An anonymous reader shares a report: Author Adam Silvera four years ago released the young adult science fiction novel "They Both Die at the End," which found success and landed a few weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But years later in August 2020, Silvera said his publisher noticed a significant sales bump, the start of a trend that would send the book to the top of the New York Times' young adult paperback monthly bestseller list in April, where it still reigns. Silvera had no idea where the sales spike was coming from. "I kept commenting to my readers, 'Hey, don't know what's happening, but there's been a surge in sales lately, so grateful that everybody's finding the story years later,'" Silvera said. "And then that's when a reader was like, 'I'm seeing it on BookTok.' And I had no idea what they were talking about."

"BookTok" is a community of users on TikTok who post videos reviewing and recommending books, which has boomed in popularity over the past year. TikTok videos containing the hashtag #TheyBothDieAtTheEnd have collectively amassed more than 37 million views to date, many of which feature users reacting -- and often crying -- to the book's emotional ending. BookTok's impact on the book industry has been notable, helping new authors launch their careers and propelling books like Silvera's to the top of bestseller lists years after their original publication. Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles," E. Lockhart's "We Were Liars" and Taylor Jenkins Reid's "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" -- all of which were published before BookTok began to dominate the industry -- are among some of the other books that have found popularity on the app years after their initial release. Retailers like Barnes & Noble have taken advantage of BookTok's popularity to market titles popular on the app to customers by creating specialized shelves featuring books that have gone viral.

Since most ebook readers run some version of the kernel Linux (with some even run the GNU/Linux operating system), "This puts ebook readers a few steps closer to freedom than other devices," notes a recent call-to-action in the Free Software Foundation Bulletin.

But with e-ink screens and DRM-laden ebooks, "closing the gap will still require a significant amount of work." Accordingly, as we announced at the LibrePlanet 2021 conference, we've decided this year to prioritize facilitating the process for an ebook reader to reach the high standards of our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) hardware certification program, whether this means adapting an existing one from a manufacturer, or even contracting its production ourselves...

The free software community has made some good strides in the area of freeing ebooks. Denis "GNUToo" Carikli has composed a page on the LibrePlanet wiki documenting the components of ebook readers and other single-board computers; this has laid the groundwork for our investigation into releasing an ebook reader, and is one of the wiki's more active projects. Also, earlier in the year, a user on the libreplanet-discuss mailing list documented their project to port Parabola GNU/Linux to the reMarkable tablet, thereby creating a free ebook reader at the same time. It's steps like these that make us feel confident that we can bring an ebook reader that respects its user's freedom to the public, both in terms of hardware and the software that's shipped with the device...

If the FSF is successful in landing RYF certification on an ebook reader, which I fully believe we will be, we can ensure that users will have the ability to read digitally while retaining their freedom.

It's up to all of us to make sure we have the right to read, by avoiding ebook DRM in each and every case, and celebrating free (as in freedom) resources like Wikibooks and the Internet Archive, bridging the divide between the movement for free software and the movement for free culture, empowering both readers and computer users around the globe.
The article also warns that ebook DRM has gotten more restrictive over the years. "It's common for textbooks to now require a constant and uninterrupted Internet connection, and that they load only a discrete number of pages at a time... Even libraries fell victim to 'lending' services like Canopy, putting an artificial lock on digital copies of books, the last place it makes sense for them to be."

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone. From a report: It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has "billions of books and no central filing system." Imagine if libraries didn't exist and there was only a "sharing economy" for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It's no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be -- especially if someone reported a book being in someone else's home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That's what we have right now on the web.

[...] People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary -- they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren't stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web -- the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks -- diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

Britain's proposed new internet law entails a government power grab with worrying implications for freedom of speech, according to civil liberties groups, academics and the tech industry. From a report: The groups are concerned the proposed Online Safety Bill would hand to Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden disproportionate powers in the name of protecting users from "harmful" content. The Bill allow him to "modify" a code of practice -- the blueprint created by the regulator Ofcom for how tech companies should protect users -- to ensure it "reflects government policy." Critics say such powers, which were set out in a draft of the proposed law published in May and due for imminent scrutiny by MPs and peers, could undermine the regulator's independence and potentially politicize the regulation of the internet.

"The notion that a political appointee will have the unilateral power to alter the legal boundaries of free speech based on the political whims of the moment frankly makes the blood run cold," said Heather Burns, policy manager at the Open Rights Group. The draft bill -- which hasn't yet begun its formal passage through parliament -- is due to be checked line-by-line by legislators before being brought back to parliament later this year, where it will then pass through the stages it needs to end up on the statute books. The U.K. government and opposition parties are currently finalizing which lawmakers will sit on the pre-legislative committee.

The most severe heat wave in the history of the Pacific Northwest is nearing its climax. The National Weather Service had predicted it would be "historic, dangerous, prolonged and unprecedented," and it is living up to its billing as it rewrites the record books. From a report: On Sunday, Portland, Ore., soared to its highest temperature in more than 80 years of record-keeping: 112 degrees. This new mark occurred just one day after hitting 108, which had broken the previous all-time record of 107. Seattle surged to 104 degrees Sunday, surpassing the old record of 103. The extraordinary heat swelled north of the international border as Canada saw its highest temperature recorded Sunday afternoon, when Lytton in British Columbia surged to 116 degrees. For perspective, that is just 1 degree from the all-time record in Las Vegas. While temperatures may have peaked Sunday afternoon in a few places, many were expected to turn even hotter on Monday or Tuesday, breaking all-time records (a number of which were initially broken Saturday and/or Sunday).

Some users who bought an external hard drive that's delightfully shaped like a book ended up with "terabytes' worth of data, years of memories and months of hard work vanished in an instant," reports Engadget. (Though according to a new statement from Western Digital, "Some customers have reported that data recovery tools may be able to recover data from affected devices, and we are currently investigating the effectiveness of these tools.")

But why were these deletions from "My Books" happening in the first place? A Slashdot reader shares the first clue from Engadget's report: Several owners looked into the cause of the issue and determined that their devices were wiped after receiving a remote command for a factory reset. The commands starting going out at 3PM on Wednesday and lasted throughout the night. One user posted a copy of their log showing how a script was run to shut down their storage device for a factory restore.
Friday Western Digital's statement offered much more detail: Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live and My Book Live Duo devices are being compromised through exploitation of a remote command execution vulnerability... The log files we have reviewed show that the attackers directly connected to the affected My Book Live devices from a variety of IP addresses in different countries. This indicates that the affected devices were directly accessible from the Internet, either through direct connection or through port forwarding that was enabled either manually or automatically via UPnP.

Additionally, the log files show that on some devices, the attackers installed a trojan with a file named ".nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z", which is a Linux ELF binary compiled for the PowerPC architecture used by the My Book Live and Live Duo. A sample of this trojan has been captured for further analysis and it has been uploaded to VirusTotal.

Our investigation of this incident has not uncovered any evidence that Western Digital cloud services, firmware update servers, or customer credentials were compromised. As the My Book Live devices can be directly exposed to the internet through port forwarding, the attackers may be able to discover vulnerable devices through port scanning...

At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live and My Book Live Duo from the Internet to protect your data on the device by following these instructions on our Knowledge Base. We have heard customer concerns that the current My Cloud OS 5 and My Cloud Home series of devices may be affected. These devices use a newer security architecture and are not affected by the vulnerabilities used in this attack. We recommend that eligible My Cloud OS 3 users upgrade to OS 5 to continue to receive security updates for your device

Space.com reports: The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday.

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")

The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?

I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.

This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...

Amazon marks millions of unsold products for destruction each year in the UK, according to a new investigation by British television program ITV News. From a report: ITV found stacks of boxes marked "destroy" that were filled with electronics, jewelry, books, and other new or gently used items in one warehouse's "destruction zone." The news outlet caught the practice on camera while going undercover at the Dunfermline fulfillment center in Scotland. It says it tracked some of the goods to recycling centers and a landfill. About 124,000 items at Dunfermline were labeled "destroy" during a single week in April, according to an internal document obtained by ITV News. Just 28,000 items were set aside for donations during the same period. About half of all the stuff that's trashed are things that people returned, a former Amazon employee told ITV. While the other half are "unopened and still in their shrink wrap," the ex-employee said.

Reddit is shutting down the beloved Secret Santa platform Reddit Gifts after the 2021 holiday season. Gizmodo reports: Over the years, the related forum r/secretsanta has attracted over 200,000 members and celebrity surprises such as a cat drawing by Arnold Schwarzennegger, an autographed photo of Shaq, and annual thoughtful gift packages from Bill Gates containing items such as video games, a horse blanket, and 81 pounds of books and toys. "Why the fuck would you kill this," a top comment reads. Reddit admins didn't explain much in their announcement yesterday but acknowledged that "countless acts of love, heroism, compassion, support, growth and hilarity happened through Reddit Gifts, and those memories will live on in the hearts of our community." Plus loads of free press. Why the fuck would you kill this? Reddit has not yet responded to Gizmodo's request for comment.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an interview The Guardian conducted with Microsoft's Kate Crawford. "Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence," writes Zoe Corbyn via The Guardian. "She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what's at stake as it reshapes our world." Here's an excerpt from the interview: What should people know about how AI products are made?
We aren't used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, "Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls," invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet... We've got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorizing data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we're talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors -- women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled -- and the response has been: "We just need more data." But I've tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorize people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin color into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.

What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions -- corporations, militaries and police.

What's needed to make things better?
Much stronger regulatory regimes and greater rigour and responsibility around how training datasets are constructed. We also need different voices in these debates -- including people who are seeing and living with the downsides of these systems. And we need a renewed politics of refusal that challenges the narrative that just because a technology can be built it should be deployed.

Type "vaccines" into Amazon's search bar, and its auto-complete suggests "are dangerous" for your search. But that's just part of a larger problem, points out Fast Company (in an article shared by Slashdot reader tedlistens).

For example, Amazon's search results are touting as "best sellers!" many books with some very bad science: Offered by small publishers or self-published through Amazon's platform, the books rehearse the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that fuel vaccine opposition, steepening the impact of the pandemic and slowing a global recovery. They also illustrate how the world's biggest store has become a megaphone for anti-vaccine activists, medical misinformers, and conspiracy theorists, pushing dangerous falsehoods in a medium that carries more apparent legitimacy than just a tweet.

"Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation, and the world leader in pushing fake anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy books," says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. For years, journalists and researchers have warned of the ways fraudsters, extremists, and conspiracy theorists use Amazon to earn cash and attention. To Hotez, who has devoted much of his career to educating the public about vaccines, the real-world consequences aren't academic. In the U.S. and elsewhere, he says, vaccination efforts are now up against a growing ecosystem of activist groups, foreign manipulators, and digital influencers who "peddle fake books on Amazon...."

Gradually, Amazon has taken a tougher approach to content moderation, and to a seemingly ceaseless onslaught of counterfeits, fraud, defective products, and toxic speech... Despite its sweeps, however, Amazon is still flooded with misinformation, and helping amplify it too: A series of recent studies and a review by Fast Company show the bookstore is boosting misinformation around health-related terms like "autism" or "covid," and nudging customers toward a universe of other conspiracy theory books.

In one audit first published in January, researchers at the University of Washington surveyed Amazon's search results for four dozen terms related to vaccines. Among 38,000 search results and over 16,000 recommendations, they counted nearly 5,000 unique products containing misinformation, or 10.47% of the total. For books, they found that titles deemed misinformative appeared higher in search results than books that debunked their theories. "Overall, our audits suggest that Amazon has a severe vaccine/health misinformation problem exacerbated by its search and recommendation algorithms," write Prerna Juneja and Tanushee Mitra in their paper, presented last month at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. "Just a single click on an anti-vaccine book could fill your homepage with several other similar anti-vaccine books..." Like any products on Amazon, or any content across social media platforms, anti-vaccine titles also benefit from an algorithmically-powered ranking system. And despite the company's aggressive efforts to battle fraud, it's a system that's still easily manipulated through false reviews...

Much of the uproar about misinformation has focused on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but Amazon's role deserves more attention, says Marc Tuters, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Amsterdam, who helped lead the Infodemic.eu study. The retailer sells half of all the books in the U.S. and its brand is highly trusted by consumers.

Some 150 birds named for people tied to slavery and white supremacy could eventually get new monikers as part of an ongoing reckoning with racism within the world of birding. The Verge: That includes Jameson's firefinch, named for a British naturalist who bought a young girl while in Africa "as a joke" and then drew pictures of her being brutally killed. In a new story this week, Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears breaks down the horrific history of ornithology that has managed to be scrubbed clean in many history books.

Fears also writes about the names these birds already had, given to them by Indigenous peoples who understood the animals long before white settlers supposedly "discovered" the creatures. There's a push now to return to some of those names or use new ones in local languages, which continue to be mocked by a cadre of birding elite that is still largely white. Just last year the American Ornithological Society apologized for "inappropriate comments" its members made nearly 10 years ago about a proposal to rename the Maui parrotbill to the Hawaiian name Kiwikiu.

The senior technology editor at Ars Technica checked the plausibility of Andy Weir's new science fiction novel Project Hail Mary with an actual professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Northern Illinois University. It's another tale of solving problems with science, as a lone human named Ryland Grace and a lone alien named Rocky must save our stellar neighborhood from a star-eating parasite called "Astrophage." PHM is a buddy movie in space in a way that The Martian didn't get to be, and the interaction between Grace and Rocky is the biggest reason to read the book. The pair makes a hell of a problem-solving team, jazz hands and fist bumps and all. But the relative ease with which Grace and Rocky understand each other got me thinking about the real-world issues that might arise when two beings from vastly different evolutionary backgrounds try to communicate...

The question I put to her was this: going by our current understanding of how and why human languages operate, do we think it would be practical—or even possible — for two divergently evolved sentient beings from different worlds to learn each other's languages well enough in a short amount of time (perhaps as little as a week) to usefully converse about abstract concepts and to be reasonably assured that both beings actually understand those abstracts...?
And the professor's response? We ended up blowing an entire hour on linguistics, and it was easily the coolest and nerdiest conversation I've had in a long time. Nearing the end, though, I asked Dr. Birner for her final take on whether or not the language acquisition exercise portrayed in Project Hail Mary would work.

Her consensus was "probably," but only given a number of extremely lucky — and extremely unlikely — coincidences in psychology and evolution (there's that anthropic principle of science fiction rearing its head!). If we can take it as a given that the alien is "friendly," and if we can also take it as a given that "friendship" in the alien's society carries along with it the same or a similar set of relationship expectations as it does for humans, and if we can take it as a given that the alien has similar emotional drivers, and if the alien values (or can at least intellectually conceive of) concepts like altruism and cooperation, and if the alien has a compatible sense of morality that places value on the lives of individuals and prioritizes the avoidance of death—if we can take all those things and more as givens, then things might work out.

"I think that given a theoretically infinite amount of time, probably yes," communication would be possible, she said. "As long as there's enough goodwill that you are going to be there together working together."
But in a long comment, long-time Slashdot reader shanen argues all sentient beings are basically Universal Turing Machines running mental programs in our heads, but still warns of "hardware-level incompatibilities not just at the level of sound systems, but in the kinds of programs that 'run sufficiently easily' in the more dissimilar Universal Turing Machines."

For over an hour on Saturday, retired Microsoft OS developer David Plummer answered questions from his viewers on YouTube.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He began with an update on a project to test the performance of the same algorithm using 30 different programming languages, and soon tells the story of how he was inspired to apply for his first job at Microsoft after reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

I decided that this is where I wanted to work, because these guys sound like me, they act like me, they are what I want to be when I grow up. And holy cow, they pay them well, apparently. So I wrote to everybody that I could find that had a Microsoft email address, which was about four people, because I had a software product people had been regisering on the Amiga. And one guy, Alistair Banks... responded and he hooked me up with a hiring manager directly in Windows that had an open slot that was hiring... And a couple of interview slots later, I wound up as an intern at MS-DOS working for Ben Slivka.

So you would think, "Oh, an intern on MS-DOS. What'd you do? Format disks?" No — it's amazing to me, actually. They give you as much work as they believe that you are capable of, and — they get you for all that you're worth, basically. They had me write a bunch of major features, like the Smart Drive cache for CD-ROMs was the first thing I wrote. Then I wrote DISKCOPY, making it work, single pass, bunch of features in MS-DOS. I re-wrote Setup to work on a single floppy disk by using deltas and patching in place, DOS 5 to turn it into DOS 6, something like, or maybe it was DOS 6 into 6.2... A whole bunch of features, within the span of, like, three months, which to me was fairly impressive at the time, I thought. And that only got me an interview...

Later he says that he'd like to see most of 16-bit Windows and all of MS-DOS open sourced, along with some select application code from that era.

I don't think there's any reason to hold back any of MS-DOS at this point. They have absolutely no reason to open source any of it, really — other than PR, because all it brings them is potential liability, complaints and angst, and probably nothing positive for putting the code out there and exposing it to ridicule. Because it's ancient code at this point. It's like, "Ha! Look what Microsoft did!" Well, yeah, I know Linux is cool now, but go look at Linux code from 1991 — and I worked on some of that code. Well, '93 I did. It's not the same as what you see today.

So yeah, MS-DOS probably looks archaic — although it's super tight, it doesn't have many bugs. It's just written differently than you would write code today, because you're targetting something that is a very different CPU and memory system and PC as a whole, and it's so much more limited that everybody's sacred, every cycle matters. That kind of thing that you don't worry about now. But I'd still like to see all the code from back then that's not embarrassing released.

And when asked what he misses most about being a Microsoft developer, he answers:

I miss going for lunch with the people that I went for lunch with, and talking to the people that I worked with. Because they were a lot like me, they had similar interests, they had similar abilities, they were people like me. We went for lunch, we ate food, it was awesome, and then we talked about cool things. And we did that every day. And now I don't get to do that any more. I get to do it rarely, because I take guys out for lunch and stuff, but it's not the same. So that's really what I miss.

And I miss somebody always feeding me something interesting to do. Because now I have to go out and find something that's interesting to do on my own. And I can't make everything be monetarily remunerative...

Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. "There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this..." argues author Steven Johnson.

In a recent 10,000-word excerpt from his new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (now also a four-part PBS/BBC series that's streaming online), Johnson tries to convey the magnitude of humanity's accomplishment: [I]t manifests in countless achievements, often quickly forgotten, sometimes literally invisible: the drinking water that's free of microorganisms, or the vaccine received in early childhood and never thought about again... The decade following the initial mass production of antibiotics marked the most extreme moment of life-span inequality globally. In 1950, when life expectancy in India and most of Africa had barely budged from the long ceiling of around 35 years, the average American could expect to live 68 years, while Scandinavians had already crossed the 70-year threshold. But the post-colonial era that followed would be characterized by an extraordinary rate of improvement across most of the developing world...

The forces behind these trends are complex and multivariate. Some of them involve increasing standards of living and the decrease in famine, driven by the invention of artificial fertilizer and the "green revolution"; some of them involve imported medicines and infrastructure — antibiotics, chlorinated drinking water — that were developed earlier. But some of the most meaningful interventions came from within the Global South itself, including a remarkably simple but powerful technique called oral rehydration therapy... the treatment is almost maddeningly simple: give people lots of boiled water to drink, supplemented with sugar and salts.... The Lancet called it "potentially the most important medical advance of the 20th century." As many as 50 million people are said to have died of cholera in the 19th century. In the first decades of the 21st century, fewer than 66,000 people were reported to have succumbed to the disease, on a planet with eight times the population...

Of all the achievements that brought the great escape to the entire world, though, one stands out: the vanquishing of smallpox... One key factor was a scientific understanding about the virus itself... Scientific innovations also played a crucial role in the eradication projects... But another key breakthrough was the development of institutions like the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. themselves. Starting in the mid-1960s, the W.H.O. — led by a C.D.C. official, D.A. Henderson — worked in concert with hundreds of thousands of health workers, who oversaw surveillance and vaccinations in the more than 40 countries still suffering from smallpox outbreaks. The idea of an international body that could organize the activity of so many people over such a vast geography, and over so many separate jurisdictions, would have been unthinkable at the dawn of the 19th century...

The list of new ideas that propelled the great escape is long and varied. Some of them took the form of tangible objects: X-ray machines, antiretroviral drugs. Some of them were legal or institutional in nature: the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, seatbelt laws. Some of them were statistical breakthroughs: new ways of tracking data, like the invention of randomized controlled trials, which finally allowed us to determine empirically if new treatments worked as promised, or proved a causal link between cigarettes and cancer. Some of them were meta-innovations in the way that new treatments are discovered, like the development of "rational drug design," which finally moved drug development from the Fleming model of serendipitous discovery to a process built on the foundations of chemistry...

The truth is the spike in global population has not been caused by some worldwide surge in fertility. What changed is people stopped dying... All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves.

Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: "In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems." The key innovation was an algorithm called PageRank, which ranked search results by calculating how relevant they were to a user's query on the basis of their links to other pages on the web. On the back of PageRank, Google became the gateway to the internet, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page built one of the biggest companies in the world. Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model, such as BERT or GPT-3 -- or a future version of them. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but what they do -- and how we interact with them.

[Donald Metzler and his colleagues at Google Research] are interested in a search engine that behaves like a human expert. It should produce answers in natural language, synthesized from more than one document, and back up its answers with references to supporting evidence, as Wikipedia articles aim to do. Large language models get us part of the way there. Trained on most of the web and hundreds of books, GPT-3 draws information from multiple sources to answer questions in natural language. The problem is that it does not keep track of those sources and cannot provide evidence for its answers. There's no way to tell if GPT-3 is parroting trustworthy information or disinformation -- or simply spewing nonsense of its own making.

Metzler and his colleagues call language models dilettantes -- "They are perceived to know a lot but their knowledge is skin deep." The solution, they claim, is to build and train future BERTs and GPT-3s to retain records of where their words come from. No such models are yet able to do this, but it is possible in principle, and there is early work in that direction. There have been decades of progress on different areas of search, from answering queries to summarizing documents to structuring information, says Ziqi Zhang at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies information retrieval on the web. But none of these technologies overhauled search because they each address specific problems and are not generalizable. The exciting premise of this paper is that large language models are able to do all these things at the same time, he says.

"An XKCD comic — and its many remixes — perfectly captures the absurdity of academic research," writes the Atlantic (in an article shared by Slashdot reader shanen).

It argues that the cartoon "captured the attention of scientists — and inspired many to create versions specific to their own disciplines. Together, these became a global, interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of modern research practices." It depicts a taxonomy of the 12 "Types of Scientific Paper," presented in a grid. "The immune system is at it again," one paper's title reads. "My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it," declares another. The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The cartoon's childlike simplicity, though, seemed to offer cover for scientists to critique and celebrate their work at the same time...

You couldn't keep the biologists away from the fun ("New microscope!! Yours is now obsolete"), and — in their usual fashion — the science journalists soon followed ("Readers love animals"). A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes. At that point, the writer and internet activist Cory Doctorow lauded the collective project of producing these jokes as "an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography — self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story."

Put another way: The joke was on target. "The meme hits the right nerve," says Vinay Prasad, an associate epidemiology professor and a prominent critic of medical research. "Many papers serve no purpose, advance no agenda, may not be correct, make no sense, and are poorly read. But they are required for promotion." The scholarly literature in many fields is riddled with extraneous work; indeed, I've always been intrigued by the idea that this sorry outcome was more or less inevitable, given the incentives at play. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review ... and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can't keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.
The article argues the Covid-19 pandemic induced medical journals to forego papers about large-scale clinical trials while "rapidly accepting reports that described just a handful of patients. More than a few CVs were beefed up along the way."

But pandemic publishing has only served to exacerbate some well-established bad habits, Michael Johansen, a family-medicine physician and researcher who has criticized many studies as being of minimal value, told me. "COVID publications appear to be representative of the literature at large: a few really important papers and a whole bunch of stuff that isn't or shouldn't be read."
Unfortunately, the Atlantic adds, "none of the scientists I talked with could think of a realistic solution."

It's taken 17 years, with many setbacks and some deaths, and still Richard Branson's space mission is yet to launch. From a report: Richard Branson was running almost 15 years late. But as we rode into the Mojave desert on the morning of 12 December 2018, he was feeling upbeat and untroubled by the past. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and the easy smile of someone used to being behind schedule. Branson hadn't exactly squandered the past 15 years. He'd become a grandfather, moved to a private island in the Caribbean and expanded Virgin's business empire into banking, hotels, gyms, wedding dresses and more. But he was staking his legacy on Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company he formed in 2004. The idea was to build a rocketship with seats for eight -- two pilots, six passengers -- that would be carried aloft by a mothership, released about 45,000ft in the air and then zoom just beyond the lower limit of space, float around for a few minutes, before returning to Earth. He was charging $200,000 a seat. It did not initially seem like such a crazy idea. That year, a boutique aviation firm in Mojave, California, two hours north of Los Angeles, had built a prototype mothership and rocketship that a pair of test pilots flew to space three times, becoming the first privately built space craft. Branson hired the firm to design, build and test him a bigger version of the craft.

But the undertaking was proving far more difficult than Branson anticipated. An accidental explosion in 2007 killed three engineers. A mid-air accident in 2014 destroyed the ship and killed a test pilot, forcing Virgin Galactic to more or less start over. I approached the company shortly after the accident to ask if I could embed with them and write a story about their space programme for the New Yorker. I worked on the story for four years. After it came out, in August 2018, I spent another two years reporting and writing a book about the test pilots who fly Branson's spaceship. Amid the tragedies and setbacks, Branson remained optimistic of the prospect of imminent success. In 2004: "It is envisaged that Virgin Galactic will open for business by the beginning of 2005 and, subject to the necessary safety and regulatory approvals, begin operating flights from 2007." Then, in 2009: "I'm very confident that we should be able to meet 2011." Later, in 2017: "We are hopefully about three months before we are in space, maybe six months before I'm in space." Meanwhile, other private space companies, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, were making progress. Branson confessed that had he known in 2004 what he knew now, "I wouldn't have gone ahead with the project... We simply couldn't afford it."

His record on delivering promises has made him a polarising figure. Branson has appeared on lists of both hucksters and heroes. One poll ranked him second among people whom British children should emulate; Jesus Christ came third. His biographer describes him as "a card player with a weak hand who plays to strength," but also a "self-made and self-deprecating man whose flamboyance endears him to aspiring tycoons, who snap up his books and flock to his lectures to glean the secrets of fortune-hunting." But all of that was in the past; the turmoil and hardship would hopefully make the triumph all that much sweeter. For he and I knew as we headed into the desert that tomorrow could finally be the day that Virgin Galactic went to space.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This week the Free Software Foundation posted some new answers to frequently-asked questions "as the FSF board sets about the work of strengthening the Foundation's governance structure." The FAQ notes that most of their financial support comes from individuals, and that "At this moment, the FSF has more associate members than at any time in its history," adding that it's in good financial health. (And the FAQ also reminds readers that all board members are uncompensated volunteers.)

But it also confirms that a seat on the board was created for union staff "in the aftermath of the March 2021 controversy over the election of Richard Stallman to the board." And apparently in light of Stallman's return, the first question is "What are the responsibilities of a member of the FSF board?"

Answer: The board of directors does not usually deal with the everyday work of the FSF, focusing instead on the long-term direction and financial stability of the Foundation, as well as the appointment of the officers. In addition, members of the board do not speak for the board or for the FSF. Outside of the deliberations of the board, they are private citizens. The right to speak for the Foundation is reserved to the president of the FSF and other FSF officers, such as the executive director.

When the board does make statements, each statement is carefully deliberated. No one member has this individual authority.

The FAQ also clarifies that while Stallman is also a voting board member, "Voting member meetings normally discuss only who should be on the board. They do not take up the issues that come before the board itself... When the Foundation was formed in 1985, the founders were advised that, to qualify for a tax exemption, board members should not be chosen solely by other board members. Legal counsel advised the founders that there should be two bodies with some overlap, one being the active board and the other being a body that appointed the active board.

"Governance standards have since changed, and this structure is no longer required. As part of the effort to improve FSF governance, the board can consider possible changes to this overall structure."

It also adds that "There is no formal term limit for a board member. Board members are evaluated by the voting members at regular intervals, and occasionally by the other directors."

The last question on the list? "In addition to holding a board seat, what other role or roles does Richard Stallman play in the FSF?"

The answer? "Richard Stallman frequently gives talks on free software, in his personal capacity, and, when he does so, he sells merchandise from the FSF shop, recruits volunteers for FSF and GNU, and raises donations for FSF. He is the primary author and editor of two books sold by the FSF."

kackle writes: I just received an email telling me that "Popular Science" magazine is no more. That is, it is to be delivered to readers from now on only via ones and zeros. I can't say I had a subscription since its beginnings in 1872, but I did learn much from the rag and will sincerely miss it. "Today, we're unveiling our biggest change in my tenure: Popular Science is now a fully digital magazine," writes Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio. In addition to "redesigned" and "reimagined stories" made especially for mobile devices, Iozzio notes that their various apps "include an archive of 15-plus years of back issues..."

"The mediums may change, but even after all these evolutions and iterations, our core belief remains as fixed and focused as it was in 1872: Embracing science and tech means living in the realm of possibility."