"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."

"Could it be the phones? Absolutely! To be clear: the idea that phones are causing distraction both inside and outside of school hours, and this contributes to declining test scores, seems totally plausible to me-and preliminary cross-sectional data from the PISA report indicates the same. Might it be a good idea to keep phones out of the classroom? Definitely! But, as often happens when an excerpt of a larger study makes the rounds online, some nuance is missing. Let's talk about what the data actually show. "

"Next, was two months of probation where we moderated on practice queues that consisted of hundreds of thousands of videos that had already been moderated. The policies we applied to these practice videos were compared with what had previously been applied to them by a more experienced moderator in order to find areas we needed to improve in. Everyone passed their probation. One trend that is particularly hated by moderators are the "recaps". These consist of a 15- to 60-second barrage of pictures, sometimes hundreds, shown as a super fast slideshow often with three to four pictures a second. We have to view every one of these photos for infractions. If a video is 60 seconds long then the system will allocate us around 48 seconds to do this. We also have to check the video description, account bio and hashtags. Around the end of the school year or New Year's Eve, when these sort of videos are popular, it becomes incredibly draining and also affects our stats. "

"The use of "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests. Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time."

"The UK is not Russia. For all that the many civil liberty campaigners will complain, as is their role, the independence of the judiciary remains strong. The laws relating to freedom of association, expression and right to privacy are well defended in parliament and outside. But the technology, the means by which the state might insert itself into our lives, is developing apace. The checks and balances are not. The Guardian has revealed that the government is legislating, without fanfare, to allow the police and the National Crime Agency to run facial recognition searches across the UK's driving licence records. When the police have an image, they will be able to identify the person, it is hoped, through the photographic images the state holds for the purposes of ensuring that the roads are safe. Searching those digital images would have taken more man-hours than could have been justified in the old analogue world. It is now a matter of pushing a button, thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence systems that are able to match biometric measurements in a flash."

"TikTok moderators have struggled to assess content related to the Israel-Gaza conflict because the platform removed an internal tool for flagging videos in a foreign language, the Guardian has been told. The change has meant moderators in Europe cannot flag that they do not understand foreign-language videos, for example, in Arabic and Hebrew, which are understood to be appearing more frequently in video queues. The Guardian was told that moderators hired to work in English previously had access to a button to state that a video or post was not in their language. Internal documents seen by the Guardian show the button was called "not my language", or "foreign language"."

"Rite Aid facial recognition misidentified Black, Latino and Asian people as 'likely' shoplifters Surveillance systems incorrectly and without customer consent marked shoppers as 'persons of interest', an FTC settlement says Johana Bhuiyan and agencies Wed 20 Dec 2023 14.29 EST Last modified on Thu 21 Dec 2023 12.04 EST Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people - particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people - on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years."

"TikTok faces questions over safeguards for child users after a Guardian investigation found that moderators were being told to allow under-13s to stay on the platform if they claimed their parents were overseeing their accounts."

"Can AI bring personalized tutors to every student? The AI education tools being piloted today are mind-blowing because they are tailored to each individual learner. Some of them-like Khanmigo and MATHia-are already remarkable, and they'll only get better in the years ahead. One of the things that excites me the most about this type of technology is the possibility of localizing it to every student, no matter where they live. For example, a team in Nairobi is working on Somanasi, an AI-based tutor that aligns with the curriculum in Kenya. The name means "learn together" in Swahili, and the tutor has been designed with the cultural context in mind so it feels familiar to the students who use it."

"Microsoft will also launch Content Credentials for digital watermarking, create teams to work with political campaigns on cybersecurity and AI, and endorse a bill banning AI in political ads."

"This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt."

"The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton. It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime."

"In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University. However, they found that using an AI model to generate text is significantly less energy-intensive. Creating text 1,000 times only uses as much energy as 16% of a full smartphone charge. "

"Sources familiar with how AI-based systems have been integrated into the IDF's operations said such tools had significantly sped up the target creation process. "We prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist," a source who previously worked in the target division told +972/Local Call. "It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate." A separate source told the publication the Gospel had allowed the IDF to run a "mass assassination factory" in which the "emphasis is on quantity and not on quality". A human eye, they said, "will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them". For some experts who research AI and international humanitarian law, an acceleration of this kind raises a number of concerns."

"The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew - but never disclosed - it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents. In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage"."

"AI tool GNoME finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation. Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals - equivalent to nearly 800 years' worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials."

"A scammer paid Facebook's parent company $7,000 to reach up to 100,000 people in Australia with a deepfake A Current Affair video featuring altered versions of Jim Chalmers, Dick Smith, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart, data reveals. Smith issued a warning to the public earlier this week after a video began circulating on Facebook and Instagram in recent weeks. The video was designed to appear like a segment on A Current Affair, featuring host Ally Langdon seemingly interviewing the treasurer and the rich listers about an investment opportunity."

"Robot dogs have unnerved and angered the public. So why is this artist teaching them to paint?"

"They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material. Emma Hardy, UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) director, said the pictures were "terrifyingly" realistic. "The quality of the images that we're seeing is comparable to professional photos taken annually of children in schools up and down the country," said Hardy, who is also the Internet Watch Foundation communications director."

"After I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2022, I started following Instagram accounts that could help me understand the condition. Reels and memes about being neurodivergent started to fill my feed, along with tips on how to manage ADHD in a relationship and other helpful advice. But within days, something else happened: my phone found out about my diagnosis. All of a sudden, I was being served with ads for apps that claimed they could help me to manage my symptoms. There were quizzes to determine what type of ADHD I had: was I predominantly inattentive or impulsive, one asked. Did I definitely have it? Find out by taking this diagnostic test, another promised."