Scientists have shown – IgNobel-y – that if you flip a coin , it tends to land on the same side it started. CC-licensed photo by Nicu Buculei on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Flipping heck. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
US government pushes Nvidia and Apple to use Intel’s foundries: Department of Commerce Secretary Raimondo makes appeal for US-based chip production • Tom’s Hardware
Jowi Morales:
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During a meeting with U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expressed frustration with America’s reliance on TSMC to produce advanced chips. After this, Raimondo (via CNBC) went on private meetings with some public market investors, including shareholders of tech giants Nvidia and Apple, encouraging them to push their companies to use US foundries to produce AI chips.
The discussions between the investors and the Secretary were not publicly revealed. Still, sources say that the latter highlighted the growing geopolitical risk around Taiwan, especially as China is eyeing to invade the de facto country. Aside from this, Washington is also investing more on the American semiconductor industry than the last 28 years combined, so the White House is likely keen on pushing American companies to use locally produced chips.
Intel is gunning to become one of the top players in the foundry business, aiming to go head-to-head with TSMC and Samsung. However, recent developments revealed that Intel Foundry Services (IFS) is struggling to gain traction, causing the company to lose $1.6bn and practically making its stock price fall by 30% overnight. Because of this, Intel is reportedly considering spinning off its manufacturing division and other non-crucial business units, similar to how AMD spun off GlobalFoundries in 2008.
However, it’s also in the interest of the Biden administration that Intel succeeds, especially as it is one of the biggest recipients of funds under the CHIPS Act. Although sources say that the federal government is delaying the disbursement of CHIPS Act money to Team Blue until it can get its act together, it seems that the government still wants to see them succeed. Furthermore, while Raimondo did not mention Intel during the meetings, its status as one of the foremost chipmakers in the U.S. has likely been discussed privately.
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This is a touch ironic – Intel is using TSMC to do some of its foundry work itself. Maybe at some point Intel will be struggling badly enough that TSMC will buy it.
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Homing pigeon missiles honored with Ig Nobel Prize • The Register
Richard Currie:
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With less than a month to go before the Nobel Prizes are handed out for the most worthy scientific discoveries of the preceding year, it would be remiss of The Register not to observe the honors conferred by the gong’s bratty little brother, the Ig Nobel Prize.
The satirical ceremony has been run annually since 1991 by the scientific humor mag Annals of Improbable Research, which serves the laudable goal of highlighting “research that makes people laugh… then think.” In other words, the quirky, trivial, inane, and insane.
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I won’t include all of them, but these were rather good:
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Probability Prize: František Bartoš et al, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started. “Fair Coins Tend to Land on the Same Side They Started: Evidence from 350,757 Flips,” arXiv 2310.04153, 2023.
Biology Prize: Fordyce Ely and William E Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat that’s standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spew their milk. “Factors Involved in the Ejection of Milk,” Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 3, 1941.
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Though I thought that the IgNobels used to be awarded for science that “could not, and/or should not, be repeated”.
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The Plaude NotePin is a great AI voice recorder, and it’s totally doomed • The Verge
David Pierce:
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Kudos to Plaud for one thing: in a year otherwise marred by high-profile failures and oh so much AI vaporware, it made an AI gadget that does exactly what it claims to do and does it pretty well. The gadget is called the NotePin, and it’s a $169, pill-shaped voice recorder that can transcribe, summarize, and pull important information out of your audio. This is something current AI systems can actually do well! There’s good and mature tech at every step along the pipeline here, from tiny microphones to speech-to-text transcription to natural-language processing and AI summarization. The NotePin does it well.
But the reason the NotePin works is also the reason I wouldn’t recommend buying one. AI voice recording is great and handy and being commoditized at an absolutely blistering pace. With iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, you get transcriptions and summarization built into the Voice Memos app. Google’s Pixel Recorder app is terrific and is built into both the Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch. You can also get similar features from lots of apps. Do you need a dedicated voice recorder?
This is, of course, the eternal question about AI assistants as a whole. Are they a feature of your existing devices or a gadget category unto themselves? Plaud’s argument for dedicated hardware is about the same as all the other AI startups: that ease of use is everything.
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Agree – hardware is hard, but this is hardware which is being supplanted at top speed.
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The price of privacy: how paywalled cookie banners are redefining digital revenue streams • Conroyp
Paul Conroy:
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For many ad-supported online publications, users refusing to consent to cookies used for personalised advertising can lead to a significant drop in ad revenue. Depending on the site niche and userbase, personalised ads can deliver in the region of 50% more revenue than the non-personalised kind. The legislation which led to the creation of these CMPs [Consent Management Platforms, aka cookie notices] state that it’s not legal to outright block someone who says “no” to their data being shared, so what can publishers do to try to fill this revenue gap when they see users declining consent?
A number of large European publications have begun changing their CMPs in an effort to plug this gap. Rather than the traditional “Accept” and “Reject” buttons, the options on these sites are now closer to “Accept” and “Reject tracking by paying a small fee”. The “Reject” option is modified to ask users to make up the difference in lost revenue by paying a small amount to gain access.
It’s an interesting approach from publishers struggling in a cut-throat market, but is it legal? In April 2024, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued a revised ruling on Meta’s “Pay or Okay” model, which has significant implications for large online platforms and potentially for media publishers in the future.
…In response, publishers in countries like Spain and Germany have introduced a novel concept, linking a paywall to the “reject” option. On websites such as elpais.es and bild.de users are presented with a stark choice: accept cookies or pay a small fee to access content. This fee works like a paywall, giving access to a version of the site without tracking cookies, or in many cases, any display ads at all. This model, while controversial, has opened up a potentially-valuable new revenue stream for publishers.
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The Sun and The Mirror and some others are trying this: either accept the cookies, or pay £4.99 per month (per month!) to reject. Amazing: that would be equivalent to a paywall on its own.
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Spotify says it accounted for just $60k of $10m streaming fraud case • Music Ally
Stuart Dredge:
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Last week, we reported on the case of a US producer arrested and charged with multiple felonies relating to streaming fraud. Michael Smith is accused of fraudulently obtaining more than $10m in royalty payments from streaming services.
This morning, there’s a very interesting development. Spotify has gone on the record to say what its share of those royalty payouts was.
“Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” its spokesperson told Music Ally.
“In this case, it appears that our preventative measures worked and limited the royalties Smith was able to generate from Spotify to approximately $60,000 of the $10,000,000 noted in the indictment.”
“As Spotify typically accounts for around 50% of streamshare, this shows how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” continued the spokesperson.
Well then. The streaming service that claims to account for 50% of streamshare only paid out 0.6% of the royalties in this alleged case of streaming fraud.
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Which leaves a comparatively small group of suspects who could have paid out on that sort of scale: Apple Music, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Deezer. Perhaps more will come out in the case.
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Own a virtual piece of Tannadice Park! • Dundee United Football Club
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United supporters are being offered the opportunity to own a digital piece of the hallowed Tannadice turf following the launch of an innovative new partnership with Sportli!
Through Sportli’s unique platform, fans can now purchase and own virtual sections of the pitch at The CalForth Construction Arena at Tannadice Park. Each virtual area represents a real-life segment of the stadium, offering fans a new way to connect with the club and their favourite players.
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Feel like they missed a trick here – they could have let them name a star *and* own a crater on the moon as well.
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Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation • Lieff Cabraser
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On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier B.V., John Wiley & Sons, Wolters Kluwer NV, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), on behalf of a putative class of scientists and scholars who allege that these six world’s-largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would otherwise have funded scientific research.
As detailed in the complaint, the defendants’ alleged scheme has three main components. First, an agreement to fix the price of peer review services at zero that includes an agreement to coerce scholars into providing their labour for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labour with their ability to get their manuscripts published in the defendants’ preeminent journals.
Second, the publisher defendants agreed not to compete with each other for manuscripts by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time, which substantially reduces competition by removing incentives to review manuscripts promptly and publish meritorious research quickly.
Third, the publisher defendants agreed to prohibit scholars from freely sharing the scientific advancements described in submitted manuscripts while those manuscripts are under peer review, a process that often takes over a year. As the complaint notes, “From the moment scholars submit manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property, to be shared only if the Publisher Defendant grants permission. Moreover, when the Publisher Defendants select manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants will often require scholars to sign away all intellectual property rights, in exchange for nothing. The manuscripts then become the actual property of the Publisher Defendants, and the Publisher Defendants charge the maximum the market will bear for access to that scientific knowledge.”
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Academic publishers are under attack in all sorts of ways. This might come to nothing – it still needs to rise to the status of a class action, though that’s a low bar – but even the fact it’s possible is surprising.
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Is anyone out there? • Prospect Magazine
James Ball:
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If you’ve ever walked a city street so late at night that it’s very early in the morning, you may have been greeted by a strange and unbidden thought. In the eerie stillness, it can feel for a moment as though you’re the last person alive. The usual throngs are gone, and the absence of what should be there is impossible to ignore—until some other person, off to start their working day, breaks the spell. The world is still there.
It is hard, in any real-world city, to maintain the illusion of being the only person for any length of time. But the internet is different. There is always an element of unreality to an online interaction with another human: how do we know for sure that they are who they say they are? Can we be certain they’re even actually a person?
This is the idea at the core of what became known as Dead Internet Theory, a joke-cum-conspiracy that says if you’re reading these words online, you’re the last person on the internet. Everyone else is a bot. The other commentators on Reddit? Bots. The people in the videos or the podcasts you listen to? Bots. What’s filling the junky websites that we all can’t help but click? You guessed it. They’re all bots, and you’re the guinea pig in the perverse experiment of some unknown power.
Dead Internet Theory is, if anything, a thought experiment. We’ve learned that we can’t necessarily trust what we read or who we meet online—so what happens if we take that notion to the extreme? If you were the last actual human on the internet, how long would it take for you to notice?
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Neat question.
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The exact hour you hit peak vacation happiness—and how to make that feeling last • WSJ
Jen Rose Smith:
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studies suggest that holiday blahs set in more commonly than many would like to admit, especially for travelers who linger in one place for a long time. To understand why fun sometimes trails off so quickly, we turned to scientists who examine vacationing. Their work can both help explain why fun peters out, and offer tips on how to hack your brain’s source code to optimize vacation enjoyment.
Let’s dig into the findings. A 2019 survey of tourists at an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic determined that vacationers’ average happiness rose steadily from the moment they left home, then peaked around hour 43 of a trip.
Key to this good-vibes spike is “dishabituation,” a perspective refresh one gets from a change of pace, says neuroscientist Tali Sharot, who helped interpret the survey results.
“The word people used more than any other to describe the parts of the holiday they liked best was ‘first,’” said Sharot. “First view of the ocean, first cocktail, first sand castle.” A daiquiri or two later, and the thrill starts to subside.
“You kind of habituate to joy, to the great things around you,” said Sharot, whose recent book, “Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,” co-authored with Cass R. Sunstein, offers strategies to disrupt the lulling effects of routine. Sharot argues that finding ways to dishabituate—again and again—is the secret to making the most of every precious vacation day.
Long trips give your brain ample time to adjust to new surroundings—precisely the shift that leads to a drop-off in pleasure. Instead plan shorter, more frequent getaways, which can jolt your perspective with repeated doses of novelty. “You’re less likely to habituate,” said Sharot, noting that a three-day escape leverages the 43-hour sweet spot. (The benefits of brief trips are particularly salient for Americans, who get less time off than any other nationality surveyed in Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report.)
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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 