The karaoke machine was honoured this week by a US organisation – though its origin is disputed. CC-licensed photo by WordRidden on Flickr.
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No new post this week at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week?
A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Wikipedia pauses AI-generated summaries after editor backlash • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.
“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn’t mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let’s not insult our readers’ intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”
Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”
…[Another said:] “Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don’t think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”
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I find it quite encouraging that Wikipedia is insisting on remaining the chatbot-resistant space of the internet.
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Tesla’s Robotaxi launch date was supposed to be today, but we’re shocked to hear that it’s been pushed back • Futurism
Frank Landymore:
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The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi network will have to wait.
On Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk made a tweet stating that, “tentatively,” the first public rides on its autonomous vehicles — which will not be in its purpose-built Cybercabs, but in regular Teslas with updated software — will start on June 22.
But the date could shift, Musk added, because “we are being super paranoid about safety.”
That comment could prove to be revealing.
Tesla’s robotaxi initiative is clouded with uncertainty, because the automaker has never released a driving system that’s capable of operating without a human behind the wheel.
Its most advanced system that it’s released to date, Full Self-Driving (Supervised), frequently requires driver intervention and poses serious safety concerns; it’s the subject of an ongoing federal investigation after a Tesla with the driving mode activated struck and killed an elderly pedestrian.
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Yet another thing that Musk has promised and which isn’t going to happen.
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In case of emergency, break glass • Morrick.me
Riccardo Mori at the end of a long and detailed exposition of the many, many ways in which the new “Liquid Glass” design at Apple prevents you actually understanding what’s on the screen in front of you and manipulating it:
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Regarding the most obvious flaws and misguided UI choices in Liquid Glass, a common sentiment I’ve seen on social media is something like, Well, this is just the first beta. Hopefully things will improve by the time the official releases are out. While I understand this, I also implore people to stop cutting Apple so much slack in these matters. It’s not a two-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) more than 40 years of experience in UI/UX design.
Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal? And if they have and approved them, shouldn’t that be worrying? Isn’t it tiring and exasperating that, still after all these years, developers and end users get to be Apple’s free beta testers, when the lion’s share of issues should be studied and resolved internally before even showing things publicly? This drives me up a wall every single time.
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There have been lots of murmurings in the past few months about how Tim Cook should go. But I really think that Alan Dye, the head of design, should be fired. Preferably into the sun.
There’s no way on earth that I’ll update any of the devices I rely on to this mess – particularly not my laptop.
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A California dairy tried to capture its methane, and it worked • Phys.org
Jules Bernstein, University of California:
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A giant, balloon-like tarp stretches over a lagoon of manure on a Central Valley dairy farm, concealing a quiet but remarkable transformation. Methane, a potent climate-warming gas, is being captured and cleaned instead of released into the atmosphere.
A new study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside shows the effectiveness of dairy digesters, which are manure ponds tightly sealed to capture and re-use the methane they produce. The study shows these systems can reduce atmospheric methane emissions by roughly 80%, a result that closely matches estimates California state officials have used in their climate planning.
The findings, published in Global Change Biology Bioenergy, come as California ramps up investment in methane control technologies to meet its goal of cutting emissions 40% below 2013 levels by the end of the decade. More than 130 of these systems are now operating across California dairies, but until now, their real-world performance hadn’t been verified this rigorously.
“The digesters can leak, and they sometimes do,” said Francesca Hopkins, a climate scientist at UCR who led the research. “But when the system is built well and managed carefully, the emissions really drop. That’s what we saw here.”
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Disney and Universal sue AI image creator Midjourney, alleging copyright infringement • The Guardian
Blake Montgomery and agencies:
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Disney and Universal sued an artificial intelligence company on Wednesday, alleging copyright infringement. In their lawsuit, the entertainment giants called Midjourney’s popular AI-powered image generator a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” for its alleged reproductions of the studios’ best-known characters.
The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission “innumerable” copies of their marquee characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit by Disney and Universal over images and video represents a new frontier in the raging legal wars over the copyright and the creation of generative artificial intelligence. Previous suits have covered copyrighted text and music; Disney and Universal are two of the biggest industry players thus far to sue over images and videos.
Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal officer, said in a statement: “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
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I read that quote from the Disney person as translating to “we aim to make a lot of money from using AI to generate video, and we don’t want anyone getting ahead of us in the queue to do so.”
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When do girls fall behind in maths? Gigantic study pinpoints the moment • Nature
Celeste Biever:
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The latest study is more comprehensive than previous ones that found a similar gender gap in the first year of school. It covers four cohorts: all children who started their first year of school in France in 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021. This amounts to almost three million five-, six- and seven-year olds. It confirms the finding across the whole country: the gap emerged in all cohorts, socioeconomic groups, regions of France and types of school.
This “startling” universality suggests that policies aimed at reducing the gap have to target everyone, says economist Andrew Simon at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The policy can’t be limited to a certain group if you really want to fix it.”
The study uses the power of big data to show that it is the start of formal education — not age — that triggers the gap. In France, children start school the September of the calendar year that they turn six. The researchers compare children who were born just a few days apart but are in different school years. The gender gap is present for boys and girls born in December entering their second year of school, the researchers report, but is absent among their peers born days later, in January, who have just started school.
The lack of average differences between the performance of boys and girls at the beginning of the first year suggests that the causes lie in the environment children experience once they start school, rather than innate differences in interest or ability, say researchers.
“There might be some biological factor that we haven’t been able to clearly link to maths or spatial reasoning,” says Lauer. “But this paper suggests that their experiences with the world are mattering more than anything else.”
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What’s amazing is that the gap becomes apparent four months into the first year, and by the second year is absolutely embedded. It seems more like something to do with the contact with schooling.
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A rockslide-generated tsunami in a Greenland fjord rang Earth for 9 days • Science
Kristian Svennevig et al:
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Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start of a nine-day-long, global 10.88-millihertz (92-second) monochromatic very-long-period (VLP) seismic signal, originating from East Greenland. In this study, we demonstrate how this event started with a glacial thinning–induced rock-ice avalanche of 25 × 106 cubic meters plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high tsunami. Simulations show that the tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter-high long-duration seiche with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow amplitude decay that were nearly identical to the seismic signal. An oscillating, fjord-transverse single force with a maximum amplitude of 5 × 1011 newtons reproduced the seismic amplitudes and their radiation pattern relative to the fjord, demonstrating how a seiche directly caused the 9-day-long seismic signal.
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The paper is paywalled, but there’s a good thread on X explaining how it was first detected – and puzzled people! – and then solved.
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AI is making health care safer in the remote Amazon • Rest Of World
Pedro Nakamura:
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The Amazonian municipality of Caracaraí has 22,000 inhabitants and an overworked pharmacist named Samuel Andrade.
Andrade arrives at work at 8 a.m. to handle hundreds of prescriptions from free government clinics. Most days, he can’t get through all of them. He sometimes gets stuck for hours cross-checking drug databases to ensure nothing has been prescribed incorrectly by rural doctors.
It is stressful work. He has to help the dozens of patients who line up at his dispensary every day, some of whom have traveled for days to get there. Sometimes he has to rush through prescriptions, and worries he will miss something dangerous.
In April, Andrade welcomed a new assistant: artificial intelligence software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions, he told Rest of World. In the months since he started using the AI assistant, it has caught more than 50 errors, he said.
“It works instantly and uses digital rather than physical reports,” said the 34-year-old.
Pharmacists in Brazil began testing the technology earlier this year. Its initial success suggests it could be a game changer for the country’s overburdened primary care system.
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First karaoke machine recognized as entertainment tech ‘milestone’ • The Mainichi
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The world’s first karaoke machine was honoured Thursday as a “milestone” that created a new brand of entertainment by a U.S. organization dedicated to promoting technological advancement.
At a ceremony in Tokyo, a plaque was handed to the family of Shigeichi Negishi, who invented the machine that was manufactured and sold as the “Music Box” in 1967. Negishi died last year at age 100.
“He was very grateful for people enjoying karaoke around the world, although he didn’t imagine it to spread globally when he created it,” said Akihiro Negishi, the inventor’s son, at the ceremony.
The original karaoke machine was a cube measuring 30 centimeters on each side. It had a microphone, tape player, and coin box for payment.
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As we all know, “karaoke” translates to “empty orchestra”. However, the invention of the karaoke machine is disputed: other sources say it was a drummer, Daisuke Inoue, in the 1970s. Not sure if the IEEE knows yet.
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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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