The HS2 high-speed rail project has been a failure almost from the start. Is that because of its scope, or its context? CC-licensed photo by Ross Hawkes on Flickr.
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HS2 and the slow decay of Britain • The Value of Nothing
M. F. Robbins:
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HS2 was conceived to solve a clear strategic problem. England’s spine is, from a transport perspective, awkwardly constricted. The railway lines connecting London to the great cities of the north have become bottlenecks, restricting the flow of goods and people and stunting economic growth, like a limb with an insufficient blood supply. HS2 would blast a new, Y-shaped route to the north, the ‘stem’ running from London to Birmingham with two branches going on to Manchester and Leeds. Speed is volume, and fast trains would shift vast numbers of passengers, freeing up huge amounts of capacity on the existing lines for people, goods and trade.
That was the theory at least, but the economic case was always confused. Stewart is (correctly) a fan of the book ‘How Big Things Get Done’ and quotes a line from it: “Projects don’t go wrong, they start wrong.” HS2’s problems started with the vision: while the strategic case was about capacity, the economic case focused on travel times, which were easier to measure and talk about, and more in line with how the Department for Transport typically talks about projects. The conflict between the strategic case and how the economic case was talked about led to constant confusion about the purpose of HS2 in the public discourse (epitomised by the columnist Simon Jenkins), but also made it hard to know how to evaluate proposed solutions.
Worse, a kind of British exceptionalism crept in. It’s a recurring theme that keeps coming up in national infrastructure projects3 – we set out to build something like a nuclear power plant or a high speed railway, and rather than learning from other countries or projects – boring! – we insist on creating our own ‘better’ thing. In this case, it wasn’t enough to just build a high speed railway line, from the outset it had to be the greatest and best high-speed line in the world, with all the signals that gave to suppliers on costs.
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Another insightful piece by Robbins. Reading it, one gets the feeling that it’s all so easy if only people listen to him.
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Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin • Financial Times via Ars Technica
Rafe Uddin, Stephen Morris, and Kana Inagaki:
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Tesla’s robotaxi service, touted by Elon Musk as the future of his flagging electric-car maker, launched in the company’s home city of Austin, Texas, on Sunday with about 10 vehicles and a human safety driver on board amid regulatory scrutiny of its self-driving technology.
Shares in Tesla have risen about 50% from this year’s low in early April, with investors hopeful the autonomous ride-hailing service will help revive a company that has suffered declining sales and a consumer backlash against Musk’s political activism.
Despite the hype surrounding Tesla’s robotaxi, the launch—with a company employee seated in the passenger side for safety while leaving the driver’s seat empty—was low-key, and the initial service was open only to a select group of social media influencers.
Shortly before the launch, Musk said on social media that the robotaxi service would begin “with customers paying a $4.20 flat fee.”
According to Musk, who has stepped back from his US government role to focus on the electric-car maker and the robotaxi, the self-driving Tesla Model Y vehicles will only operate in limited areas, avoid challenging intersections, and have teleoperators who can intervene if problems arise.
The limited launch comes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration continues to carry out multiple investigations into Musk’s claims about the capabilities of Tesla’s autopilot and “full self-driving” systems. Despite its name, the full self-driving system still requires humans to sit in the driver’s seat and pay full attention—unlike Google’s Waymo taxis.
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The NHTSA is not impressed by the robotaxis, and seems ready even now to investigate the robotaxis. Wonder what sort of end run Musk will seek to get around that. Still, seems to have arrived in better time than trips to Mars.
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Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy? • Climate Change News
Matteo Civillini, Azril Annuar, David Fogarty, Megan Rowling and Sebastian Rodriguez:
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One Saturday morning last month in the city of Melaka, volunteers in green T-shirts rushed over as Adibah Rahim and her husband drove into the central square, eager to unpack, weigh and register her consignment of used cooking oil (UCO) – the “liquid gold” in European plans to ramp up production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Rahim left the collection point 90 ringgit ($21) richer, three ringgit per litre of oil – a welcome boost to her family’s household budget.
“We usually collect UCO from around 200 members of the public,” said Michael Andrew, sales manager for Evergreen Oil & Feed, the company running the Melaka collection with the local council and a supplier to leading European SAF producers including Spain’s Repsol, UK-based Shell and Finland’s Neste.
When made from waste such as UCO, rather than agricultural commodities like soy or palm oil, backers say SAF can slash planet-heating emissions by up to 80% over kerosene jet fuel, without taking up land that would otherwise be used for food crops, or fuelling forest destruction.
But behind SAF’s climate-friendly facade, a months-long investigation by Climate Home News and its partner The Straits Times has uncovered an opaque global supply chain that exposes jet fuel providers and their aviation clients to significant fraud risks, raising doubts about the climate benefits of the sector’s main green hope for the years ahead.
As SAF producers scramble for limited raw materials to meet new blending quotas in Europe and growing demand elsewhere, barely used and virgin palm oil is being passed off as UCO to traders that supply fuel companies, experts and industry operators told us. Palm oil that is not considered waste is not permitted under European Union rules for SAF because of its links to deforestation.
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Perverse incentives, perverse incentives everywhere.
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People with severe diabetes are cured in small trial of new drug • The New York Times
Gina Kolata:
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A single infusion of a stem cell-based treatment may have cured 10 out of 12 people with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. One year later, these 10 patients no longer need insulin. The other two patients need much lower doses.
The experimental treatment, called zimislecel and made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, involves stem cells that scientists prodded to turn into pancreatic islet cells, which regulate blood glucose levels. The new islet cells were infused and reached the liver, where they took up residence.
The study was presented Friday evening at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and published online by The New England Journal of Medicine.
“It’s trailblazing work,” said Dr. Mark Anderson, professor and director of the diabetes center at the University of California in San Francisco. “Being free of insulin is life changing,” added Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the study.
Vertex, like other drug companies, declined to announce the treatment’s cost before the Food and Drug Administration approves it. A Vertex spokeswoman said the company had data only on the population it studied so it could not yet say whether the drug would help others with type 1 diabetes.
About two million Americans have type 1 diabetes, which is caused when the immune system destroys islet cells. A subset of islet cells, the beta cells, secrete insulin. Without insulin, glucose cannot enter cells. Patients with type 1 must inject carefully calibrated doses of the hormone to substitute for the insulin their body is missing.
…“For the short term, this looks promising” for severely affected patients like those in the study,” said Dr. Irl B. Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study.
But patients in the trial had to stay on drugs to prevent the immune system from destroying the new cells. Suppressing the immune system, he said, increases the risk of infections and, over the long term, can increase the risk of cancer.“The argument is this immunosuppression is not as dangerous as what we typically use for kidneys, hearts and lungs, but we won’t know that definitely for many years,” Dr. Hirsch said. Patients may have to take the immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, the Vertex spokeswoman said.
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China’s electric-vehicle factories have become tourist hot spots • WIRED
Zeyi Yang:
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Tours of electric vehicle factories have quickly become the hottest ticket in Beijing, with tens of thousands of people signing up each month for the chance to win a free visit. Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which has reinvented itself as an EV maker in recent years, started offering the one-hour tours in January to visitors interested in seeing its factory up close and getting a race car experience in a Xiaomi EV.
As Chinese EV brands expand from competing on low prices to promoting premium features and sleek designs, they are increasingly putting their factories in the spotlight. At least two Chinese EV brands, Xiaomi and Nio, offer regular tours for the general public this year, and three more automakers have announced plans to follow suit.
“More and more Chinese EVs are using factory tours as an important channel of communication between the brand and the outside world. It offers a chance to not only see the production line up close, but also experience the human side of the brand,” says Freya Zhang, a research analyst at the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, who has been organizing tours for foreign investors to visit Chinese electric vehicle startups for two years.
People who have visited the Xiaomi factory say they were struck by the amount of automation on display. The company says that the overall automation rate at the factory has reached 91%, with some production lines like casting fully automated.
“The factory is huge with only a handful of workers. As I stood there watching, it was all robotic arms doing the work. The robots were all running preset programs—picking up parts from one place and delivering them to another, all in a very orderly manner,” says Yuanyuan, a Beijing resident who took her 13-year-old daughter on the Xiaomi tour last month. Yuanyuan says she had been applying to get tickets since January, but since the limited spots are awarded on a lottery basis, she was only finally able to secure them in May.
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Neat way to make people engage with the prospect of buying one of these cars – or perhaps feeling good about the cars they’ve already bought from that brand. (Thanks Karsten for the link.)
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Reddit considers iris-scanning Orb developed by a Sam Altman startup • Semafor
Reed Albergotti:
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Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.
Talks between representatives of Reddit and World ID parent Tools for Humanity highlight the growing market for new identity verification technologies, as artificial intelligence floods online platforms with inauthentic content and governments around the world consider new age verification laws to prevent children and teenagers from accessing social media.
If World ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb.
Reddit and Tools for Humanity declined to comment on the talks.
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Don’t think this would be massively popular with Reddit users, to be honest.
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Detachment 201: why Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth joined the US Army reserves • Pirate Wires
An interview with Bozworth, who is one of the first people fast-tracked recruited into the US Army’s “tech bro” division:
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Blake Dodge: How do you feel like Meta’s culture with respect to the military has evolved? Or maybe it hasn’t changed as much as people think?
Boz: The degree to which people have been comfortable publicly supporting the military has changed a huge amount over the last 20 years, ebbing and flowing. The amount of actual support probably hasn’t changed a huge amount.
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how much that affected Meta — like me, or Mark Zuckerberg, or what we were doing. It wasn’t clear 10 years ago what kind of position we would’ve been in to do anything of meaning in terms of providing assistance to the government. We really were, at that point, just building websites and apps. But now, following 10 years of big investment in hard research problems — physics problems around optics and the technology required to do super lightweight wearable computing — that is a platform I think is super relevant and interesting to the government. [Same goes for AI.]So I don’t know how much the change of tone and acceptability of public displays of patriotism affected the actual work Meta was doing. I think the work was the same. I think probably the support was the same. But I am very glad we are now in a moment where the response to me making a personal decision, in a personal capacity, to join the Army Reserves was very, very, very fair. People had reasonable questions about what it meant, but also a lot of people were very proud and very excited about it.
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Quite the journey from “site to keep up with your friends from college” to “aiding, ooh, who knows which country is in line for an invasion to produce regime change”.
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Fake experts and SEO: Journalists adopting new checks • Press Gazette
Rob Waugh:
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Journalists and PRs have changed their habits around verifying sources in the wake of a Press Gazette investigation which revealed that one of the UK’s most widely-quoted psychologists does not exist.
Barbara Santini’s main online presence is on profiles connected with a sex toys website and CBD retailers. Press Gazette revealed in April how a PR working for these businesses duped multiple publishers into quoting Santini by responding to journalist questions posted on services like ResponseSource and Qwoted.
…However, PR companies continue to deploy fake experts apparently using AI-generated responses.
Freelance journalist Rosie Taylor explained that in response to one query via a journalist response service, she received three near-identical responses in the same email format with identical headshots, all at the same time.
While she remains unsure whether the people are real, she said she was convinced the quotes are AI-generated, and now insists on phoning every expert in order to verify them.
She told Press Gazette: “In an ideal world, journalists would always research their interviewees first and then interview them on a call or face-to-face, but the reality is many of us are under huge pressure to turn copy around quickly and quote multiple experts on a wide variety of topics, so getting the occasional comment over email makes life a whole lot easier.”
Taylor said she received the identical responses 24 hours after submitting a journalist request – but the emails did not appear to come via the service she used.
Taylor, who also edits the media pitching advice newsletter Get Featured, said that the experts had little relation to the story. Among those who responded to her request about car hire were an AI/SEO company, a graphic design company and a lighting business.
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“In an ideal world”. Well, yes, but before email, there really was only one way to get a quote from someone, and that was by phoning them up. So maybe that ideal world did exist. And there was plenty of pressure back then, honest.
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Alibaba, Tencent freeze AI tools during high-stakes China exam • Bloomberg via Yahoo
Luz Ding:
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China’s most popular AI chatbots like Alibaba’s Qwen have temporarily disabled functions including picture recognition, to prevent students from cheating during the country’s annual “gaokao” college entrance examinations.
Apps including Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Yuanbao and Moonshot’s Kimi suspended photo-recognition services during the hours when the multi-day exams take place across the country. Asked to explain, the chatbots responded: “To ensure the fairness of the college entrance examinations, this function cannot be used during the test period.”
China’s infamously rigorous “gaokao” is a rite of passage for teenagers across the nation, thought to shape the futures of millions of aspiring graduates. Students — and their parents — pull out the stops for any edge they can get, from extensive private tuition to, on occasion, attempts to cheat. To minimize disruption, examiners outlaw the use of devices during the hours-long tests.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen and ByteDance Ltd.’s Doubao still offered photo recognition as of Monday. But when asked to answer questions about a photo of a test paper, Qwen responded that the service was temporarily frozen during exam hours from June 7 to 10. Doubao said the picture uploaded was “not in compliance with rules.”
China lacks a widely adopted university application process like in the US, where students prove their qualifications through years of academic records, along with standardized tests and personal essays. For Chinese high-school seniors, the gaokao, held in June each year, is often the only way they can impress admissions officials. About 13.4 million students are taking part in this year’s exams.
The test is considered the most significant in the nation, especially for those from smaller cities and lower-income families that lack resources. A misstep may require another year in high school, or completely alter a teenager’s future.
The exam is also one of the most strictly controlled in China, to prevent cheating and ensure fairness. But fast-developing AI has posed new challenges for schools and regulators.
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Hard to imagine such a move ever working in the West. Note how China still values personal skills.
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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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