Anyone who has spent time working in an office has seen how quickly a box of doughnuts gets demolished. But it's not just genuinely tasty snacks that get gobbled up. From a report: Dr. Susan Albers-Bowling, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic and author of six books on mindful eating, says one of the big reasons is that it's free. "We are motivated to try things that are free because it's low risk," she says. "We also feel like we're getting a deal." The cost of obtaining a food could be a deterrent for unhealthy behavior, says Luke Ayers, PhD, assistant psychology professor at Widener University. "People may be less likely to spend money on a knowingly unhealthy snack," he says. "The food being free might just remove that obstacle."

The office is also a ripe place for encouraging mindless eating, particularly in the afternoon. "We hit an afternoon slump, and a lot of us go looking for food," says Albers-Bowling. "If it's available, we are creatures of convenience. If it's easy and it's there, we go for it." Watching our peers eat can also trigger mindless eating. "Seeing others eating something has a contagious affect," says Albers-Bowling. [...] Where the eating takes place can also influence your behavior, says Ayers. You might be more open to trying new foods when you're in a different environment, and then you connect that environment to a new habit.

Apple's mobile apps routinely appear first in search results ahead of competitors in its App Store, a powerful advantage that skirts some of the company's rules on such rankings, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. From the report: The company's apps ranked first in more than 60% of basic searches, such as for "maps," [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] the analysis showed. Apple apps that generate revenue through subscriptions or sales, like Music or Books, showed up first in 95% of searches related to those apps. This dominance gives the company an upper hand in a marketplace that generates $50 billion in annual spending. Services revenue linked to the performance of apps is at the center of Apple's strategy to diversify its profits as iPhone sales wane. While many of Apple's products are undoubtedly popular, they are held to a different standard by the App Store. Apple tells developers that downloads, user reviews and ratings are factors that influence search results. Yet more than two dozen of Apple's apps come pre-installed on iPhones and are shielded from reviews and ratings.

[...] Audiobooks.com, an RBmedia company, largely held the No. 1 ranking in "audiobooks" searches in the App Store for nearly two years. Then last September it was unseated by Apple Books. The Apple app had only recently begun marketing audiobooks directly for the first time. "It was literally overnight," said Ian Small, Audiobooks.com's general manager. He said the change triggered a 25% decline in Audiobooks.com's daily app downloads. [...] Apple's role as both the creator of the App Store's search engine and the beneficiary of its results has rankled developers. They contend Apple is essentially pinning its apps No. 1, compelling anyone seeking alternatives to consider Apple apps first. [...] Phillip Shoemaker, who led the App Store review process until 2016, said Apple executives were aware of Podcasts' poor ratings. Around 2015, his team proposed to senior executives that it purge all apps rated lower than two stars to ensure overall quality. "That would kill our Podcasts app," an Apple executive said, according to Mr. Shoemaker, who has advised some independent apps on the App Store review process since leaving Apple. The proposal was eventually rejected, Mr. Shoemaker said.

An anonymous reader quotes the Atlantic: Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources...

In the face of coffee shaming, young people usually point to things like student loans and housing prices as the true source of the generation's instability, not their $100-a-month cold-brew habits... Orman and her compatriots now receive widespread pushback when denigrating coffee aficionados, a change that reflects the shifting intergenerational tensions that are frequently a feature of the post-Great Recession personal-finance genre. The industry posits that many of the sweeping generational trends affecting Americans' personal stability -- student-loan debt, housing insecurity, the precarity of the gig economy -- are actually the fault of modernity's encouragement of undisciplined individual largesse. In reality, those phenomena are largely the province of Baby Boomers, whose policies set future generations on a much tougher road than their own. With every passing year, it becomes harder to sell the idea that the problems are simply with each American as a person, instead of with the system they live in. "There's a reason for this blame-the-victim talk" in personal-finance advice, the journalist Helaine Olen wrote recently. "It lets society off the hook. Instead of getting angry at the economics of our second gilded age, many end up furious with themselves."

That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books... [W]hen it comes to money, says Laura Vanderkam, the author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, there are usually only a couple of things that actually make a difference in how stable people are. It's the big stuff: how much you make, how much you pay for housing, whether or not you pay for a car.

Texbook publishing giant Pearson will soon be publishing a lot fewer textbooks. It said this week it's ending regular revisions of all print textbooks in its higher-education category. As Pearson faces mounting pressure from the resale market, the move signals a growing shift in the publishing industry to a "digital-first" model. From a report: Instead of revising all 1,500 of its active titles every three years according to the print schedule, the British education publisher said it will focus on updating its digital products more frequently, offering artificial intelligence capabilities, data analytics and research. Pearson is billing the decision as a way to help drive down college costs for students. But the company and the education publishing industry as a whole have been criticized for years for the rising prices of textbooks. That has pushed a majority of students into secondhand textbook markets like Chegg or spurred them to forego buying class materials altogether. The average cost of college textbooks rose about four times faster than the rate of inflation over the last decade. "Our digital first model lowers prices for students and, over time, increases our revenues," Fallon said in a statement. "By providing better value to students, they have less reason to turn to the secondary market. Pearson's e-books can cost about $40 on average and go up to $79 for additional learning tools like homework assistance. That compares to prices that can go as high as $200 or $300 for a print textbook, according to Pearson CEO John Fallon, though students can still rent one for $60 on average.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Our workplaces are set up for convenience, not to get the best out of our brains, says Cal Newport, bestselling author of books including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, and a Georgetown University professor. In knowledge sector jobs, where products are created using human intelligence rather than machines, we must be switched on at all times and prepared to multitask. These are two things that are not compatible with deep, creative, insightful thinking. "In knowledge work, the main resource is the human brain and its ability to produce new information with value," says Newport. "But we are not good at getting a good return." Being switched on at all times and expected to pick things up immediately makes us miserable, says Newport. "It mismatches with the social circuits in our brain. It makes us feel bad that someone is waiting for us to reply to them. It makes us anxious."

Because it is so easy to dash off a quick reply on email, Slack or other messaging apps, we feel guilty for not doing so, and there is an expectation that we will do it. This, says Newport, has greatly increased the number of things on people's plates. "The average knowledge worker is responsible for more things than they were before email. This makes us frenetic. We should be thinking about how to remove the things on their plate, not giving people more to do." What might being wired for work at all times lead to? Inevitably, burnout. Newport describes this way of working as a "hyperactive hivemind." Unstructured conversations on messaging apps and meetings dropped into diaries on the fly congest our day. His objective, to give people the space to do their best work without distraction, is the subject of his next book: The World Without Email. Newport's idea is to allow workers to do less work, but better. Cutting out unnecessary chatter is important but only if the organization's culture allows for slower communication. Newport advocates for a more linear approach to workflows. "People need to completely stop one task in order to fully transition their thought processes to the next one," reports the BBC. "However, this is hard when we are constantly seeing emails or being reminded about previous tasks. Some of our thoughts are still on the previous work -- an effect called attention residue."

While it is very convenient to have everyone in an ongoing conversation, such as in a Slack thread, Newport says convenience is never the goal in business, it is value. "The assembly line revolutionized car production but it is not a convenient system -- it is the system that produces the most cars quickly."

IQ test scores have been increasing for 100 years, reports a senior journalist at BBC Future. He also writes that there's evidence "that we may have already reached the end of this era -- with the rise in IQs stalling and even reversing."

But this raises an even larger question: did a century of increasing scores on IQ tests bring benefits to society? You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are, but it's not quite this simple... Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as "95% fat-free" sounds healthier than "5% fat", for instance -- a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages. People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias -- our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That's a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.

Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias -- the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses -- a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.) Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of "temporal discounting", which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That's essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.

Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills -- such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people's degrees. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction," and suggests "we might also make a more concerted and deliberate effort to improve those other essential skills too that do not necessarily come with a higher IQ..."

"Ideally, we might then start to see a steep rise in rationality -- and even wisdom... If so, the temporary blip in our IQ scores need not represent the end of an intellectual golden age -- but its beginning."

After being shut down last month with 22 employees losing their jobs, Maker Faire and Maker Media are coming back, but in a weakened capacity. Founder and CEO Dale Dougherty tells TechCrunch that "he's bought back the brands, domains, and content from creditors and rehired 15 of 22 laid off staffers with his own money." The report says that he will formally announce the relaunch of the company with the new name "Make Community." From the report: The company is already working on a new issue of Make Magazine that it will hope to publish quarterly (down from six times per year) and the online archives of its do-it-yourself project guides will remain available. It hopes to keep publishing books. And it will continue to license the Maker Faire name to event organizers who've thrown over 200 of the festivals full of science-art and workshops in 40 countries. But Dougherty doesn't have the funding to commit to producing the company-owned flagship Bay Area and New York Maker Faires any more.

For now, Dougherty is financing the revival himself "with the goal that we can get back up to speed as a business, and start generating revenue and a magazine again. This is where the community support needs to come in because I can't fund it for very long." The immediate plan is to announce a new membership model next week at Make.co where hobbyists and craft-lovers can pay a monthly or annual fee to become patrons of Make Community. Dougherty was cagey about what they'll get in return beyond a sense of keeping alive the organization that's held the maker community together since 2005. He does hope to get the next Make Magazine issue out by the end of summer or early fall, and existing subscribers should get it in the mail.

"From JFK's real motives to the Soviets' secret plot to land on the Moon at the same time, a new behind-the-scenes view of an unlikely triumph 50 years ago," writes schwit1 sharing a new article from Smithsonian magazine titled "What You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Mission."

It's an excerpt from the recently-released book ONE GIANT LEAP: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. The Moon has a smell. It has no air, but it has a smell... All the astronauts who walked on the Moon noticed it, and many commented on it to Mission Control.... Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold warned NASA that the dust had been isolated from oxygen for so long that it might well be highly chemically reactive. If too much dust was carried inside the lunar module's cabin, the moment the astronauts repressurized it with air and the dust came into contact with oxygen, it might start burning, or even cause an explosion. (Gold, who correctly predicted early on that the Moon's surface would be covered with powdery dust, also had warned NASA that the dust might be so deep that the lunar module and the astronauts themselves could sink irretrievably into it.) Among the thousands of things they were keeping in mind while flying to the Moon, Armstrong and Aldrin had been briefed about the very small possibility that the lunar dust could ignite....

The Apollo spacecraft ended up with what was, for its time, the smallest, fastest and most nimble computer in a single package anywhere in the world. That computer navigated through space and helped the astronauts operate the ship. But the astronauts also traveled to the Moon with paper star charts so they could use a sextant to take star sightings -- like 18th-century explorers on the deck of a ship -- and cross-check their computer's navigation. The software of the computer was stitched together by women sitting at specialized looms -- using wire instead of thread. In fact, an arresting amount of work across Apollo was done by hand: The heat shield was applied to the spaceship by hand with a fancy caulking gun; the parachutes were sewn by hand, and then folded by hand. The only three staff members in the country who were trained and licensed to fold and pack the Apollo parachutes were considered so indispensable that NASA officials forbade them to ever ride in the same car, to avoid their all being injured in a single accident. Despite its high-tech aura, we have lost sight of the extent to which the lunar mission was handmade...

The space program in the 1960s did two things to lay the foundation of the digital revolution. First, NASA used integrated circuits -- the first computer chips -- in the computers that flew the Apollo command module and the Apollo lunar module. Except for the U.S. Air Force, NASA was the first significant customer for integrated circuits. Microchips power the world now, of course, but in 1962 they were little more than three years old, and for Apollo they were a brilliant if controversial bet. Even IBM decided against using them in the company's computers in the early 1960s. NASA's demand for integrated circuits, and its insistence on their near-flawless manufacture, helped create the world market for the chips and helped cut the price by 90 percent in five years. NASA was the first organization of any kind -- company or government agency -- anywhere in the world to give computer chips responsibility for human life. If the chips could be depended on to fly astronauts safely to the Moon, they were probably good enough for computers that would run chemical plants or analyze advertising data.
The article also notes that three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

Foreigners crossing certain Chinese borders into the Xinjiang region, where authorities are conducting a massive campaign of surveillance and oppression against the local Muslim population, are being forced to install a piece of malware on their phones that gives all of their text messages as well as other pieces of data to the authorities, a collaboration by Motherboard, Suddeutsche Zeitung, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the German public broadcaster NDR has found. From the report: The Android malware, which is installed by a border guard when they physically seize the phone, also scans the tourist or traveller's device for a specific set of files, according to multiple expert analyses of the software. The files authorities are looking for include Islamic extremist content, but also innocuous Islamic material, academic books on Islam by leading researchers, and even music from a Japanese metal band. In no way is the downloading of tourists' text messages and other mobile phone data comparable to the treatment of the Uighur population in Xinjiang, who live under the constant gaze of facial recognition systems, CCTV, and physical searches. [...] The malware news shows that the Chinese government's aggressive style of policing and surveillance in the Xinjiang region has extended to foreigners, too.

"[This app] provides yet another source of evidence showing how pervasive mass surveillance is being carried out in Xinjiang. We already know that Xinjiang residents -- particularly Turkic Muslims -- are subjected to round-the-clock and multidimensional surveillance in the region," Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said. "What you've found goes beyond that: it suggests that even foreigners are subjected to such mass, and unlawful surveillance."

NPR notes today's "supercomputer-driven" weather modelling can crunch huge amounts of data to accurately forecast the weather a week in advance -- pointing out that "a six-day weather forecast today is as good as a two-day forecast was in the 1970s."

Here's some highlights from their interview with Andrew Blum, author of The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast : One of the things that's happened as the scale in the system has shifted to the computers is that it's no longer bound by past experience. It's no longer, the meteorologists say, "Well, this happened in the past, we can expect it to happen again." We're more ready for these new extremes because we're not held down by past expectations...

The models are really a kind of ongoing concern. ... They run ahead in time, and then every six hours or every 12 hours, they compare their own forecast with the latest observations. And so the models in reality are ... sort of dancing together, where the model makes a forecast and it's corrected slightly by the observations that are coming in...

It's definitely run by individual nations -- but individual nations with their systems tied together... It's a 150-year-old system of governments collaborating with each other as a global public good... The positive example from last month was with Cyclone Fani in India. And this was a very similar storm to one 20 years ago, that tens of thousands of people had died. This time around, the forecast came far enough in advance and with enough confidence that the Indian government was able to move a million people out of the way.

Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing: "The books will stop working": That's the substance of the reminder that Microsoft sent to customers for their ebook store, reminding them that, as announced in April, the company is getting out of the ebook business because it wasn't profitable enough for them, and when they do, they're going to shut off their DRM servers, which will make the books stop working.

Almost exactly fifteen years ago, I gave an influential, widely cited talk at Microsoft Research where I predicted this exact outcome. I don't feel good about the fact that I got it right. This is a fucking travesty.
We're just days away from the "early July" shutdown. And Doctorow elaborated on his feelings in a blog post in April: This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast... The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

Public library cardholders in New York City will no longer have access to tens of thousands of movies through Kanopy as of July 1, when the New York, Brooklyn and Queens public libraries end their partnerships with the streaming service because of the cost, the libraries said Monday. From a report: The San Francisco-based platform, which notified library cardholders by email on Monday, offers well-known feature films, like "Lady Bird" and "Moonlight," as well as classic movies, documentaries and foreign-language films not always available on other services. In a statement, the New York Public Library said, "We believe the cost of Kanopy makes it unsustainable," adding that it would use its resources to purchase "more in-demand collections such as books and e-books." The Brooklyn and Queens libraries also cited what they said were Kanopy's rising costs in dropping the service. About 25,000 people with New York Public Library cards -- about 1 percent of the library's 2 million cardholders -- used the service in the past year. The New York library -- with branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island -- and the Brooklyn Public Library first offered Kanopy in August 2017, and the Queens Library followed several months later.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Oregon Department of Corrections has banned prisoners from reading a number of books related to technology and programming, citing concerns about security. According to public records obtained by the Salem Reporter, the Oregon Department of Corrections has banned dozens of books related to programming and technology as they come through the mail room, ensuring that they don't get to the hands of prisoners. At least in official department code, there is no blanket ban on technology-related books. Instead, each book is individually evaluated to assess potential threats. Many programming-related books are cited as "material that threatens," often including the subject matter ("computer programming") as justification. The Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) worries that prisoners could use the tools mentioned in some of the programming-related books to compromise their systems. But what's odd is the scope of the ban. Justin Seitz's Black Hat Python book failed the prison's security test since it's geared towards hacking, but so did the book Windows 10 for Dummies, Microsoft Excel 16 for Dummies which simply teaches proficiency in Excel and Windows 10.

Officials at the DOC argue that knowledge of even these basic programs can pose a threat to prisons. "Not only do we have to think about classic prison escape and riot efforts like digging holes, jumping fences and starting fires, modernity requires that we also protect our prisons and the public against data system breaches and malware," DOC spokesperson Jennifer Black said in an emailed statement. "It is a balancing act we are actively trying to achieve."

Since 2005 Randall Munroe has been the author/illustrator of the popular nerdy comic strip XKCD -- and he's now planning to publish "the world's least useful self-help book." How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems offers readers a third choice beyond simply doing things either the right way or the wrong way: "a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it," according to a new page at XKCD.com: It describes how to cross a river by removing all the water, outlines some of the many uses for lava around the home, and teaches you how to use experimental military research to ensure that your friends will never again ask you to help them move.
To promote the book Munroe has already scheduled visits in 14 nerd-friendly cities (including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Raleigh). But a final 15th city will be chosen "based on the results of a challenge..." The challenge: Write the best story using nothing but book covers. Arrange the titles of your favorite books into sentences that tell a story, assemble a single continuous line of people holding up the covers, and take a photo or video documenting your feat.

You can make the story as long as you want, but each book needs to be held by a different human. Creative grammar is fine, and you'll get extra credit for including as many books and people as possible.
Photos should be either shared on social media with the hashtag #howtoxkcd, or emailed to that address on Gmail. "Submit your entry between June 10 and July 31," explains the site, adding that a winner will be announced in August.

"Make sure to include your location (city/state, US only) so we know where to find you!"

How many words can you fit in a subtitle? For a slew of modern books, the answer seems to be as many as possible. From a report: Just look at Julie Holland's "Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You're Taking, the Sleep You're Missing, the Sex You're Not Having, and What's Really Making You Crazy," Erin McHugh's "Political Suicide: Missteps, Peccadilloes, Bad Calls, Backroom Hijinx, Sordid Pasts, Rotten Breaks, and Just Plain Dumb Mistakes in the Annals of American Politics" and Ryan Grim's "We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement." Blame a one-word culprit: search.

Todd Stocke, senior vice president and editorial director at Sourcebooks, said that subtitle length and content have a lot to do with finding readers through online searches. "It used to be that you could solve merchandising communication on the cover by adding a tagline, blurb or bulleted list," he said. But now, publishers "pack the keywords and search terms into the subtitle field because in theory that'll help the book surface more easily." He should know. Sourcebooks will publish Shafia Zaloom's "Sex, Teens, and Everything in Between: The New and Necessary Conversations Today's Teenagers Need to Have about Consent, Sexual Harassment, Healthy Relationships, Love, and More" in September.

Amazon allows up to 199 characters for a book's title and subtitle combined, making the word combination possibilities, if not endless, vast. Anne Bogel, host of the podcast "What Should I Read Next?," is not generally a fan of the trend. "I don't feel respected as a reader when I feel like the subtitle was created not to give me a feeling of what kind of reading experience I may get, but for search engines," she said. When Bogel asked author friends how they came up with their subtitles, several told her they can't even remember which words they ended up using. That being said, sometimes titular long-windedness works.

A Florida election software company targeted by Russians in 2016 inadvertently opened a potential pathway for hackers to tamper with voter records in North Carolina on the eve of the presidential election, POLITICO reported on Wednesday, citing a document and a person with knowledge. From the report: VR Systems, based in Tallahassee but with customers in eight states, used what's known as remote-access software to connect for several hours to a central computer in Durham County, N.C., to troubleshoot problems with the company's voter list management tool, the person said. The software distributes voter lists to so-called electronic poll books, which poll workers use to check in voters and verify their eligibility to cast a ballot.

The company did not respond to POLITICO's requests for comment about its practices. But election security experts widely condemn remote connections to election-related computer systems -- not only because they can open a door for intruders but because they can also give attackers access to an entire network, depending on how they're configured. In Durham County's case, the computer in question communicated with North Carolina's State Board of Elections to download the county's voter list before elections, which could have potentially opened a gateway to the state system as well.

dryriver writes: Vice/Motherboard writes that since the U.S. Navy admitted that its pilots encounter unidentified flying objects all the time, and mainstream news outlets like the New York Times have devoted coverage to Navy Pilots' UFO encounter stories, old UFO hunters around the world feel vindicated, and many new younger people are taking an interest in the phenomenon.

For decades people who believe in UFOs, UFO lore and take UFO sightings and UFO encounters seriously have been widely ridiculed as stupid, uneducated, gullible, deluded or crazy. Now that highly trained military pilots are talking about encountering UFOs all the time and mainstream media doesn't ridicule UFO sightings anymore — this only took a few decades — a fundamental taboo appears to have been broken. UFO sightings are suddenly real, not a product of overactive imaginations, people mistaking clouds for aliens or people spreading fake news to sell books, seminars and videos.

The question is, why, for so long, did mainstream media systematically ignore and ridicule a phenomenon just about everybody around the world has some knowledge of and had some exposure to? And if UFOs are "officially not crazy" now, what else that still is ridiculed by the MSM may also turn out to be "officially not crazy" in the future?
As a counterpoint, long-time Slashdot reader Martin S. argues that "UFO's are real, they are unidentified flying objects. There is absolutely no evidence that they are Aliens.

"If people continue to equate them with little green men then they can still expect to be ridiculed."

This week the Guardian ran an expose on Google Assistant (Google's version of Alexa or Siri)

"Interpreting a spoken request isn't magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible." "It's smoke and mirrors if anything," said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. "Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it's human beings that are doing the work." The Google employee works on Pygmalion, the team responsible for producing linguistic data sets that make the Assistant work. And although he is employed directly by Google, most of his Pygmalion co-workers are subcontracted temps who have for years been routinely pressured to work unpaid overtime, according to seven current and former members of the team.

These employees, some of whom spoke to the Guardian because they said efforts to raise concerns internally were ignored, alleged that the unpaid work was a symptom of the workplace culture put in place by the executive who founded Pygmalion. That executive was fired by Google in March following an internal investigation. But current and former employees also identified Google's broad reliance on approximately 100,000 temps, vendors and contractors (known at Google as TVCs) for large amounts of the company's work as a culprit.

Google does not directly employ the workers who collect or create the data required for much of its technology, be they the drivers who capture photos for Google Maps' Street View, the content moderators training YouTube's filters to catch prohibited material, or the scanners flipping pages to upload the contents of libraries into Google Books. Having these two tiers of workers -- highly paid full-time Googlers and often low-wage and precarious workers contracted through staffing firms -- is "corrosive", "highly problematic", and "permissive of exploitation", the employees said.

"It's like a white-collar sweatshop," said one current Google employee. "If it's not illegal, it's definitely exploitative. It's to the point where I don't use the Google Assistant, because I know how it's made, and I can't support it."

I loved this story. The Hustle remembers how in 1964 a world-renowned medical professor found a way to beat roulette wheels, kicking off a five-year winning streak in which he amassed $1,250,000 ($8,000,000 today). He noticed that at the end of each night, casinos would replace cards and dice with fresh sets -- but the expensive roulette wheels went untouched and often stayed in service for decades before being replaced. Like any other machine, these wheels acquired wear and tear. Jarecki began to suspect that tiny defects -- chips, dents, scratches, unlevel surfaces -- might cause certain wheels to land on certain numbers more frequently than randomocity prescribed. The doctor spent weekends commuting between the operating table and the roulette table, manually recording thousands upon thousands of spins, and analyzing the data for statistical abnormalities. "I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers," he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. "If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3...."

With his wife, Carol, he scouted dozens of wheels at casinos around Europe, from Monte Carlo (Monaco), to Divonne-les-Bains (France), to Baden-Baden (Germany). The pair recruited a team of 8 "clockers" who posted up at these venues, sometimes recording as many as 20,000 spins over a month-long period. Then, in 1964, he made his first strike. After establishing which wheels were biased, he secured a £25,000 loan from a Swiss financier and spent 6 months candidly exacting his strategy. By the end of the run, he'd netted £625,000 (roughly $6,700,000 today).

Jarecki's victories made headlines in newspapers all over the world, from Kansas to Australia. Everyone wanted his "secret" -- but he knew that if he wanted to replicate the feat, he'd have to conceal his true methodology. So, he concocted a "fanciful tale" for the press: He tallied roulette outcomes daily, then fed the information into an Atlas supercomputer, which told him which numbers to pick. At the time, wrote gambling historian, Russell Barnhart, in Beating the Wheel, "Computers were looked upon as creatures from outer space... Few persons, including casino managers, were vocationally qualified to distinguish myth from reality." Hiding behind this technological ruse, Jarecki continued to keep tabs on biased tables -- and prepare for his next big move...

In the decades following Jarecki's dominance, casinos invested heavily in monitoring their roulette tables for defects and building wheels less prone to bias. Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution, a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, New York Times reported this week, citing five people with knowledge of the agency's plans. From the report: The E.P.A. had originally forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it is formally adopted. The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.