Some university students in America now quail at reading a long book in a week. Or any books. CC-licensed photo by vickysandoval22 on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Novel. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Google paid $2.7bn to bring back an AI genius who quit in frustration • WSJ
Miles Kruppa and Lauren Thomas:
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At a time when tech companies are paying eye-popping sums to hire the best minds in artificial intelligence, Google’s deal to rehire Noam Shazeer has left others in the dust.
A co-author of a seminal research paper that kicked off the AI boom, Shazeer quit Google in 2021 to start his own company after the search giant refused to release a chatbot he developed. When that startup, Character.AI, began to flounder, his old employer swooped in.
Google wrote Character a check for around $2.7bn, according to people with knowledge of the deal. The official reason for the payment was to license Character’s technology. But the deal included another component: Shazeer agreed to work for Google again.
Within Google, Shazeer’s return is widely viewed as the primary reason the company agreed to pay the multibillion-dollar licensing fee.
The arrangement has thrust him into the middle of a debate in Silicon Valley about whether tech giants are overspending in the race to develop cutting-edge AI, which some believe will define the future of computing.
“Noam is clearly a great person in that space,” said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “Is he 20 times as good as other people?”
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The fact that Google has this amount of money to spend on a single individual (come on, they don’t need the technology) is just mindboggling. Heading off a rival? Is that the true profit that he will add to the company? It’s hard to think anyone since a few of the original hires at Google has managed to be that valuable.
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Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘I see AI as born out of surveillance’ • Financial Times
Madhumita Murgia:
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Until 2017, Whittaker had thought she could successfully mobilise change from inside the machine, building up ethical AI research and development programmes at Google in collaboration with academics at universities and companies such as Microsoft. But in the autumn of that year, a colleague contacted her about a project they were working on. They had learnt it was part of a Department of Defense pilot contract, codenamed Project Maven, that used AI to analyse video imagery and eventually improve drone strikes. “I was basically just a . . . dissent court jester,” she says, still visibly disappointed.
She drafted an open letter to Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, that received more than 3,000 employee signatures, urging the company to pull out of the contract. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter said.
“The Maven letter was sort of like, I can’t make my name as an ethical actor redounding to Google’s benefit,” she says. “You’re talking about Google becoming a military contractor. It’s still shocking, although it’s become normalised for us, but this is a centralised surveillance company with more kompromat than anyone could ever dream of, and now they’re partnering with the world’s most lethal military, as they call themselves.
“Yeah, that was the end of my rope.”
Whittaker went on to help organise employee protests and walkouts, in which more than 20,000 Google workers participated, to protest against the company’s handling of other ethical matters such as sexual harassment allegations against high-profile executives. At the time, Google’s management opted not to renew the Pentagon contract once it expired. But Whittaker left Google in 2019, after the company presented her with a set of options that she says gave her no choice but to quit. “It was like, you can go be an administrator, doing spreadsheets and budgets for the open source office [and] stop all the shit I had been building forever.”
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Fascinating interview – there’s much more (the link should pass the paywall) and it’s all engrossing.
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CNN puts a paywall on its website as TV revenues decline • SF Gate
Stephen Battaglio:
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CNN has long had one of the most visited news websites in the world. Starting Tuesday, users are going to have to pay for it.
The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned news operation is putting a paywall on CNN.com, requiring U.S. users to pay $3.99 for access or a discounted rate of $29.99 a year. The subscription will allow unlimited usage of the site, which is visited by 150 million people globally each month.
Users will be asked to subscribe after accessing a number of free stories, according to an internal memo from Alex MacCallum, executive vice president of digital products and services for CNN.
CNN’s reason for the move is rooted in the problems that plague all of traditional television. Consumers are spending more time with online video and canceling their traditional pay-TV subscriptions. Revenues from cable and satellite subscribers are declining as cord-cutting continues at a steady pace each year. The trend, along with a decline in ratings, has put pressure on CNN’s profit margins.
Whether consumers will pay for a product they have used for free over the years remains to be seen. Mark Thompson, who took over as CNN’s chairman last year, turned the New York Times into a successful digital subscription site during his tenure at that company.
MacCallum’s memo said subscribers “will receive benefits like exclusive election features, original documentaries, a curated daily selection of our most distinctive journalism, and fewer digital ads.” CNN is currently developing video content with some of its talent designed to be behind the paywall on the site, according to people familiar with the plans.
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That’s not a lot of money to ask. And yet it’s going to mean a lot of people not going on the site: any amount of friction will do that. Passwords, usernames, different devices, it’s going to be the usual mess.
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The elite college students who can’t read books • The Atlantic
Rose Horowitch:
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Nicholas dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.
And yet. “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible.
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Pride & Prejudice is 108,500 words (or so). Crime & Punishment is 107,500 words (or so). Think of all the TikToks you could watch in the time it takes you to read them!
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How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels • Grist
Akielly Hu:
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Matthias Weyland loves having people ask about his balcony. A pair of solar panels hang from the railing, casting a sheen of dark blue against the red brick of his apartment building. They’re connected to a microinverter plugged into a wall outlet and feed electricity directly into his home. On a sunny day, he’ll produce enough power to supply up to half of his family’s daily needs.
Weyland is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Germany who have embraced balkonkraftwerk, or balcony solar. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology doesn’t require users to own their home, and anyone capable of plugging in an appliance can set it up. Most people buy the simple hardware online or at the supermarket for about $550 (500 euros.)
The ease of installation and a potent mix of government policies to encourage adoption has made the wee arrays hugely popular. More than 550,000 of them dot cities and towns nationwide, half of which were installed in 2023. During the first half of this year, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar. Regulations limit each system to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, but the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.
“I love the feeling of charging the bike when the sun is shining, or having the washing machine run when the sun is shining, and to know that it comes directly from the sun,” Weyland said. “It’s a small step you can take as a tenant” and an act of “self-efficacy, to not just sit and wait until the climate crisis gets worse.”
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Guess they could also not shut down their nuclear power stations and stop using coal? Just a thought.
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Fraud. So much fraud • Science
Derek Lowe:
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Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story on Thursday morning, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.
As is so often the case, image manipulation is at the heart of the scandal. Readers here will be all too familiar with the techniques of cutting and pasting Western blots in order to make them tell the story the authors want told, and of re-using images and parts of images over and over even when they’re supposed to be produced from different experiments at different times. That’s what we’re seeing here, and a 300-page dossier has been assembled with examples of it.
Splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals: a great deal of effort seems to have gone into carefully doctoring, cleaning, beautifying, and spicing up these papers digitally. After looking over examples, I find the evidence convincing and impossible to explain (at least in my mind) as anything other than sustained, deliberate acts of deception lasting for decades.
Hundreds of them. Again and again. The dossier references 132 papers with apparent problems. Unfortunately, these include many highly cited papers on mechanisms of synaptic damage (Masliah specialized in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s mechanisms, particularly around the alpha-synuclein protein).
As the article details, this all has some direct drug discovery implications, particularly for an antibody called prasinezumab which targets alpha-synuclein. All four of the fundamental papers about prasinezumab (as cited on the web site of its developer, Prothena) are full of manipulated images, unfortunately.
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As the blogpost points out, this is disastrous for Alzheimer’s research. (Via Benedict Evans.)
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AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline • Fast Company
Chris Stokel-Walker:
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A number of websites have begun to take action to fend off crawlers, seeking to avoid the negative impact of being bombarded with requests. An increasing number of websites are putting restrictions on AI crawlers, according to a recent analysis by the Data Provenance Initiative (DPI), a group of AI researchers. In the DPI’s analysis, around one in four tokens from the most critical web domains called upon by crawlers have put up restrictions. And social media is buzzing with complaints about the increasing instances of web crawlers pushing up traffic on websites.
Edd Coates is one of those who has raised concerns online. He runs Game UI Database, a database of details taken from games designed to be used as a reference tool. The website was relaunched in early August, gaining large volumes of visitors keen to check it out. But then a few weeks later, the website’s performance declined dramatically, slowing to a crawl. “I thought that was weird, because we had about a quarter of the people visiting the website that did at the relaunch,” says Coates. “And it’s somehow running slower.”
Coates and his web developer checked the website’s server logs, which turned up the cause of the problem: a crawler by OpenAI was pouncing on the website. “They were hitting the site so hard,” he says. “It was, like, 200 times a second.” OpenAI doesn’t dispute its GPTBot crawler visited Game UI Database, but does dispute the scale of how frequently their crawler was hitting the website, showing evidence that suggested the number of queries per second was only around three.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company: “We enable publishers to use industry-standard tools to express preferences about access to their websites. By using robots.txt publishers can set time delays and reduce load on their systems, choose to allow access to only certain pages or directories, or opt out entirely. We stopped accessing this website as soon as they updated their robots.txt directions for our bot, as our systems recognized and respected this.”
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All these years it’s existed and robots.txt still doesn’t have a “don’t hit this site more than X times per second/minute/hour” setting.
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Study finds zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated for HPV before age 14 • STAT
Annalisa Merelli:
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A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: no cases of cervical cancer were detected in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.
Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.
“The study is super exciting. It shows that the vaccine is extremely effective,” said Kathleen Schmeler, a professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the research. “It’s obviously early. We’re just starting to see the first data of the impact of the vaccine because it takes so long from the time of the vaccine to the effects.”
The results underscore the importance of working to increase uptake of the HPV vaccine in the US, said Schmeler. Scotland, for example, introduced routine immunization in schools in 2008, and close to 90% of students in their fourth year of secondary school (equivalent to 10th grade in the US.) in the 2022-2023 school year had received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the US, where HPV vaccines are not administered in school, uptake among adolescents ages 13 to 17 is a little over 60%.
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In case you didn’t know, HPV is identified as a key cause of cervical cancer. Even one dose given before girls become sexually active seems to be effective. In the age cohort, the expectation was for 15 to 17 cases. There could be other HPV strains, and this isn’t the end of the story. But it’s a big bookmark in the story.
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Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first • Nature
Smriti Mallapaty:
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A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her own body.
“I can eat sugar now,” said the woman, who lives in Tianjin, China, on a call with Nature. It has been more than a year since the transplant, and, she says, “I enjoy eating everything — especially hotpot.” The woman asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy.
James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon and researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says the results of the surgery are stunning. “They’ve completely reversed diabetes in the patient, who was requiring substantial amounts of insulin beforehand.”
The study, published in Cell, follows results from a separate group in Shanghai, China, who reported in April that they had successfully transplanted insulin-producing islets into the liver of a 59-year-old man with type 2 diabetes. The islets were also derived from reprogrammed stem cells taken from the man’s own body, and he has since stopped taking insulin.
The studies are among a handful of pioneering trials using stem cells to treat diabetes, which affects close to half a billion people worldwide. Most of them have type 2 diabetes, in which the body doesn’t produce enough insulin or its ability to use the hormone diminishes. In type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks islet cells in the pancreas.
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So far the woman’s transplanted cells have generated insulin for a year; other researchers want to see them work for five years before they consider her “cured”. But it’s a big breakthrough.
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Did you solve it? The box problem that baffled the boffins • The Guardian
Alex Bellos:
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The 15 boxes problem.
Andrew and Barbara are playing a game, in which fifteen boxes are arranged in a 3-row 5-column grid as shown below:
Prizes are put in two randomly-chosen boxes. Andrew will search the boxes row by row, so his search order is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO. Barbara will search column by column, so her order is AFKBGLCHMDINEJO.
If Andrew and Barbara open their boxes together each turn, that is, on the first turn, they both open A, on the second, Andrew opens B and Barbara opens F, on the third Andrew opens C, and Barbara opens K, and so on, who is more likely to find a prize first?
a) Andrew.
b) Barbara.
c) Both equally likely.«
Think a bit about this one. I got the correct answer despite misreading the question (it matters that there are *two* prizes hidden.) Bellos says it intrigues mathematicians because they struggle to find an intuitive explanation for why the correct answer is correct. The obvious next step to find that intuitive explanation, I think, is to consider whether the result would be different if the grid were square, and if it were taller than it is wide but both players used the same strategy. (And would adding more prizes change anything?) Bellos has a new book out – Think Twice – which is full of intriguing puzzles like this. For those that like that sort of thing, that is the thing they like.
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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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