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Sherwood: “Ever wanted to own 46 copies of Orlando Bloom’s latest movie? What about a dozen empty Redbox DVD cases? Or maybe an entire Redbox kiosk, free with local pickup? It’s all up for grabs, thanks to Redbox’s recent demise. The chain of DVD-rental kiosks filed for bankruptcy in June after racking up close to …
Ars Technica: “A school district in Massachusetts was sued by a student’s parents after the boy was punished for using an artificial intelligence chatbot to complete an assignment. The lawsuit says the Hingham High School student handbook did not include a restriction on the use of AI. “They told us our son cheated on a …
Ars Technica: “Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge of witch trials swept across early-modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing …
Wired: “Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official. An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a …
The Guardian: More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in …
Setayesh Radkani, Marika Landau-Wells, Rebecca Saxe. How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization. PNAS Nexus, 2024; 3 (10) DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae393 In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective …
The Economist: Excel has featured in plenty of workplace blunders — though its defenders will be quick to blame human error. The financial world is littered with tales of costly spreadsheet errors. Excel has also been blamed for botching gene names in over a third of genomics papers (because it labelled them as dates); underreporting …
