Sam Radford

How would we write differently if…

Love this hypothetical raised by Todd Rogers, author of ‘Writing for Busy Readers’:

How would we write differently if we thought 90% of those…

…reading books stopped after one chapter?

…reading memos stopped after the introduction?

…reading academic articles stopped after the abstract?

…reading legal decisions stopped after the Summary?

Reality may not be very far from this hypothetical. If that’s true, I’d likely write more like journalists by using the inverted pyramid where the first paragraph has all the key information and what follows is more detail.

[writingforbusyreaders.com]

Screenable: the new app supporting digital parenting.

Om Malik, the San Francisco-based writer, photographer, and investor, investigates a new app the makers describe as ‘the kid phone for Apple families’:

Screenable, an app available for download from Apple’s App Store, allows parents to limit the features and functionalities of their child’s device. Currently available for iPhones and iPads, it offers settings appropriate for kids of varying ages.

In the words of CEO Tom Clifton:

The idea is to offer parents an easy way to dial down the phone to the right level of power for each kid’s age and stage. It’s not about locking everything down forever, but about gradually opening up access as they demonstrate responsibility.

Why do we need this app—an app that isn’t free—when Apple already offers screen time controls? Well, because, sadly, Apple has dropped the ball somewhat in this area. In my own experiences, Apple’s controls are both flaky and too fiddly. What appeals about this app (which is currently only available in the US) is its simplicity. Looking forward to testing it when it comes out here in the UK.

[om.co]

TikTok knows its app is harmful for teens.

For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns.

The confidential material was part of a more than two-year investigation into TikTok by 14 attorneys general that led to state officials suing the company on Tuesday. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok was designed with the express intention of addicting young people to the app. The states argue the multi-billion-dollar company deceived the public about the risks.

No surprises here.

[npr.org]

Nature absorbed almost no carbon last year.

The hope is that this is temporary, but the implications of this could accelerate the heating of our world dramatically:

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

[theguardian.com]

“My girlfriend dumped me by text — and my iPhone sent me a summary”.

A software developer discovered that his girlfriend was splitting up with him on his birthday through a new AI feature on his iPhone. It summed up her messages as: “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from apartment.”

I’ve been testing the new Apple Intelligence features myself, and the summaries of notifications and emails have been something I’ve taken to. It’s fair to say I hadn’t considered these kinds of scenarios though!

[thetimes.com]

Vaping teenagers.

…parents are passing vapes through the school fence to pupils, according to head teachers. A tidal wave of teenage vaping has normalised the habit in many areas, and some parents are buying vapes for their children or turning a blind eye because they reason it is better than them taking drugs…

…43 per cent of schools catch children vaping daily and 30 per cent weekly.

The acceptance of vaping as a better alternative to smoking is something that will, I fear, properly come back to haunt us.

[thetimes.com]

When empathy is too hard.

A series of experiments led by Pennsylvania State University psychologist C. Daryl Cameron found that most individuals prefer to opt out of the cognitive effort empathy requires, especially if they don’t know the other person well:

…it’s harder to empathize with someone who feels distant or unknown than with a close loved one. “The more shared experiences you have with someone, the more of a rich, nuanced representation you can draw on,” Cameron says. But empathy for someone whose experience feels alien—the person who disagrees with you online, the man in a tent outside the subway or even a cousin who spouts extremist views—is a different matter. A host of disquieting unknowns arises: Is identifying with this person going to put you in danger? Will it compel you to sacrifice something important, such as time, money, tranquility?

When such anticipated costs overwhelm people, they’re more prone to withdraw altogether rather than trying to understand where the other person is coming from. “We are quite adept at learning how to manage our emotional environments to cultivate what we want to feel,” Cameron says. “Empathizing with a stranger, taking on their experiences—either negative or positive experiences—people find it difficult, they find it costly. And the more they feel that way, the less they opt in.”

Harvard social psychologist Erika Weisz points out there is hope though:

…another way to nudge people toward empathy—and keep them there—is to embed them in communities where empathy is a baseline expectation. “People want to increase their empathy if you tell them, essentially, it will help them socially,” Weisz says. “That is a perfectly reasonable leverage.” Unlike empathy skills training, which teaches specific methods of relating to others, Weisz’s approach involves building communities that value and reward empathetic behavior. It draws on a kind of constructive peer pressure.

[scientificamerican.com]

Inventing good and evil.

The Economist reviews ‘The Invention of Good and Evil’ by Hanno Sauer, concluding:

…despite the fury of the culture wars, Mr Sauer sees “an enormous… unrealised potential for reconciliation”. After hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, people share more moral values than they think, and this could help them cast off the identity politics that tells them they are enemies. “Between the extremes of ‘being on time is white supremacy’ and ‘we must revitalise Western Christianity’s cultural hegemony,’ there is a silent majority of reasonable people,” he concludes. He is surely right.

[theeconomist.com]

Finalists from the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition.

Here are the finalists from the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition. Winners will be announced on the 10th of December 2024. Voting for the People’s Choice Award runs from 26th September until 31st October.

Plenty to make you chuckle!

[comedywildlifephoto.com]

Why ChatGPT made this teacher quit teaching.

Victoria Livingstone, a writer, educator, and editor:

…I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.

So I quit.

[time.com]

How AI can help diagnose depression and anxiety.

This feels like it could be genuinely transformative:

By analysing the acoustic properties of speech, these ai models can identify markers of depression or anxiety that a patient might not even be aware of, let alone able to articulate. Though individual features like pitch, tone and rhythm each play a role, the true power of these models lies in their ability to discern patterns imperceptible to a psychiatrist’s ears.

[theconomist.com]

ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought.

You may be hungry for knowledge, but your chatbot is thirsty for the world’s water supplies. The huge computer clusters powering ChatGPT need four times as much water to deliver answers than previously thought, it has been claimed.

Using the chatbot for between ten to 50 queries consumes about two litres of water, according to experts from the University of California, Riverside.

[thetimes.com]

Number of non-believers is surging in Britain.

Britain is entering its “first atheist age” as parents increasingly fail to pass on religious beliefs to their children, according to the largest study of its kind…

…It has long been known that children raised by non-religious parents are more likely to grow up as “non-theists” themselves, but academics have found the same is true for children whose parents believe firmly in God but do not actively participate in religious rituals or devote much “time or money” to their faith.

Of course, this is all blurry. People may not believe in ‘God’ as prescribed by a particular religion or denomination, but that doesn’t mean they don’t embrace the idea of a ‘higher being’ and actively practice spirituality.

[thetimes.com]

What makes a good manager?

Really want to be a manager? You probably wouldn’t be a good one.

The researchers found that a competent manager had about twice as much impact on the team’s performance as a competent worker. More usefully, they also found out which traits were associated with good and bad managerial performance. Teams run by people who said they really, really wanted to be managers performed worse than those who were assigned to lead them by chance. Self-promoting types tended to be overconfident about their own abilities; in a huge shock, they also tended to be men.

[theeconomist.com]

Zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated before age 14.

A historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.

Remarkable.

[statnews.com]

“Holding death close so I remember to live”.

Kelly McMasters, writing in the New York Times:

I wrote my obituary last week. I often do so once a year; it has become a kind of ritual.

…I’m grateful my mother brought the practice of looking at death this way to the dinner table all those decades ago and continued to do so through all the stories of her dying patients after that. Just as my aunt taught me the value of keeping a journal, my mother’s obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.

[nytimes.com]

New London restaurant is staffed by the recently homeless.

Love this story.

In cities across Britain and the world, homelessness and joblessness feed upon each other. Most employers won’t hire someone who does not have a stable address, which means the homeless can’t earn the money to afford a place to live.

Home Kitchen aims to break that cycle by training people for a career in the restaurant industry. Before opening day, recruits took a three-week culinary crash course and then spent two weeks in a kitchen at the Megaro, the five-star hotel where Mr. Simmonds was recently appointed chef patron.

[nytimes.com]

New law: All tips must go to workers.

All tips, whether in cash or by card, must be shared between workers by law in Britain, with millions of workers such as those working for cafes, pubs, restaurants, taxi companies and hairdressers most likely to benefit…

…The Department for Business and Trade has predicted the new law will mean a further £200m will be received by workers rather than their employers.

Some rogue employers will no doubt still find workarounds, but this feels like a good step.

[bbc.co.uk]

Why Malcolm Gladwell still appeals.

With the recent release of his newest book, The Economist explores the ongoing success of Malcolm Gladwell’s books:

Two things are near-certain about this book: it will wind up, probably soon, on bestseller lists. His detractors, also soon, will sneer at it. Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, said in a review in 2009 that “Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out.”

This line of criticism misses the point. Mr Gladwell is not a social scientist, nor does he claim to be. He is a journalist who popularises ideas from social science using what he has called “intellectual adventure stories…Their conclusions,” he concedes, “can seem simplified or idiosyncratic.” But stories are also, to use a Gladwellian phrase, sticky. The 10,000-hour rule is memorable; “work hard” is the forgettable line that every coach, teacher and parent has said a million times over.

[theeconomist.com]

Broken Britain.

Fascinating essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman unpacking why Britain has stagnated:

…the most important economic fact about modern Britain: that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues…

…Britain’s economy has stagnated for a fundamentally simple reason: because it has banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs. Britain has denied its economy the foundations it needs to grow on.

[ukfoundations.co]

The return of the knob.

Turns out that making everything a touch screen interface isn’t what we want. Christopher Mims, technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal:

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics…

…Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them. Think, for example, of the screen of your smartphone, which requires your undivided gaze when you press on its smooth surface.

[wsj.com] / [Apple News]

On Monday Britain will become the first rich nation to quit coal.

A good news story on Britain’s energy transition.

On Monday Britain’s last coal-fired power station will spew vapour from its massive towers for the last time. When it shuts it will end 142 years of coal in Britain…

…In 1920 virtually all of Britain’s electricity was produced by burning coal. Today, after advances in wind and solar power, it accounts for almost nothing.

[thetimes.com]

Chance and fortune.

Thought-provoking conversation on the Start the Week podcast, hosted by Tom Sutcliffe:

‘Professor Risk’ David Spiegelhalter delves into the data and statistics to explore the forces of chance, ignorance and luck… Whereas life is uncertain, he shows how far the circumstances of how, when and where you were born have an overriding influence on your future. But he warns against confusing the improbable with the impossible.

[bbc.co.uk]

Oscar-winning star Maggie Smith dies aged 89.

Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actor whose work ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, has died aged 89.

The news was confirmed by her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement. They said: “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27 September.”

What a truly incredible career.

[theguardian.com]