njb311

But hang on, Cook has Vision _Pro_!

I’d echo some of the other comments that the first priority should be to find ways to stop further damage rather than adding another human impact that attempts to mitigate previous ones.

As you have pointed out, this proposal carries significant risks. Ignoring the GMO aspect, introducing foreign species into the coral ecosystem could superficially appear to be successful in that some of the corals on the reefs might be revived. But what exactly is the measure of success here? Reefs are richly biodiverse so which corals will be affected and what other species might be affected? This might be impossible to predict until the experiment is released into nature and in a marine environment I doubt containment is possible. Humans have some form when it comes to translocating species and the costs incurred trying to revert can be significant.

There are lots of potential unintended consequences some of which might be foreseeable and others which are not. For example, what if the causes of bleaching in a locality do reverse? Will the GMO species out-compete the natural ones and prevent re-establishing the ecosystem?

Plus, of course, the worst aspect of layering more human interference into ecosystems is that it supports (and is often financially supported by) those who want to continue with all the damaging processes that have got us to this point – hey, we don’t have to worry about fertiliser run-off/ocean acidification/ocean warming because look, we ‘fixed’ the coral reef!

I’m not saying that we can’t do both things – reduce future impacts and try to fix past ones – but history has shown that solutions for a genuinely more sustainable future (for humans and the ecosystem that supports us) are harder so they get watered down or kicked down the road, when we actually need them to work even better than originally envisaged and be implemented faster.

You should not lose your passion for nature but perhaps direct it at solving problematic human activities, replacing current systems, processes and products with better ones. People are convinced we can’t do without all the things/choices we have today, so if consumers don’t want to change then we have to focus on transforming products and production. And we have to do it in a world where population has doubled in the last 50 years and is still growing, and if we expect per capita GDP also to grow – apparently our principal measure of success as a species – then overall human consumption will have to grow even faster.

Plenty to get yours and the best minds of your generation working on!

If you’re scraping the estate agents’ sites rather than striking licensing agreements, I can see how you might justify analysing the images to build a property profile but when you’re reproducing them on your site how do you get round the photographer’s copyright?

According to the source statistics at gov.uk there has been an 8% increase in vehicle miles but a 5% reduction in deaths over the period 2013–23. Unless you adjust for the increased miles travelled, I would say the stats are just showing annual variability.

Data sources/classifications for injuries are more open to question because, for example, it might be possible for a minor injury to not be included in a police report at the scene while presenting later at a hospital. However, using a consistent basis for the period, Seriously injured are down 10% and Slightly injured down 32%, without adjusting for the increase in miles.

As with any stats, though, you have to understand the detail to draw any conclusions.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

That is in theory, not in practice.

While it is possible to use WordPress for free without any paid plugins, most professionals/businesses using WP do so for the extensibility and that, in practice, comes at a cost of either paid plugins or external developer time for custom coding.

Very exciting until they figure out the jet is just a Starlink satellite passing in front of the telescope.

Yes, because the roads were used for driving herds of cattle or sheep.

And because a little black book might be carried in a pocket and potentially misplaced or stolen, some teams use a system of small self-adhesive pieces of paper, each with just a single password on it, that are attached to the front of the PC. This in turn is secured by a cable lock to the desk.

A printer’s guillotine that cuts hundreds of sheets at once has a diagonal blade.

I read that as Google ‘Stopping Coding’ Competitions, which would hint at the process by which they kill all those projects.

The first news story I saw about this only mentioned the amount. I assumed it was one-off for a new app, or maybe annual. Per month is crazy. I don’t object to subscriptions, but in so many cases the pricing is way out of line with the value.

Yes, I wasn’t suggesting that this solution was more efficient, but that solutions that are more efficient than what they replace are what we should be focusing on. It’s fine to say that resistive is 100% efficient, but my point was that a 10kW instant electric heater is not enough to meet the demands of many households (and falls well short of a gas boiler output) and you can’t just say install a 20kW electric heater because typically household supply is not built for that. And so if you heat a tank of water (a typical immersion heater is 3kW) then all of a sudden you have heat loss and you are nowhere near 100% efficient.

The article doesn’t say it explicitly, but I’m assuming it heats water on demand, rather than heating a tank which immersion heaters do. You can buy a resistive element electric shower that gives instant hot water and requires up to about 10kW (and costs £100-200 not £3500) but a gas central heating boiler might pump out 22-30kW equivalent of heat. You would need modifications to your electricity supply to achieve that with electric heaters. If the microwave technology was able to give better performance that would be in its favour, but the boiler cost is not competitive (like many new products). Air source heat pumps are more efficient but again the purchase/install costs make the return on investment long, it was going to be more than 40 years in my case (unless of course carbon pricing changed the calculation), which may be longer than the lifetime of the unit. You also have to be mindful of the refrigerant used in ASHPs because if it leaks the warming potential is several tonnes of CO2e, thankfully a lot of change is happening there too.

What will make the difference to all this is the combination of increased efficiency plus production at scale that makes retrofitting attractive to homeowners. Part of that scale could come from mandatory fitting of such equipment to all new builds.

I remember seeing an episode of Tomorrow’s World (BBC) in the 1980s where more or less this system was used to generate electricity from anywhere there was a change of water height, so even in small scale at weirs which was the demonstration project. It’s quite possible the TV piece was aired showcasing an implementation of Well’s original work, as it captured energy from air that switched directions forced by water moving through a tube, and power was generated in both phases.

There are obviously countless inventions that never make it for one reason or another, timing can be the biggest issue if investment policy is not pointing in the right direction to develop them further, and I suspect a lot of solutions for environmental problems fell into this hole in the last century when economic growth at any cost was the mantra. Hopefully more of the work that was done then might resurface.

Of course there is often opportunity coming out of catastrophe, though I doubt the displaced people would see it quite like that. In reality, sea level rise (barring any sudden shifts caused by ice shelves collapsing into the sea) is a slow process. Places will become uninhabitable in stages, first of all not because they are under water all the time but because the frequency of flooding is not economically sustainable. For some coastal populations that does not require a lot of rise from where we are today. Then you may have only 10s of cm of permanent water building up over decades and centuries. It’s a protracted process of inundation and it would be many generations before The Lost City of Venezia might be a tourist attraction, with an interim period where it is just a mess.

Meaning that social impact is prioritised over profit. There’s still no constraint on making profit, and there is the same potential to be financially successful.

Many, if not most, businesses aim to make profit regardless of their social impacts — they’ve probably never even thought about what they are. It’s easy to say that employing people and giving them a salary is the most useful social impact a business can (or should) have, but when you factor in negative externalities that may not be true.

A social entrepreneur actively aims to make a positive social impact. It’s not about it being a weak business or a charity.

A ‘not-for-profit’ does not mean it doesn’t make a profit. It means that profits generated are used to further the purpose of the organisation and not, for example, for shareholder enrichment. A loss-making organisation could only be sustainable if it was receiving grants or donations, in which case it is more likely to be a charity than NFP.

It’s only taken the last 25 years to add 30% to the human population, and the rapid increases of the last 50 years owe a lot to reduced infant mortality and people living longer.

So a rapid decline might come from a reversal of those trends.

I’m sure that’s true, but if you have poor teachers or poor administrative policies/systems then you have a much bigger problem.

As a lecturer that has used TurnItIn (because it was an automated part of electronic submission), I would have to say that anyone who just looks at the score is not actually using it. TurnItIn marks up the submitted essay so while grading it I can see exactly where the student has cited other work and where they might be claiming copy/pasted text as their own. I don’t think it should be used for screening essays such that they aren’t actually marked at all, after all that would mean the educator wasn’t doing the work they’re paid for and they wouldn’t be able to give feedback to the student.

I’m not even saying it’s good at it’s job, but in the end anything can be misused so we have to keep it in perspective.

Yes, trust and honesty. That is what's wrong with WhatsApp.

The quote was it made WhatsApp “potentially more dangerous”. Bad information spread through a trusted relationship can be dangerous for obvious reasons. Marketers and influencers use this all the time, it’s something they strive to achieve because a friend telling you about product X is far more effective than the manufacturer of product X.

That said, I don’t think that WhatsApp is much different from any other social network in how this can be exploited, though one difference is that everything you receive comes from your ’trusted’ group. But the ability to monitor communications is not the answer, helping people to become more critical thinkers might be. That would empower people rather than suppress them though, so guess which option the authoritarians prefer?

No, schools are not parents. Acting in loco parentis means acting in the place of the parent while they aren’t there, not becoming the parent. It places a duty of care to safeguard the child and act in its best interests. It does not mean raising the child. It is the misguided attitude of some parents that somehow the school is responsible for parenting children that is probably half the problem.

And yes, parents should have support. This used to come from much stronger, multigenerational family units. Where that isn’t the case, few would consider attending parenting classes even if they were available. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s necessarily just about that, as I said originally, I think adult mental wellbeing is a bigger problem than is generally recognised. Anxiety, aggression, apathy, these transfer from the parent to the child.

While I agree with your points, I’d reframe them slightly: it’s a sucking chest wound of teenage mental health.

Schools are having to deal with young people who come to them with problems from outside. Schools can make them better or worse, but that’s loading a responsibility onto schools way beyond education. The fact that we are even having to consider non-traditional subjects/activities like mindfulness as a treatment to help kids get through the day, rather than to help prepare them for adult life, is a huge red flag.

We can look closely at how we run schools, but where is the scrutiny on parenting? There is a ton of assessment of teachers and metrics on school performance (whether they are a good thing or not in improving outcomes is a different matter). Serious problems in the home are generally picked up by social services – and you could say that they function as a bandaid to cover the sucking chest wound of adult mental health - but straightforward poor parenting is far more widespread, how do we fix that?

If we want to improve mental health in young people we need to look closely at how we run society. Schools could help, but only if they were adequately funded for everything they are being expected to deliver.

I wouldn’t say the _whole point_ becomes moot. As you have to have a legal basis for each type of data that you are storing or processing, relying on different legal bases can add complexity to the problem of a deletion request. Just because you have to retain some information does not give a free pass to retain everything.

Also, remember that data subjects have a right to limit the purposes for which their data is used – systems need to be able to cope with that.

This is where a well thought-out and documented approach to personal information makes everything easier, for internal users of that data too. For legacy systems it can be a nightmare because nobody seemed to care, but with a clean sheet, _why wouldn’t you_ address data protection and privacy from the outset?

I wasn’t aware of the click to chat function, so I checked it out. On the Whatsapp website it gives clear instructions on how to place the link on your website. It’s a hyperlink that couldn’t be more obvious that your Whatsapp number is in clear text (and will show if you hover over the link, even if it isn’t visible as such). So on the face of it you are publishing your own personal information to the web, it’s obvious it will be visible to search bots, and there is no GDPR issue assuming you are using your own number.

The article and Many comments refer to a QR code/widget. This does not appear to be provided by Whatsapp – there was nothing came up on the Whatsapp website and search results were all for third party services. The article also notes that you have to go to a third party for the QR code. I just quickly made a QR code for my Whatsapp and there was no alt text for the image or other metadata. So if there is a data processing issue then it is with the individual’s use of whichever service they pick.

But underlying both these things are two questions: first, unless the link is being embedded in a user comment on someone else’s website, then the individual using the link or widget is putting it on a website they control. As webmaster (or at least content contributor), they have to take responsibility for the code. As you mention GDPR, then that person is also legally responsible for what PI they publish there, so if they put someone else’s PI (knowingly or not) then they are the one that is potentially in breach.

This leads to another question, which is what proportion of people are using this in an individual capacity (i.e. it is their personal number) and how much is for business use? I suspect the majority is for business use, and in that case then why would you be hiding your contact number? The article talks about identity fraud, but if you’re a business then all the information cited should be public domain anyway, and discoverable. And similarly from a legal perspective, posting a contact link that is obscured could be contrary to the Disability Discrimination Act.

I wouldn’t generally defend WA or any part of the social media commercialisation of privacy, but as many others have said, I don’t believe this is a Whatsapp issue. If there are genuine cases where private information is being leaked, then it points to people either lacking competence or failing to take responsibility for their own actions.

Sure, and humans have hardware exiting the solar system. A very different story to put a person there.

Deploying military to Mars is as likely as deploying military to the Antarctic.

Nobody is suggesting we colonise the Antarctic, because there's nothing much (of current economic value) there. There are a handful of people there to study it and they need a constant supply of resources to sustain them. If that was the point of going to Mars, then you'd really have to question what can be achieved there that warrants such massive cost, especially if any part of that cost is government funded.

Now, if we contrast that with the Arctic, the first sign of a melting ice cap and there's military posturing over who is going to exploit the natural resources being exposed there.

I've been excited by the potential of hyperloop since the first time I heard about it maybe 30-40 years ago. The idea isn't new - there have been pneumatic trains in the 1800s and at least a design for a vacuum train in the early 1900s - it is the engineering challenges that have held it back. I'm sure these challenges would require no less effort to solve than projects like travelling to Mars, but the outcome would benefit more of mankind and would create something truly amazing (until it's been around for a while and then it would seem no more amazing than a laser printer).

The disadvantage of that would be that high-importance leaders who are in a spacecraft far away won't be high-importance leaders for very long.

I agree, earth orbit is great for deploying tech that helps us on the surface. The moon may prove useful if there's something of sufficient value to bring back. Mars is pure 'human endeavour', putting it kindly. Some individuals with large egos and wallets are pursuing it just because they can. Any sense in which Mars could be 'colonised' is indeed fantasy unless we are talking over a hundreds-to-thousands-of-years timescale, and you can be sure that it wouldn't be some haven. For one thing, the military would be the first to occupy, and if that was the military of one country you can be sure that they'd be joined by another fairly soon, and then...

Given we seem to struggle with working out how humans will get on okay on earth in the coming decades, we should not be distracting resources (our own and our planet's) until we have solved some more pressing issues. Given most of the 'wealth' that we have today has been created by exploiting fossil fuels (or exists only within financial systems), we have a huge job ahead in transforming society into something more sustainable.

there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today

As I heard someone say recently: while we think about terra-forming Mars, we are busy Mars-forming Earth.

True, but they run the risk of taking too long when there are targets in force that require more radical change. That said, what often happens is that incremental change reaches a tipping point where either the demand or supply side causes a step change.