Tag: In The News

  • Researchers Claim to Have Detected A Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background

    As widely reported, including in this piece on the Caltech website, “[s]cientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves.” 

    As the article reminds us, “[g]ravitational waves were first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1916.” The new evidence confirming their existence is a result of “15 years’ worth of observations made by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a National Science Foundation-funded (NSF) Physics Frontier Center of more than 190 scientists from the United States and Canada.” 

    The article gives some background on NANOGrav: 

    “NANOGrav is an international collaboration dedicated to exploring the low-frequency gravitational-wave universe through radio pulsar timing. NANOGrav was founded in October 2007 and has grown to more than 190 members at more than 70 institutions. In 2015, it was designated a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center.”

    The methodology of this long-term study has been summarised in lay terms as follows: 

    “NANOGrav used data from radio telescopes—the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Very Large Array in New Mexico—to monitor 68 dead stars, called pulsars, in the sky. The pulsars acted like a network of buoys bobbing on a slow-rolling sea of gravitational waves.” 

    and 

    “When gravitational waves travel across the cosmos, they stretch and squeeze the fabric of spacetime very slightly. This stretching and squeezing can cause the distance between Earth and a given pulsar to minutely change, which results in delays or advances to the timing of the pulsars’ flashes of light. To search for the background hum of gravitational waves, the science team developed software programs to compare the timing of pairs of pulsars in their network. Gravitational waves will shift this timing to different degrees depending on how close the pulsars are on the sky […]” 

    Reportedly, a “series of papers detailing the new NANOGrav results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Buying Russian Oil with Chinese Currency: Pakistan Flirts with De-dollarisation

    As widely reported, including in this report in The Cradle, “Pakistan paid for its first imports of discounted Russian crude oil in Chinese currency.”

    As the report goes on to point out, this is significant because:

    “Pakistan’s purchase takes advantage of new opportunities arising from the war between Russia and Ukraine. Due to western sanctions, Moscow lost its European markets for oil and natural gas exports and has instead redirected its sales toward other nations, notably India and China.

    Large quantities of oil paid for in non-US denominated currency and at reduced prices comes at a crucial time for Pakistan, which suffers from a balance of payments problem that risks the country defaulting on its external debt. The Pakistan central bank’s foreign exchange reserves are currently only sufficient to cover a month of controlled imports.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Germany to Purchase Israel-made Air Defence System

    As multiple reports have pointed out, including this one in the European version of Politico, Germany is set to purchase the Israeli Arrow-3 air defence system. 

    The purchase is part of Germany’s efforts “to modernize its military under a €100 billion fund.” The anti-missile system has apparently “been in use in Israel since 2017 as part of its Iron Dome protection network.” 

    The cost of the procurement is not insignificant: 

    “Eventually, Germany’s expenditure on Arrow-3, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, is expected to reach €4 billion.”

    This is only one instance of “a splurge in defense spending across Europe following Russia’s war on Ukraine.” 

    Read the full Politico report here.

  • The PPE Medpro Saga in the UK

    This report in the Byline Times summarises the PPE Medpro case. 

    The UK government had sued the company for £122m in 2022. But in the latest development: 

    “PPE Medro’s unaudited accounts, published last month for the year ended 31 March 2022, show just over £4m in current assets and just over £47,000 in cash. It reported no employees for the accounting period and none in 2021.”

    As the report points out: 

    “Byline Times was the first publication to reveal in September 2020 that PPE Medpro had won hundreds of millions in Government COVID contracts, just 44 days after being incorporated.” 

    During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had “won two contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment (PPE)” including one contract “for £122 million worth of sterilised gowns to the NHS.” The government has since claimed that the supplied gowns “did not comply with the specification in the contract”. 

    The concern is that the company “won contracts through the so-called ‘VIP lane’ of suppliers” with the Conservative peer Michelle Mone being “accused of lobbying Michael Gove and Lord Agnew at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to secure business for PPE Medpro.” Mone “has denied having any relationship with the company” and “PPE Medpro claims it delivered the contract to its terms and supplied equipment “fully in accordance” with the contracts.” 

    It is important to note that: 

    “The Byline Times has previously been the subject of legal threats from PPE Medpro.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Scam Involving International Missed Calls on WhatsApp

    As this report in The Indian Express explains, “many WhatsApp users in India have reported receiving a spate of missed calls from international numbers” and “[t]he scam has caught the government’s attention.”

    This is how the scam works: 

    “The scam typically involves defrauding unsuspecting people on platforms such as WhatsApp, where the victim, who responds to a missed call, is promised money for YouTube video likes or a positive Google review. The scammer makes initial payments to the victim, who is invited to join a group, typically on Telegram app. The victim is encouraged to “invest” small amounts for bigger payouts, but after a considerable sum has been invested, they are blocked from the group.” 

    Further investigation by The Indian Express revealed that “the fraudster who intends to target multiple people doesn’t even need to manually call each of them” as “automatic dialer software” can make multiple calls to an entire database of numbers “in one go.” 

    Reportedly, experts have “pointed to holes in WhatsApp’s security systems” but “[a] detailed questionnaire sent to WhatsApp on whether it was aware that its platform was being used by an ecosystem that created fake accounts to scam people and if it was working to strengthen its firewall remained unanswered till the time of publication of” the report. 

    Read the full report here.

  • Ireland Considering Starting a Sovereign Wealth Fund

    According to this report by CNBC, “Ireland is considering funneling some of the bumper tax income it’s receiving from the many multinationals based in the country into a new sovereign wealth fund.”

    Ireland is one of the few countries worldwide to have a budget surplus and “[p]revious reports have suggested the new fund would be used to continue to pay down debt as well as on pensions and health care spending.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • End of the Road for Erdogan?

    Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan about to lose political control in Turkey? The Economist sounds optimistic.

    As this article points out, Erdogan has had a tight grip over power in his country:

    “He was jailed and barred from public office, yet managed to overturn the ban and came to dominate Turkish politics. He has won five parliamentary elections, two presidential polls and three referendums. He has even faced down a military coup.” 

    And yet, the article reports, “the polls suggest that the united opposition could wrest control of parliament from Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party and its allies” in the upcoming elections and “Erdogan himself appears to be trailing in the presidential election to be held on the same day.” 

    And as this article, also in The Economist points out, “[w]ere he to lose, it would be a stunning political reversal with global consequences” and it could provide a reason for hope for democrats around the world: 

    “The Turkish people would be more free, less fearful and—in time—more prosperous. A new government would repair battered relations with the West. (Turkey is a member of NATO, but under Mr Erdogan has been a disruptive actor in the Middle East and pursued closer ties with Russia.) Most important, in an era when strongman rule is on the rise, from Hungary to India, the peaceful ejection of Mr Erdogan would show democrats everywhere that strongmen can be beaten.” 

    Read these two opinion pieces on the upcoming Turkey elections in The Economist here and here. 

  • Better Understanding Photosynthesis

    According to reports in multiple science publications, such as this one, “researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, together with collaborators from Uppsala University and Humboldt University and other institutions” have been able to shed more light on “how Photosystem II, a protein complex in plants, algae and cyanobacteria, harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to split water, producing the oxygen we breathe.” 

    As the report goes on to state:

    “Using SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser (SACLA) in Japan, they captured for the first time in atomic detail what happens in the final moments leading up to the release of breathable oxygen. The data reveal an intermediate reaction step that had not been observed before.

    The results, published today in Nature, shed light on how nature has optimized photosynthesis and are helping scientists develop artificial photosynthetic systems that mimic photosynthesis to harvest natural sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into hydrogen and carbon based-fuels.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Excavated Buddha Statue Seen as Proof of Trade Between Ancient Egypt and India

    As this report by English-language Egyptian news portal Ahram Online states, archaeologists from a joint “Polish-American archaeological mission” have found a statue depicting the Buddha at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Berenike while excavating in a temple complex “dedicated to the Goddess Isis.”

    The find, along with other excavations on the site, like “an inscription in Sanskrit” and “two second-century CE coins” from a central Indian kingdom, is said to show “a connection between Egypt and India during the Roman Empire.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Spate of Privacy Breaches by Healthcare Businesses

    According to this report, “Telehealth company Cerebral is facing a lawsuit that accuses the company of installing tracking technologies on its website and app that led to the protected health information of more than 3 million patients to be sent to social media companies.” 

    This is happening against the backdrop of “14 other hospitals and health systems around the country” facing lawsuits “alleging use of these tracking technologies on their websites.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Buzzfeed News Shutting Down

    As this report summarises: 

    “Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News is being shut down, leading to layoffs of about 15% of BuzzFeed staff. The layoffs will affect the company’s business, content, tech and admin teams as well as some staff in international markets. In an email to staff reprinted by CNBC, Peretti said they can no longer fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone operation.”

    Reportedly, the company’s news content will be shifted to Huffpost: 

    “The company’s sole news provider will now be HuffPost. BuzzFeed.com will continue its signature clickbait content, including listicles, quizzes, celebrity gossip and more.”

    Read a comprehensive report on the issue here.

  • Paid Subscriptions Now Necessary for Running Ad Campaigns on Twitter

    Twitter now requires that individuals or organisations intending to run ad campaigns on Twitter be subscribed to either Twitter Blue or the “Verified Organizations” service.

    This report from Tech Crunch quotes a letter from Twitter to a Twitter user:

    “[…] your @account must have a verified checkmark or subscribe to either Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations to continue running ads on Twitter.”

    Read the full Tech Crunch report here.

  • Data Security Concerns Over the Use of Generative AI Tools

    A study by an Israeli firm Team8 got widely picked up by media outlets because of the concerns it raises about corporate secrets and customer information. 

    As one report says: 

    “The report said that companies using such tools may leave them susceptible to data leaks and laws. The chatbots can be used by hackers to access sensitive information. Team8’s study said that chatbot queries are not being fed into the large language models to train AI since the models in their current form can’t update themselves in real-time. This, however, may not be true for the future versions of such models, it added.”

    Bloomberg News covered the study first and is said to have received it “prior to its release.” As the Bloomberg report says: 

    Major technology companies including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are racing to add generative AI capabilities to improve chatbots and search engines, training their models on data scraped from the Internet to give users a one-stop-shop to their queries. If these tools are fed confidential or private data, it will be very difficult to erase the information, the report said. 

    Read the complete Bloomberg report on the Team8 study here.

  • Rising Debt Servicing Costs Eating into Government Revenues in Poorest Countries

    This piece in the Financial Times reports how studies from across the ideological spectrum, by Debt Justice campaign and the IMF, show that “[l]ow-income countries will face their biggest bills for servicing foreign debts in a quarter of a century this year, putting spending on health and education at risk.”

    The report says: “The figures — the highest since 1998 — follow a steep rise in global borrowing costs last year, when central banks sought to counter high inflation with rapid rate rises.”

    Some argue that this may call for debt relief at a large scale like when “[m]ultilateral lenders and foreign governments led by the IMF and the World Bank delivered far-reaching debt relief around the turn of the millennium.” The argument goes that this may even require “changes to laws governing bond contracts in England and the state of New York to force private creditors to take part in debt cancellation.”

    Sri Lanka, having been in the news for some time now due to its financial troubles, “faces the steepest schedule of external repayments, equal to 75 per cent of government revenues this year. The country is unlikely to meet those payments following a default on its external debts last year.”

    Read the full report here.

  • PBS and NPR Stop Using Twitter

    As widely reported, PBS and NPR have stopped using Twitter. 

    According to the National Public Radio or NPR website: “NPR is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public.”

    According to the Public Broadcasting Service or PBS website: “PBS is a membership organization that, in partnership with its member stations, serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives.”

    To access multi-media content put out by NPR, visit their website here. To take a look at PBS programming, visit their website here or their Youtube channel here.

  • Politically Motivated Anti-gay Hysteria in East Africa

    In this “letter” for BBC, Sammy Awami, a freelance journalist based in Tanzania, talks about the “wave of anti-homosexuality sentiments sweeping through” East Africa. 

    Awami argues, as have others, that this anti-gay sentiment is being whipped up “by politicians and political parties who have not delivered on their promises to their voters.” Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo is quoted as making a similar argument in a tweet: “There is currently no anti-gay hysteria in African countries with high economic growth rates or which are able to manage their debt”. 

    About the bogus claim of homosexuality being un-African, Awamy writes: 

    “It is interesting that these politicians ignore the fact that it is actually the harsh anti-homosexuality laws – not homosexuality – that were imposed on us by the colonial government. 

    Indeed, the original anti-homosexuality law was first introduced across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda by the British colonialists, after successfully using it in India about 150 years ago.” 

    Read the full article here. 

  • Generative AI in Finance

    This report in Forbes covers the research paper released earlier by Bloomberg introducing BloombergGPT, which applies ChatGPT-style machine learning techniques to financial datasets, those available in Bloomberg’s own vast repertoire and beyond. 

    Forbes‘s “back-of-napkin cost estimation” speculates that just the cost of Amazon Web Services cloud computing used to generate these models would have been to the tune of “$2.7 million to produce the model alone.” 

    After listing the datasets that were used to train these models, the report goes on to speculate about the uses that BloombergGPT could potentially be put to, like drafting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, researching companies, individuals, and their linkages, drafting market reports and summaries, fetching financial statements etc.

    Read the full Forbes report here. Read the Bloomberg announcement of BloombergGPT here.

  • Amazon Deliberately Miscategorising Businesses?

    According to a story broken by The Information, Amazon has been miscategorising sellers as “Small Business” or “Black-Owned Small Business” even when they are not. 

    While Amazon had launched such badges with the claim that it was a way to “help customers who want to support small businesses”, facts uncovered in this report raise the question if this was just a way to exploit public sentiment to drive up sales. 

    The story has been picked up by other media outlets. This report in Business Insider says:

    “Even though not all businesses say they’ve seen a boost from the badges, the badges could have the potential to increase sales. An IBM study found that product downloads rose by 64% after the products were given digital badges, showing that badges can help some sales professionals ‘achieve sales quotas.’” 

    Read the original report published by The Information here. Read Business Insider‘s coverage of the story here.

  • San Francisco After the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

    This piece on Bloomberg takes a look at San Francisco in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. While all the usual issues that come up when talking about San Francisco – the city’s fiscal deficit, cost-of-living, tech slump, post-pandemic economic recovery, layoffs, vacant offices, homelessness, drug use, etc. – are touched upon in the article, it doesn’t give a conclusive picture on whether or not there is any cause for optimism in the sombre picture that the quoted figures paint. Even as the mayor of the city is said to have “pointed to cataclysms from the 1906 earthquake to the bursting of the dot-com bubble that brought in a spate of naysayers, only to have the city rebound stronger than ever”, an investor at a venture capital firm is quoted as having said that “the renewed interest in San Francisco is more in spite of the city, not aided by it”. 

    Read the full article here.

  • Avoiding Deliberations in Policy-making in the Name of Efficiency

    In this editorial for the Deccan Herald, policy researcher Yamini Aiyar warns against the tendency to problematise the bureaucracy only as a means to undermine democratic processes. 

    As she writes: 

    “Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency (conflated with State capacity). “Too much democracy”, the argument goes, with its attendant chaos caused by necessary rules of deliberation-negotiation and consensus-building, can become an impediment to State capacity. Indeed, this is the ruse that has been used to legitimise strongman leadership across the globe.” 

    Such demonising of bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency” is often used as a way to circumvent institutional mechanisms for deliberations on matters of policy, the author argues. As she concludes: “The expectation that a less democratic, low-capacity State can endow itself with the capacity to do what the State ought to do in a complex and unequal social setting is a falsity spurred by a deep desire to legitimise undemocratic political regimes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • US Media's Coverage of the Latest IPCC Report and the Willow Project

    Media Matters has put out this piece condemning the coverage (or lack of it) in US corporate TV news on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the controversial Willow project, an oil drilling project in Alaska. The report claims  “national TV news mostly failed to contextualize the Willow project’s recent approval within the framework of the IPCC report.”

    Talking of the expected role of the media in such matters, the report says:

    “National TV news has the potential to shape public opinion and drive action on climate change and therefore has a crucial role to play in holding the fossil fuel industry and politicians accountable for their role in exacerbating the crisis. Making these connections is one of the key actions climate correspondents can take whenever they are asked to discuss major climate news.”

    The main conclusion of the report is that “the overall lack of coverage of the IPCC report and the failure to connect it to the Willow project represents a missed opportunity to demand accountability from the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration for its continued support for new fossil fuel infrastructure.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Virus-eating Microorganisms

    Late last year, researchers confirmed the existence of virus-eating microorganisms. The existence of such organisms had been hypothesised earlier. The question that researchers are now seeking answer(s) to is whether these and/or other microorganisms feed on viruses “in the wild,” outside laboratory conditions.

    Read a report on this research here.

  • On Social Media Companies Charging for Basic Services

    Geoffrey A. Fowler writes for The Washington Post: “Social media used to be free. That’s starting to change, in part, because the profits are no longer piling up quite as high in Silicon Valley for companies that built businesses on targeting us with ads. So they’re looking for new sources of growth that are actually worth paying for.”

    Comparing these subscription plans to mobsters asking for protection money, Fowler writes: “Facebook’s current support limitations are costing people time, money and relationships. It’s true that, unlike Twitter, Facebook is not removing any existing security features from everyone else to begin charging for them. But don’t even think about offering premium customer service until you’re able to keep a product or service functional at a basic level for everyone.”

    Meta’s Zuckerberg has responded to such concerns with: “Verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people costs a significant amount of money. Subscription fees will cover this and will also pace how many people sign up so we’ll be able to ensure quality as we scale,” he wrote.

    But users and commentators are far from convinced by this explanation.

    As Fowler concludes: “These are Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s problems to solve, not ours. Meta’s net income last year was $23 billion, mostly made off our personal data. Protecting us is a cost of doing business.”

    Read the full article here.