Tennis players face a complex game theory decision before each match. What’s the best choice according to the best pros?CC-licensed photo by Steven Pisano on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Serve. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
How Ukraine’s autonomous killer drones defeat electronic warfare • IEEE Spectrum
Tereza Pultarova:
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After the Estonian startup KrattWorks dispatched the first batch of its Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopters to Ukraine in mid-2022, the company’s officers thought they might have six months or so before they’d need to reconceive the drones in response to new battlefield realities. The 46-centimeter-wide flier was far more robust than the hobbyist-grade UAVs that came to define the early days of the drone war against Russia. But within a scant three months, the Estonian team realized their painstakingly fine-tuned device had already become obsolete.
Rapid advances in jamming and spoofing—the only efficient defense against drone attacks—set the team on an unceasing marathon of innovation. Its latest technology is a neural-network-driven optical navigation system, which allows the drone to continue its mission even when all radio and satellite-navigation links are jammed. It began tests in Ukraine in December, part of a trend toward jam-resistant, autonomous UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles). The new fliers herald yet another phase in the unending struggle that pits drones against the jamming and spoofing of electronic warfare, which aims to sever links between drones and their operators. There are now tens of thousands of jammers straddling the front lines of the war, defending against drones that are not just killing soldiers but also destroying armored vehicles, other drones, industrial infrastructure, and even tanks.
…Now in its third generation, the Ghost Dragon has come a long way since 2022. Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.
The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.
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The dance of measure-countermeasure-measure-countermeasure is just amazing. I do find it a little surprising that any company is willing to let itself be named as a supplier to Ukraine, especially of drones, given that it will mean being targeted by Russia.
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Apple and Google clash with police and MPs over phone thefts • BBC News
Tom Gerken:
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Senior figures at Apple and Google have clashed with the police over its recommendations for how best to deal with phone theft in the UK.
The Met’s James Conway told the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee – which is considering the question – that two-thirds of thefts in London now relate to mobile phones.
With up to 70% of knife crime linked to robbery, he told MPs that meant phone theft was “significantly driving parts of our violence problem”.
The Met wants phone companies to use the unique identifying number – known as an IMEI – that each device has to block any that are reported as stolen. But Apple and Google – who dominate the market – raised concerns about the idea. “Focusing on IMEI blocking might miss some of the problems,” Apple’s head of law enforcement requests, Gary Davis, told the committee.
“We worry that there is a vector for fraud… we are concerned about a world where it would be a person who claims to be the owner who’s asking.”
Stolen devices are blocked from being used in the UK by phone networks by using its IMEI, but this is not the case globally.
This means a stolen phone can still be used in some other countries if a criminal is able to bypass the device’s security.…Police officers said they were looking for action from phone providers to help prevent further thefts. The Met’s chief technology officer Darren Scates said 75% of phones which were stolen are moved abroad, with 28% ending up in either China or Hong Kong.
“We’re asking the cloud providers specifically to prevent a lost or stolen device from connecting to their cloud services,” he said. “This doesn’t even need to involve the police.”
He said they had been asking for this since October 2023, but had not yet been able to convince the firms to take action.
Some MPs accused the two tech firms of lacking the will to take action.«
The Washington Post plans an influx of outside opinion writers • The New York Times
Benjamin Mullin:
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The Washington Post has published some of the world’s most influential voices for more than a century, including columnists like George Will and newsmakers like the Dalai Lama and President Trump.
A new initiative aims to sharply expand that lineup, opening The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Executives hope that the program, known internally as Ripple, will appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X.
The project will promote the outside opinion columns on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall, according to the people, who would speak only anonymously to discuss a confidential project. It will operate outside the paper’s opinion section.
…A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.
…Ember, the A.I. writing coach being developed by The Post, could automate several functions normally provided by human editors, the people said. Early mock-ups of the tool feature a “story strength” tracker that tells writers how their piece is shaping up, with a sidebar that lays out basic parts of story structure: “early thesis,” “supporting points” and “memorable ending.” A live A.I. assistant would provide developmental questions, with writing prompts inviting authors to add “solid supporting points,” one of the people said.
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So, mutating into the Huffington Post with an AI writing coach. Strange destination.
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Inside the creepy, surprisingly routine business of animal cloning • The Atlantic
Bianca Bosker:
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Twenty-seven years ago, Ty Lawrence began to be haunted by a slab of meat.
The carcass, which he spotted at a slaughterhouse while doing research as a graduate student, defied the usual laws of nature. The best, highest-quality steaks—picture a rib eye festooned with ribbons of white fat—typically come from animals whose bodies yield a relatively paltry amount of meat, because the fat that flavors their muscles tends to correspond to an excess of blubber everywhere else. This animal, by contrast, had tons of fat, but only where it would be delicious. “In my world,” Lawrence told me, “people would say, ‘That’s a beautiful carcass.’ ”
As Lawrence watched the beef being wheeled toward a meat grader that day, an idea hit him: we should clone that.
The technology existed. A couple of years earlier, in 1996, scientists at the Roslin Institute, in Scotland, had cloned Dolly the sheep. Lawrence lacked the funds or stature to make it happen, but he kept thinking about that beautiful carcass, and the lost potential to make more like it.
He was gathering data at another slaughterhouse in 2010 when, late one evening, he spotted two carcasses resembling the outlier he’d seen years before. Lawrence—by then an animal-science professor at West Texas A&M University—immediately called the head of his department. It was nearly 11 p.m. and his boss was already in bed, but Lawrence made his pitch anyway: He wanted to reverse engineer an outstanding steak by bringing superior cuts of meat back to life. He would clone the dead animals, and then mate the clones. “Think of our project as one in which you’re crossbreeding carcasses,” he told me.
A few years later, Lawrence and his team turned two tiny cubes of meat, sliced off exceptional beef carcasses at a packing plant, into one cloned bull and three cloned heifers. After breeding the bull with the heifers, Lawrence slaughtered the offspring to assess the quality of the meat, and found it to be just as terrific as the originals’. The next generation’s meat was even better than that—superior, even, to that of animals bred from the cattle industry’s top bulls.
…Once confined to research labs, the technology has become reliable and lucrative enough to be the basis for companies around the world, which are churning out clones of super-sniffing police dogs, prizewinning show camels, pigs for organ transplantation, and “high-genomic-scoring” livestock—which is to say, ultra-lactating dairy cows and uncommonly tasty beef cattle. The top-ranked polo player, Adolfo Cambiaso, has more than 100 clones of his best horses and once won a match riding six copies of the same mare at different points throughout the competition.
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To serve or to receive? The ultimate decision for any pro tennis player • ESPN
Simon Cambers:
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There is one part of tennis that has retained its simplicity: the coin toss.
Though some events do it digitally, most tournaments still bring out the real thing to decide who serves first and which end the other player chooses. Heads or tails, serve or receive, it’s as simple as that.
Well, almost.
In his book “Winning Ugly,” Brad Gilbert says receiving is the wise choice, psychologically. According to Gilbert, who reached world No. 4 as a player and found renewed fame as the coach to Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and most recently Coco Gauff, if someone chooses to serve and is broken, they are immediately on the back foot. If they choose to receive and don’t break, they have lost nothing and have a game under their belt before serving themselves.
Weather conditions, how players match up against each other, court surface and how a player feels on any given day can all play a role in the choice. Some players choose an end of the court rather than to serve or receive.
Novak Djokovic said his instinct has changed over the years.
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You’ll have to read it to find out how the greatest ever male player (measured in all sorts of ways) has altered his thinking. But this might be one of the neatest little bits of game theory – aha – that gets tested every day.
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Exercise ‘better than drugs’ to stop cancer returning after treatment, trial finds • The Guardian
Andrew Gregory:
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Exercise can reduce the risk of cancer patients dying by a third, stop tumours coming back and is even more effective than drugs, according to the results of a landmark trial that could transform health guidelines worldwide.
For decades, doctors have recommended adopting a healthy lifestyle to lower the risk of developing cancer. But until now there has been little evidence of the impact it could have after diagnosis, with little support for incorporating exercise into patients’ routines.
Now a world-first trial involving patients from the US, UK, Australia, France, Canada and Israel has found that a structured exercise regime after treatment can dramatically reduce the risk of dying, the disease returning or a new cancer developing.
The results were presented in Chicago at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco) annual meeting, the world’s largest cancer conference, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
For the first time in medical history, there was clear evidence that exercise was even better at preventing cancer recurrence and death than many of the drugs currently prescribed to patients, one of the world’s top cancer doctors said.
Dr Julie Gralow, the chief medical officer of Asco, who was not involved in the decade-long study, said the quality of its findings was the “highest level of evidence” and would lead to “a major shift in understanding the importance of encouraging physical activity during and after treatment”.
…Asked to put the effect of exercise on cancer patients’ outcomes into context, Gralow said: “We titled [the session it was presented in] As Good as a Drug. I would have retitled it Better than a Drug, because you don’t have all the side-effects.”
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Medicine remains a mystery, pt 1.
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Down the rabbit hole with xenon • The Curious Wavefunction
Ash Jogalekar:
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I wasn’t aware of this use of xenon [mixed with oxygen to help a rapid Everest ascent] to enhance physical fitness, but I was very much aware of the use of xenon as an anesthetic. You would think that something as commonly used as anesthetics would have their mechanism of action figured out to the last detail, but that’s not the case. The detailed mechanism of anesthetic action is supposed to involve something relatively non-specific like binding to and saturating membranes (there’s some evidence for specific interactions with receptors like NMDA). And it turns out that the use of xenon in enhancing the fitness of Everest-class climbers lends itself to a similar paradigm.
Xenon seems to increase the production of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha or HIF-1α, which is a protein that gets upregulated in oxygen-poor environments. Among other things, it’s a clever hack used by cancer cells to grow in anaerobic environments, and it was the discovery of this fact among others that was recognized by a Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Unsurprisingly, HIF-1α is a part of an entire intricate biochemical cascade involving cell growth and development in both health and disease. But the detailed mechanism of Hif-1α and xenon interaction is fascinating, in part because of how much we don’t know. Under normal conditions with adequate oxygen, HIF-1α is hydroxylated by prolyl hydroxylase (PHD) which act as a kind of oxygen biosensor. When it hydroxylates prolyl groups on HIF-1α, the protein becomes a substrate for the E3 ligase VHL, which binds to it, slaps on a ubiquitin group and carts it off to the proteasome for degradation. But under hypoxic conditions or in the presence of xenon, the hydroxylation does not occur and HIF-1α gets upregulated.
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What this uncovers is: we just don’t really understand why it works like it does.
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Meta plans to replace humans with AI to assess risks • NPR
Bobby Allyn and Shannon Bond:
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For years, when Meta launched new features for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, teams of reviewers evaluated possible risks: Could it violate users’ privacy? Could it cause harm to minors? Could it worsen the spread of misleading or toxic content?
Until recently, what are known inside Meta as privacy and integrity reviews were conducted almost entirely by human evaluators.
But now, according to internal company documents obtained by NPR, up to 90% of all risk assessments will soon be automated.
In practice, this means things like critical updates to Meta’s algorithms, new safety features and changes to how content is allowed to be shared across the company’s platforms will be mostly approved by a system powered by artificial intelligence — no longer subject to scrutiny by staffers tasked with debating how a platform change could have unforeseen repercussions or be misused.
Inside Meta, the change is being viewed as a win for product developers, who will now be able to release app updates and features more quickly. But current and former Meta employees fear the new automation push comes at the cost of allowing AI to make tricky determinations about how Meta’s apps could lead to real world harm.
“Insofar as this process functionally means more stuff launching faster, with less rigorous scrutiny and opposition, it means you’re creating higher risks,” said a former Meta executive who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the company. “Negative externalities of product changes are less likely to be prevented before they start causing problems in the world.”
Meta said in a statement that it has invested billions of dollars to support user privacy.
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Just one question: what’s that “almost entirely” in the second paragraph? Were they done by automation in the past too? Naturally, too, now we’re going to hand it over to black boxes we don’t entirely understand.
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Bing lets you use OpenAI’s Sora video generator for free • The Verge
Jess Weatherbed:
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Microsoft has added a new AI video generator to its Bing mobile app that’s built on OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video model. The Bing Video Creator announced on Monday provides a free way to generate short clips with Sora, which is normally locked behind ChatGPT subscriptions starting at $20 per month for Plus users.
“Bing Video Creator represents our efforts to democratize the power of AI video generation,” Microsoft said in its announcement. “We believe creativity should be effortless and accessible to help you satisfy your answer-seeking process. We’re excited to empower anyone to turn their words into wonder through an AI-generated video.”
The Video Creator is now rolling out globally (excluding China and Russia) to the Bing Search apps for Android and iPhone, and Microsoft says desktop and Copilot Search support are also “coming soon.” The video generator can be accessed via the menu at the bottom right corner of the Bing app, or by adding a description of the clip you want to make directly to the Bing search bar.
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AI video is going to flood social networks and news sites, isn’t it.
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Business Insider cuts: why 100+ staff are leaving and who’s going • Press Gazette
Dominic Ponsford:
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The cutbacks reflect falling advertising revenue and also a change in strategy at Business Insider away from chasing high traffic towards instead focusing more on paid subscribers. Audience growth and entertainment reporters are among the roles being cut. But many senior investigative journalists producing the sort of content which might drive subscriptions have also been cut, reflecting the fact the changes look likely to be as much about cost-saving as they are about changing editorial priorities.
Business Insider has not reported subscriber numbers since November 2023 when it claimed to have 330,000 paying readers.
Insiders have expressed concern at Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng’s assertion that the company was going “all in on AI” in the same note announcing the lay-offs.
The NUJ represents 15 out of 23 UK Business Insider staff who are facing redundancy. A spokesperson for union members at the company said: “AI will never replace journalists, not unless the future media bosses want is one where content is regurgitated in perpetuity, getting increasingly warped and unrecognisable. In that world, original ideas don’t exist and the powerful are never held to account. We all deserve better than that.”
The job cuts are also reflect a scaling-back of Business Insider’s ambitions since its failed bid to become a general newsbrand in the years from the start of 2021 to the end of 2023 when it rebranded as Insider. It is instead focusing back on business coverage, which drives higher rates of advertising and is more likely to prompt subscriptions.
Business Insider has announced cuts every year since 2023, when it had around 950 staff of which 600 were believed to be in editorial. Some 10% of US staff were cut that year, with a further 8% of worldwide staff going the following year.
The latest job cuts have targeted 21% of the remaining total (which has been falling steadily since 2023 due to a long-standing hiring freeze) so likely at at least another 100 people. One well-placed source said they believe the latest cuts would leave the company no more than half the size it was in headcount terms at its peak pre-2023.
Successive Google algorithm updates have hurt Business Insider traffic in recent years as has Facebook’s move away from working with news publishers.
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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 
I think the Estonians feel targeted by Russia already. But yes, even so…