The sport of pickleball is rising fast in the US, and so are injuries related to it – mainly of the wrist. CC-licensed photo by Seattle Parks and Recreation on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Magic mushrooms, LSD, ketamine: the drugs that power Silicon Valley • WSJ
Kirsten Grind and Katherine Bindley:
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Elon Musk takes ketamine. Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics.
Routine drug use has moved from an after-hours activity squarely into corporate culture, leaving boards and business leaders to wrestle with their responsibilities for a workforce that frequently uses. At the vanguard are tech executives and employees who see psychedelics and similar substances, among them psilocybin, ketamine and LSD, as gateways to business breakthroughs.
“There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now,” said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is “the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on,” said Goldfield.
Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.
The account of Musk’s drug use comes from people who witnessed him use ketamine and others with direct knowledge of his use. Details about Brin’s drug use and the Founders Fund parties come from people familiar with them.
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Fairly sure they left one drug out, but anyway: I remember about 30 years ago all the talk was of “smart drugs” that would, well, you understand. Seems like that hasn’t happened. Instead it’s quite different things that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the 1960s.
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Google violated its standards in ad deals, research finds • WSJ
Patience Haggin:
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Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business.
Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page’s main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren’t skipped.
Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetization, among other violations.
Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal.
In a statement, Google said the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe.” The company said it has strict policies for the program that serves video ads on third-party sites.
“As part of our brand safety efforts, we regularly remove ads from partner sites that violate our policies and we’ll take any appropriate actions once the full report is shared with us,” the company said.
…Among the major brands whose Google video-ad placements weren’t in line with the promised standards were Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Samsung, Sephora, Macy’s, Disney+ and The Wall Street Journal, according to Adalytics. It also affected ads for government agencies, including Medicare, the U.S. Army, the Social Security Administration, and the New York City municipal government.
“CMS is concerned with reports of invalid ad placements by YouTube,” said a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
YouTube accounts for 8.3% of U.S. digital-video ad spending, according to research company Insider Intelligence. Marketers feel obligated to advertise on YouTube because of its size, several ad buyers said.
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Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT • The Guardian
Dan Milmo and agency:
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A US judge has fined two lawyers and a law firm $5,000 (£3,935) after fake citations generated by ChatGPT were submitted in a court filing.
A district judge in Manhattan ordered Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay the fine after fictitious legal research was used in an aviation injury claim.
Schwartz had admitted that ChatGPT, a chatbot that churns out plausible text responses to human prompts, invented six cases he referred to in a legal brief in a case against the Colombian airline Avianca.
The judge P Kevin Castel said in a written opinion there was nothing “inherently improper” about using artificial intelligence for assisting in legal work, but lawyers had to ensure their filings were accurate.
“Technological advances are commonplace and there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”
The judge said the lawyers and their firm “abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted nonexistent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”
Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said.
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Google killed its augmented-reality Iris smart glasses • Business Insider
Hugh Langley:
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Google killed off a project to build a pair of augmented-reality glasses it had been working on for several years.
The glasses, known internally by the codename Iris, were shelved earlier this year following layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s chief of augmented and virtual reality, according to three people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
The Verge first reported on the existence of Project Iris in January 2022, describing the device as resembling a pair of ski goggles. However, Google employees said the “ski goggles” were actually the foundations of a separate AR project that’s since been announced as a partner product with Samsung, while Iris was a series of devices more closely resembling eyeglasses.
Google planned to build and launch Iris as its own product, and it shored up talent through acquisitions. In 2020, the company announced it had purchased North, a Canadian startup that made AR glasses. An early version of Iris closely resembled North’s first device, the Focals, while a later version that Google publicly demoed had translation features.
Since shelving the Iris glasses, Google has focused on creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets. It’s building an Android XR platform for Samsung’s headset and has been working on a “micro XR” platform for glasses, a person familiar with the plan said.
Employees working on the “micro XR” software are using a prototyping platform known internally as Betty. One employee described Google’s new ambition as being the “Android for AR,” focusing on software rather than hardware.
Insiders say Google leaders kept changing the strategy for the Iris glasses when they were in development, which led to the team continually pivoting, frustrating many employees.
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Google Glass and now this. Google really is struggling to come up with hits in the hardware space.
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Pickleball injuries are skyrocketing across the country • Axios
Nathan Bomey:
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Pickleball injuries are creating $250m to $500m in medical costs annually, UBS analyst Andrew Mok estimated after assessing data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association and studies about the sport.
The pickleball-induced sprains, strains and fractures to wrists and legs are contributing to the spike in treatments that sent shares of health insurers plunging earlier this month.
80% of the costs are for outpatient treatment, while Medicare is picking up 85% of the tab, with more than 8 in 10 Pickleball patients over 60 years old, the UBS analyst estimates.
Roughly 22.3 million people are expected to play pickleball this year, up from 8.9 million in 2022 and 3.5 million in 2019, according to UBS.
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If you haven’t seen it, pickleball is like beach tennis, played with a hard hollow aerated ball and solid bats, and scored like badminton on a court of similar size (but much lower net). Tolerable if you’ve got nothing better to do.
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Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” • Data Colada
Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons:
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This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.
In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020). In the fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS). Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.
…Two summers ago, we published a post (Colada 98: .htm) about a study reported within a famous article on dishonesty (.htm). That study was a field experiment conducted at an auto insurance company (The Hartford). It was supervised by Dan Ariely, and it contains data that were fabricated. We don’t know for sure who fabricated those data, but we know for sure that none of Ariely’s co-authors – Shu, Gino, Mazar, or Bazerman – did it [1]. The paper has since been retracted (.htm).
That auto insurance field experiment was Study 3 in the paper.
It turns out that Study 1’s data were also tampered with…but by a different person.
That’s right: Two different people independently faked data for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.
…A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc.
Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like “First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc.” CalcChain is short for ‘calculation chain’.
…CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with!
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Years ago, this sort of detective work wouldn’t have been possible. Now: it’s available to anyone determined enough and who knows what they’re looking for.
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Apple finally breaks Android’s grip on Southeast Asia • Rest of World
Joan Aurelia Rumengan:
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Yuni Pulungan, a 28-year-old project manager at a nonprofit in Jakarta, always thought of iPhones as luxury devices — too expensive to ever consider seriously. But when the Android phone she had used since 2019 ran out of storage and the camera started to degrade, she began to mull switching to a higher-quality phone, one she’d be able to enjoy and use for years to come.
In April, after nearly a year of meticulous research and teetering back and forth, Pulungan finally cracked and bought an iPhone 13. She hasn’t looked back. “The phone is durable and the camera doesn’t shake when recording videos,” she told Rest of World. “The audio is also good.” The sting of the high cost — $798, more than double the average monthly salary in urban Indonesia — was made much less painful with a cashback deal from the e-commerce site she bought it from.
Pulungan is not alone in her appreciation for the iPhone. According to research agency Counterpoint, Apple’s iPhone shipments to Southeast Asia increased by 18% in the first three months of 2023 compared to the same period last year. In Indonesia and Vietnam especially, iPhone demand was strong, even as smartphones reached saturation point elsewhere across Southeast Asia.
…Le Xuan Chiew, Singapore-based analyst at technology research firm Canalys, told Rest of World the region’s youthful population is also helping Apple in the region.
“The middle class, which Apple traditionally targets, are grown-up consumers. Now [Apple] targets more Gen Z, more young people. In terms of target group, channel, there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Chiew.
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Interesting how once you have a saturated market, you create the opportunity for people to shift towards its premium end if you can keep the brand value and quality up.
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Canada’s Online News Act targets Facebook and Google • The New York Times
Mike Ives:
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The Canadian Parliament has passed a law that will require technology companies to pay domestic news outlets for linking to their articles, prompting the owner of Facebook and Instagram to say that it would pull news articles from both platforms in the country.
The law, passed on Thursday, is the latest salvo in a push by governments around the world to force big companies like Google and Facebook to pay for news that they share on their platforms — a campaign that the companies have resisted at virtually every turn.
With some caveats, the new Canadian law would force search engines and social media companies to engage in a bargaining process — and binding arbitration, if necessary — for licensing news content for their use.
The law, the Online News Act, was modeled after a similar one that passed in Australia two years ago. It was designed to “enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contribute to its sustainability,” according to an official summary. Exactly when the law would take effect was not immediately clear as of Friday morning.
…Mr. Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, suggested that he was not open to striking a compromise with tech companies over the Online News Act.
“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way,” he told reporters. “It’s not going to work.”
Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in regulations that govern the internet and e-commerce, has said the efforts could backfire. “It will disproportionately hurt smaller and independent media outlets and leave the field to poorer quality sources,” Professor Geist said. “Worst of all: It was totally predictable and avoidable.”
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The act doesn’t actually specify any per-link payments; that has to be worked out by a form of arbitration. I’d love to know what the amount is.
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RIP to my Pixel Fold, dead after four days • Ars Technica
Ron Amadeo:
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The phone sat on my desk while I wrote about it, and I would occasionally stop to poke the screen, take a screenshot, or open and close it. It was never dropped or exposed to a significant amount of grit, nor had it gone through the years of normal wear and tear that phones are expected to survive. This was the lightest possible usage of a phone, and it still broke.
The flexible OLED screen died after four days. The bottom 10 pixels of the Pixel Fold went dead first, forming a white line of 100% brightness pixels that blazed across the bottom of the screen. The entire left half of the foldable display stopped responding to touch, too, and an hour later, a white gradient started growing upward across the display.
Samsung, BOE, and pretty much every other company making foldable screens build these flexible OLEDs the same way. The OLED panel is covered in an “ultra thin glass” that’s thin and flexible enough to survive the folding process, though it’s not very durable. Because the glass can’t stand up to the slightest bit of damage, the whole display is covered in a protective plastic layer. This essentially kills the firm, slippery glass surface we’re all used to, but the interior glass layer provides some much-needed structure to what would otherwise be very squishy plastic.
This plastic layer is critical to the OLED’s survival, but it doesn’t stretch to the edges. Every company that builds these screens leaves a margin around the perimeter of the display where there is no plastic layer, just a raw, exposed OLED panel peeking out into the world. We would normally expect a foldable to break along the crease, where the screen sees the most stress. But mine died due to this exposed OLED gap.
The tiniest bit of something got in there, and when I closed the display, the pressure of the other display side was enough to puncture the OLED panel.
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As I said yesterday, foldables leave me cold. But they can leave their owners out of pocket. (OK, if that happened to someone in the normal course of events during the first year of ownership, it would get replaced for free. But it’s still an inconvenience that would also put you on edge for the future.)
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The Snowden files: where are they and where should they end up? • Electrospaces
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In order to protect the Snowden files, only brand new laptops with no connection to the internet are used to search, sort and read them. It’s not clear whether the files themselves are also stored on these laptop computers, or only on removable storage devices, like a thumb drive or an SD card.
According to Barton Gellman’s book Dark Mirror, the files he received from Snowden were stored on brand new laptops which had their USB ports sealed, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware removed and the batteries disconnected. The data on these laptops were encrypted, with the keys stored on memory cards which were also encrypted and were never in the same room except when in use. The laptops were stored in a big and heavy safe bolted to the floor of a windowless room with a high-security lock and a video camera in the hall outside. The Snowden archive was thus protected by four different credentials: door key, safe combination, digital key card, and passphrases. These credentials were divided among the reporting team members and no one but Gellman had all of them.*
In a 2013 Brazilian television report, Glenn Greenwald was seen using some thumb drives and a standard SD card while working with the Snowden documents.
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Sounds like the files are now more securely held than when they were originally collected. It’s pretty hard to say if they retain any value now, more than a decade after the first exposure. Snowden seems to think what remains is just bureaucratic.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 