Netflix leans on algorithms for virtually all of its show suggestions, but it’s trying something radical: curation from real, honest-to-goodness humans. The service is testing expert-crafted Collections that, much like music playlists, offer selections based around certain themes. You can check out a collection of light-hearted fare if you’re looking for relief from a stressful week, or go for prizewinning titles if you only want critically-praised pieces.
The company is only testing the feature in its iOS app so far, and stressed that there’s no guarantee Collections will be widely available. They "may or may not become permanent features," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Netflix’s disc-based service already has a similar Collections feature, although it clearly doesn’t have the instant gratification of streaming.
It seems like it may be just a matter of time before Collections are more widely available, though. As initial discoverer Jeff Higgins found, Collections are billed as an "easy way" to find shows you’d like. It’s all too common to be overwhelmed by choices on streaming services like Netflix. If this helps you start watching sooner instead of browsing endless automated suggestions, you may be more likely to come back instead of drifting toward other services.
A drone with an Amazon package floats in front of the Amazon logistics center in Leipzig, Germany, 28 October 2014. Amazon did not comment on whether drones will fuel this default one-day speed boost for paying Amazon Prime subscribers’ deliveries.
Amazon is by far the biggest US online retailer. In the past 20 years it has leapt past its origins as a website you could order books from to become, among other things, the everything store—one-stop shopping for all physical and digital goods from A to Z.
The company’s explosive growth is due in part to its sprawling third-party merchant marketplace. Many marketplace merchants are indeed above-board retailers, manufacturers, and resellers. But thousands more sell not only counterfeit items, but also mislabeled, unsafe, recalled, or even banned items that can put consumers—especially children—in serious danger.
The Wall Street Journal identified more than 4,100 such products for sale on Amazon.com during the course of a months-long investigation, and at least 2,000 are toys or medications that fail to include warnings about risks to children.
Among the Journal’s findings: 116 products falsely listed as FDA-approved, including toys, which the agency does not regulate; 80 listings for infant “sleeping wedges” the FDA says can cause suffocation and that Amazon had previously banned; 1,412 electronics listings falsely claiming to be UL-certified; 2,324 toys that failed to include federally mandated choking hazard warnings; and more.
The WSJ commissioned tests of 10 specific children’s products it bought on Amazon, many carrying the enigmatic “Amazon’s Choice” badge. Of those, four failed tests based on federal safety standards, including one that contained excessively high levels of lead.
Balloons also proved to be a sticking point: the WSJ found 4,500 balloon listings that did not include required choking hazard warnings, and the paper notified Amazon about them. Weeks later, WSJ found another 2,200 balloon listings that did not include required warnings. Including all the balloon listings, the WSJ identified 10,870 problematic listings to Amazon, of which 83% were eventually removed or altered.
One mislabeled product the WSJ included in its report proved deadly to its owner. A 23-year-old man in Missouri purchased a motorcycle helmet from Amazon that was at the time listed as certified as meeting US Department of Transportation safety standards. Later that year, however, he was killed in a crash while riding. A federal investigation later found that the helmet did not meet DOT standards and was recalled. The WSJ, however, found the product still for sale, with an active listing promising compliance, until the WSJ contacted Amazon to inquire about it.
Whack-a-Mole
The WSJ’s investigation found 157 products for sale that Amazon has already banned from sale on its site. The motorcycle helmet was one of more than 2,300 product listings altered or pulled after the WSJ drew them to Amazon’s attention. Yet, within two weeks, the WSJ found that at least 130 of these problem items reappeared, “some sold by the same vendors previously identified by the Journal under different listings.”
In short, the Journal writes, Amazon “has increasingly evolved like a flea market,” exercising little to no oversight over items sold by third-party merchants unless a specific complaint or media report draws an item to the company’s attention. The marketplace setup that causes Amazon to land in hot water seemingly annually for selling some kind of pro-rape, pro-slavery, or pro-Nazi apparel also leads to endemic listings for recalled or harmful goods.
About 60% of Amazon’s physical retail sales come from the third-party marketplace, the company has said. A recent quarterly report showed the marketplace generates $11.14 billion in sales for the ecommerce behemoth in just three months. But even consumers wary of shopping from third-party merchants can still easily find themselves purchasing from one. Many of the items in the WSJ’s investigation were fulfilled by Amazon: eligible for Prime shipping, from Amazon warehouses, and in Amazon boxes. Two different shoppers told the WSJ they had assumed harmful or mislabeled products they bought from the site were reviewed and approved in some way by Amazon, as they would be in a big-box store such as Target or Walmart, until contacted by the WSJ.
Counterfeit products, which are often less safe than their “real deal” counterparts, are also a persistent plague to Amazon and its customers. The WSJ did not test counterfeit goods, which show up in searches for every kind of product, from luxury goods to cheap USB cables.
When reached by Ars for comment, an Amazon representative directed us to a company blog post that says, in part, “We provide a number of ways for regulatory agencies, industry organizations, brands, customers, and our customer service teams to report safety issues. When we receive these reports, we move quickly to protect customers, remove unsafe products from our store, and investigate.”
Limited recourse
Swimming against the tide of dodgy listings and questionable goods is challenging for even the best-educated consumer, and prevailing in court if you do end up with a damaging product is, at best, a hit-or-miss exercise.
The family of the young man who died in the motorcycle crash sued Amazon, as well as the driver of the vehicle with which he had collided and the third-party merchant that sold the helmet. The merchant was ordered to pay $1.9 million in restitution; Amazon settled for $5,000 without admitting wrong doing. A company attorney told the WSJ, “Basically, a third party was using Amazon as a bulletin board to advertise the product and sell.”
Your ability to sue Amazon if you are injured by a third party’s product largely depends on where you live. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled in July that Amazon could be held liable under state law for a defective product that blinded a Pennsylvania woman.
The Third Circuit court, however, was the first to do so. The Fourth and Sixth Circuit Courts of Appeals ruled in May and June respectively that Amazon is merely a platform, not a “seller,” when it comes to state consumer protection law.
In the plan, service providers will provide technology to combat a practice known as "spoofing" to aid state attorneys general in locating and prosecuting the fraudulent robocallers.
A person exhales vapor while using an electronic cigarette device in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, June 24, 2019.
Cases of severe lung disease linked to vaping rose from 94 to 153—a jump of over 60%—in just five days, according to an update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
into the cases, which have puzzled health officials. The cases tend to involve gradual breathing difficulties, coughing, fatigue, chest pain, and weight loss, which leads to hospitalization (no one had died from the condition). Health officials say there’s no evidence pointing to an infectious agent behind the illnesses. The only commonality appears to be recent use of e-cigarettes, aka vaping.
As of the August 17, the agency had counted 94 probable cases from 14 states between June 28 and August 15. In an update released late Wednesday, August 21, the CDC said the figures are up to 153 probable cases between June 28 and August 20, spanning 16 states.
The sharp rise in cases has not brought any clarity as to the cause of the illnesses. The CDC said there is still no evidence pointing to an infectious disease and that vaping is the only commonality.
Following early suspicions, the CDC did note that “[i]n many cases, patients have acknowledged recent use of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-containing products while speaking to healthcare personnel or in follow-up interviews by health department staff.” THC is the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
A 26-year-old Wisconsin man sickened in July told NPR he believed his case was caused by dubious THC-containing vaping liquid he bought off the street. He noted that it looked watered-down and had an off color.
Still, the CDC in its update cautioned that “no specific product has been identified in all cases, nor has any product been conclusively linked to illnesses.”
The CDC is working with state health departments and the Food and Drug Administration to gather information on the products potentially involved and run tests.
The 16 states affected are: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
Microsoft Xbox owners will bummed to learn that humans have been listening to some of their voice commands. Motherboard recently spoke to a number of Microsoft contractors who said they’d been hired by the company to review Xbox and Cortana voice commands to improve the technology. This is the same sort of thing that’s been happening with all kinds of voice assistants lately, but that doesn’t make it any less unsettling.
This latest report follows an earlier Motherboard report about Microsoft hiring contractors to listen to Skype recordings. It sounds like a similar team was also recruited to review Xbox recordings in order to train the software that powers the voice control features. One contractor did say that “most of the voices they heard were of children.” Which is creepy.
Still, it’s glaringly obvious now that adding voice control to various devices has typically involved humans listening to our recordings. The technology that powers voice control and voice assistants simply requires human review in order to improve. It’s also very clear that the companies building this technology have done a terrible job communicating this human involvement to users.
Since reports emerged earlier this year that humans were reviewing Amazon Alexa recordings, we’ve learned that similar teams were at work at Apple, Google, and Facebook. Those three companies have since suspended their human review processes. Amazon, meanwhile, has offered users the option to opt-out of being included in the human review process. And following Motherboard’s reporting, Microsoft has updated its privacy policy to specify that its “processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing.”
So game on, Xbox users. But realize that whatever you say to your console might eventually be heard by a human hired by Microsoft. They’re not exactly spying. But they are listening.
Poor air quality is associated with an array of health harms. (Pixabay/)
Over the past decade, researchers have identified dozens of genes that are associated with risk for conditions like bipolar disorder and depression. However, genetics can only explain a small portion of a person’s risk of developing a disease, sending researchers searching for other factors that could contribute. Air pollution might be a candidate, according to a new study, which found that living in areas with bad air quality is associated with increased risk for neuropsychiatric disorders, including bipolar disorder and depression.
“This was part of a search for environmental determinants of disease,” says senior author Andrey Rzhetsky, professor in the department of human genetics and senior fellow in the computation institute at the University of Chicago.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, also adds another item to the laundry list of harms associated with air pollution, which also includes cardiovascular disease, premature birth, infertility, and dementia.
The team looked at two datasets, one from the United States, which included 151 million people, and one from Denmark, which included 1.4 million people. The datasets have different strengths and weaknesses: the United States data, for example, which comes from the EPA, is very large but only includes overall air quality at the county level. The Denmark data includes fewer people, but has information on air quality at each person’s specific address at each day from birth until their 10th birthday—allowing the researchers to calculate the cumulative exposure they had to air pollution. That environmental data was then analyzed with disease diagnosis information from an insurance database in the US and the Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register in Denmark.
“Each data set is imperfect in its own way,” Rzhetsky says. “With this we have two similar analyses, but on different data sets and in different countries, which we thought would be more convincing than a single analysis.”
In the United States, people living in counties with the poorest air quality had a 27 percent increase in the rate of bipolar disorder and a 6 percent increase in rates of major depression when compared to those with the best air quality. In Denmark, people with the most exposure to air pollution had nearly 150 percent higher rates of schizophrenia as people with the lowest exposure. They also had higher rates of bipolar disorder (by 29 percent), personality disorder (by 162 percent), and major depression (by 50 percent). The differences between the two countries could be due to the more granular data available in Denmark, Rzhetsky says. It also might be due to genetic and cultural differences, or differences in environmental management and health care. “Everybody is vulnerable in a different way,” he says. “The same environmental insult can induce different things.”
The study builds on prior research that shows a relationship between air quality and psychiatric conditions: increasing levels of pollutants come along with more frequent antipsychotic prescriptions, more hospitalizations for schizophrenia patients, increased risk of depression, and more severe anxiety symptoms.
"These findings add to the current evidence from previous studies of a possible link between air pollution and psychiatric disorders," Ioannis Bakolis, an epidemiologist from King’s College London who was not involved with the study, told National Geographic.
Rzhetsky notes that this particular study was observational, and can’t definitively say that air pollution in any way causes psychiatric disorders. "This provides clues, but is not definite," he says.
However, there are biological mechanisms that link the two. Air pollutants, like particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone, can affect the brain directly, by traveling through the thin barrier that separates it from the nasal cavity, or indirectly, by entering the lungs and bloodstream. These pollutants have beenshown to cause inflammation in the brain in both humans and animal models and affect the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, both of which are associated with psychiatric disorders.
If further research continues to show a relationship between air quality and psychiatric disorders, it might open a new avenue for treatment, Rzhetsky says. “Maybe symptoms could be reduced with some measures like reducing related inflammation, or moving people to cleaner areas.”
The findings highlight the importance of good air quality. “It would be nice if it helps convince people in power that it’s important to have the environment clean,” Rzhetsky says.
via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com
Smoke from human-ignited fires across the Brazilian Amazon.Image: NASA Earth Observatory
What began as a “day of fire” a week and a half ago has now turned daytime skies in São Paulo an inky black. The Amazon has been in deep, deep trouble ever since far-right president Jair Bolsnaro took over running Brazil. Advocates feared his regime would commit ecological “genocide” in the Amazon and with each passing month, those fears are becoming reality.
Deforestation rates have spiked in recent months, and now large swaths of the world’s largest rainforest have exploded in flames set by human activities. The fires could accelerate the decline of the Amazon and its ability to foster biodiversity and store carbon.
The Amazon has seen 71,497 fires ignited since January, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (more commonly known by its Portuguese acronym, INPE). That’s an 82 percent increase compared to last year and well above 2016’s extreme count of 66,622 blazes.
The Brazilian state of Pará saw a huge burst of fire activity last week after farmers called for a “day of fire” on August 10, according to Brazilian paper Folha de S. Paolo. INPE spotted hundreds of fires across the state as farmers lit up rainforest, a practice often used to clear land to put in mono crops like soybeans or open land for pastures and cattle farming. The fires have also sent carbon dioxide emissions spiraling well above normal, according to data from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
“The recent increase of the deforestation combined with fires could exponentially affect Amazonia by liberating CO2 and other greenhouse gases,” Vitor Gomes, an environmental scientist at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil, told Earther.
Those fires, along with others in the state of Amazonas to the northwest, have continued burning for the past 10 days, unleashing a massive plume of smoke. Prevailing winds on Monday and Tuesday took that smoke and transported it nearly 2,000 miles to southeast. That blackened São Paulo skies on Monday, creating eerie scenes like darkened streets and cars driving with headlights in mid-afternoon.
The vibe is reminiscent of last year, when smoke from wildfires did the exact same thing in British Columbia. But in some ways, the Brazilian situation is more ominous. After all, the fires in British Columbia weren’t inspired by a fascist president looking to open the forest up for business.
Brazil’s blazes are a whole other story. Bolsonaro ran on a campaign platform that was pro-big business, anti-LGBTQ, and straight up racist. He promised to open the Amazon to mining, fossil fuel exploitation, timber, and agriculture while kicking indigenous groups off their land. From the moment he took office in January, he has done just that.
The result led to an acceleration in deforestation. In July, a soccer pitch-sized hunk of rainforest disappeared every three minutes. The fires this month could drive deforestation rates even higher still. The wanton destruction has led Germany and Norway to pull money out of the Amazon Fund, a program for sustainability-related projects in the Amazon that was designed as an incentive to cut down on deforestation. That could, ironically, lead to even more deforestation.
“As humans cut down more forests, what you see is forest fragmentation,” Jacquelyn Shuman, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s terrestrial research section, told Earther. “You have more edges of forest. In a forest that’s broken up where you have pasture or cleared land, it’ll have more edges exposed to drier conditions. When you have these dry edges, the forest at that edge is more susceptible to fire.”
As trees disappear, Shuman noted, the unique properties that make a rainforest, well, a rainforest could change as well. Evapotranspiration from trees in the Amazon helps feed the clouds that then dump downpours over the forest. As more open land pops up, Shuman said that “forest-cloud cycle is broken.”
The double-edged deforestation disruption comes at a time when climate change is also ratcheting up the pressure on the Amazon. The rainforest is key to combatting climate change, sucking up 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually or a quarter of all carbon absorbed by forests globally. Yet climate change has contributed to drying the region out, weakening the so-called lungs of our planet. Fires like the ones currently burning can even cause parts of the forest to become a net emitter of carbon dioxide as all those decades of stored carbon goes up in smoke, creating a nasty feedback loop.
Eventually, rising temperatures and drought coupled with deforestation could permanently alter one of the world’s most iconic ecosystems, effectively cleaving the Amazon in two. It’s not like the damage can be easily undone. Once the Amazon is gone, it’s gone. And the remaining fractured forest wouldn’t have anywhere near the carbon sequestering capacities of its former self, meaning climate change could accelerate there and the rest of the planet.
Under the Bolsonaro administration, the rise in deforestation is sending the Amazon careening toward a very dangerous place not just for the forest but for the planet as a whole. It might not be at a tipping point, but that’s hardly any consolation.
“We should be worried in finding that out, because probably there will be no turning back after we cross a tipping point,” Gomes said.
