Our Disappearing Shoreline

The cycle of land erosion

Notice in the image above that the sea doesn’t have to rise much for quite a bit of land behind it, the land it newly touches, to erode and collapse. As John Englander points out in this TED Talk (3:36):

It makes sense that every time sea level goes higher, the shoreline is going to move inland. But the ratio is surprising. For each foot of rise, the average global shoreline moves inland about 300 feet — the length of a football field.

Keep that ratio in mind. To answer our original question, one foot of sea level rise moves the shoreline inland by something like 300 feet, or more if you live in a low coastal zone like most of Florida. (...)

When Will We Start?

So no, we’re not safe during “modest” sea level rise. A rising sea level shouldn’t be counted in vertical inches and feet, but in horizontal feet, yards and miles, measured from the previous shoreline to where our towns and cities will be safe for the next 100 years or so.

How long will it take to effectively move New York City? Mumbai? Jakarta? Shanghai? San Diego? Forever, if the planning never starts.

by Thomas Neuburger, God's Spies |  Read more:

Image: Life cycle of a landslide on a bluff composed of sediment (modified from Kelley and others, 1989) via:

The Newest College Admissions Ploy

Paying to Make Your Teen a “Peer-Reviewed” Author

On a family trip to the Jersey Shore in the summer of 2021, Sophia’s go-to meal was the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich. The buns were toasty, the chicken was crispy and the fries didn’t spill from the bag.

Sophia was entering her sophomore year in prep school, but her parents were already thinking ahead to college. They paid to enroll her in an online service called Scholar Launch, whose programs start at $3,500. Scholar Launch, which started in 2019, connects high school students with mentors who work with them on research papers that can be published and enhance their college applications.

Publication “is the objective,” Scholar Launch says on its website. “We have numerous publication partners, all are peer-reviewed journals.”

The prospect appealed to Sophia. “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given” for college applicants, she said. “If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”

Sophia said she chose marketing as her field because it “sounded interesting.” She attended weekly group sessions with a Scholar Launch mentor, a marketing executive who also taught at an Ivy League business school, before working one-on-one with a teaching assistant. Assigned to analyze a company’s marketing strategy, she selected Chick-fil-A.

Sophia’s paper offered a glowing assessment. She credited Chick-fil-A as “responsible for the popularity of the chicken sandwich,” praised its fare as healthier than fast-food burgers, saluted its “humorous yet honest” slogan (a cow saying, “Eat mor chikin”) and admired its “family-friendly” attitude and “traditional beliefs,” exemplified by closing its restaurants on Sundays. Parts of her paper sounded like a customer endorsement (and she acknowledged to ProPublica that her marketing analysis could’ve been stronger). Neither too dry nor too juicy, the company’s signature sandwich “is the perfect blend to have me wanting more after every bite,” she wrote. “Just from the taste,” Chick-fil-A “is destined for success.”

Her heartfelt tribute to the chicken chain appeared on the website of a new online journal for high school research, the Scholarly Review. The publication touts its “thorough process of review” by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” but it also displays what are known as preprints. They aren’t publications “in the traditional sense” and aren’t vetted by Scholarly Review’s editorial board, according to Roger Worthington, its chair.

That preprint platform is where Sophia’s paper appeared. Now a 17-year-old high school junior, she said she wasn’t aware of the difference between the journal and the preprint platform, and she didn’t think the less prestigious placement would hurt her college chances: “It’s just important that there’s a link out there.” 

Sophia is preparing to apply to college at a time when the criteria for gaining entry are in flux. The Supreme Court appears poised to curtail race-conscious affirmative action. Grade inflation makes it harder to pick students based on GPA, since so many have A averages. And the SAT and ACT tests, long criticized for favoring white and wealthy students, have fallen out of fashion at many universities, which have made them optional or dropped them entirely.

As these differentiators recede and the number of applications soars, colleges are grappling with the latest pay-to-play maneuver that gives the rich an edge: published research papers. A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential. (...)

The programs serve at least 12,000 students a year worldwide. Most families are paying between $2,500 and $10,000 to improve their odds of getting into U.S. universities that accept as few as 1 in every 25 applicants. Some of the biggest services are located in China, and international students abound even in several U.S.-based programs.

The services pair high schoolers with academic mentors for 10-15 weeks to produce research papers. Online services typically shape the topic, direction and duration of the project, and urge students to complete and publish a paper regardless of how fruitful the exploration has been. “Publication specialists” then help steer the papers into a dizzying array of online journals and preprint platforms. Almost any high school paper can find an outlet. Alongside hardcore science papers are ones with titles like “The Willingness of Humans to Settle on Mars, and the Factors that Affect it,” “Social Media; Blessing Or Curse” and “Is Bitcoin A Blessing Or A Curse?”

“You’re teaching students to be cynical about research,” said Kent Anderson, past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing and former publishing director of the New England Journal of Medicine. “That’s the really corrosive part. ‘I can hire someone to do it. We can get it done, we can get it published, what’s the big deal?’” (...)

Online research services are an offshoot of the booming college-admissions-advising industry. They draw many of their students from the same affluent population that hires private counselors. Many families that are already paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for advice on essay writing and extracurricular activities pay thousands more for research help. Scholar Launch charges $3,500 for “junior” research programs and between $4,500 and $8,800 for advanced research, according to its website. (...)

Then there’s the question of credentials. Lumiere Education’s website has routinely identified mentors as Ph.D.s even when they don’t have a doctorate and described itself as “founded by Oxford and Harvard PhDs,” even though its founders, Dhruva Bhat and Stephen Turban, are pursuing doctorates. It’s “shorthand,” Turban said. “We’re not trying to deceive anyone.” After ProPublica questioned the practice, Lumiere changed mentors’ credentials on its website from “PhD” to “PhD student.”

Paid “mentors,” who are frequently doctoral students, play key roles in the process of generating papers by high schoolers. The job is “one of the most lucrative side hustles for graduate students,” as one Columbia Ph.D. candidate in political science put it. Another Ph.D. candidate, who mentored for two services, said that one paid her $200 an hour, and the other paid $150 — far more than the $25 an hour she earned as a teaching assistant in an Ivy League graduate course.

In some instances, the mentors seem to function as something more than advisers. Since high schoolers generally don’t arrive with a research topic, the mentor helps them choose it, and then may pitch in with writing, editing and scientific analysis.

by Daniel Golden, and Kunal Purohit, ProPublica | Read more:
Image: Rose Wong for ProPublica

A Big El Niño is Looming

How warm water in the Pacific shapes storms, droughts, and record heat around the world.

El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, and this year’s El Niño is poised to be a big one, sending shock waves into weather patterns around the world. It’s likely to set new heat records, energize rainfall in South America, fuel drought in Africa, and disrupt the global economy. It may already have helped fuel early-season heat waves in Asia this year.

“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement earlier this month. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. (...)

How does El Niño work?

Fishers off the coast of Ecuador and Peru coined the term El Niño in the 19th century to describe a warm water current that regularly built up along the west coast of South America around Christmas (“El Niño” means “the boy,” a reference to the Christ child.)

The warm water turned out to be part of a much larger complicated system connecting seas and skies all over the world. Scientists now know that the Pacific Ocean cycles between warm, neutral, and cool phases roughly every two to seven years, inducing changes in the ocean and in the atmosphere. This back-and-forth is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s “the strongest fluctuation of the climate system on the planet,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (You can read a more detailed explanation of El Niño’s mechanics here.)

The key thing to understand is that the Pacific Ocean is huge. Huuuuge. Huuuuuuuuge. And that’s just the surface area; the Pacific averages 13,000 feet in depth but can dip as low as 36,000 feet. Water isn’t just moving north, south, east, and west, but up and down. These currents are driven by wind as well as temperature and salt gradients.

Earth’s oceans also act as a giant thermal battery. They’ve absorbed upward of 90 percent of the warming humans have induced from burning fossil fuels, and the Pacific, at least, appears to be warming particularly fast.

All this adds up to a world-changing amount of energy packed into one big ocean.

During ENSO’s neutral phase, wind pushes warm water in the Pacific around the equator from east to west. This lets warm water pool near Indonesia and raises sea levels there by 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) above normal compared to the coast of South America. The warmer water near Asia evaporates more readily and fuels rainstorms there. And as surface waters get pushed away from South America, water from deeper in the ocean rises, bringing with it valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. This phenomenon is called upwelling, and it’s critical for nourishing sea life. About half the fish in the world are caught in upwelling zones.

When El Niño starts picking up, this engine shifts gears. The trade winds slow down and the warm water near Asia starts sloshing back eastward across the Pacific, reaching the coast of South America. The drift in warm water also moves evaporation and rain such that southeast Asia and Australia tend to get drier while Peru and Ecuador typically see more precipitation.

“It creates a lot of convection and a lot of thunderstorms in a part of the world that doesn’t always have that activity,” said Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA. “You release a lot of energy and a lot of heat into the atmosphere and this creates waves that propagate in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere symmetrically.”

These perturbations can then deflect weather patterns across the world. For instance, in the US, El Niño typically leads to less rainfall in the Pacific Northwest and more in the Southwest. But it’s one of several factors that influences the weather, making it tricky to anticipate just how it will play out in a given year. “It’s not always a one-to-one relationship,” Amaya said. (...)

This engine can also shift into reverse. Tradewinds blowing east to west across the Pacific get stronger, cooling the region around the equator, a phenomenon known as a La Niña. This tends to have a cooling effect over the whole planet.

What can we expect this year?

El Niño typically picks up over the summer and shows its strongest effects over the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Right now, forecasts drawing on ocean buoys, sensors, satellite measurements, and computer models show that a strong one is brewing as the eastern Pacific Ocean steadily warms up just below its surface.

“The vast majority ... are assuming that we’re going to have a big El Niño this winter,” said Amaya. “I think we’re definitely expecting to break global temperature records this year.”

Part of what’s making this so jarring is that ENSO is coming out of an unusually long La Niña phase. They typically last one to two years, but the world has been in one since 2020. “There’s only been three triple-dip La Niñas in the last 50 years: One in 1973 to 76, one from 1998 to 2001, and then this one,” said McPhaden. That has allowed more heat energy to accumulate in the ocean and may have helped cushion some of the warming due to climate change. However, the World Meteorological Organization noted that the past eight years were still the hottest on record.

by Umair Irfan , Vox | Read more:
Image: NOAA

Joe Walsh & Barnstorm

[ed. Why he ever hooked up with those loser Eagles, I'll never know. See also: Joe the guitar perfectionist: StarLicks Master Sessions with Joe Walsh.]

The Average American Millennial

* Meet the average American millennial, who has an $8,000 net worth, is delaying life milestones because of student-loan debt, and still relies on parents for money

"There's no way around it: The average American millennial is financially behind.

Faced with a high cost of living, staggering student-loan debt, and the fallout of the Great Recession, American millennials are trying to make ends meet in the midst of The Great American Affordability Crisis."

* Meet the average American millennial, who's a parent and homeowner with a net worth of $128,000 and hoping for student-debt relief

"Millennials are growing up.

The oldest of the generation, which includes anyone born between 1981 and 1996, is now past the age of 40. In recent years, many have checked off major life milestones including buying a home and having children, and some could even be on the verge of a midlife crisis. (...)

Despite these obstacles, the average millennial is faring better financially than they have in the past. And while some of this may simply be a byproduct of getting older — people tend to earn more over the course of their careers — some experts have argued that even compared to past generations, millennials are doing pretty well financially these days."

[ed. Those millennials are sure amazing. They've turned it all around in just three years! Both articles from Business Insider - March, 2020 and May, 2023. (h/t via: Twitter)]

In a Gift to Polluting Industries, Supreme Court Rolls Back Clean Water Act Protections

The vast majority of wetlands in the United States — more than 100 million acres — are no longer protected by the Clean Water Act, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Sackett v. EPA. Wetlands are critically important to clean drinking water and flood mitigation; they’re also effective at sequestering carbon and a boon to drought resilience, storing water during dry periods. But in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court brushed off peer-reviewed science and plain old common sense that you can’t protect the water downstream, which even the majority agreed is covered by the law, if you’re polluting it upstream.

The case was filed by a wealthy Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who were annoyed that they were required to get a special permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to build on their land because of its proximity to Priest Lake. The Sacketts’ land contains wetlands, but because the wetlands are separated from the lake by a road, they argued the permit was unnecessary. It’s almost certain they would have gotten the permit had they applied, but they opted to sue instead. The court took the Sacketts’ case as an opportunity to open up a broader discussion about what exactly the Clean Water Act is meant to protect, changing the law completely and removing protections from any wetland not immediately connected to a body of water.

Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.

“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”

In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.

“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.

It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said. 

by Amy Westervelt, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images
[ed. This is a huge deal - one that a variety of industries and special interest groups have been pushing for decades. Environmental destruction to follow (thanks again, Alito).]

Is Cybersecurity an Unsolvable Problem?

In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories.

Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments.

The "Morris Worm" is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.

With his Yale colleague Oona Hathaway, Shapiro co-authored a book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, a sweeping historical analysis of the laws of war that spans from Hugo Grotius, the early 17th century father of international law, all the way to 2014. That experience raised numerous questions about the future of warfare—namely, cyberwar and whether the same "rules" would apply. The topic seemed like a natural choice for his next book, particularly given Shapiro's background in computer science and coding.

Despite that background, "I honestly had no idea what to say about it," Shapiro told Ars. "I just found it all extremely confusing." He was then asked to co-teach a special course, "The Law and Technology of Cyber Conflict," with Hathaway and Yale's computer science department. But the equal mix of law students and computer science students trying to learn about two very different highly technical fields proved to be a challenging combination. "It was the worst class I've ever taught in my career," said Shapiro. "At any given time, half the class was bored and the other half was confused. I learned nothing from it, and nor did any of the students."

That experience goaded Shapiro to spend the next few years trying to crack that particular nut. He brushed up on C, x86 assembly code, and Linux and immersed himself in the history of hacking, achieving his first hack at the age of 52. But he also approached the issue from his field of expertise. "I'm a philosopher, so I like to go to first principles," he said. "But computer science is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." The result was Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.

The book is a lively, engaging read filled with fascinating stories and colorful characters: the infamous Bulgarian hacker known as Dark Avenger, whose identity is still unknown; Cameron LaCroix, a 16-year-old from south Boston notorious for hacking into Paris Hilton's Sidekick II in 2005; Paras Jha, a Rutgers student who designed the "Mirai botnet"—apparently to get out of a calculus exam—and nearly destroyed the Internet in 2016 when he hacked Minecraft; and of course, the titular Fancy Bear hack by Russian military intelligence that was so central to the 2016 presidential election. (Fun fact: Shapiro notes that John von Neumann "built a self-reproducing automaton in 1949, decades before any other hacker... [and] he wrote it without a computer.")

But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[ed. Personal privacy died a long time ago.]

Jane Madgwick, Swallocky  

via:

Encountering the High Arctic

How nature is revealed when you are most helpless.

“How would you like to go to the high Arctic?”

It was the National Geographic calling, and no one turned down Big Yellow. Not because the prose was great—it wasn’t—but because the money was, and they sent you places you would otherwise never go. Since I knew nothing about the Arctic, I put the editor off until I could do some reading: The sun doesn’t set from May to mid-August… The vastness of the area is difficult to imagine… If we fail to appreciate the challenges we can expect to meet with difficulties…

Daunting photographs of harsh botanical deserts full of nunataks (rocky peaks on glaciers), fluvial braids, hanging tributary valleys, and lichen fields. Ptarmigans exploding from snowbanks and white wolves casting along silt-laden rivers and fjords gouged out by glaciers. Narwhals with twisted tusks in mythic, inky seas, ghosted by white belugas and killer whales stalking you under black ice. Polar bears doing with you whatever they please.

I agreed to go. “We want you to write for the armchair traveler,” the editor said. “No politics, nothing fancy, strictly factual.”

He sent me to a resident expert in Washington, DC, who dreamily twisted his Salvador Dalí mustache. “It will be summer there, which means daylight all the time. And flowers—mountain avens, locoweed, poppies, bumblebees. Maybe even songbirds.” (...)

But no one at National Geographic seemed to know what I would need. The editor sent me down to the Geographic basement, full of old tenting, moldy sleeping bags, outdated frame backpacks. So for weeks I hounded clerks in Appalachian Outfitters, Hudson’s Bay, and other enablers of the wilderness-struck, lavishly spending the Society’s money for a down coat Michelin might have designed and a raucous little pack stove that would have to boil water for a hundred pounds of freeze-dried food. Ten thousand dollars went just for traveler’s checks. My editor didn’t even want me to think about buying a gun, but my contact in the Canadian interior department explained that a 12-gauge pump shotgun with a slug barrel was standard issue for anyone of their own in the Arctic. A friend in Virginia bought one for me, and I drove up to another friend’s house in Pennsylvania to practice with it.

Six white plastic buckets stand in a row on a freight platform at National Airport, scrawled over with Magic Marker hearts by my daughter Susanna to bring me luck. I collected them from Dunkin’ Donuts, washed out the smells of raspberry and chocolate mousse, and filled them with dehydrated lasagna, scrambled eggs, beef stroganoff, shrimp creole, all in foil. My interior frame pack holds an audio device the size of an aspirin tin for playing Pachelbel’s Canon, The Four Seasons, Patsy Cline. Also, a North Col sleeping bag, two pairs of gloves, a chamois shirt, a heavy wool sweater, wool trousers, goggles, binoculars, cook kit, fuel bottle, canteen, maps, a compass, a Buck knife, a Sierra cup, matches, parachute cord, Gortex rain gear, biodegradable toilet paper, insect repellent.

The ticket agent regards my shoal of utilitarian gear without enthusiasm. My jeans and corduroy jacket sharply contrast with the surrounding corporate tack. But I have a seat in first‑class—this is the old Geographic. I’ve just had a good night’s rest in Montreal, where I’ve been put up in a fancy hotel that sends up salmon and chardonnay on a trolley while my pack rests against flocked wallpaper: lip balm, antiseptic ointment, elastic bandage, moleskin, surgical blade, pemmican, suturing strips, tea bags, Hav‑A‑Wipes, morphine. I’m well provisioned, in great physical shape after working at it for a month, and scared.

Frobisher Bay’s radar dome beckons like a giant, teed‑up Titleist at the edge of a cerulean sea. This is the northeastern corner of the continent: sculpted gobs of melting glacier under white, desolate headlands, sunlight glinting off them in one continuous searing. Plumes of steam rise among a cluster of sheds and steel mesh nearby. The heavy equipment operators who got drunk as soon as we left Montreal noisily deplane. Out the window I see a coffin go into the hold, watched by an Inuit couple in matching Velour jogging suits, their soft, round faces passive. Then we are aloft again.

The plane’s bias is northwesterly, across an inky Arctic Sea, without the contracting longitudinal lines on the maps I have studied, all of which converge on the Pole. I am bound for Ellesmere Island, a vast orogeny still birthing after 300 million years, with an intermediary stop in the town of Resolute on Cornwallis Island under glaciated hills, the adjacent sea littered with ice shards. Distant cliffs levitate and then are gone, then back again, shimmering in the thermals.  (...)

The oversized tires on the stubby Twin Otter transport plane have been cut down on a lathe to provide the soft-skinned buoyancy necessary for landing on tussocks. The pilot and co-pilot grip the overhead throttle as we accelerate, the big droning De Havilland engines changing tone once we’re in the air. I can smell the fuel in fifty-gallon barrels stowed behind my seat.

We fly over a pink smear on the sea ice below where a seal was recently killed by a polar bear—Ursus arcticus. I’ve already heard too many stories about the polars: an archeologist on Admiralty Inlet pulled by his head from his sleeping bag, two roughnecks on a drilling rig in the Beaufort Sea walking out onto the metal deck to relieve themselves and a bear crouching in the darkness breaking the neck of one with a single blow. Twice I’ve been told that the last thing you see in a blizzard is a black tennis ball, which is, in fact, the polar bear’s nose. 

by James Conaway, The Hedgehog |  Read more:

Image: BlueIce64 via reddit

[ed. "How nature is revealed when you are most helpless." And completely alone.]

Tina Turner

via:

[ed. She did it her way.]

His Enormous Philanthropy

One-click on a fascinator, readers, because there’s a mega-wedding in the offing. Congratulations to Mr Jeff Bezos, Amazon kajillionaire, and Ms Lauren Sánchez, bralette-wearing philanthropist/immense force of nature. Although news of the couple’s engagement seeped out this week after Lauren was spotted wearing a diamond ring in the south of France, Jeff has yet to release a formal announcement. So let’s just draft one for him: “Ladies and gents, she said Proceed to Checkout.”

Now look, you already know Jeff. World’s third-richest man. Went to space. Looks like he should be appearing above a daytime TV caption reading “I make £40 a month as a Vin Diesel escort and my fiancee loves it!” But are you fully across Lauren? I’ll be honest: we haven’t met. But from the outside looking in, my nose pressed against the glass of Google Images, I simply cannot get enough of this Nietzschean superwoman, the final form of the East German silicon-doping programme, who has missile-titted her way into my consciousness and now captivates me twice weekly with her insouciance, her outfits, and her observations on just how difficult philanthropy is to do. Seriously: no one has ever thought harder about how to help poors while mooching round a Grand Prix enclosure with some kind of You Could Never Access All My Areas lanyard dangling from her belt loop. (...)

Anyway, the now-affianced Bezos and Sánchez are currently touring Europe on Jeff’s new yacht, Koru, a 417ft three-master/three-peniser that is the largest such vessel ever built. To put things into perspective, this yacht is so big it has its own yacht – a 246ft “support vessel”, which lugs around boring little things like the helicopter pad and reportedly some kind of personal submarine. And this week, for the first time, we saw Koru’s figurehead. Ships’ figureheads have traditionally come in various forms, of course: mermaids, Neptunes, angels – and now, Fox-News-anchor-in-transparent-singlet-with-erect-nipples. Suck on it, history! Our century is so the best. The Bezos yacht figurehead is fingering a large pendant necklace, and appears to be about to say something. “Draw me like one of your French girls”? Either way, the vast boat it adorns only recently left the shipyard, hopefully while some urchin child on the dock cackled: “Yeah but you’ll never be cool, will you, Bezos – YOU’LL NEVER BE COOL!”

But will the Amazon boss ever, really, even be a genuine philanthropist? We do seem to be at the stage of human intellectual decay where anyone who is a multibillionaire is also automatically described as a “philanthropist”, when in many cases “misanthropist” would be more supported by the evidence. For instance, I’m forever seeing Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed described as a philanthropist. Is he the one who has at least two of his children missing/kidnapped at any given moment? Honestly, so what if he’s built a sanitation programme? I should hope so.

Back to Lauren, though, who last year declared: “I’m immersing myself in philanthropy and strategic giving.” Which sounds a lot more fun than Amazon warehouse workers immersing themselves in strategic peeing-in-bottles. Yet it turns out this stuff is hard. “You want to give money away,” claimed Lauren. “You want to know that it’s helping people and it’s going to continue to help people, and that it’s going to the right places. You could give it not-strategically. You can just give it away! But, we take it seriously.” Mm. It feels like they’ve thought of everything except Amazon paying tax like normal businesses.

by Marina Hyde, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Clive Mason/Formula 1/Getty Images

Haters Will Say It’s Photoshopped

Adobe is set to give new meaning to the act of photoshopping an image.

Starting this week, the company will begin adding features to the popular image-editing program that let users alter images with AI. The new generative fill tool can replace objects or backgrounds with imagery produced from a text prompt in a way that’s meant to blend seamlessly with the rest of the image.

Haters Will Say It’s Photoshopped (Tech Brew)

Frank Zappa

[ed. Charva...Charva...I loved you through and through. I loved you since in grammar school when we were sniffing glue...]

Two Decades of Prison Did Not Prepare Me for the Horrors of County Jail

When I was 22 years old, I committed robbery and murder. I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 45 years, of which I have so far served two decades. During that time, I’ve experienced the squalor and dangerous conditions of various state prisons. I’ve lived in a crumbling penitentiary built in the 1800s. I’ve been put in isolation for weeks on end because of Covid exposure and infection. Still, I was not prepared for what I found when I was transferred to a county jail for two weeks last December.

Along with people serving short sentences for relatively minor offenses, jails house people who are awaiting trial and either didn’t get bail or simply couldn’t pay it — people, that is, who have not been convicted of any crime.

Despite that fact, conditions in these facilities are often worse, and sometimes much worse, than those in the prisons where people who are convicted of the worst crimes are confined. Jails throw people together in overcrowded units that may be controlled by the most violent people in the room. Like prisons, jails house a disproportionate number of people experiencing addiction or chronic health conditions but jails lack the resources to treat them and adequate staffing overall. Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University who focuses on policing and criminal justice reform, told me that jails “regularly rely on even harsher conditions of confinement” than prisons do.

As a prison writer, journalist and criminal justice activist, I try to communicate to anyone who will listen that the vast majority of incarcerated people will eventually return to their communities. The trauma they suffer on the inside comes with them. Just as a very short time in solitary confinement can cause lasting harm, weeks or months in county jail can have a huge negative impact on people’s lives, even after they are released. What happens in jails doesn’t stay in jails.

Ethan Frenchman, a lawyer in Washington who advocates on behalf of people with disabilities in jails, told me that while the nation’s roughly 1,500 state prisons are operated or overseen by 50 states, the 3,000 or so jails “are operated by who knows how many hundreds or thousands of different jurisdictions,” making it extremely hard to get reliable information about what goes on there, or to enforce any kind of accountability.

One data point is unmistakable: suicide rates. Suicides are the leading cause of death in jails, where they occur at a much higher rate than in prisons. Big city jails, like the complex on Rikers Island, are infamous for violence, neglect and overcrowding, but they are not outliers. In fact, research by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that suicide rates in the nation’s smallest jails were more than six times as high as those in the largest. (...)

Conditions in county jails are bad not just for people suffering from mental illnesses. Prisoners there are often given so little food that they are hungry all the time and must buy more in the commissary. My meals in prison consist of larger portions and far more fruits and vegetables than my meals in jail. To my surprise, I even found myself missing the flavors and variety of prison food. A prisoner in Maine summed up a typical meal in a county jail well when he asked a reporter to “consider eating ground-up gym mat with a little bit of seasoning.” But jail commissaries are so expensive that many people who can’t afford bail also can’t afford anything sold in them. In jail, I saw people beat each other up over commissary food.

Twenty-four packets of Top Ramen noodles that cost $6 on Amazon and just under $8 in my Washington State prison cost $26.40 in the Pierce County Jail’s commissary while I was incarcerated there. A small bag of freeze-dried coffee that costs $3.34 in state prison costs almost $13 in the county jail.

Phone calls to our loved ones, which cost just over a dollar for 20 minutes at a Washington State prison, cost nearly $4 from the county jail. An investigation by the Prison Policy Initiative found that in 20 states, phone calls from jails were at least three times as expensive as calls from state prisons. The calls I made from state prison and the county jail are managed by the same company, Securus Technologies, and I see no legitimate reason they should be three times as expensive at one facility. 

by Christopher Blackwell, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Robert Gumpert/Redux

via:

Netflix Might Ruin Password Sharing For Everyone

Netflix is betting that a password-sharing crackdown will reverse its dwindling revenue and wavering subscriber count. The company has historically never enforced its policy of one account per household. Now, by making members pay to share their subscriptions with people who live in other homes, Netflix will cash in on all those users they’ve been missing out on for all these years, right?

Well, it might not be that simple.

Netflix — where co-founder and now-former CEO Reed Hastings once said “password sharing is something you have to learn to live with” — told investors last year that password sharing contributed to the streamer’s first loss in subscribers in over a decade. After months of testing throughout Latin and Central America, Netflix finally brought paid sharing to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and now, the US. Under its new rules, Netflix wants users to pay an extra $7.99 per month to let just one person outside their household access their subscription.

Many questions remain about how Netflix will actually implement this — and whether it will actually help increase the company’s bottom line. Netflix has warned its investors of a “cancel reaction” several times in the past when talking about paid sharing, meaning that some people will cancel their subscriptions in response to the rollout in their locations. It has already seen that kind of reaction in Spain, where data from the analytics group Kantar found that the streamer lost 1 million users following the crackdown.

But to Netflix execs, the “improved overall revenue” will ultimately outweigh those lost subscriptions. (...)

While Netflix’s $15.49 per month Standard plan lets you watch Netflix on two devices at a time, the $19.99 per month Premium plan allows up to four simultaneous viewers. The shift toward password sharing could mean that some users will opt to go for the $9.99 per month Basic plan instead of canceling their subscription, which allows users to watch Netflix on just one device at a time. This potential trend could deal a blow to Netflix’s average revenue per user (ARPU), which sat at $16.18 in its last earnings report. “The cancellations will hurt, but the downgrades will hurt as well because Netflix can’t make that up in advertising,” Rayburn explains.

Whether or not paid sharing ends up hurting Netflix’s balance sheet, it could have huge implications for the entire streaming industry. Other companies, like Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount, are likely looking to see how consumers respond to Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown. If all goes well, other services might want to follow suit, similar to the way we saw several streamers hop on the price hike bandwagon last year.

by Emma Roth, The Verge |  Read more:
Image: Nick Barclay/The Verge

[ed. Seems like a desperation move. The current streaming system is unsustainable and will probably go the way of most big business these days - consolidation around a few major players.] 

There Is No A.I.

There are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.

The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.

If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration. (...)

Many of the uses of A.I. that I like rest on advantages we gain when computers get less rigid. Digital stuff as we have known it has a brittle quality that forces people to conform to it, rather than assess it. We’ve all endured the agony of watching some poor soul at a doctor’s office struggle to do the expected thing on a front-desk screen. The face contorts; humanity is undermined. The need to conform to digital designs has created an ambient expectation of human subservience. A positive spin on A.I. is that it might spell the end of this torture, if we use it well. We can now imagine a Web site that reformulates itself on the fly for someone who is color-blind, say, or a site that tailors itself to someone’s particular cognitive abilities and styles. A humanist like me wants people to have more control, rather than be overly influenced or guided by technology. Flexibility may give us back some agency.

Still, despite these possible upsides, it’s more than reasonable to worry that the new technology will push us around in ways we don’t like or understand. Recently, some friends of mine circulated a petition asking for a pause on the most ambitious A.I. development. The idea was that we’d work on policy during the pause. The petition was signed by some in our community but not others. I found the notion too hazy—what level of progress would mean that the pause could end? Every week, I receive new but always vague mission statements from organizations seeking to initiate processes to set A.I. policy.

These efforts are well intentioned, but they seem hopeless to me. For years, I worked on the E.U.’s privacy policies, and I came to realize that we don’t know what privacy is. It’s a term we use every day, and it can make sense in context, but we can’t nail it down well enough to generalize. The closest we have come to a definition of privacy is probably “the right to be left alone,” but that seems quaint in an age when we are constantly dependent on digital services. In the context of A.I., “the right to not be manipulated by computation” seems almost correct, but doesn’t quite say everything we’d like it to.

A.I.-policy conversations are dominated by terms like “alignment” (is what an A.I. “wants” aligned with what humans want?), “safety” (can we foresee guardrails that will foil a bad A.I.?), and “fairness” (can we forestall all the ways a program might treat certain people with disfavor?). The community has certainly accomplished much good by pursuing these ideas, but that hasn’t quelled our fears. We end up motivating people to try to circumvent the vague protections we set up. Even though the protections do help, the whole thing becomes a game—like trying to outwit a sneaky genie. The result is that the A.I.-research community communicates the warning that their creations might still kill all of humanity soon, while proposing ever more urgent, but turgid, deliberative processes.

Recently, I tried an informal experiment, calling colleagues and asking them if there’s anything specific on which we can all seem to agree. I’ve found that there is a foundation of agreement. We all seem to agree that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.

How can all this be done? There is also near-unanimity, I find, that the black-box nature of our current A.I. tools must end. The systems must be made more transparent. We need to get better at saying what is going on inside them and why. This won’t be easy. The problem is that the large-model A.I. systems we are talking about aren’t made of explicit ideas. There is no definite representation of what the system “wants,” no label for when it is doing a particular thing, like manipulating a person. There is only a giant ocean of jello—a vast mathematical mixing. A writers’-rights group has proposed that real human authors be paid in full when tools like GPT are used in the scriptwriting process; after all, the system is drawing on scripts that real people have made. But when we use A.I. to produce film clips, and potentially whole movies, there won’t necessarily be a screenwriting phase. A movie might be produced that appears to have a script, soundtrack, and so on, but it will have been calculated into existence as a whole. Similarly, no sketch precedes the generation of a painting from an illustration A.I. Attempting to open the black box by making a system spit out otherwise unnecessary items like scripts, sketches, or intentions will involve building another black box to interpret the first—an infinite regress.

At the same time, it’s not true that the interior of a big model has to be a trackless wilderness. We may not know what an “idea” is from a formal, computational point of view, but there could be tracks made not of ideas but of people. At some point in the past, a real person created an illustration that was input as data into the model, and, in combination with contributions from other people, this was transformed into a fresh image. Big-model A.I. is made of people—and the way to open the black box is to reveal them.

This concept, which I’ve contributed to developing, is usually called “data dignity.” It appeared, long before the rise of big-model “A.I.,” as an alternative to the familiar arrangement in which people give their data for free in exchange for free services, such as internet searches or social networking. Data dignity is sometimes known as “data as labor” or “plurality research.” The familiar arrangement has turned out to have a dark side: because of “network effects,” a few platforms take over, eliminating smaller players, like local newspapers. Worse, since the immediate online experience is supposed to be free, the only remaining business is the hawking of influence. Users experience what seems to be a communitarian paradise, but they are targeted by stealthy and addictive algorithms that make people vain, irritable, and paranoid.

In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create, even when it is filtered and recombined through big models, and tech hubs would earn fees for facilitating things that people want to do. Some people are horrified by the idea of capitalism online, but this would be a more honest capitalism. The familiar “free” arrangement has been a disaster.

One of the reasons the tech community worries that A.I. could be an existential threat is that it could be used to toy with people, just as the previous wave of digital technologies have been. Given the power and potential reach of these new systems, it’s not unreasonable to fear extinction as a possible result. Since that danger is widely recognized, the arrival of big-model A.I. could be an occasion to reformat the tech industry for the better.

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker
[ed. Perhaps, but with the CIA, Pentagon and other international defense agencies deeply involved (and charging full speed ahead) I'm not too optimistic. See also: Whose Planet Are We On? (TomDispatch):

"Still, let’s not forget that AI was created by those of us with LTAI [ed. less than artificial intelligence]. If now left to its own devices (with, of course, a helping hand from the powers that be), it seems reasonable to assume that it will, in some way, essentially repeat the human experience. In fact, consider that a guarantee of sorts. That means it will create beauty and wonder and — yes! — horror beyond compare (and perhaps even more efficiently so). Lest you doubt that, just consider which part of humanity already seems the most intent on pushing artificial intelligence to its limits.

Yes, across the planet, departments of “defense” are pouring money into AI research and development, especially the creation of unmanned autonomous vehicles (think: killer robots) and weapons systems of various kinds, as Michael Klare pointed out recently at TomDispatch when it comes to the Pentagon. In fact, it shouldn’t shock you to know that five years ago (yes, five whole years!), the Pentagon was significantly ahead of the game in creating a Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to, as the New York Times put it, “explore the use of artificial intelligence in combat.” There, it might, in the end — and “end” is certainly an operative word here — speed up battlefield action in such a way that we could truly be entering unknown territory. We could, in fact, be entering a realm in which human intelligence in wartime decision-making becomes, at best, a sideline activity. (...)

The Pentagon, however, instantly responded to that call this way, as David Sanger reported in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials, speaking at technology forums, said they thought the idea of a six-month pause in developing the next generations of ChatGPT and similar software was a bad idea: The Chinese won’t wait, and neither will the Russians.” So, full-speed ahead and skip any international attempts to slow down or control the development of the most devastating aspects of AI!"

[ed. Last quote is a winner. After thousands of years of war, nuanced reasoning still isn't one of humanity's strong points.]

The Cowsills

[ed. Once really popular. See also: The Cowsills: The Heartbreaking Reason Why They Suddenly Disappeared (ed. hint: bad dad manager).

Glen Campbell

[ed. See also: Why THIS Is The Greatest Country Song; and, Wichita Lineman | The greatest song ever? | Guitar Lesson (YouTube).]

Hibernation Artificially Triggered in Breakthrough

In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses.

The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats – animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated.

“If this proves feasible in humans, we could envision astronauts wearing a helmet-like device designed to target the hypothalamus region for inducing a hypothermia and hypometabolism state,” said Hong Chen, an associate professor at Washington University in St Louis, who led the work.

The team first identified a specific group of neurons in a deep brain region called the hypothalamus preoptic area, which were found to be involved in regulating body temperature and metabolism during hibernation. They showed that, in mice, these neurons could be artificially activated using ultrasound, delivered non-invasively through a helmet.

When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3C for about one hour. The mice’s metabolism also shifted from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.

The scientists also developed an automatic closed-loop feedback system that delivered an ultrasound pulse to keep the mice in the induced torpor if they showed signs of warming up. This allowed the mice to be kept at 33C in the hibernation-like state for 24 hours. When the ultrasound system was switched off, they woke up again.

The experiments, described in the journal Nature Metabolism, showed that the same device worked in rats, which had a 1C drop in core body temperature when the same brain region was targeted. Chen said the result was “surprising and fascinating” and the team planned to test the technique in larger animals.

by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

[ed. Amazing it's so straightforward and non-invasive.]