Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending February 7, 2014)
The New Snowden Revelation Is Dangerous for Anonymous—And for All of Us
Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman explains why news that U.K. intelligence attacked chat rooms used by the nebulous hacker collective Anonymous is bad for online life and democracy as a whole.
—Tom Simonite, senior editor, IT
Tim Berners-Lee: We Need to Re-Decentralise the Web
Tim Berner-Lee invented the World Wide Web but isn’t happy with the way it has turned out, warning that countries like China, Iran, and Brazil threaten to undo the openness that made it a success.
—Tom Simonite
The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art
The amount of time consumed forming images with our typewriters and keyboards has not yet been forgotten.
—J. Juniper Friedman, editorial assistant
Blazing Trails in Brain Science
Meet the man trying to bring more neuroscience to psychiatry in a New York Times profile of brain scientist Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
—Susan Young, biomedicine editor
The Idea Maker—The Walrus
A short but revealing look at the effort to raise funding for a thought-controlled computer interface.
—Will Knight, news and analysis editor
Hate Sinks
Inside the jobs of site moderators, young women, mostly; filtering hate.
—Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher
Online Memorial Services: After a Death, Celebrating a Life Online
As more and more of our lives go online, anything that isn’t online—even the details of a human life—risks falling into a collective memory hole.
—Brian Bergstein, deputy editor
Facebook’s Fatal Weakness: Why the Social Network Is Losing to Amazon, Apple & Google
This week, the world commemorated the social-media giant’s 10th birthday: “We accept Facebook’s huge presence in our lives because there is no other option. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.”
—Kyanna Sutton, senior Web producer
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Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
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Plug-in hybrids are often sold as a transition to EVs, but new data from Europe shows we’re still underestimating the emissions they produce.
How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch
Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.
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