Increasing the number of steps you take each day is definitely correlated with living longer, and if you raise them you benefit. CC-licensed photo by Timo Newton-Syms on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about hyperbole. Get excited!
A selection of 10 links for you. Stepping out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Someone put facial recognition tech onto Meta’s smart glasses to instantly dox strangers • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.
The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.
Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.
The demo video posted to X on Tuesday shows the pair using the tech against various people. In one of the first examples, Ardayfio walks towards the wearer. “To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,” the video says. “After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.”
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It’s very impressive. Unexpectedly, the effect of being able to recognise people and get their context is that you seem to make a lot more friends, or get friendly reactions. People like being recognised and having their achievements mentioned. After all, who wouldn’t?
Give it time: this is going to get faster, more accurate, and the samizdat will become everyday.
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No man’s hand: artificial intelligence does not improve police report writing speed • Journal of Experimental Criminology
Ian Adams, Matt Barter, Kyle McLean, Hunter Boehme and Irick Geary at various US universities:
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Objectives: This study examines the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the time police officers spend writing reports, a task that consumes a significant portion of their workday.
Methods: In a pre-registered randomized controlled trial, we test this claim within the patrol division of a medium-sized police department (n = 85) at the individual report level (n = 755). Analyses utilize mixed-effects regression accounting for the nested structure of report-writing.
Results: AI assistance did not significantly affect the duration of writing police reports. Alternative specifications beyond those specified in the pre-registration, including a difference-in-differences approach observing report duration over a full year (n = 6084), confirm the null findings are robust.
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That’s going to be a disappointment for the police in Colorado who thought chatbots would be good for this job.
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Why the US can’t impose its will over global trade in electric cars • Financial Times
Alan Beattie:
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middle-income countries such as Turkey and Brazil wanting to increase domestic EV consumption are actively courting Chinese producers.
And even taking into account the protectionist motive, Joe Biden’s administration may well have a point about the security threats of EVs as “smartphones on wheels”, with manufacturers able to collect personal data and potentially control the cars remotely. But this is an unpropitious environment for the American sheriff to stick up “WANTED FOR DATA RUSTLING” posters around the place and try to run Chinese producers out of town.
The lure of US market access, via which Washington traditionally exerts control over other countries’ trade and tech policies, is weaker than it ought to be. American consumer preferences and the domination of the Detroit carmakers have left the US EV market pitifully under-developed. EVs in 2023 had a 10% share of total sales compared with 38% in China and 21% in the EU, and even the EV tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act have so far had only limited effect.
EV prices relative to traditional vehicles in the US market are higher than in China and the EU, and Washington has reduced competitive pressure by walling off its market to Chinese exporters with 100% tariffs.
…Strict implementation might simply force carmakers to create a separate North American supply chain with non-Chinese software. In that case, Dunne says, the global car market could divide in two: a high-priced low-tech island comprising the US and Canada and a cheaper, more digitally connected market for the rest of the world. (Mexico, which is part of the US-Canada trade bloc but also exports cars outside it, would probably straddle the two.)
It’s somewhat against the historical grain for US companies to be behind on technology and its households weak on consumption. But that’s where we’ve ended up with EVs.
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Israel could bomb Iran’s oil. Energy markets aren’t panicking • POLITICO
Ben Lefebrvre:
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The risk of an escalating war between Israel and Iran is testing the global market’s faith that crude oil prices would be insulated from a widening of hostilities across the Middle East.
For decades, conflicts in the oil-rich region frequently spooked oil markets and weighed on the economy. But now, Middle East military skirmishes are causing more shrugs than drastic price spikes — a welcome development for the Biden administration, which has faced political criticism from Republicans over fuel prices and is trying to contain the fallout from Iran’s launch of nearly 200 missiles into Israel on Tuesday.
Increased oil production from the United States, Brazil and other places in the past two decades has diversified the global fuel supply, which means oil markets rely less on Middle East shipments that Tehran could disrupt, energy and security analysts told POLITICO.
“For those of us who spend our lives looking at the effects of a [Middle East] crisis on oil prices, obviously the past 10-plus years have been a complete washout,” said Michael Knights, an analyst at the think tank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “No matter how insane the thing is, it has a minimal impact on oil. The market has proven time and time again it can make up shortfalls.”
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Whatever this is, it’s not 1973 all over again: we’re not going to see those queues at the fuel pumps.
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The Before and After – Columbia Journalism Review
Lauren Watson on the effect of Facebook removing news links in Canada:
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Meta’s retreat from journalism didn’t stop Canadians from seeking out news—but it did prevent them from finding information from legitimate sources. According to a report by the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a research collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto, in the year since the ban went into effect, Canadians have seen less reporting online, even as they continue to use Meta to read, watch, and listen to news: 70% of survey respondents do so on Facebook, 65% on Instagram.
Some of that can be explained by screenshots of articles, which tripled in frequency in the four months following the ban [by Facebook after a Canadian law demanding payment if it included news links]. But the researchers also found that only 22% of Canadians are aware that Meta has bailed on journalism. That has turned Canadian newsgathering on social media into a game of telephone—out-of-context photos and summaries absent links to the articles from which they’ve been sourced—that few even know is being played.
“It would be one thing if they made the absence clear, but they went from blocking the news to facilitating the bamboozling of the news,” David Beers, the founding editor of The Tyee, told me. “If you were an old-fashioned Orwellian dictator, you couldn’t come up with a more clever plan.”
When fall arrived, Meta’s news ban faced its first major test, in Canada’s worst wildfire season to date. In British Columbia, more than three hundred and eighty fires burned; some twenty thousand people were placed under evacuation orders. Canadian officials observed that public service announcements were failing to get around.
“I find it astonishing,” David Eby, the province’s premier, said in a press conference, “that we are at this stage of the crisis and the owners of Facebook and Instagram have not come forward and said, ‘Look, we’re trying to make a point with the federal government, but it’s more important that people are safe, it’s more important that they have access to basic information through our networks, and then we can deal with our concerns with the federal government and their new laws later.’” Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, complained that Meta’s actions were “inconceivable.”
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Here’s an easy way our trains could usefully connect us • The Times
Tom Whipple:
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Over the years, there has not been a lot about my daily commute that has been consistent. There have been times during engineering works when I have not been certain when my morning train will arrive. There have been times during strikes when I have not been certain when, or even whether, it will leave.
What has been consistent though, through Covid, floods and industrial action, has been the knowledge that if I’ve forgotten to download an important document beforehand, then the journey will be even more frustrating. Because, despite the jaunty promises of the train operator, I know that for much of the journey the supposed train Wi-Fi is unlikely to help much. And it won’t help at all if I happen to be going past Ascot.
Party conference season has come to an end. We have been told we must face hard choices if we are to achieve growth. We have seen depressing graphs of what our productivity rates have become because those hard choices have gone unmade.
Here is my idea for getting a bit of growth, without hard choices. It won’t involve scarring the Cotswolds countryside or spending Covid-style billions on bat surveys and newt tunnels so that we can finally build a new road. It just involves making the wretched train Wi-Fi work — like it does in other countries.
Each morning I look across a carriage full of open laptops. I see web pages failing to open, emails failing to send. I see people trying to use their mobile hotspots but doing little better. Most of all I see people — who often look like they are paid pretty high hourly rates — trying, and failing, to work.
This is not just my commute. There are many subjects on which journalists are ill-equipped to speak but there is one on which we are world experts: being sent to random parts of the country and trying to work on trains. So believe me when I say that this is a problem everywhere.
This year a report in The Sunday Times revealed that our train wifi network is so dilapidated that operators are being forced to ration access. It also reported that the system could be upgraded across the country for £200m.
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Which really isn’t a lot of money in the scheme of things.
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The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth • Aeon Essays
Michelle Nijhuis:
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In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
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Except.. what Ostrom demonstrated was that if there are community safeguards and punishments for overuse, then the commons won’t be overexploited. Without that, we see the TOTC (paper available here) occur again and again: overfishing, pollution, even climate change. (The original paper itself is a somewhat Malthusian treatise on the limited planet; it reads oddly in the modern context.)
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The iPhone content machine: a visual essay • On my Om
Om Malik:
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Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event differed greatly from most of its past events. It was larger and more overwhelming. There were fewer familiar faces among the attendees, and there was also a new type of attendee — content creators. They were busy filing short bursts of information to their followers in vertical formats: videos, selfies at Apple Park and occasional comments about the products themselves.
I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves. It was fun to just float among the crowds with my Nikon Zf and a 40mm lens.
It was a wonderful spectacle — just to bask in this new kind of raw media energy. Content for the sake of content. Events for the sake of content. Fog of content. It’s the new way of the world.
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Malik decided just to take some photos, and very good photos they are. (The big closeup is John Gruber, of Daring Fireball.) One person – not Gruber – commented that the attendees this year seemed essentially clueless about Apple, and about the executives they were talking to who tend to have long histories at the company:
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My feeling is that they “saw” the keynote but didn’t actually “watch” it. It’s the same difference as “hearing” music versus “listening” to it. They’re more focused on how to later take selfies next to the new products, not necessarily think deeply about why the products were created and what impact they could have.
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Craft and creativity • The Bookseller
Nadim Sadek:
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There are less perceivably creative people in our world. The architects who design perfect arches. Whoever invented the wheel. The master-distiller, blending liquids in casks of sherry and port to make that perfect single-malt. Or a nurse who finds a way to make an old woman comfortable by playing her songs from her childhood. These days, also the TikToker who produces a new meme, combining a societal insight with a memorable tune and perhaps a signature dance.
Each human is creative. But not each human can craft, whether it’s with paintbrushes, words or filters on a social-media site.
AI solves this. It’s not a Stradivarius. It’s not a Porsche. It’s not squirrel-hair brush. But it is a new expresser, a means of fashioning an artefact from a creative impulse without having to master the craft of expression.
So long as you can articulate your notion, AI can make a decent stab at producing an artefact to represent your creativity. It’ll make music to your command. Write words. Produce an image. Whatever you’re trying to conceive and give birth to, AI disintermediates the historic imperative of “crafting”. It takes your ideas and makes them evident. Others can see what you intend. People can relate to what you wish to convey.
…If you’re reading this, you’re likely either a crafter, or someone involved in the craft-trade, including book publishing. AI is challenging the status quo. And it’s a positive thing.
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I’m really not sure that this is a view widely shared by those who have to decide what to publish.
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Effect of daily steps and sedentary time on death and cardiovascular risk • Kudos
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The study (in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, March 2024) suggested that an increase in the number of daily steps is associated with a lower risk of both death and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Here, the greatest benefit was observed between 9,000 and 10,500 steps per day. This optimal range for lowering health risks remains consistent regardless of whether a person has high or low levels of sedentary time. Specifically, individuals with high sedentary time (more than 10.5 hours per day) had a higher risk of death if they walked fewer steps, compared to those with lower sedentary time. Also, even a modest increase in daily steps (between 4,000 and 4,500 steps) can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD.
Increasing daily steps to around 9,000 to 10,500 can significantly lower the risk of death and CVD, independent of sedentary time. Even a small increase in daily steps can have a positive impact on health, and reducing sedentary time further improves these benefits.
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OK, no excuse now! Though Strava data suggests that those who do 9,000 steps per day are in the top 3% of walkers. The fact that increasing steps is helps seems obvious – it’s exercise. But this has come from “device data” – hip-worn accelerometers worn over the course of three years (2013-2015) by 100,000 participants in the UK aged between 40 and 69.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 