Last Tuesday, representatives from the world's heavy hitters in "artificial intelligence" (AI) made a public pledge at a mini-summit in Seoul, South Korea to make sure AI develops safely.  Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Meta (of which Facebook and other social-media platforms are a part), and OpenAI all agreed on voluntary safety precautions, even to the extent of cutting off systems that present extreme risks.   This isn't the first time we've seen such apparent unanimity on the part of companies that otherwise act like rivals.  This meeting was actually a followup to a ..read more

ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot-detection system marketed by the public-safety technology firm SoundThinking and used by well over 100 cities in the U. S.  In some ways, it sounds like a law-enforcement dream come true.  Before ShotSpotter, a citizen who reported hearing gunshots could report them, but usually had no idea where the sound came from.  In an area covered by ShotSpotter, police can now often pinpoint the source of the gunshot with an accuracy in the range of 2 to 8 meters (about 6 to 26 feet).  What's not to like about ShotSpotter?   A lot, it turns out ..read more

  Last week, my wife and I joined some friends for supper at an unpretentious cafe in a nearby town.  It's the kind of place where the waitresses learn the customer's names and most people don't need to look at the menu before they order.  We've eaten there numerous times, and the food was good, as usual.   But since the last time we visited the place, something new had been added:  a small white electronic piano taking up a few feet of lunch-counter space, just as you came in the main door.  Seated at the piano was a teenage boy, and he was playing pop tunes.&nbs ..read more

  As polluters go, diesel-electric trains could be a lot worse.  A post on the website of the Institute for Energy Research says that it takes only a gallon of diesel fuel to move a ton of freight 500 miles by train, whereas if you put the same load in your one-ton pickup that gets 15 miles per gallon, or even a semi-trailer that does somewhat better, you will be making a lot more greenhouse gas with the trucks than with the train.    But that hasn’t deterred the California Air Resources Board (hereinafter CARB) from issuing a set of proposed regulations that would effectiv ..read more

  The business of cryptocurrency turns out to be one of the more power-hungry forms of market speculation.  An article in the April 2024 issue of Physics Today says that between 0.6% and 2.3% of the total electricity production in the U. S. goes to cryptocurrency mining farms.  Is this a bad thing, and if so, what can be done about it?   A helpful review of the history of cryptocurrency is found in the surprisingly entertaining 2020 book Money:  The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by National Public Radio reporter Jacob Goldstein, who points out that one of the main attr ..read more

  In the May issue of National Review, San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge presents smoking-gun data that shows the manifold harms to children and teenagers caused by smartphones, specifically social-media use on them.  She claims, and I agree, that we have to do more to alleviate these harms, by government intervention if necessary.    First, the harms.  Twenge has collected data on a wide number of measures of wellbeing including sleep patterns, socializing, indicators of loneliness and depression, and participation in adult activities.  Signific ..read more

  For nearly a decade, there have been isolated reports of strange health problems in U. S. diplomatic and espionage personnel stationed in sensitive parts of the world such as Cuba, China, and Vietnam.  Although there is no typical case, there are some commonalities in many of the cases.  The symptoms usually have a sudden onset.  Victims describe hearing strange noises, feeling severe pain in the head and elsewhere, and other neurological symptoms.  Some of them have proved to sustain serious brain-trauma injuries and suffered chronic debility from the attack.  ..read more

  Some accidents are simple:  two cars collide on a freeway, a tree falls on a jogger, lightning hits a golfer.  Others require a chain of events, each of which is unlikely, and so are much rarer than the simple kind.  The sequence of occurrences, each one fairly harmless by itself, which led to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor on last Tuesday, March 26 included things that by themselves would cause few if any major problems.  But on that fateful night, they all aligned to end four lives and cause what will eventually turn out to be bill ..read more

Every time a new technology becomes popular, effects happen that nobody anticipates—not the designers, not the firms selling the product, and not the users either.  A small but significant case in point was highlighted in a recent Associated Press piece describing the increased vulnerability of historic covered bridges in the U. S. to truck and RV drivers who blindly follow their GPS instructions, only to smash into the bridge superstructure.   Covered bridges were themselves a technical innovation.  According to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges, wooden structural member ..read more

  The online platform TikTok is once again in the news, this time the target of proposed U. S. legislation.  One of the most popular and innovative social-media outlets, the Chinese-originated and Chinese-controlled app's infinite-scrolling videos have been imitated by Facebook and YouTube, and 170 million Americans use it, many of them under 30.  So why is Congress once more considering legislation that would either force ByteDance, the Chinese parent company, to divest itself of the U. S. division of TikTok, or else face a total ban of the app?   The ostensible reason is ..read more