomenon to climate change, they told AFP on Friday.
Over 1,350 patches of dead pine trees have been reported in southwestern Finland since April, when researchers started collecting observations from the public.
“Every day we receive more in our mapping service,” Turku University geography professor Risto Kalliola told AFP.
He described the phenomenon as a “local mass-death of patches of pine trees”.
Most affected were rocky coastal areas with barren soil easily exposed to drought, he said.
Browned groups of dead pines suddenly started to appear along Finland’s southern coast a few years ago, and researchers are now trying to find out the cause of the phenomenon.
“Something is happening in our nature and we have to take it seriously,” Kalliola said.
Similar deaths of pine trees have also occurred in other northern European countries, including neighbouring Sweden.
“What is new in Finland is that this phenomenon has quite recently begun to be common,” he said.
He believed several factors could be causing the local die-offs, such as insect pests and fungal diseases — all exacerbated by global warming.
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The foreign pro-Trump fake news industry has pivoted to American patriotism • Forbes
Emily Baker-White:
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The idea of America is big business on Facebook. The social network has hosted more than a hundred pages that have adopted American patriotism as a theme, boasting names like Proud American, Proud To Be An American, American Story, and We Are America.
But a large swath of those pages — despite their names — aren’t American at all. Instead, they’re run by foreign click farmers, many of whom are based in Macedonia, who use AI to pump out a near-endless ocean of clickbaity soup. Posts sharing prayers for American soldiers, rewritten tweets, memes and pictures of old Hollywood pin-up girls link out to AI-generated articles, against which the click farmers can sell advertising.
Headlines like “Dedicated Firefighters Risk Their Lives To Save Others” and “A Father’s Heroism: The Tragic Story of Phil Dellegrazie And His Son Anthony” tease short, uninformative articles on websites plastered with often sexual advertisements. The pages promoting them fake Americanness because they get paid every time someone clicks on one of their links, and in the advertising world, American clicks are some of the most valuable.
A Forbes review identified 67 Facebook pages — now taken down — that identified themselves as champions of American news, culture or identity, but were actually based overseas. As of August 20, they had more than 9 million followers combined — more than the Facebook pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Thirty-three of them were run from Macedonia, with others spread out across 23 different countries, including Canada, France, Morocco, Venezuela and Vietnam.
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Ah, it’s 2016 again. Will the clickbait/ads scheme ever fall out of favour?
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Apple event announced for September 9: “It’s Glowtime” • MacRumors
Juli Clover:
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Apple today announced plans to hold its annual iPhone-centric event on Monday, September 9 at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. The event is set to start at 10:00 a.m., and select members of the media have been invited to attend.
This year’s event will see Apple unveil the iPhone 16 lineup, new Apple Watch models, and the AirPods 4, plus we’ll get official launch dates for iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and Apple’s other software updates.
All four of the new iPhones are expected to have the customizable Action Button and a new Capture Button for taking photos that will have built-in gestures, such as a swipe for zooming in and out or a soft press for autofocus. The Capture Button will be on the right side of the devices below the power button.Apple is also adding an A18 chip to all models, so the entire iPhone 16 lineup will be capable of supporting the Apple Intelligence features that are coming in iOS 18 . No other major new features are expected for the standard iPhone 16 models, but the Pro lineup will get an increase in display size, going from 6.1 and 6.7 inches to 6.3 and 6.9 inches, respectively, for the Pro and Pro Max. Both models will also include the 5x Telephoto zoom option that was exclusive to the Pro Max last year.
For the Apple Watch, the standard Series 10 is expected to feature a thinner design with a larger display, but the change won’t be radical. Apple also plans to refresh the Apple Watch SE and the Apple Watch Ultra, and we could see new health features such as sleep apnea detection and blood pressure monitoring, but it is not yet entirely clear if Apple will have them ready in time for this year’s launch.
There are two models of the AirPods 4 coming, one that’s a direct successor to the current AirPods 3 and one that’s a step up with support for Active Noise Cancellation at a non-Pro price.
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There was only one mystery about this: why on the Monday? Apple almost always holds these events on Tuesdays – giving it time to get everything sorted the day before – or, if there’s a holiday on the Monday, on the Wednesday.
And the answer: the presidential debate is on Tuesday September 10. Even Apple can’t overwhelm that.
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Scientific fraud solutions: should research misconduct be illegal? • Vox
Kelsey Piper:
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You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.
Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.
One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain heart surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.
The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.
After the revelations, a new meta-analysis was published in 2014, evaluating whether to use beta blockers before cardiac surgery. It found that a course of beta blockers made it 27% more likely that someone would die within 30 days of their heart surgery. That is, the policy which Poldermans had recommended using falsified data, adopted in Europe on the basis of his research, was actually dramatically increasing the odds people would die in heart surgery.
Tens of millions of heart surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner. While that exact number is hotly contested, a 27% increase in mortality for a common procedure for years on end can add up to an extraordinary death toll.
I learned about the Poldermans case when I reached out to some scientific misconduct researchers, asking them a provocative question: Should scientific fraud be prosecuted?
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It’s a big question, but the shocking thing is to look at the link to the European medical guidelines. Their lead author is.. Poldermans. So the question of “why didn’t they look for replication?” is easily answered: the lead author would say it wasn’t needed.
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Exactly how valuable is 100 million views? • Posting Nexus
Julia Alexander:
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YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X all define a “view” differently. A view on YouTube consists of at least 30 seconds watched. Three seconds is considered a view on Instagram compared to one second for TikTok. X is my favorite: a view is two seconds of a video watched when the video takes up half the screen.
Let me paint that picture for you even more. If you’re scrolling through X and there’s a video playing above a tweet you take a second to read — even if you’re not playing the video above and so long as it takes up half the screen — it’s a view. Even digital creators who spend their time hyperfixating on these metrics think it’s hilarious.
Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson posted a re-cut version of his “$1 vs $1,000,000 car” YouTube video and posted it on X to see how it would perform. It was then run as an ad — not by Donaldson’s team — to inflate views as an example of how powerful X can be for video. Donaldson posted what he earned from the video, noting it had generated more than $260,000 based on views. If you’re an advertiser, does the fact that Donaldson received 20 million views on a video that most people scrolled past constitute the same value as a video being sought out on YouTube or actually being engaged with on TikTok?
How do you create a 1:1 benchmark in this world? What is actually popular?
All social platforms use different machine learning algorithmic tools that impact the types of content that travel. Primetime slots in broadcast are replaced with prioritized feed placement for an additional fee. These primetime slots that also existed within one unified ecosystem with limited access points are also replaced with platforms being consumed on different devices at different times and surfaced based on perceived individual user interest.
This makes it nearly impossible to benchmark views across multiple platforms; that’s a problem when the internet is defined by its decentralized media approach. It’s also what makes it difficult for someone like Trump to boast about his appearance on Theo Von or Logan Paul’s podcast on YouTube, which is made explicitly clear when Variety and Bloomberg are writing ratings stories about the RNC and DNC instead of his interview with Elon.
Does any of this really matter is a question hanging over our entire world these days.
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Why do we find it so hard to accept coincidences for what they are? • FT
Jemima Kelly on what seems to us the strangely coincidental deaths of Mike Lynch and co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain:
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what makes it so hard to get our heads around the idea that some things are really just a coincidence?
Further, what do we even mean by the term? I like the definition offered by mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller in their 1989 paper, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”, namely “a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection”.
That we should be astonished when coincidences do happen is understandable, even reasonable. After all, every coincidence that occurs is, by its very nature, highly improbable. But that some coincidences occur is not just highly likely; it is inevitable. We might like to imagine that we all have control over our lives and what goes on around us, but in reality we live in a complex, messy, often inexplicable world in which chance plays a huge role.
“Everything that happens is incredibly unlikely, and the most unlikely thing of all is to be born,” David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, tells me.
“The sequence of occurrences that led to your existence is so bizarrely implausible — any little whisker of change and you wouldn’t be you,” Spiegelhalter says. “With the uncountable ways in which your parents’ chromosomes can combine, if you were conceived an hour later you could be a very different person. We are each a product of a unique sequence of unrepeatable events.”
As we know from Diaconis and Mosteller’s definition, though, what makes a coincidence is something that is “meaningfully related”. So while our very existence might be vastly more unlikely than the close-together deaths of Lynch and Chamberlain, we don’t consider ourselves to be walking coincidences.
But when we do notice a set of circumstances that seem both highly unlikely and related in some way that we consider significant, our tendency is to look for causation. When the exact same numbers were drawn two weeks in a row in Bulgaria’s national lottery back in 2009, authorities ordered an investigation, suspecting manipulation, but they came up with nothing. A mathematician put the odds of this happening at one in four million — highly improbable, but at some point, such coincidences will inevitably occur.
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Finding connections, and causality, between events is what marks intelligence in creatures; humans do it best of all. But we also overdo it because we find that instinct almost impossible to turn off.
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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 