If you want to live longer, have you considered taking up the high jump? CC-licensed photo by filip bossuyt on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Not a flop. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Large French Alpine ski resort to close in face of shrinking snow season • The Guardian
Kim Willsher:
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A large French Alpine ski resort has announced it is to close, citing a lack of funds to become a year-round destination, as low- and medium-altitude mountain areas around Europe struggle with a truncated season due to global heating and declining snowfalls.
Local councillors voted not to reopen Alpe du Grand Serre in the Isère this winter, saying they could no longer pay for the mountain lifts or pay to complete a programme to diversify as an all-year tourist destination.
The move will wipe out 200 jobs and hit businesses in the nearby village of La Morte, whose economy and population of 150 people depend on winter sports.
A local sports shop owner, Lauranne Vincent, told France 3 television: “We are devastated and shocked. It’s a brutal decision coming two months before we were due to open. We were hoping the opposite would happen. We said all lights were green to go.”
Frédérique Laurence, the owner of a grocery shop in La Morte, added: “We’ve been left completely in the lurch. We still have loans to pay as we’ve only been here four years. Who will pay them? Our lives have been ruined. That’s what is going to happen to us.”
A lack of snow in the past two years has meant slopes opening later and being forced to close during the season, keeping skiers away. The loss-making Alpe du Grand Serre has also suffered from ageing infrastructure and a lack of investment over the past 40 years.
The local authority has spent nearly €3m since 2021 on a project that would keep the resort open all year round, attracting visitors with hiking and bike paths, but said it did not have the money to continue with it for the final two years before completion.
…Alpe du Grand Serre, a collection of six villages at an altitude of 1,368 metres, a 45-minute drive from Grenoble, is the largest ski station in the northern Alps to be forced to close. It opened as a winter sports resort 85 years ago, is the second-oldest in the region and has 55km (35 miles) of slopes, three chairlifts and 10 drag lifts.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s lost board game finally published • Polygon
Charlie Hall:
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Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer?
In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins.
With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ’s endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years after it was created.
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Not sure it’s going to topple Monopoly, but certainly one for the fans.
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Don Norman: ‘Apple has fallen prey to the most disastrous part of design, which thinks it’s about making something beautiful and elegant’ • EL PAÍS English
Tom C. Avendaño:
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“Apple computer used to be famous for the fact that you wouldn’t even need a manual. You could just pick up the telephone or plug in the computer and in seconds, you could use it and learn. It was self-explanatory,” says [Don] Norman, with the kind of fluid speech that can only come from decades of university teaching. “But unfortunately, the designers who care only about aesthetics and beauty have taken over. And I also blame the journalists who have said that the iPhone screen should be as big as possible, with no boundary [and that the center button that pre-2017 models featured should disappear]. Because when the telephone rings, I can no longer answer the phone.”
In case there was any doubt as to whether the matter was settled, Norman continues: “What happened was that Apple fell prey to the disastrous part of design, which is that design is about making something beautiful and elegant. And I say, nonsense, that’s not what my kind of design is about. My kind of design is — sure, I want it to be attractive and I want it to be nice, but more important than anything else is that I know I can use it freely and that it’s easy to learn and that it doesn’t keep changing. Apple believes that words are ugly, they try not to use them, and you have to memorize all these gestures, up and down, left and right, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, one tap, two taps, a long tap, starting from the top of screen, the middle of the screen. Who can remember that?”
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Norman is, what shall we say, uncompromising. But he also has a habit of being right.
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Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls “video scraping,” which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes.
What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we’re doing on our computer screens.
“The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails,” Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into Google’s AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models.
Willison then asked Gemini to pull the price data from the video and arrange it into a special data format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that included dates and dollar amounts. The AI model successfully extracted the data, which Willison then formatted as CSV (comma-separated values) table for spreadsheet use. After double-checking for errors as part of his experiment, the accuracy of the results—and what the video analysis cost to run—surprised him.
“The cost [of running the video model] is so low that I had to re-run my calculations three times to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake,” he wrote. Willison says the entire video analysis process ostensibly cost less than one-tenth of a cent, using just 11,018 tokens on the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model. In the end, he actually paid nothing because Google AI Studio is currently free for some types of use.
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Algorithms policed welfare systems for years. Now they’re under fire for bias • WIRED
Morgan Meaker:
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The algorithm, used since the 2010s, violates both European privacy rules and French anti-discrimination laws, argue the 15 groups involved in the case, including digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, Amnesty International, and Collectif Changer de Cap, a French group that campaigns against inequality.
“This is the first time that a public algorithm has been the subject of a legal challenge in France,” says Valérie Pras of Collectif Changer de Cap, adding she wants these types of algorithms to be banned. “Other social organizations in France use scoring algorithms to target the poor. If we succeed in getting [this] algorithm banned, the same will apply to the others.”
The French welfare agency, the CNAF, analyzes the personal data of more than 30 million people—those claiming government support as well as the people they live with and their family members, according to the litigation, filed to France’s top administrative court on October 15.
Using their personal information, the algorithm gives each person a score between 0 and 1, based on how likely it estimates they are to be receiving payments they are not entitled to—either as fraud or by mistake.
France is one of many countries using algorithms to search for error or fraud in its welfare system. Last year, WIRED’s three-part investigation with Lighthouse Reports into fraud-detection algorithms in European welfare systems focused on their use in the Netherlands, Denmark and Serbia.
People with higher risk scores can then be subject to what welfare recipients across the bloc have described as stressful and intrusive investigations, which can also involve their welfare payments being suspended.
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Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over WordPress chaos • 404 Media
Samantha Cole:
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This is the latest in what has been a tense few months at Automattic.
“Regarding escalations, to me, the most upsetting thing has been the way he’s treating current and former employees and WP community members,” one former employee who recently left the company after several years told me. “He clearly has no clue what people care about or how the community has contributed to the success of WordPress. It very clearly shows how out of touch he is with everyday reality. One, sharing pictures of him being on safari while all this shit is going down, as if people would think that was cool. Only rich tech bros would think that.” (Mullenweg posted photos from a trip on his personal blog and social media posts last week.)
In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site.
Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him.
If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.
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This is really creepy: diverting work emails, even if it’s in theory legal, implies a paranoia on Mullenweg’s part that is quite disturbing.
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AlphaFold reveals how sperm and egg hook up in intimate detail • Nature
Heidi Ledford:
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An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by one of this year’s Nobel prizes has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs .
The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures , identified a trio of proteins that team up to work as matchmakers between the gametes. Without them, sexual reproduction might hit a dead end in a wide range of animals, from fish to mammals.
The finding, published on 17 October in Cell, contradicts a previous notion that just two proteins — one on the egg and one on the sperm — are sufficient to ensure fertilization, says Enrica Bianchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the old concept of having a key and a lock to open the door any more,” she says. “It’s more complicated.”
Despite its crucial role in reproduction, the process by which the fusion of egg and sperm occurs in vertebrates is a molecular mystery that has proved difficult to crack. The union of the two cells involves proteins that reside in greasy membranes, making them hard to study using standard biochemical methods. The interactions between these proteins are often weak and fleeting, and it is difficult to harvest enough viable eggs and sperm from some of researchers’ favoured laboratory animals, including mice, for extensive experiments.
…AlphaFold predicted that three sperm proteins come together to form a complex. Two of these proteins were already known to be important for fertility. Working in the laboratory, Pauli and her colleagues confirmed that the third is also crucial for fertility in both zebrafish and mice, and that the three proteins interact with one another in zebrafish and human sperm.
The team also found that, in zebrafish, the trio creates a binding site for an egg protein called Bouncer, providing a mechanism by which the two cells can recognize one another. “It’s a way to say, ‘Sperm, you found an egg’ and ‘Egg, you found a sperm’,” says Andreas Blaha, a biochemist at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology and a co-author of the paper.
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How Digg helped invent the social internet • The Verge
David Pierce talks to Kevin Rose, the creator and one-time owner of Digg, the former front page of the internet (before it got many, many more front pages):
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David Pierce: As I think about the universal homepage thing, part of me thinks we need that more than ever now. Instead of having to go to 50 websites and 10 different forums and read 20 newsletters, how can I just get a quick sense of what people care about and what they’re saying… and then move on to my life?
Kevin Rose: I think you’re absolutely right. If you can find out who owns Digg, I would love to buy it back from them and turn it back into that old-school homepage. So, I don’t know if you have any connections…
DP: I’ll look into it. But let’s just quickly reboot Digg right here, for 2024. What would you do?
KR: I would heavily lean into AI on this front — AI for vetting and AI for a bunch of different things. If someone posts a comment, you could instantly run it against AI and say, “Is this comment additive to the article of substance, or is it attacking someone?” There could be some really interesting positive use cases for AI here to help with keeping things civil. I would lean pretty heavily on AI for both summaries for content moderation.
I would not want to embrace an ad model. I’d much rather have it be almost more Wikipedia-style, where it’s community-supported in some way. It wouldn’t be about building the next billion-dollar, publicly traded company, but more like a utility for good. I would want to really lean in heavily on this idea of providing a safe place for people. It’s unfortunate to me that I’ve had to step away from several different social networks out there because they just can be so toxic at times. And so I would want to spend a great deal of time thinking through those issues.
It would be important to go out and probably sit down with 50 or 100 of the largest moderators on Reddit and ask them what features and functionality they’re missing that they would like to see and have it really be community-driven features and functionality on the site versus top-down telling you what you should have. I don’t know. I think that’d be a good place to start.
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As it happens, Digg has been reborn, at digg.one. Unclear who’s behind it.
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Fuel duty expected to rise by up to 7p a litre after the budget • The Guardian
Gwyn Topham and Helena Horton:
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Fuel duty is levied at 52.95p a litre and pulls in about £25bn a year to the exchequer. Campaigns against the duty by motoring groups and publications including the Sun have coincided with previous governments abolishing planned hikes since 2010.
According to a Whitehall source quoted by the Mail, officials have told Reeves “it’s now or never on fuel duty … They are advising her that motorists can afford it and that if she doesn’t act to end the freeze now she will find it much harder to do so later in the parliament”.
Forecasts by the government’s spending watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, assume a reversal of the 5p cut and with much discussion of the £22bn “black hole” and now a £40bn “spending gap”, campaigners believe Reeves should go further.
The Campaign for Better Transport said reversing the cut and reinstating an inflationary increase would raise an additional £4.2bn in duty. Director Silviya Barrett said: “At the moment, it’s often cheaper to drive or even fly within the UK than to take the train and that shouldn’t be the case. We’re calling on the chancellor to use the budget to level the playing field for public transport.”
Domestic transport is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, accounting for 29.1% in 2023. Almost all domestic transport emissions are from carbon dioxide, the main source of which is petrol and diesel road vehicles.
According to a Carbon Brief analysis, duty freezes may have increased UK total greenhouse gas emissions by 7% since 2010, as drivers may otherwise have switched forms of transport or chosen more fuel-efficient cars.
…new research from the Social Market Foundationshows that the richest fifth of households have benefited twice as much as the poorest from lower fuel duty as they drive and own more vehicles, including less fuel efficient SUVs.
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Differences in life expectancy between Olympic high jumpers, discus throwers, marathon and 100 metre runners • BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation
Jeffrey and David Lee-Heidenreich and Jonathan Myers:
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For each Olympics between 1928 and 1948 we identified the top (up to 20) Olympic male and female finishers in the high jump (HJ), discus throw, marathon, and 100-m run. We determined date of death using internet searches and calculated age-specific expected survival using published US life tables. We adjusted life expectancy for country of origin based on Global Burden of Disease data.
Results
We identified a death date for 336 of 429 (78%) Olympic athletes including 229 males (55 marathon, 56 100-m 58 high jump, 60 discus), and 107 females (54 100-m, 25 high jump, 28 discus). Discus throwers were heaviest and marathon runners the lightest and oldest athletes (p < 0.01). Observed-expected survival was highest for high jumpers (7.1 years for women, 3.7 years for men) and marathon runners (4.7 years for men) and lowest for sprinters (−1.6 years for women and −0.9 years for men). In multivariate analysis controlling for age and gender, type of sport remained significantly associated with mortality with greatest survival for high jumpers and marathon runners compared to discus throwers and sprinters (p = 0.005). Controlling for weight reduced the survival benefit of high jumpers over discus throwers, but had little effect on the survival benefit of marathon runners vs. sprinters.Conclusion
Significant differences in long term survival exist for different types of track and field Olympic athletes that were explained in part by weight.«
But only in part. Anyway, a neat thing to tell people at parties: marathon runners and high jumpers live longer. (And it’s not just that it feels longer.)
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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 