>The repeated emphasis on “I,” instead of “we,” embodies a defining characteristic of current startup culture, one that has plagued the tech sector. These companies, the world has been told, aren’t simply run by chief executives or entrepreneurs – they are managed by founders. And founders are very special people who should not be questioned.
>
>Last year, Michele Romanow, Clearco’s co-founder, filmed promotional videos dubbed “Founder Diaries.” In one she declares that it is her life’s work to protect her breed. “If I can do anything in this world,” she says, “it is to help and defend founders, because they ultimately build the world we want to believe in.”
>
>Entrepreneurs, of course, deserve some praise. It is scary to venture out on your own, especially when the statistics show the vast majority of startups fail. Economic growth is also becoming more dependent on fresh ideas. In Canada, the oil and gas sector has been a major engine of gross domestic product for decades, but the world is moving away from fossil fuels.
>
>Yet the fawning over founders has become obscene. Even though cult-like admiration has deep roots in the tech sector, worship was once reserved for true visionaries such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Somehow it was co-opted by oodles of entrepreneurs over the past five years – and turned truly perverse during the pandemic. Even Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms, was seduced by FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
>
>The excessive praise is particularly glaring now that so many companies are coming to grips with reality in a world of normal interest rates. Ms. Romanow stepped down as CEO of Clearco earlier this month after the company announced its second round of deep job cuts in six months. The new CEO, a U.S. finance-industry veteran, will try to turn Clearco around.
>
>Every business cycle has its alleged geniuses. The 1980s were dominated by junk bond specialists, the nineties by investment bankers, the aughts by hedge fund mangers. Eventually, they lose some, or all, of their glory. Many of the megamergers concocted by investment bankers blew up, and many hedge fund managers struggled to outperform the broader market for more than a few years. Founders, who personified the past decade, are facing their own comeuppance now.
>
>With some luck, a prolonged rout will humble them. And in the aftermath, a much healthier ecosystem may emerge, because entrepreneurs will refocus on building quality companies.
>
>...
>
>Because startups, and particularly software startups, became so sexy, it was hard to tell what was truly motivating founders any more – the experience or the money.
>
>Does it mean we’ve been building some bad businesses? “I would argue there’s some real truth to that,” Mr. Bartha said. After selling eCompliance in 2019, he launched GoodCapital, which backs founders who try to solve what he describes as “real world problems.”
>
>This theme – using the entrepreneurial spirit to make life better – is having a bit of a renaissance. It’s still early days, but even Mr. Suster is hopeful. For years he has ranted about how the goal of attaining unicorn status – a billion-dollar valuation on paper – destroyed so much of the good that startups can do. “Instead of growing revenue and holding down costs and building great company cultures, the market chased valuation validation,” he reiterated in a post last month.
>
>Lately, though, he believes we’re getting back to building “real businesses.”

It will be interesting to see what directions business, and in particular startup culture will take going forwards.

>The oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) is a staple of many kinds of cuisine, prized for its mild flavors and a scent vaguely hinting at anise. These cream-colored mushrooms are also one of several types of carnivorous fungi that prey on nematodes (roundworms) in particular. The mushrooms have evolved a novel mechanism for paralyzing and killing its nematode prey: a toxin contained within lollipop-like structures called toxocysts that, when emitted, cause widespread cell death in roundworms within minutes. Scientists have now identified the specific volatile organic compound responsible for this effect, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. > >Carnivorous fungi like the oyster mushroom feed on nematodes because these little creatures are plentiful in soil and provide a handy protein source. Different species have evolved various mechanisms for hunting and consuming their prey. For instance, oomycetes are fungus-like organisms that send out "hunter cells" to search for nematodes. Once they find them, they form cysts near the mouth or anus of the roundworms and then inject themselves into the worms to attack the internal organs. Another group of oomycetes uses cells that behave like prey-seeking harpoons, injecting the fungal spores into the worm to seal its fate. > >Other fungi produce spores with irritating shapes like stickles or stilettos. The nematodes swallow the spores, which get caught in the esophagus and germinate by puncturing the worm's gut. There are sticky branch-like structures that act like superglue; death collars that detach when nematodes swim through them, injecting themselves into the worms; and a dozen or so fungal species employ snares that constrict in under a second, squeezing the nematodes to death. > >The oyster mushroom eschews these physical traps in favor of a chemical mechanism. P. ostreatus is what's known as a "wood rotter" that targets dead trees, but wood is relatively poor in protein. Its long branching filaments (called hyphae) are the part of the 'shroom that grows into the rotting wood. Those hyphae are home to the toxocysts. When nematodes encounter the toxocysts, the cysts burst, and the nematodes typically become paralyzed and die within minutes. Once the prey is dead, the hyphae grow into the nematode bodies, dissolving the contents and absorbing the slurry for the nutrients. > >... > >But Lee et al. could not identify the specific toxins responsible for the effect, though they did note that the oyster mushroom's chemical mechanism was distinct from the nematicides currently used to control nematode populations. For the new study, Lee and co-authors used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to do just that. The first version of the experiment tested a vial sample containing just the culture medium and glass beads. A second version tested a vial sample containing P. ostreatus that had been cultured for two to three weeks. The third version was a combination of the first two, testing a vial sample that contained both cultured P. ostreatus and glass beads. > >The culprit: a volatile ketone called 3-octanone, one of several naturally occurring volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that fungi use for communication. It seems 3-octanone also serves as a potent nematode-killing mechanism. Exposing four species of nematode to 3-octanone triggered the telltale massive (and fatal) influx of calcium ions into nerve and muscle cells. The dosage is critical, per the authors. Low dosages are a repellant to slugs and snails, but high dosages are fatal. The same is true for nematodes. A high concentration of more than 50 percent of 3-octanone is required to trigger the rapid paralysis and widespread cell death. The team also induced thousands of random genetic mutations in the fungus. Those mutants that didn't develop toxocysts on their hyphae were no longer toxic to the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

Some super interesting mycological research here on carnivorous fungi and a chemical mechanism that is used in lieu of physical ones.

A direct link to the journal for those who are interested:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2800490

Key Points:

>Question Does body weight modify metabolism and response to vitamin D supplementation?
>
>Findings In this cohort study, a subset including 16515 participants of the VITAL randomized clinical trial, established and novel vitamin D serum metabolite levels were on average lower at higher body mass index. Supplementation increased vitamin D levels less over 2 years at higher body mass index.
>
>Meaning Previous trials observed reduced efficacy of vitamin D supplementation for outcomes of cancer, diabetes, and others, in subsets of participants with higher body mass index; the findings of this cohort study suggest this may be due to a blunted metabolism and internal dose at higher body weights.

From the article:

>The study is a reanalysis of the VITAL trial, a large-scale project that tested whether proactively taking vitamin D or marine omega-3 supplements could reduce older people’s risk of developing cancer and cardiovascular disease. The randomized, placebo-controlled trial was led by researchers from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, which is affiliated with Harvard University. It overall found no significant effect from either type of supplementation on these outcomes. But some data also indicated that vitamin D supplementation was associated with benefits in those with a BMI lower than 25 (BMI between 18.5 to 25 is considered “normal”), specifically a smaller risk of developing cancer and autoimmune disease, as well as a lower cancer mortality. > >To better understand this link, some of the same researchers decided to study blood samples taken from over 16,000 volunteers over the age of 50 involved in the trial. These samples allowed them to look at people’s total vitamin D levels as well as other biomarkers of vitamin D, like metabolic byproducts and calcium, before the study began. About 2,700 of these volunteers also came back for follow-up blood tests two years later. > >The team found that people’s levels of vitamin D and these biomarkers generally increased following supplementation, no matter their BMI. But this increase was significantly less pronounced in those with a BMI over 25, the threshold for overweight and obesity. This dampening effect was also seen in people who had low levels of vitamin D at baseline, meaning those who would experience the greatest benefit from supplementation. The team’s findings were published Tuesday in JAMA Network Open. > >“We observed striking differences after two years, indicating a blunted response to vitamin D supplementation with higher BMI,” said study author Deirdre Tobias, an associate epidemiologist in Brigham’s Division of Preventive Medicine, in a statement from Harvard. “This may have implications clinically and potentially explain some of the observed differences in the effectiveness of vitamin D supplementation by obesity status.”

These are some interesting results, and it's good that researchers went back to look again at the data in this study. Perhaps with more research in this area, weight-based guidelines for dosage could be developed subsequently.

>The company claims to have granular details on more than 2.5 billion people across 62 different countries. The chances that Acxiom knows a whole lot about you, reader, are good. > >In many respects, data brokering is a shadowy enterprise. The industry mostly operates in quiet business deals the public never hears about, especially smaller firms that engage with data on particularly sensitive subjects. Compared to other parts of the tech industry, data brokers face little scrutiny from regulators, and in large part they evade attention from the media. > >You almost never directly interact with a company like Acxiom, but its operation intersects with your life on a near constant basis through a byzantine pipeline of data exchanges. Acxiom is in the business of identity, helping other companies figure out who you are, what you’re like, and how you might be persuaded to spend money. Got a list of a list of 50,000 of your customers’ names? Acxiom can tell you more about them. Want to find the perfect audience for your next ad campaign—perhaps people who’ve gone through bankruptcy or Latino families that spend a lot on healthcare? Acxiom knows where to look. > >Though Engelgau’s business understands so much about so many people, most people know very little about Acxiom. Engelgau offered to sit down for an interview with Gizmodo to offer a look at one of the least understood corners of the digital economy.

This interview seems to serve as a decent introduction into the world of data brokers for those who are unfamiliar, though there also seems to be a dose of self-promotion and justification within as well. It's good that he talks about the standards they have for privacy and not doing harm with their data, but as a whole, the industry is far shadier than that. Regulation of data collection/analytics would be something that might help to bring some accountability to this sector.

From the Abstract:

>Lead-formulated aviation gasoline (avgas) is the primary source of lead emissions in the United States today, consumed by over 170,000 piston-engine aircraft (PEA). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that four million people reside within 500m of a PEA-servicing airport. The disposition of avgas around such airports may be an independent source of child lead exposure. We analyze over 14,000 blood lead samples of children (≤5 y of age) residing near one such airport—Reid-Hillview Airport (RHV) in Santa Clara County, California. Across an ensemble of tests, we find that the blood lead levels (BLLs) of sampled children increase in proximity to RHV, are higher among children east and predominantly downwind of the airport, and increase with the volume of PEA traffic and quantities of avgas sold at the airport. The BLLs of airport-proximate children are especially responsive to an increase in PEA traffic, increasing by about 0.72 μg/dL under periods of maximum PEA traffic. We also observe a significant reduction in child BLLs from a series of pandemic-related interventions in Santa Clara County that contracted PEA traffic at the airport. Finally, we find that children’s BLLs increase with measured concentrations of atmospheric lead at the airport. In support of the scientific adjudication of the EPAs recently announced endangerment finding, this in-depth case study indicates that the deposition of avgas significantly elevates the BLLs of at-risk children.

It's unfortunate that a full switch from leaded gasoline in all its forms hasn't been implemented since we've understood the dangers over a generation ago. Industry convenience should not trump public health and yet it occurs on a regular basis.

>The idea of an open web where actors use common standards to communicate is as old as, well, the web. "The dreams of the 90s are alive in the Fediverse," Lemmer-Webber told me.
>
>In the late '00s, there were more than enough siloed, incompatible networking and sharing systems like Boxee, Flickr, Brightkite, Last.fm, Flux, Ma.gnolia, Windows Live, Foursquare, Facebook, and many others we loved, hated, forgot about, or wish we could forget about. Various independent efforts to standardize interoperation across silos generally coalesced into the Activity Streams v1 standard.
>
>Both the original Activity Streams standard, and the current W3C Activity Streams 2.0 standard used by Mastodon and friends, offer a grammar for expressing things a user might do, like "create a post" or "like👍 a post with a given ID" or "request to befriend a certain user." The vocabulary one would use with this grammar is split into its own sub-standard, the Activity Vocabulary.
>
>Now that we have a way to express a person's stream of thought and action in JSON blobs, where do all these streams go? The ActivityPub standard is an actor-based model which specifies that servers should have a profile for each actor providing a universal resource indicator (URI) for each actor's inbox and outbox. Actors can send a GET request to their own inbox to see what the actors they follow have been posting, or they can GET another actor's outbox to see what that specific actor has been posting. A POST request to a friend's inbox places a message there; a POST request to the user's own outbox posts messages for all (with the right permissions). The standard specifies that these various in- and outboxes hold activities in sequential order, much like our familiar social media timelines.
>
>...
>
>Here we have the vision of the Fediverse: a set of ActivityPub nodes, scattered across the globe, all speaking a common language. Mastodon is one of many efforts to implement the inboxes and outboxes of the ActivityPub standard. There are dozens of others, ranging from other microblogging platforms ("It's like Mastodon, but...") to an ActivityPub server that runs a chess club.
>
>In theory, they all intercommunicate; in practice, not so much. The sources of incompatibility stem from several issues, from imperfections in the standard to questions of how online communities should form to efforts to reach beyond the standard post/comment/follow format of typical social networks. > >... > >What's next? The Fediverse may remain a host of small hosts. But there are economies of scale. In the federation model, a small, ragtag community sharing an instance is now stuck paying the server bill. > >In terms of skill and time costs, the preparation for many of the systems on the Fediverse is as easy as "just spin up a Docker container on a Raspberry Pi." Of course, most people cannot understand and execute that (relatively) simple instruction. > >Or the Fediverse may centralize. Large instances can be bought. The CEO of Tumblr has promised to implement ActivityPub ASAP, and with 135 million monthly active users, that could make Tumblr the bright giant around which the rest of the Fediverse revolves. MacWright speculates that in such a case, “Inevitably everyone's gonna get grumpy that they're dominating the standard and it's no longer an Indieweb thing, and the cycle starts over.”

Moving (back) to a set of open standards with an aim for interoperability is fundamentally a good direction to be moving in. Walled gardens certainly bring their users a certain set of benefits, but if recent actions by various platforms have shown, also brings a set of challenges as well. It will be interesting to see what the future brings for ActivityPub and its various platforms, and hopefully this growth is managed well, with an eye to longevity and resiliency.

Abstract:

>Urban expansion is generating unprecedented homogenization of landscapes across the world. This uniformization of urban forms brings along dramatic environmental, social, and health problems. Reverting such processes requires activating people’s sense of place, their feeling of caring for their surroundings, and their community engagement. While emotions are known to have a modulating effect on behavior, their role in urban transformation is unknown. Drawing on large cognitive-psychological experiments in two countries, we demonstrate for the first time that urban homogenization processes lower people’s affective bounds to places and ultimately their intentions to engage with their neighbourhoods. The dulled emotional responses in peri-urban areas compared to urban and rural areas can be explained by lower social cohesion and place attachment. The findings highlight the significance of considering emotions in shaping just, equitable, sustainable, and resilient cities.

This is some interesting research especially for those engaged in the work of city and community building in all its various forms. It is important to consider these kinds of psychological and social factors when designing our communities, but the difficulty of communicating the importance of these issues to the broader public remains a challenge that still needs to be overcome in many instances.

I wouldn't be too surprised if I were to discover that some of the big insurance companies are invested in some/many of these telehealth companies.

Looks like HIPAA isn't well suited for situations encountered in digital ecosystems. It might be time for it to be revamped at the very least to take into account these kinds of situations that have and might continue to arise.

>A joint investigation by STAT and The Markup of 50 direct-to-consumer telehealth companies like WorkIt found that quick, online access to medications often comes with a hidden cost for patients: Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms. > >On 13 of the 50 websites, we documented at least one tracker—from Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest—that collected patients’ answers to medical intake questions. Trackers on 25 sites, including those run by industry leaders Hims & Hers, Ro, and Thirty Madison, told at least one big tech platform that the user had added an item like a prescription medication to their cart, or checked out with a subscription for a treatment plan.  > >The trackers that STAT and The Markup were able to detect, and what information they sent, is a floor, not a ceiling. Companies choose where to install trackers on their websites and how to configure them. Different pages of a company’s website can have different trackers, and we did not test every page on each company’s site. > >All but one website examined sent URLs users visited on the site and their IP addresses—akin to a mailing address for a computer, which can be used to link information to a specific patient or household—to at least one tech company. The only telehealth platform that we didn’t observe sharing data with outside tech giants was Amazon Clinic, a platform recently launched by Amazon. > >Health privacy experts and former regulators said sharing such sensitive medical information with the world’s largest advertising platforms threatens patient privacy and trust and could run afoul of unfair business practices laws. They also emphasized that privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) were not built for telehealth. That leaves “ethical and moral gray areas” that allow for the legal sharing of health-related data, said Andrew Mahler, a former investigator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. > >“I thought I was at this point hard to shock,” said Ari Friedman, an emergency medicine physician at the University of Pennsylvania who researches digital health privacy. “And I find this particularly shocking.”

This is, to put it mildly, not good. There need to be clear standards and requirements for any organization, public or private, to safekeep health data and metadata. Meaningful sanctions need to also be in place for those who violate these standards. Given the current situation, it would not be surprising if insurance companies and the like are buying all the data they can to help build out profiles on the people they insure to determine coverage and premiums.

>Electronic logging devices (ELD) are billed as a way to make roads safer by keeping truckers accountable to their allowed hours of service. But the devices raise questions about what information employers are collecting about their workers. > >"People sort of tend to view the trucker as an 'other,'" said Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance. "They maybe say … 'You know, that maybe makes sense for truckers, but it wouldn't make sense for me.'" > >"The issues truckers are facing, I think, are issues that everybody is beginning to face — particularly post-pandemic — as these technologies become used in more remote work." > >... > >In addition to logging the number of hours a driver operates the vehicles, the devices can track information such as vehicle location and speed. > >Levy said that the proliferation of ELDs has opened the doors for other monitoring systems that can monitor driving behaviours, like hard braking or swerving, and may include driver-facing cameras that use artificial intelligence to track eye movements and check for signs of drowsiness.  > >The devices don't address the factors she says are driving fatigue among many truckers, including declining wages over decades. > >... > >Using ELDs to improve safety for drivers and the public can be valuable, but potentially using that data to improve efficiency could prove problematic, she said. > >"When that surveillance is used to 'data-ify' the job and track how many deliveries that person made in a day, and pushing them to cut corners or accelerate through red lights, or causing people to urinate or defecate in bottles in their truck because they're fearful of taking any time off to tend to natural bodily functions, then I think we're using it improperly," Bednar said.

Using technology to ensure safety is a laudable goal, but as mentioned in the article, using it to maximize efficiency (or some other business metric) has proven thus far to be problematic. There should be a clear firewall between these data that are collected ostensibly for safety reasons, and a company's other business units.

edit: typo

>Some of the billionaires who have committed significant funds to this goal include Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Ben Delo, Jaan Tallinn, Peter Thiel, Dustin Muskovitz, and Sam Bankman-Fried, who was one of EA’s largest funders until the recent bankruptcy of his FTX cryptocurrency platform. As a result, all of this money has shaped the field of AI and its priorities in ways that harm people in marginalized groups while purporting to work on “beneficial artificial general intelligence” that will bring techno utopia for humanity. This is yet another example of how our technological future is not a linear march toward progress but one that is determined by those who have the money and influence to control it.  > >One of the most notable examples of EA’s influence comes from OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Silicon Valley elites that include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who committed $1 billion with a mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” OpenAI’s website notes: “We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.” Thiel and Musk were speakers at the 2013 and 2015 EA conferences, respectively. Elon Musk has also described longtermism, a more extreme offshoot of EA, as a “close match for my philosophy.” Both billionaires have heavily invested in similar initiatives to build “beneficial AGI,” such as DeepMind and MIRI.  > >Five years after its founding, Open AI released, as part of its quest to build “beneficial” AGI, a large language model (LLM) called GPT-3. LLMs are models trained on vast amounts of text data, with the goal of predicting probable sequences of words. This release set off a race to build larger and larger language models; in 2021, Margaret Mitchell, among other collaborators, and I wrote about the dangers of this race to the bottom in a peer-reviewed paper that resulted in our highly publicized firing from Google.  > >Since then, the quest to proliferate larger and larger language models has accelerated, and many of the dangers we warned about, such as outputting hateful text and disinformation en masse, continue to unfold. Just a few days ago, Meta released its “Galactica” LLM, which is purported to “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.” Only three days later, the public demo was taken down after researchers generated “research papers and wiki entries on a wide variety of subjects ranging from the benefits of committing suicide, eating crushed glass, and antisemitism, to why homosexuals are evil.” > >... > >With EAs founding and funding institutes, companies, think tanks, and research groups in elite universities dedicated to the brand of “AI safety” popularized by OpenAI, we are poised to see more proliferation of harmful models billed as a step toward “beneficial AGI.” And the influence begins early: Effective altruists provide “community building grants” to recruit at major college campuses, with EA chapters developing curricula and teaching classes on AI safety at elite universities like Stanford. > >Just last year, Anthropic, which is described as an “AI safety and research company” and was founded by former OpenAI vice presidents of research and safety, raised $704 million, with most of its funding coming from EA billionaires like Talin, Muskovitz and Bankman-Fried. An upcoming workshop on “AI safety” at NeurIPS, one of the largest and most influential machine learning conferences in the world, is also advertised as being sponsored by FTX Future Fund, Bankman-Fried’s EA-focused charity whose team resigned two weeks ago. The workshop advertises $100,000 in “best paper awards,” an amount I haven’t seen in any academic discipline.  > >Research priorities follow the funding, and given the large sums of money being pushed into AI in support of an ideology with billionaire adherents, it is not surprising that the field has been moving in a direction promising an “unimaginably great future” around the corner while proliferating products harming marginalized groups in the now.  > >We can create a technological future that serves us instead. Take, for example, Te Hiku Media, which created language technology to revitalize te reo Māori, creating a data license “based on the Māori principle of kaitiakitanga, or guardianship” so that any data taken from the Māori benefits them first. Contrast this approach with that of organizations like StabilityAI, which scrapes artists’ works without their consent or attribution while purporting to build “AI for the people.” We need to liberate our imagination from the one we have been sold thus far: saving us from a hypothetical AGI apocalypse imagined by the privileged few, or the ever elusive techno-utopia promised to us by Silicon Valley elites. 

There is clearly a lot of potential with AI research, but the potential for negative outcomes must be considered and dealt with early on, rather than wait until they inevitably occur. Research does follow funding, and as a technology that has the potential to deeply affect all aspects of private and public life, it might be good for there to be a strong public stake in this field of research.

>On Monday, OpenAI announced a new model in the GPT-3 family of AI-powered large language models, text-davinci-003, that reportedly improves on its predecessors by handling more complex instructions and producing longer-form content. Almost immediately, people discovered that it could also generate rhyming songs, limericks, and poetry at a level GPT-3 could not previously produce. > >... > >Introduced in 2020, GPT-3 gained renown for its ability to compose text in various styles at a similar level to a human, thanks to extensive training on text scraped from the Internet and data pulled from books. It uses statistical associations between learned word positions to predict the next best word in the sequence while reading from the prompt. > >Of course, generating poetry with a machine is hardly a new pastime. Even as far back as 1845, inventors have been crafting ways to write expressive verse through automation. But in particular, experts note that GPT-3's latest update feels like a step forward in complexity that comes from integrating knowledge about a wide variety of subjects and styles into one model that writes coherent text. > >Beyond poetry, GPT-3 still has its flaws, as some have examined in detail. While its factual accuracy has reportedly increased over time, it can still easily generate false information, limiting its applications. And GPT-3's short-term memory is generally limited to what you've recently fed it within a prompt. But when it comes to purely creative fictional output, GPT-3 hits the mark fairly well.

It will be interesting to see how this technology is initially going to be (ab)used, especially by those in the commercial creative sectors.

From the article:

>It's no easy feat to come up with a tasty-but-healthy alternative to one of our favorite treats. "The most difficult aspect of developing an alternative food is getting the texture right," said Risbo. "Whipped cream undergoes a unique transformation that occurs in a complex system where a high saturated fat content makes it possible to whip the cream stiff. So, how do we create an alternative where we avoid the high fat content, while still achieving the right consistency? This is where we need to think innovatively." > >Risbo and his colleagues only used four ingredients in their experiments: water, edible lactic acid bacteria, a little bit of milk protein, and a thickening agent. There are many kinds of lactic acid bacteria—the kind used by the food industry as a yogurt culture and to preserve cold cuts—and they are plentiful in nature, found in plants and in human/animal mucus membranes and digestive tracts. They also turn out to be ideal building blocks for foods and are roughly the same size as the fat globules in heavy whipping cream. > >The Danish team made both soft and stiffer versions of their prototype whipped cream using two different varieties of bacteria: Lactobacillus delbrueckii subs. lactis (LBD) and Lactobacillus crispatus (LBC). The LBC strain is more hydrophobic, producing a cream that is stiffer and retains liquid better than the concoction produced with LBD, which is hydrophilic. > >These experiments were primarily to demonstrate proof of concept, and the resulting foams were evaluated primarily for texture and desirable foamy characteristics—not for taste. So we're not likely to see canisters of "Lacti-Wip" on store shelves any time soon. But the experiments provided valuable insight into how best to create a non-dairy whipped cream alternative with a similar food structure.

It's promising to hear about these initial results with this topic of research, and it will be interesting to see what results from this in the future.

>DuckDuckGo is positioning App Tracking Protection as something like Apple's App Tracking Transparency for iOS devices, but "even more powerful." Enabling the service in the DuckDuckGo app for Android (under the "More from DuckDuckGo" section) installs a local VPN service on your phone, which can then start automatically blocking trackers on DDG's public blocklist. DuckDuckGo says this happens "without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers." > >Google recently gave Android users some native tools to prevent wanton tracking, including app-by-app location-tracking approval and a limited native ad-tracking opt-out. Apple's App Tracking Transparency asks if users want to block apps from accessing the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), but apps can still use the largest tracking networks across many apps to better profile app users. > >Allison Goodman, senior communications manager for DuckDuckGo, told Ars Technica that App Tracking Protection needs Android's VPN permission so it can monitor network traffic. When it recognizes a tracker from its blocklist, it "looks at the destination domain for any outbound request and blocks them if they are in our blocklist and the requesting app is not owned by the same company that owns the domain." > >Goodman added that "much of the data collected by trackers is not controlled by [Android] permissions," making App Tracking Protection a complementary offering.

It's great to see some more privacy initiatives/innovations from folks such as DDG. This is especially needed in the Android space, given Google/Alphabet's reliance on advertising and data analytics for their revenues.

>"We've already made a decision to be buying out of a plant in Arizona, and this plant in Arizona starts up in '24, so we've got about two years ahead of us on that one, maybe a little less," Cook reportedly said at the meeting, according to Bloomberg. "In Europe, I'm sure that we will also source from Europe as those plans become more apparent." > >Also present at the meeting were Apple Services chief Eddy Cue and Head of People Deirdre O'Brien. > >Construction for the TSMC chip fabrication plant in Arizona began in June 2021. The company had initially projected to fire up production in September 2022, but the timeline has been pushed back by about six months. > >The TSMC plant is expected to go on-line in March 2023. TSMC expects it will reach its production start in early 2024. > >The labor pool in Arizona is also creating a challenge for TSMC. Intel already employs 12,000 people and seeks 3,000 more for its expanded facilities. TSMC will have to compete in an already low-unemployment region when seeking talent for its new plant.

It will be interesting to see how this works out for US and European fabs in the long run. Are companies going to be setting up US or EU-based assembly plants as well, or as the article mentions in the end will the chips still need to be shipped to China or India or wherever else the devices will be made in the future.

Link to the original research, "A Nanofocused Light on Stradivari Violins: Infrared s-SNOM Reveals New Clues Behind Craftsmanship Mastery"

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.analchem.2c02965

Article abstract:

>It is well-known that all the phases of the manufacturing influence the extraordinary aesthetic and acoustic features of Stradivari’s instruments. However, these masterpieces still keep some of their secrets hidden by the lack of documentary evidence. In particular, there is not a general consensus on the use of a protein-based ground coating directly spread on the wood surface by the Cremonese Master. The present work demonstrates that infrared scattering-type scanning near-fields optical microscopy (s-SNOM) may provide unprecedented information on very complex cross-sectioned microsamples collected from two of Stradivari’s violins, nanoresolved chemical sensitivity being the turning point for detecting minute traces of a specific compound, namely proteins, hidden by the matrix when macro or micro sampling approaches are exploited. This nanoresolved chemical-sensitive technique contributed new and robust evidence to the long-debated question about the use of proteinaceous materials by Stradivari.

>A recent paper published in the journal Analytical Chemistry reported that nanoscale imaging of two such instruments revealed a protein-based layer at the interface of the wood and the varnish, which may influence the wood's natural resonance, and hence the resulting sound. Meanwhile, another paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America showed that the better resonance of older violins produces stronger combination tones, which can also affect the perception of musical tones. > >... > >It's the varnish that has received the most attention in recent years. The theory dates back to 2006 when Joseph Nagyvary, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at Texas A&M University, made headlines with a paper in Nature claiming that it was the chemicals used to treat the wood—not necessarily the wood itself—that was responsible for the unique sound of a Stradivarius violin. > >Specifically, it was salts of copper, iron, and chromium, all of which are excellent wood preservers but may also have altered the instruments' acoustical properties. He based his findings on studies using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study the chemical properties of the backboards of several violins (the backboard is the instrument's largest resonant component). > >... > >While prior research largely focused on the chemistry of the varnishes, Chiaramaria Stani of the Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CERIC) and co-authors were keen to take a closer look at the treatments used before varnishing the instruments to fill the outer pores of the wood. It's a matter of considerable academic debate since some studies found just a layer of drying oil between the varnish and the wood. Other studies using chemical staining and gas chromatography showed the presence of proteins—most notably animal glue (collagen) found in two early 18th-century violoncellos, and casein found in a 1730 violin. Traces of unidentified proteins were also detected in violins from 1677, 1706, and 1720 using staining tests.

This looks to be some pretty interesting research on some of the other wood treatments that might have been used in the preparation of the wood before and during the construction of these instruments and ultimately may be of aid to future luthiers as they work to improve their processes.

>A couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount. The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India. This whole situation rang a bell with us, because last year we had to grapple with the very same problem. Last November, our bandwidth usage shot up through the roof for no good reason. After investigating the issue, we found out that two apps with ad-blocking functionality were abusing our servers.
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>So, the bottom line is this:
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>1 - Many ad blockers cannot download filters updates because EasyList is throttled.
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>2 - EasyList may need to change the domain name. These faulty browsers will DDOS any hosting EasyList chooses as long as they continue to use the easylist.to domain.

This is going to be a challenge for these folks to overcome. Given how many people use these lists in their ad blocker plugins/browsers, this could grow into a larger problem if not resolved. It doesn't seem like there's any straightforward way out of this unfortunately.

>Skeptics of robo-policing, including Tu, say these debates need to happen today to preempt the abuses of tomorrow, especially because of the literal and figurative distance robotic killing affords. Guariglia said, “It in many ways lowers the psychological hurdle for enacting that violence when it’s just a button on a remote control.” > >... > >With thousands of Andros robots operated by hundreds of police department across the country, those concerned by the prospect of shotgun robots on the streets of Oakland or elsewhere refer to what they say is a clear antecedent with other militarized hardware: mission creep. > >Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics of the PAN disruptor proposal say the Oakland police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech, as happened frequently during the George Floyd protests. > >“As you do this work for a few years, you come to realize that we’re not really talking about a slippery slope. It’s more like a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization,” said O’Sullivan, of Parity. There’s no reason to think the PAN disruptor will be any different: “One can imagine applications of this particular tool that may seem reasonable, but with a very few modifications, or even just different kinds of ammunition, these tools can easily be weaponized against democratic dissent.”

A full and proper public debate on whether these kinds of technologies are appropriate for police forces is best done before they are adopted, rather than after. Recent history and recent speculative fiction are both littered with instances of what could go wrong in these kinds of scenarios.

>Employees reportedly cracked jokes about the feature’s inept, and potentially misleading privacy protections in recent years, with one marketing officer reportedly directly emailing CEO Sundar Pichai, basically begging him to make the product actually live up to its name according to recent court documents viewed by Bloomberg. Those jokes and internal criticism comes amid multiple lawsuits questioning Google transparency around the feature. > >In one email sent to Pichai, Google marketing chief Lorraine Twohill reportedly warned that the current customer confusion around Incognito mode was forcing the company to dance around using fuzzy and hedging language that ultimately risked degrading consumer trust. > >“Make Incognito Mode truly private,” she wrote in the email. It’s worth noting that Twohill sent that email after multiple users filed a multi-billion dollar class action privacy lawsuit against Google for allegedly tracking users while using Incognito. Those users claim that supposedly surreptitious tracking amounts to privacy violations. The judge presiding over the lawsuit last week refused to let plaintiffs question Pichai in pre-trial proceedings despite the CEO’s connections in Google Chrome’s development and subsequent concerned emails regarding Incognito. > >Let’s back up for a second. For some clarity, Google Chrome’s so-called Incognito browsing hides your search history from other people using your device but doesn’t actually prevent Google or its advertiser friends from logging and profiting off your search history. Critics of Incognito, like the plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit, and more recently Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argue Google’s branding and messaging around Incognito makes it appear much more privacy preserving than it actually is. Paxton, in particular, alleges the company’s ​​representations about Incognito mode are “false, deceptive, and misleading.” > >... > >“We need to stop calling it Incognito and stop using a Spy Guy icon,” one engineer said in a 2018 chat. The engineer reportedly cited publicly available research showing users didn’t really understand how the feature worked. Another employee flippantly responded by posting a wiki to the page for “Guy Incognito” from The Simpsons, who, other than a small mustache, looks identical to Homer Simpson. That low effort disguise, according to the employee, “accurately conveys the level of privacy it [Incognito] provides.”

One thing that tech companies like Google seem to get wrong all the time is the bombastic language they use in their branding and marketing attempts. The challenge here is that the public will take these terms at face value, not understand the fine print, and then suffer the consequences of something that is notably different than what was promised. In addition to 'Incognito Mode' here, another recent offender would be Tesla's 'Autopilot' and 'Full Self Driving'.

For those interested, a link to the referenced research paper:

Neurogenesis is disrupted in human hippocampal progenitor cells upon exposure to serum samples from hospitalized COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms

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>Abstract
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>Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), represents an enormous new threat to our healthcare system and particularly to the health of older adults. Although the respiratory symptoms of COVID-19 are well recognized, the neurological manifestations, and their underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms, have not been extensively studied yet. Our study is the first one to test the direct effect of serum from hospitalised COVID-19 patients on human hippocampal neurogenesis using a unique in vitro experimental assay with human hippocampal progenitor cells (HPC0A07/03 C). We identify the different molecular pathways activated by serum from COVID-19 patients with and without neurological symptoms (i.e., delirium), and their effects on neuronal proliferation, neurogenesis, and apoptosis. We collected serum sample twice, at time of hospital admission and approximately 5 days after hospitalization. We found that treatment with serum samples from COVID-19 patients with delirium (n = 18) decreased cell proliferation and neurogenesis, and increases apoptosis, when compared with serum samples of sex- and age-matched COVID-19 patients without delirium (n = 18). This effect was due to a higher concentration of interleukin 6 (IL6) in serum samples of patients with delirium (mean ± SD: 229.9 ± 79.1 pg/ml, vs. 32.5 ± 9.5 pg/ml in patients without delirium). Indeed, treatment of cells with an antibody against IL6 prevented the decreased cell proliferation and neurogenesis and the increased apoptosis. Moreover, increased concentration of IL6 in serum samples from delirium patients stimulated the hippocampal cells to produce IL12 and IL13, and treatment with an antibody against IL12 or IL13 also prevented the decreased cell proliferation and neurogenesis, and the increased apoptosis. Interestingly, treatment with the compounds commonly administered to acute COVID-19 patients (the Janus kinase inhibitors, baricitinib, ruxolitinib and tofacitinib) were able to restore normal cell viability, proliferation and neurogenesis by targeting the effects of IL12 and IL13. Overall, our results show that serum from COVID-19 patients with delirium can negatively affect hippocampal-dependent neurogenic processes, and that this effect is mediated by IL6-induced production of the downstream inflammatory cytokines IL12 and IL13, which are ultimately responsible for the detrimental cellular outcomes.

From the article:

>The researchers analysed blood from 36 Covid patients admitted to Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London in the first wave of the pandemic. They found that levels of a protein called IL-6, which immune cells release as a rallying call for other immune cells, were more than 15 times higher than normal in infected individuals. > >But an even more dramatic rise in IL-6 was found in Covid patients with delirium – a state of extreme confusion that can leave people not knowing who, or where, they are. In these patients, IL-6 was six times higher than in other Covid patients. Nearly a third of Covid patients admitted to hospital experience delirium, rising to two-thirds in severe cases. > >The scientists then investigated how high levels of IL-6 might affect neurons in the hippocampus by exposing lab-grown nerve cells to the patients’ blood. They found that blood from patients with delirium increased the normal death rate of neurons and reduced the generation of new brain cells. The damage caused is thought to drive delirium. > >The harmful effects were traced back to a cascade of events where IL-6 triggers the release of two related immune proteins, called IL-12 and IL-13. Dr Alessandra Borsini, the study’s first author, said the impact of the proteins on generating new brain cells was “profound”. > >However, blocking the proteins protected brain cells from damage, the scientists report in Molecular Psychiatry. The work suggests drugs known as Janus kinase inhibitors, which are already used to calm dangerous immune reactions to Covid, might combat delirium and its knock-on effects. > >Older people are particularly vulnerable to delirium after a range of infections and operations. The state of confusion leads to a substantial rise in the risk of dementia. > >“We believe these proteins are responsible for the delirium symptoms in acute Covid patients, and in general in long Covid patients experiencing neurological symptoms,” Borsini said. Measuring the levels of the immune proteins in patients could help personalise their treatment, she added.

It will be interesting to see further research in this direction. Hopefully some of the other factors that might be contributing to neurological damage from COVID infections and their relationships with each other can also be determined in short order.