The longest actor’s strike in Hollywood history ended with “groundbreaking” protections against the use of AI, reports CNN:

Studios will have to provide informed consent for the creation of any kind of digital replica of a performer or background actor, with a specific description of the intended use, the union officials said. Compensation for the replica will vary. Notably, the contract also protects background performers from any use of their digital replica without their consent, SAG leadership said. [Even after they are deceased.]

Negotiations over using AI to create synthetic performers continued down to the wire. Union leadership said studios will have to gain consent for any actors whose facial features are used for the AI performer, the studios have to inform actors they’re using AI, and the union can bargain over compensation for those affected by it.

The separate deal signed in September with the writer’s guild “also includes assurances that AI cannot write or rewrite literary material,” the article adds, “and will require AI-generated materials to be disclosed to writers.” Now the president of the actor’s union tells the Hollywood Reporter, “We got everything we wanted with the AI protections, which was key. Plus we’re going to be meeting with the AMPTP [the entertainment industry’s bargaining unit] twice a year to make sure that our finger remains on the pulse of the progress, and also to align ourselves on the same side with regard to federal regulations and protections against piracy.”
And the union president underscored the importance of AI-related protections to Rolling Stone”
“If we didn’t get that package, then what are we doing? We’re not really able to protect our members in the way that they needed to be protected… If we didn’t get those barricades, what would it be in three years…?”

In the union’s initial announcement of the tentative deal on Wednesday, SAG-AFTRA promised it had secured a contract “of extraordinary scope” valued at more than $1 billion and “unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI.”

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Source: Slashdot – The AI Protections Hollywood Actors Got After Their 118-Day Strike

A new book argues lockdowns during the pandemic were “a failure.” But in response CNN published an opinion piece disagreeing — written by physician/infectious disease expert Kent Sepkowitz from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York — who argues “You bet it was worth it.”

[Authors Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean] consider the lockdown a single activity stretched across the entire pandemic; in contrast, I would distinguish the initial lockdown, which was crucial, from the off-and-on lockdowns as therapies, vaccines and overall care improved. There is an argument to be made that these were not anywhere near as effective… One only had to work in health care in New York City to see the difference between early 2020, when the explosion of cases overwhelmed the city, versus later in 2020 when an effective therapy had been identified, supplies and diagnostic testing had been greatly improved (though still completely inadequate) and the makeshift ICUs and emergency rooms had been set in place. It was still a nightmare to be sure, but it was a vastly more organized nightmare.

The “short-term benefits” at the start of the pandemic are simple to characterize: Every infection that was delayed due to the lockdowns was a day to the good, a day closer to the release of the mRNA vaccines in December 2020, a less-hectic day for the health care workers, a day for clinical trials to mature. Therefore, the authors’ statement that lockdowns “were a mistake that should not be repeated” because they had no “purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun in the short-term” is to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the day-to-day work that was being done. Most disturbing to me about this assessment and the others that have come along are the minimal mention of the death and debility the infection caused. A reminder for those who have forgotten just how brutal the pandemic was: Worldwide there have been 7 million deaths. In the U.S., there have been more than a million deaths, millions have some post-infection debility and many health care workers remain profoundly demoralized. [By these figures the U.S., with 4.2% of the world’s population, had 14% of Covid fatalities.]

In this context, many of the outcomes of concern listed by Nocera and McLean — suicidal thoughts in teens, alcoholism and drug use increases, violence — are as easily explained by this staggering death toll as by the cabin fever brought on by lockdowns. Once again: About 1 out of every 350 Americans died in the Covid-19 pandemic. Another way to consider the impact of so many deaths is examination of life expectancy. Of note, life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2020 (1.8 years) and 2021 (0.6 years), the sharpest drop since the 1920s; per the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 74% of the drop was attributed to Covid-19… To fall more than two years so precipitously requires the deaths of many in their 30s and 40s and 50s, as occurred with the first year of the pandemic.

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Source: Slashdot – Covid Lockdowns ‘Were Worth It’, Argues Infectious Disease Expert on CNN

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes:

The Scottish wildcat–a fierce, solitary feline with striking stripes and a legendary reputation in Scotland–may be extinct, due to breeding with domestic cats. Domestic cats and European wildcats (a species to which the Scottish wildcat belongs) shared Europe for more than 2000 years without interbreeding, according to a new study. But around 70 years ago, something changed.

In the mid-1950s, more than 5% of the genetic markers in Scottish wildcats began to resemble those of domestic cats, according to a second new study. After 1997, that figure jumped to as high as 74%. In the wild, the markings of the Scottish wildcat became muddled and spotted, its short, bushy tail replaced by the long, thin tail of domestic cats. Today, the genome of the Scottish wildcat is so “swamped” with domestic cat DNA that the animal is “genomically extinct,” the authors conclude. All that’s left in nature is a “hybrid swarm,” they write, a confused mix of wild and domestic DNA. “Everything these wildcats have evolved over thousands of years is being lost in a few generations,” says the study’s lead author, Jo Howard-McCombe, a conservation geneticist at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.

The reason appears to be a shrinking wildcat population in Scotland—the last stronghold of the European wildcat in Britain—and human encroachment, both of which forced the wildcats to breed with domestic cats. The only hope may lie in a captive population of Scottish wildcats, which researchers have begun releasing into the wild, far from domestic felines. The team hopes that as the animals adapt to their environment over several generations, they’ll begin to shed their domestic DNA. It may be an uphill battle, but the project’s lead, Helen Senn, says, “We’ve got to start somewhere.”

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Source: Slashdot – Domestic Cats Have Wiped Out the Scottish Wildcat. Only ‘Hybrid Swarm’ Remains

Wednesday five of the U.S. Republican candidates for president gathered for their third debate in Miami — where they again urged the banning of TikTok in America:

Moderator: Last week congressman Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House bipartisan select committee on the Chinese Community party, published a long essay on TikTok… [H]e called the app “predatory… controlled by America’s preeminent adversary,” used to push propaganda and divide America. It’s “spyware,” he said — a means of surveillance.
Governor Christie, do you agree with chairman Gallgaher, and if so would you ban or force the sale of TikTok.
Chris Christie: I agree 100% with chairman Gallagher, and let me say this. TikTok is not only spyware. it is polluting the minds of American young people, all throughout this country. And they’re doing it intentionally… This is China trying to further divide the United States of America…

In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok. They want to go ahead and sell it, let ’em go ahead and sell it. But I’ll tell you another reason we would do it. Facebook’s not in China. X is not in China. They’re not permitting a free flow of information to the Chinese people from our social media companies. Yet we just open the door and let them do what they’re doing. TikTok should be banned because they are poisoning American minds, and I would do it Week One… [Applause from audience.]
Ron DeSantis: [DeSantis began by saying he would also ban TikTok.] I think that China’s the top threat we face. They’ve been very effective at infiltrating different parts of our society… And as the dad of a 6-, 5-, and a 3-year-old, I’m concerned about the data that they’re getting from our young people, and what they’re doing to pollute the minds of our young people… Their role in our culture? If we ignore that, we’re not going to be able to win the fight…

Vivek Ramaswamy: In the last debate [Nikki Haley] made fun of me for joining TikTok? Well her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first… [Audience boos]

Nikki Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The next generation of Americans are using it, and that’s actually the point… Here’s the truth. The easy answer is actually to say that we’re just going to ban one app. We gotta go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese. Here’s a story most people don’t know. Airbnb hands over U.S. user data to the CCP. Now that’s a U.S.-owned company… Even U.S. companies in Silicon Valley are regularly doing it…

Tim Scott: What we should do is ban TikTok, period… If you cannot ban TikTok, you should eliminate the Chinese presence on the app. Period.

In the previous debate Nikki Haley made her own position clear. “We can’t have TikTok in our kids’ lives. We need to ban it.”

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Source: Slashdot – Five Republican Presidential Candidates Call for TikTok to Be Banned in America

“Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet,” reports the CBC, calling it “a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang.”
“The findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe…”
Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years. Even more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper — 10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way. It’s believed to weigh anywhere from 10 to 100 per cent the mass of all the stars in its galaxy, said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That is nowhere near the miniscule ratio of the black holes in our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies — an estimated 0.1 per cent, he noted. “It’s just really early on in the universe to be such a behemoth,” said Yale University’s Priyamvada Natarajan, who took part in the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. A companion article appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters…

The researchers believe the black hole formed from colossal clouds of gas that collapsed in a galaxy next door to one with stars. The two galaxies merged, and the black hole took over.
The researchers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, reports NASA:
“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing…

This discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses soon after the big bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds of gas, creating black holes weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns? Or do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes weighing only between about 10 and 100 Suns…? Bogdan’s team has found strong evidence that the newly discovered black hole was born massive… The large mass of the black hole at a young age, plus the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the galaxy detected by Webb, all agree with theoretical predictions in 2017 by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University for an “Outsize Black Hole” that directly formed from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.

“We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” said Natarajan. “For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.” The researchers plan to use this and other results pouring in from Webb and those combining data from other telescopes to fill out a larger picture of the early universe.

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Source: Slashdot – Oldest, Massive Black Hole Discovered With JWST Data. Confirms ‘Collapsed Gas Cloud’ Theory