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"A startup in Israel is tackling the problem, and saving lives, with a sophisticated algorithm that can analyze the almost infinite number of possible conflicts. Ask any doctor or pharmacist and they'll tell you about the minefield called "drug interaction". That's when a medicine designed to resolve one problem causes an adverse reaction with another medicine designed to resolve another problem. Or with anything else the patient puts in their body."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"Our reliance on their information is now a matter of life and death. Misinformation online has real-world consequences. In the developing world, a hoax claimed India had banned coronavirus social posts, and in the US, 13 percent of people thought coronavirus was a hoax during the critical weeks where earlier notification to shelter-in-place would have saved thousands of lives. Tech platforms have an ability through their persuasive techniques and microtargeting to influence the behavior of society in ways traditional media can't. "

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"The main rationale for increasing state surveillance was to tackle the pandemic effectively to save people's lives. Yet, states are not enthusiastic about abandoning these digital tools, even though the pandemic is winding down. Instead, they are determined to preserve their surveillance capacities under the pretext of national security or preparation for future pandemics. In the face of increasing state surveillance, however, we should thoroughly discuss the risk of digital authoritarianism and the possible use of surveillance technologies to violate privacy, silence political opposition, and oppress minorities. For example, South Korea's sophisticated contact tracing technology that involves surveillance camera footage, cell-phone location data, and credit card purchases has disclosed patients' personal information, such as nationality. It raised privacy concerns, particularly for ethnic minorities, and underlined the risk of technology-enabled ethnic mapping and discrimination."

"It forecast 14 earthquakes within a 200-mile area of the estimated epicenter and also made a very accurate forecast regarding their intensity, a report on the university's website said. It failed to warn of just one earthquake and gave eight false predictions. The research team trained the AI to detect statistical bumps in real-time seismic data that the research team had paired with previous earthquakes, the report explained. Once trained, the AI monitored for signs of approaching earthquakes. "Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail," said Sergey Fomel, a professor at UT's Bureau of Economic Geology and a member of the research team, adding: "What we achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem is solvable in principle.""

"ns Work in Progress It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic. By Derek Thompson A student looking at their phone Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock December 19, 2023 Saved Stories This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."

"Cybersecurity researchers say the My2022 mobile app - the official app of the Beijing Winter Olympics - has serious security vulnerabilities and that "all Olympian audio is being collected, analyzed and saved on Chinese servers." Why This Matters: The Chinese government is mandating all Olympic athletes, coaches, and attendees use the My2022 app and, as of Thursday morning, the app is still available in the Apple and Android U.S. app stores where Americans can download it too."

"The premise of the commercial is that Progressive can't prevent us from becoming our parents but can save us money on insurance. In the commercial there was a scene where we're told, "we don't need to print the Internet." The commercial made me chuckle and it inspired this blog post. "

"The collapse of SVB was the second-largest bank failure in the history of the United States. The largest, Washington Mutual in 2008, took place over the course of eight months. SVB's collapse played out in barely two days. Anxious Twitter posts and WhatsApp exchanges, coupled with the ease of access that online banking provides, are seen by analysts as a serious catalyst for the current crisis. Experts suggest that in the social media age, the psychological behaviour behind a bank run - mass fear from depositors of losing their savings - may be amplified and go viral quicker than bank officers and regulators can successfully respond."

"From 2016 to 2020, the Australian government operated an automated debt assessment and recovery system, known as "Robodebt," to recover fraudulent or overpaid welfare benefits. The goal was to save $4.77 billion through debt recovery and reduced public service costs. However, the algorithm and policies at the heart of Robodebt caused wildly inaccurate assessments, and administrative burdens that disproportionately impacted those with the least resources. After a federal court ruled the policy unlawful, the government was forced to terminate Robodebt and agree to a $1.8 billion settlement."

"To date, activity trackers have been used medically only to encourage or monitor patient activity, particularly in conjunction with weight loss programs.5, 6 To our knowledge, this is the first report to use the information in an activity tracker-smartphone system to assist in specific medical decisionmaking."

"is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications."

""The problem," Leveson wrote in a book, "is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.""

"We may be only just starting to understand how digital democracy can help address the crisis of legitimacy that is affecting different levels of the political process."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

""How are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?""

"A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes - recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, "poison bread sandwiches" and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes."