Don’t fret: an extensive overview of thousands of studies shows mobile phones don’t cause cancer. CC-licensed photo by Nana B Agyei on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Calling back. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.

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Mobile phones not linked to brain cancer, biggest study to date finds • The Guardian

Natasha May:

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Mobile phones are not linked to brain and head cancers, a comprehensive review of the highest quality evidence available commissioned by the World Health Organization has found.

Led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa), the systematic review examined more than 5,000 studies from which the most scientifically rigorous were identified and weak studies were excluded.

The final analysis included 63 observational studies in humans published between 1994 and 2022, making it “the most comprehensive review to date”, the review lead author, associate prof Ken Karipidis, said.

“We concluded the evidence does not show a link between mobile phones and brain cancer or other head and neck cancers.”

Published on Wednesday, the review focused on cancers of the central nervous system (including brain, meninges, pituitary gland and ear), salivary gland tumours and brain tumours.

The review found no overall association between mobile phone use and cancer, no association with prolonged use (if people use their mobile phones for 10 years or more), and no association with the amount of mobile phone use (the number of calls made or the time spent on the phone).

“I’m quite confident with our conclusion. And what makes us quite confident is … even though mobile phone use has skyrocketed, brain tumour rates have remained stable,” said Karipidis, Arpansa’s health impact assessment assistant director.

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This has been a claim made at more or less volume for absolutely years. And now we can, surely, say it’s done.
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Bird flu reaches cows in California, the country’s largest milk producer • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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The outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows has now spread to three herds in California, the largest milk-producing state in the country with around 1.7 million dairy cows, federal and state health officials have confirmed.

Fourteen states and 197 herds have now been affected by the unprecedented outbreak in dairy cows, which was first confirmed by federal health officials on March 25.

In a statement, the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Karen Ross, said the spread of the virus to California was not unexpected. “We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when [Highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI] detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states,” Ross said. “Our extensive experience with HPAI in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities.”

The herds in California are thought to have been infected through the movement of cattle, despite a federal order mandating testing of cattle prior to movement between states. So far, health officials believe that all of the dairy infections across the affected states stem from a single spillover event from wild birds to dairy cows in Texas. The virus is thought to spread from cow to cow, as well as from contaminated milking equipment, dirty hands, and boots.

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At what point do we start calling it bovine flu? Just so we know for the watching brief.
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The Third Circuit’s Section 230 decision In Anderson v. TikTok is pure poppycock • Techdirt

Corbin Barthold:

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Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded, in Anderson v. TikTok, that algorithmic recommendations aren’t protected by Section 230. Because they’re the platforms’ First Amendment-protected expression, the court reasoned, algorithms are the platforms’ “own first-party speech,” and thus fall outside Section 230’s liability shield for the publication of third-party speech.

Of course, a platform’s decision to host a third party’s speech at all is also First Amendment-protected expression. By the Third Circuit’s logic, then, such hosting decisions, too, are a platform’s “own first-party speech” unprotected by Section 230.

We’ve already hit (and not for the last time) the key problem with the Third Circuit’s analysis. “Given … that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment when they curate compilations of others’ content via their expressive algorithms,” the court declared, “it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under [Section] 230, too.” No, it does not. Assuming a lack of overlap between First Amendment protection and Section 230 protection is a basic mistake.

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It’s quite a detailed examination of the topic, but those paragraphs set out the essential problem: if it isn’t protected by S230, then it is by the First Amendment.
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Bluesky continues to soar, adding two million more new users in a matter of days • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil having now added over 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.

As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

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Well done, Mr Musk, really got hold of the job there.
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I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s; here’s what I discovered • The Guardian

Andrew Smith, a writer, decided he should learn coding to understand what is driving the whole world these days:

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My dismay at JavaScript was about more than discomfort with algorithms, though. Strange as it seemed for what I’d always thought of as a hyperrational realm, the primary problem was aesthetic. Emotional. Just looking at JavaScript, with its ugly flights of brackets and braces and unnecessary-seeming reams of semicolons, made me miserable. There also seemed to be 25 different ways to accomplish every task and these were constantly changing, turning the language into a kind of coding wild west. The more time I spent with it, the more I thought: “I can’t do this; coding’s not for me – I don’t have the right kind of mind (and never liked Star Wars).”

At this low ebb, I had a stroke of luck when a pro-coder friend of a friend suggested I try another language before giving up. He put me in touch with a man called Nicholas Tollervey, who was prominent within the Python language community. Before calling Tollervey, I looked at Python and instantly felt more at home with it. The first thing I noticed was the spare simplicity of its syntax, which used indentation rather than ugly symbols to delineate instructions to the machine. The language was designed by a naturally collaborative Dutchman named Guido van Rossum, who prized communication, community and concern for how his language would behave in the wild – in other words, empathy – above all else. He named his language Python after Monty Python, a whimsical, human touch that seemed promising. When Tollervey suggested I travel to Cleveland, Ohio, to experience the 4,000-strong PyCon conference, I found myself agreeing, with no idea what I was agreeing to.

The first day was less like the stiff gathering of my imagining than the first day back at Hogwarts.

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It’s an extract from a book – “Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey” by Andrew Smith, published by Grove Press (£16.99). Smart move to make a book from necessity!
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Did your car witness a crime? Police may be coming for your Tesla • San Francisco Chronicle

Rachel Swan:

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A Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

The trend offers a window into how mass surveillance — the expansion of cameras as well as license-plate scanners, security doorbells and precise cellphone tracking — is changing crime-fighting. While few cars have camera systems similar to Teslas, that could change rapidly, especially as the technology in vehicles continues to improve.

“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.

Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”

“It’s the most drastic thing you could do,” he acknowledged.

In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.

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What’s happening to oil market forecasts? • Baker Institute

Mark Finley:

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Historically, the institutional calculus was that the US was perceived to be vulnerable to higher oil prices — and as a result, policymakers would complain to the US EIA [Energy Information Administration] if the oil market was tighter than they had originally forecast. While this analysis does not include IEA’s [International Energy Agency] short-term outlooks, the same institutional pressures can certainly be ascribed to an organization that was created after the oil shocks of the 1970s and whose members are comprised largely of mature, oil-importing countries — as was the EIA. Accordingly, at the margins, the EIA and IEA had an institutional incentive to err on the side of being slightly overly aggressive on forecasting oil demand growth.

In contrast, OPEC [Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries] forecasters would receive complaints from their members if the market was weaker than they had forecast, since their members are oil exporters and, therefore, vulnerable to lower prices. Accordingly, on the margins, they would have an incentive to err on the side of undershooting on their oil demand forecast. Through 2022 — excluding the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020–21, when demand fell by a massive, unexpected 10 Mb/d after the January forecasting cycle — the differences in revisions after 12 months reflected that institutional bias:

• OPEC tended to undershoot on its annual demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure up after one year by 130,000 b/d.
• The EIA tended to overshoot on its demand forecast and would on average revise its oil demand figure down by 90,000 b/d.

Interestingly, the pattern of revisions after one year has remained consistent for the EIA even as the U.S. policy narrative has shifted since the country became a net oil exporter, and amid a greater emphasis on climate change: It has continued to tend, on average, to revise lower an overly aggressive short-term demand growth forecast. But for OPEC, the pattern has shifted: Instead of having a low-growth demand forecast that tends to be revised higher, in recent years OPEC has moved to a high-growth forecast that, on average, has tended to be revised lower, largely due to a large overshoot for 2022 oil demand as discussed above.

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The puzzle they’re all building their forecasts around is: when will oil demand peak? What will make it peak?
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Get ready for Tesla cops • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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Last month, South Pasadena’s police department became the first in the country with a fully electric police fleet, replacing all of its gas-powered vehicles with 20 Teslas. Four officers, after test-driving Teslas for the department, have already bought one for personal use, Abdalla, who leads his department’s EV-conversion project, told me. South Pasadena is one among a growing number of law-enforcement agencies that are electrifying their fleets.

About 50 miles south, the Irvine Police Department just became likely the country’s first to purchase a Tesla Cybertruck. Departments in at least 38 states have purchased, tested, or deployed fully electric cars. Electric patrol cars are not yet legion and in many cities are likely less common than EVs among the general population, but their ranks are growing. They now prowl the streets in Eupora, Mississippi; Cary, North Carolina; and Logan, Ohio.

The nation’s switch to battery-powered police cruisers isn’t only, or even primarily, about the environment. In many cases, they are proving to simply be the best-performing and most cost-effective option for law enforcement. Police departments require vehicles that have rapid acceleration and deceleration; space for radios, sirens, and other special equipment; and extreme reliability for 24-hour emergency responses.

When the South Pasadena police first looked into electrification, in the mid-2000s, no EVs on the market could handle the heavy workload that law enforcement demands. The last thing any police officer needs is to worry about their car running out of charge mid-shift. When Tesla unveiled the Model Y in 2019, Abdalla said, it “perked us up.” The model’s range, safety, and power made it the first EV that appeared potentially suitable for the department.

Five years later, the cars have gotten much better. New EVs can regularly drive upwards of 200 or 300 miles per charge, plenty for many officers.

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The acceleration alone must be useful for chases (though those are obviated more and more by drones). But they’re also cheaper to maintain and run. The only question would be what happens if they’re involved in crashes.
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‘Queen of trash’ among 11 on trial in Sweden’s largest environmental crime case • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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The [husband and wife Thomas and Bella] Nilssons face charges of serious environmental crime and serious economic crime linked to the company, all of which they deny. The others face a combination of different charges, including serious environmental crime, serious economic crime linked to the company, aiding and abetting serious environmental crime and environmental crime.

From 2018-20, the company’s heyday, the trademark pink construction bags of Think Pink, offering cheap recycling and waste disposal, were a common sight in the capital. Nilsson won awards for her work as chief executive.

The business came crashing down in 2020 when its owners were arrested. The company has been accused of dumping at least 200,000 tonnes of waste around Sweden.

Police investigators, whose report runs to 50,000 pages, found harmful levels of arsenic, dioxins, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products. Several of the rubbish dumps caught fire, with one fire lasting for months.

Anders Gustafsson, one of the trial’s three prosecutors, has described the case as “the largest environmental crime in Sweden in terms of scope and organisation”.

On Tuesday he said Think Pink had dumped rubbish and used falsified documents to deceive authorities and make big profits. “There are claims for damages of 260m SEK [£19m], mainly from municipalities, when they were forced to clear away the large mountains of rubbish,” he told the broadcaster SVT. “It is exceptional that it is on a large scale and that it has been going on for such a long time in several places in the country.”

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All that recycling you thought was happening that.. wasn’t.
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Former high-ranking New York State government employee charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party • US Department of Justice

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[Civil servant Linda] Sun and [lobster fisherman husband Chris] Hu laundered the monetary proceeds of this scheme to purchase, among other items, real estate property in Manhasset, New York currently valued at $4.1m, a condominium in Honolulu, Hawaii currently valued at $2.1m, and various luxury automobiles, including a 2024 Ferrari.  Sun never disclosed any benefits she received from representatives of the PRC government and the CCP to the New York State government, as she was required to do as a New York State government employee. 

Hu also laundered unlawful proceeds through bank accounts opened in the name of a close relative but that were actually for Hu’s exclusive use.  To open these accounts, Hu unlawfully used an image of the relative’s driver’s license.

The charges in the indictment are allegations and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

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And you thought it was just because lobster fishing was really, really lucrative.
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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