In America, videos from stars such as Adele is no longer available on YouTube. Not, we suspect, because YouTube paid too much to license them. CC-licensed photo by Laura Dorney on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. September up! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The ultra-pure, super-secret sand that makes your phone possible • WIRED
Vince Beiser, in 2018:
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Spruce Pine is not a wealthy place. Its downtown consists of a somnambulant train station across the street from a couple of blocks of two‑story brick buildings, including a long‑closed movie theater and several empty storefronts.
The wooded mountains surrounding it, though, are rich in all kinds of desirable rocks, some valued for their industrial uses, some for their pure prettiness. But it’s the mineral in Glover’s bag—snowy white grains, soft as powdered sugar—that is by far the most important these days. It’s quartz, but not just any quartz. Spruce Pine, it turns out, is the source of the purest natural quartz—a species of pristine sand—ever found on Earth. This ultra‑elite deposit of silicon dioxide particles plays a key role in manufacturing the silicon used to make computer chips. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the chip that makes your laptop or cell phone work was made using sand from this obscure Appalachian backwater. “It’s a billion‑dollar industry here,” Glover says with a hooting laugh. “Can’t tell by driving through here. You’d never know it.”
…Spruce Pine quartz [is] the world’s primary source of the raw material needed to make the fused‑quartz crucibles in which computer‑chip‑grade polysilicon is melted. A fire in 2008 at one of the main quartz facilities in Spruce Pine for a time all but shut off the supply of high‑purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry.
Today one company dominates production of Spruce Pine quartz. Unimin, an outfit founded in 1970, has gradually bought up Spruce Pine area mines and bought out competitors, until today the company’s North Carolina quartz operations supply most of the world’s high‑ and ultra‑high‑purity quartz. (Unimin itself is now a division of a Belgian mining conglomerate, Sibelco.)
In recent years, another company, the imaginatively titled Quartz Corp, has managed to grab a small share of the Spruce Pine market. There are a very few other places around the world producing high‑purity quartz, and many other places where companies are looking hard for more. But Unimin controls the bulk of the trade.
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Why link to this now? Because Spruce Pine lies in North Carolina – which has been hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Spruce Pine is inaccessible and all the bridges to it have been washed out. How long can the industry go without it? The cost of climate change is revealed in many ways. (Thanks @aadetugbo for the link.)
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AI avatars are doing job interviews now • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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Jack Ryan from San Diego was recently being interviewed for a job. On a video call, the interviewer, a woman with red hair, said, “I find it helps when candidates tell me a story in answering the questions.”
“I’m looking for examples from your work experience,” the woman added. During the conversation, Ryan had a smirk on his face.
That’s because the woman is not real. She is an AI avatar from a company called Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies.
“This HR AI avatar is a perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism,” Ryan told 404 Media in an online chat. “While Fairgo’s intent is to provide a fair and equitable interview process, I can’t imagine AI, LLMs, and other tools are able to interpret the human emotion and facial reactions to provide an actual, well rounded interview.” Ryan posted a clip of his interview to LinkedIn on Thursday.
On its website, Fairgo says its AI agent “talks to candidates any time, any where.” The company claims that it can “Ensure every candidate is evaluated on a level playing field with consistent and unbiased interview practices.” Julian Bright, founder and CEO of Fairgo, told 404 Media in an email that after an introductory video voiced by the AI avatar, candidate interviews are done by an audio-only AI. “At no point is any of the video or audio captured used to evaluate the candidate,” he wrote. Instead, that is done with a transcript afterwards.
Bright said that Fairgo does not make decisions on who to shortlist for a role; that instead falls to the hirers. Fairgo also says on its site that the interview process is low stress, and that “candidates consistently love the interview experience.”
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Well, how many candidates for the job are going to say that they absolutely detested the technology that you made them use to interact with you?
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Apple Mobile processors are now made in America, by TSMC • Tim Culpan’s Position
Tim Culpan:
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TSMC Arizona is the marquee project of the US government’s $39 billion CHIPS for America Fund under the CHIPS Act. Six months ago, I thought Apple might tap Arizona for a less-consequential chip like the H-series used in AirPods. I was surprised when I heard it was the A16. The fact that they went for the most-advanced chip they could manage on US soil, in terms of both technology and volume, shows Apple and TSMC want to start big.
(I believe there may be other products also in production at TSMC Arizona, but I don’t have much information on them. If you do, contact me here.)
Currently TSMC is achieving yields in Arizona that are slightly behind what’s enjoyed back home in Taiwan (basically, neck and neck). Most important, though, is that improvements are moving so rapidly that true yield parity between Taiwan and Arizona is expected to be reached in coming months.
I can’t tell you which Apple device these A16 chips will go into. One possibility is that they’re slated for one of the upcoming iPads, though perhaps not the iPad Mini since Mark Gurman believes they’re to be launched around October. Another likelihood is the next iteration of the iPhone SE, which makes sense since it’s supposedly based on the iPhone 14 which uses the A16 processor and is expected next year.
Normally, media outlets will pad out their reportage with lots of background and history. I’ll leave it here. That’s the scoop: Apple’s A16 mobile processors are in production at TSMC on American soil, and that choice of product is hugely significant.
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Culpan has very good contacts with Taiwanese companies, having been there as a journalist for many years. TSMC might breathe a little easier having a reliable US base.
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‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman • The Conversation
Saul Justin Newman, the scientists who won an Ig Nobel for demonstrating that the data on super-centenarians is absurd:
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In Okinawa [in Japan], the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.
According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
The oldest man in the world, John Tinniswood, supposedly aged 112, is from a very rough part of Liverpool. The easiest explanation is that someone has written down his age wrong at some point.
Q: But most people don’t lose count of their age…
You would be amazed. Looking at the UK Biobank data, even people in mid-life routinely don’t remember how old they are, or how old they were when they had their children. There are similar stats from the US.
Q: What does this all mean for human longevity?
The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know.
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The quest to build a telescope on the Moon • The New Yorker
Matthew Hutson:
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Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, [CEO and co-founder of Lunar Resources, Elliot] Carol drew a big square filled with dots.
Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.
To develop a plan for FarView, Lunar Resources, which is privately owned, has formed a consortium with several scientists and universities. “Usually, these missions are pursued by large academic and research institutions,” Carol told me. “But we said, ‘No, we want to support and fund the development of this observatory.’ ” The company’s goals go well beyond the construction of a telescope. FarView would double as a demonstration of two unprecedented activities: off-planet mining and manufacturing, which are known in the business as “in-situ resources utilization” (I.S.R.U.).
…FarView might not be completed for a decade or more, if at all, and could cost upward of two billion dollars. But it is part of a larger dream that, one day, moon-based mines might produce helium for fusion reactors, and lunar and orbital factories might build satellites that are too large to launch from Earth. Lunar ice could provide hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, which could power trips to deep space. According to a market assessment from the professional-services company PwC, the lunar economy could be worth a $170bn by 2040.
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Alternate view: it won’t happen and the lunar economy won’t be worth anything like that.
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How to crash a wired network with Excel • LaurieWired on X
Laurie Wired:
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An Excel spreadsheet crashed this company’s network.
But it wasn’t malware.
The truth is *much* weirder.
Try this out, open up a xls (not xlsx) file in your favorite text/hex editor. Notice all the repeating characters in the header.
When receiving POP3 emails with an Excel attachment, the characters bit patterns caused a signalling pattern on the physical copper of the company’s T1 line, crashing the network equipment.
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The whole story dates back to 2003, and is documented on Reddit. It’s quite a tale.
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London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: more active kids • Grist
Syris Valentine:
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Restricting the volume of high-emitting vehicles roaming city streets carries many benefits, from clearing the air to quieting the urban din and beyond. Recognition of this simple fact has led to the proliferation of clean air zones, designated regions within a city where vehicles must meet strict pollution standards or pay a fee to operate within it.
At last count, over 300 such areas had been established across Europe. In London, which boasts the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, a study has found a secondary benefit: Kids started walking and biking to school more.
In 2018 — the year before London’s rule took effect in the centre of the city, and five years before the zone encompassed its entirety — researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University saw in the impending policy an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment.
They recruited children aged six to nine and their families in central London and in Luton, a small city to the north, for a multi-year study to investigate how the program might affect a child’s health. Though research focused on understanding how lightening a city’s pollution load shaped the way young lungs develop, participants completed questionnaires alongside their annual health assessments. The responses allowed researchers to glean insights into their subjects’ activity levels, mental health, and other ancillary outcomes.
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Odd not to have heard this bit of ULEZ news somewhere else, but maybe the idea of ULEZ being good for something isn’t a popular one with some people.
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Sex and birth are big business. “Suicide pods” show death is next • The Times
Kathleen Stock:
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Thinking of investing in a sleek, ergonomic vehicle with all mod cons in which you can sail off into the sunset? I don’t mean a yacht or even a caravan, I mean a mobile gas chamber.
A 64-year-old American woman in Switzerland last week became the first person to use the Sarco — short for sarcophagus — with the help of its sponsoring organisation, wittily called the Last Resort. A spokesman made the woman’s death sound like a restorative break at Center Parcs. Her end arrived “under a canopy of trees at a private forest retreat”, he said.
Once comfortably ensconced, the unnamed woman, who had an immune condition, entered a four-digit code on a touchpad and the Sarco flooded with nitrogen. She died within minutes.
The Swiss authorities, famously relaxed about the concept of assisted suicide but unhappy about this unregulated initiative, have since arrested several of the organisers.
Dr Philip Nitschke, the machine’s Australian inventor, has been trying to perfect the technological facilitation of suicide for decades. The 77-year-old called his first attempt Deliverance. It was an intravenous system connected to a laptop computer. His second go, a mask delivering carbon monoxide, looked exactly like a plastic bag. Customers rejected it.
Nitschke put it succinctly: “People do not want to leave the world in such an aesthetically displeasing way.”
Enter the Sarco. This capsule looks like a miniature spaceship and its maker says it is “luxurious”. It even has a window to take in the scenery before you depart.
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It looks like a one-person spaceship and a tanning salon bed had a baby. It’s also a very weird concept. Yet it makes a weird sort of sense: of course you’d like to look at the sky and trees as you breathe your last. Eat your heart out, M*A*SH* theme song.
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YouTube blocks videos from Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, others in dispute with SESAC • TechCrunch
Anthony Ha:
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A number of YouTube videos featuring music from artists such as Adele, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, and R.E.M. have been unplayable in the United States since Saturday.
For example, if you try to play Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” (whether it’s the classic album recording or a live performance), you are instead told: “This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country.” Sometimes, you even get to watch a pre-roll ad before you get the message.
However, not all videos featuring these artists are blocked; it’s not clear whether the playable videos are exempt from the current dispute or if they’ve simply been overlooked.
In statements to the press and on social media, YouTube blamed the situation on failed negotiations with SESAC, a performing rights group that says it represents more than 35,000 music artists and publishers.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the reason for the failure was that YouTube wasn’t prepared to pay what SESAC wanted. But that, at the same time, that content is still available on Spotify and Apple Music. Which tells us a lot about YouTube and its view of the value of content.
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Rightmove’s property data is more valuable than news • Financial Times
John Gapper:
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If you want to buy the best house in a desirable neighbourhood, you can make a discreet approach and even put notes through the door, but an occupier who does not wish to sell will ignore you. The same applies to Rightmove, the UK’s leading property listings group.
Rightmove this week spurned a £6.1bn bid by REA, its equivalent in Australia, which is majority owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. It was REA’s third takeover approach to Rightmove this month, showing the appeal of classified advertising to publishers, long after they controlled the business. Small ads for jobs and property that once had to be placed in papers now appear online.
News Corp’s stake in REA contributed 70% of the US company’s market value of $15.4bn this week, far outweighing its more famous assets, from Dow Jones to the book publisher HarperCollins. A tiny investment made by Lachlan Murdoch about 25 years ago has come to dominate the business in the view of shareholders, if not of its 93-year-old patriarch.
…News Corp is one of many media groups finding that online classified ads carry more financial clout than news. The German billionaire Mathias Döpfner last week struck a €13.5bn deal with the private equity firm KKR to break up Axel Springer, which publishes the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt, as well as the US news sites Politico and Business Insider.
He will run Axel Springer’s media business, which was valued at €3.5bn, while KKR will be the majority owner, with an investment partner, of its €10bn classified business. This includes the European property listings group Aviv and the job recruitment site StepStone. “I am a firm believer in the future . . . of journalism,” Döpfner declared, but KKR is a firm believer in asset values.
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Chastening.
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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 