Author: Mathew Ingram

From Oxford University Press: “This article provides evidence for the first time of a systematic policy of direct collusion between the Time Inc. media empire and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. For the first two decades of the Cold War, both Time and Life magazines established policies that provided the CIA with access to their foreign correspondents, their dispatches and research files, and their vast photographic archive that the magazines had accumulated to accompany their stories. These were significant resources for a fledgling intelligence agency. Photographs of foreign dignitaries, rebel groups, protestors, and topography were vital pieces of intelligence, helping the Agency to map and visualize its targets. Depending upon the story, direct access to dispatches returned by foreign correspondents might provide the Agency with important clues to local political, social, and economic conditions, as well as insights into the intentions and capabilities of ruling elites in countries of concern.”

Sigmund Freud started using a couch because he didn’t want to look at his patients

From The Atlantic: “A person who is “on the couch” is known to be in therapy, but most therapists these days don’t ask their clients to lie down. The first time mine did, I resisted. I didn’t want to be on display or unable to see her reactions. Plus, the idea seemed antiquated. Sigmund Freud was inspired to use the couch more than a century ago after observing dramatic hypnotherapy demonstrations by his teacher Jean-Martin Charcot. In psychoanalysis, Freud thought a therapist being out of view would help people access emotions or memories that might be repressed. (He also said that he could not “put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day.”) Many of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious haven’t held up, but he may have been onto something with the couch, as I discovered when I eventually followed my therapist’s suggestion. The couch might not be for everyone, but it could be worth a try.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Time Inc. colluded with the CIA says one researcher”

From Big Think: “Back in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union was far ahead of the USA in the space race, launching the first satellite, the first human into space, and many other spaceflight firsts. This dominance continued for several years, and by the mid-1960s, they were planning a 1967 Moon landing: years ahead of even the most ambitious schedule for the United States. After the disastrous Apollo 1 fire, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would be the first to walk on the Moon. Yet they never even came close. The unexpected illness and death of one supremely competent but unsung Soviet figure, Sergei Korolev, changed everything. Without Korolev as the chief designer, everything went downhill quickly for the Soviets.”

A mysterious nerve disease in a mountain town might be a result of poisonous mushrooms

From Knowable: “Well known to skiers, the French mountain town of Montchavin has grabbed the attention of medical researchers as the site of a highly unusual cluster of a devastating neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS is both rare and rather evenly distributed across the globe: It afflicts two to three new people out of 100,000 per year. Montchavin’s year-round resident population is only a couple hundred, and neighboring villages aren’t much bigger, so the odds are strongly against finding more than just a few ALS patients in the immediate area. Yet physicians have reported 14. he notion that something in food might cause ALS does not come out of the blue. It comes from Guam, where US medical researchers, near the end of World War II, documented an epidemic of neurological disease among the island’s native Chamorro people.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The secret reason that the US beat Russia to the moon”

From Curbed: “As the Coast Guard sped toward the cruise ship, Pam was still on the phone with the Norwegian employee in Miami, begging her to tell the ship to wait. As they approached the looming 14 white decks, she got an update: The captain was refusing their request. They would not be allowed to board. They were able to watch as the ship that held their clothes, their medication, their luggage, and their phone chargers started her mighty engines and sailed away. Cruisers of all stripes are familiar with the concept of force majeure, an arcane clause in maritime law. Force majeure, an “act of God” — it’s the acknowledgment that on the high seas, a ship is vulnerable to significant events beyond its control. Cruise ships are not responsible for acts of God. In fact, as the passengers were about to learn, they are not responsible for much of anything.”

Google Street View captured a man loading a body into the trunk of a car

From the New York Times: “It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the trunk of a car. But that unexceptional picture, the authorities in Spain said on Wednesday, was among the clues that helped lead them to two people whom they recently arrested in the case of a man who disappeared last year. In a news release, the National Police said that officers had detained a woman described as the partner of the man who disappeared in the province of Soria, in the country’s north, along with a man who they said was also the woman’s partner. The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 100 miles north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later located human remains that they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “They missed their cruise ship but that was just the beginning”

Back in October, I wrote about artificial intelligence, and specifically about one of the crucial questions experts still can’t seem to agree on, which is whether it is going to destroy us or not. In that piece, I also mentioned the debate over whether the indexing or “ingesting” that AI large-language models do is — or at least should be — covered by the fair-use exception in copyright law. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it wasn’t directly relevant to the danger issue, but I wanted to expand on some of the points I made then, and also in a Columbia Journalism Review piece that I wrote last year. I am not a cheerleader for giant technology companies by any means, but I think there is an important principle at stake. And at the heart of it are some key questions: What (or who) is copyright law for? What was it originally designed to do? And does AI scraping or indexing of copyrighted content fit into that, and if so, how?

The case against AI indexing of content is relatively straightforward: by hoovering up content online and then using it to create a massive database for training large-language models, AI engines copy that content without asking and without paying for it (unless the publisher or owner has signed a deal with the AI company, as some news outlets have). This pretty clearly qualifies as de facto copyright infringement, as the Authors Guild and the New York Times and a number of others have argued and continue to argue. In a similar way, one could imagine that if a company were to copy millions of books and use them to create a massive index of content, that would pretty clearly qualify as infringement as well — copying without permission or payment.

The major difference between these two cases is that the second hypothetical one actually happened, when Google scanned millions of books as part of its Google Books project between 2002 and 2005, and created an index that allowed users to search for content from those books. After years of back-and-forth negotiations over payment for the infringement, this led to a lawsuit in which the Authors Guild and others argued that Google was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale. In the early days of that case, Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District of New York seemed to agree, but then at some point he changed his mind, and ruled that Google’s book-scanning activity was covered by the fair-use exception under US copyright law.

Continue reading “Why AI content scraping should qualify as fair use”

From the New York Times: “On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems. The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism. The molecules that serve as the building blocks of DNA and proteins typically exist in one of two mirror-image forms. While sugar molecules can exist in left- and right-handed forms, DNA only uses the right-handed molecules. That’s the reason DNA’s double helix has a right-handed twist. Our proteins, by contrast, are made of left-handed amino acids. In theory, a mirror cell — with left-handed DNA and right-handed proteins — could carry out all the biochemical reactions required to stay alive.”

A British nurse found guilty of being an “angel of death” may be innocent

From The New Yorker: “Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time.”

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Mirror life is possible but it could destroy the world”