Numlock News: April 25, 2024 • Octocorals, Pinyin, Wizards

Apr 25, 2024

Digital Books

Libraries pay extra when it comes to e-books that they lend out, and it can pinch them financially. For instance, Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman In Me cost a library $17.81 to buy a physical copy directly from the publisher, but libraries paid $64.99 for an e-book and $59.99 for a digital audiobook. That’s significantly more than the $16.99 that a consumer would pay for an e-book and the $16.49 they’d charge for an audiobook. Those copies are also rented out one reader at a time, and the license to it is only for two years, at which point they need to buy new ones. This is all to say, please be sure to check out the e-book to my book You Are What You Watch from your local library as soon as possible.

Clare McGrane and Patricia Murphy, KUOW

Keyboard

A security research team analyzed pinyin keyboard apps that facilitate typing in Chinese and found that in eight of the nine apps there were vulnerabilities that would allow the contents of every keystroke to be accessed while the apps were communicating with the cloud. Most of the vendors fixed the reported vulnerabilities, which affected an estimated 1 billion users. Three of the apps — Sogou, Baidu and iFlytek — combined for 95 percent market share in China. The researchers believe that it’s very possible that personal communications have been surveilled as a result of the vulnerabilities.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Video Game

A new trend in litigation is to sue video game companies regarding “video game addiction,” a somewhat flimsy accusation that nevertheless has appeared in over a dozen lawsuits in North America naming many triple-A game developers. One firm, Bullock Ward Mason, is involved in 11 different suits. Many of the suits are filed by parents who claim that their child’s video game addiction has caused a suite of health and behavioral problems, linking obesity, physical pain and poor academics on the game companies.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Wizards

Hasbro earnings came in, and the company continues its trajectory toward being an unsuccessful board game and toy company that is attached to an insanely profitable card game called Magic: The Gathering. Sales in the toy division were down 21 percent year over year, while Wizards of the Coast sales were up 7 percent on the back of Magic. Wizards was responsible for $123 million in operating profit, while the rest of Hasbro in the aggregate posted a loss, and Hasbro finished with profits of $116 million.

Matt Phillips, Sherwood News

Taxi TV

The New York City Council voted to give ride-hailing companies the green light to put video ads in the back of Ubers and Lyfts, which had previously been banned. They did this given direct opposition from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and requires that at least 25 percent of the revenue from the ads goes to drivers. The law requires screens to have a volume control or off switch, which makes sense given the city’s experience with Taxi TV in the backs of yellow cabs over the past 15 years. Taxi TV is controversial, with 31 percent of respondents saying that Taxi TV being annoying is the single worst part of the taxi experience. The ad market for back-of-vehicle space could be impressive; while there are just 9,000 active, licensed taxis in New York, there are 100,000 ride-share drivers.

Patrick Coffee, The Wall Street Journal

Avars

The Avars were a horse-riding people from the Mongolian steppes that settled in what is now Hungary in 568 C.E., sticking around for a few hundred years during which they had the incredible foresight to leave absolutely no written history. That makes them a bit of an enigma, but a clever new study analyzing entire graveyards full of Avar bones attempted to reconstruct the family structures and generations that lived in this society. Genetic analysis revealed that they arrived in Hungary from Mongolia inside of a single generation, and the DNA sequences of over 400 skeletons from four cemeteries were able to produce a remarkable nine-generation family tree, stretching from one man buried around the arrival of the Avars all the way to 250 years later. All the males in the cemetery were descended from a few adult men with lots of grave goods, likely the community’s founders, while all the adult females buried there don’t have parents at the cemetery, implying they were not from the community, indicating a patrilocal community where women leave the home to find mates, which reduces inbreeding.

Andrew Curry, Science

Glowing

A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B argues that bioluminescence likely first emerged in octocorals, which are a group of soft corals. The new estimate that bioluminescence evolved in the ocean 540 million years ago is a substantial push back of the date of its origin, more than doubling it from the previously accepted estimate of 267 million years. Bioluminescence mechanisms are thought to have evolved about 100 separate times.

Meghan Bartels, Scientific American

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