Nobel-winning chemist Omar Yaghi is leaving UC Berkeley for China's Tsinghua University, where he will lead a new AI institute focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced materials. "Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world's foremost chemists," reports The New York Times. "The university said he saw his new post as an opportunity 'not to slow down, not to repeat what has already been done, but to do science with more energy, more intensity, and more ambition than ever before.'" From the report: Dr. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees whose one-room home lacked electricity and running water. Early on, he became fascinated with a schoolbook's depiction of atomic building blocks. When he was 15, his father, a butcher, sent him to the United States. Last year, before flying to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize, Dr. Yaghi in an interview with The New York Times voiced concern about Mr. Trump's immigration policies, saying that they endanger the nation's system of universities, companies and governments that promote scientific excellence. "I think it's regrettable," he said of Mr. Trump's nationalism. "We have to know that people coming from different backgrounds improve the level for everybody involved," he added. "That's an amazing story. Great thinkers can improve not only the U.S. but the world."

Dr. Yaghi joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, and while there earned many awards for his scientific advances. He received his Nobel Prize for helping discover a world of chemistry in which molecular building blocks are assembled into structures that possess vast internal surface areas -- the largest of any known substance. His porous structures can act like sponges that readily absorb, store and release gases and vapors. He named them metal-organic frameworks. The metal atoms form an adjustable framework that can hold chemicals associated with life -- carbon atoms in particular. While deeply theoretical, the frameworks are so radical, innovative and flexible in nature that materials experts and companies foresee many commercial uses for them. The frameworks can, for instance, harvest water from desert air. In 2018, Dr. Yaghi's students at Berkeley tested the idea in the Mojave Desert in California, finding that a small passive harvester could each day produce nearly three cups of pure, drinkable water. The device is now nearing commercialization.

In the interview with The Times, Dr. Yaghi credited the invention to his boyhood efforts to secure water for his family. The municipal pipes worked for only a few hours every week or two. That hardship, he added, shows how the diverse experiences of emigres can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Dr. Yaghi has longstanding ties with Tsinghua University. In 2022, the Beijing school appointed him as an honorary professor and in that role he closely followed its work in chemistry, materials science and related disciplines. Now, on joining Tsinghua full time, Dr. Yaghi is being named as the head of a new A.I. institute for science research that will focus on the design and synthesis of new materials. Its underlying aim, the university said, is to "overcome the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional trial-and-error approaches" and shorten the usual cycles of discovery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the near future, AI-powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities… and maybe also to the general public.

Think of these systems as automated speed cameras, but on steroids. Only they’ll enforce not just speed limits, but any other rule you can imagine. And you won’t receive a ticket weeks later by mail; you’ll be informed about and fined for your violation immediately.

These systems will combine powerful AI, public and private surveillance via real-time facial recognition technology and digital tracking, mass databases and highly personalized enforcement. If deployed at scale, they will have profound chilling effects not just on personal freedoms, but democracy and social progress itself.

China has been developing its surveillance infrastructure for years. The country has over 600 million surveillance cameras, increasingly powered by AI and facial recognition to enforce legal and social rules. Take the case of Lao Duan, a Chinese citizen blacklisted by the system after he lost his job and was unable to repay a series of loans. When he visited Beijing, the city’s AI surveillance system identified him by his face at a major intersection and displayed his face, name and citizen ID number on a large electronic billboard nearby with a message that he was an untrustworthy person. Similar systems are now being deployed across China and integrated with its infamous online monitoring, censorship and social credit systems.

AI surveillance is now being experimented with in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to a new report, the US Department of Homeland Security is rapidly increasing its use of AI-based surveillance, including facial recognition and the monitoring of social media accounts, to keep tabs on immigrants, dissidents, journalists, legal observers and protesters. While the systems are ostensibly used to maintain security and public safety, the real aim is often social control. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle—a powerful tech giant that works closely with the Trump administration—has said: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” The chilling effects are the point.

AI surveillance raises a range of public policy challenges: technical biases, unauditable systems, and inflexible automated law and social rule enforcement that can promote discrimination and undermine transparency, accountability and the rule of law. But we believe the most urgent and long-term impact will be its broader chilling effects.

In a new book, Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, Jon Penney explains how surveillance, technology and power can be weaponized to influence behavior at scale. Surveillance, personalization, uncertainty and authority are all key mechanisms to increase the scale and impact of chilling effects. They cause people to self-censor their words and actions, to become more conformist and compliant and thus easier to manage and control. And the effects are additive: the more mechanisms employed, and the more powerful the form, the greater the chill.

Computerization has long allowed data collectors to track our locations, collect lists of whom we communicate with, and monitor our spending habits—unless we use cash. What’s new is an unprecedented fusion of each of these mechanisms, persistent and unrelenting. AI brings an analytical ability to spy on the contents of our communications, and to answer sophisticated questions about our whereabouts and activities: actions that previously required human analysts are now automated. The result will be a kind of supercharged societal level of chilling effects where fear, self-censorship and groupthink reign, and dissent, creativity and innovation become increasingly rare.

In this atmosphere of fear and conformity, risky ideas, social activism and self-reinvention—especially by disfavored groups and targeted populations—are also chilled. This will have long-term effects on social progress.

Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.

There are no real historical precursors to this; these technologies are too new. Even the most notorious and large-scale domestic surveillance program in US history, the FBI’s use of wiretapping, physical mail opening, informants and paper index cards to track alleged communists during the 1950s and 1960s, appears genuinely archaic in light of modern AI-enhanced surveillance. So does East Germany’s human-centric surveillance network during the cold war. Only science fiction, from the likes of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, comes close. But even Big Brother’s “telescreen” feels decidedly mid-20th-century by comparison.

But we need not sit idly. Now that we recognize the danger of AI-enhanced mass surveillance, we can make the policy choices not to implement it. Bans on facial recognition and other forms of identification tech can slow development; robust new privacy and data protections can restrict data tracking and retention; AI regulations can curtail its most invasive uses; and structural reforms can help us scrutinize and break up powerful state/tech cartels that pave the way for technological excesses like AI surveillance.

The chill of AI-powered mass surveillance will suffocate the very foundations of healthy democratic societies. But we can still choose a different path.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

9457 San Fernando Rd, Sun Valley, CA 91352

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Hakuba Goryu Alpine Botanical Garden
白馬五竜高山植物園・コマクサ

There were plenty of pink dicentra in bloom.

ピンク色のコマクサはいっぱい咲いていました。

Hakuba-mura, Nagano pref, Japan

Social

We zijn GEK op vrouwen. Maar vrouwenstemrecht? Te vroeg om te zeggen, of te laat! Want op gezette tijden luidt de systeempers natuurlijk de noodklok om de 'Manosphere' en hoe misogyn en fascistisch De Jongens worden. Maar onderzoek toont aan dat juist vrouwen veel verder naar links schuiven, dan jongens naar rechts. En dat diezelfde vrouwen bovendien véél negatiever zijn over mannen, dan mannen over vrouwen. Dus, wie radicaliseert hier nou eigenlijk?

Verder! Wat we dus in de tweede helft bespreken - onderstaand dus alleen te zien voor Premium Leden: hier voor slechts 5 euro per maand. 

Waarom kan Talitha zich nog altijd in de 7e versnelling boos maken om het coronabeleid van 6 jaar geleden, terwijl veel mensen die er destijds hetzelfde in stonden als zij, het inmiddels nog maar heel weinig kan schelen?

En waarom wordt Noorwegen wereldwijd geprezen om zijn viering van het koloniale Viking-verleden, met die (fantastische) Viking-teamfoto en Viking-roei, terwijl het destijds nou niet bepaald gegadigden voor de Nobelprijs voor de Vrede waren? En waarom mogen West-Europese landen dit dan niet, terwijl West-Europees kolonialisme in tegenstelling tot de Vikings niet bijna uitsluitend verminking, verkrachting, dood en verderf bracht?

Afijn, daar hebben we het dus eens goed over. En de tweede helft dus onderstaand te zien, uitsluitend voor GEENSTIJL PREMIUMS! Tot over twee weken makkers!

(Naschrift: eerste helft hier op SPOTIFY!)

The latest Linux Mint blog says that its Wayland support is about ready for primetime – but X11 isn’t going away. Linux Mint lead developer Clement Lefebvre has published the Linux Mint blog for June 2026, announcing that as of the next version of the Cinnamon desktop, it will officially drop “experimental” status for Wayland: this will be a fully supported way to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. You will have to be patient, though – the post says: “The improvements and features mentioned in this blog post are planned for the next version of Linux Mint, which is scheduled for Christmas this year.” The current release of Mint is version 22.3, which we looked at in January this year, and, as we said then, it shipped with Cinnamon version 6.6.4. The version of the desktop in development in the project’s Github repo is currently 6.7.4. So this suggests that Linux Mint 24 will arrive at the end of 2026, and that it will come with Cinnamon 6.8. Mint fans will have to be patient, but the Mint blog for March did reveal that the project was slowing down its release cycle. The post discusses some of the issues the team is encountering with Wayland, such as around controlling the size and positioning of new windows, updating icons with progress bars, and so on. Earlier in the year, the Mint blog for February went into some depth on the problem creating screensaver support in a Wayland environment. If you track such things, this is not shocking. For instance, this is something that XScreensaver creator Jamie Zawinski castigated Wayland for this at very amusing length, back in 2023. Similarly, the May Mint blog discussed performance issues in detail with hard numbers, and showed the effects of different settings on dialog boxes and screenshot-grabbing tools. For us, though, what these insights into the development process illustrate is the Mint team’s determination to bring Cinnamon to Wayland without losing any of its rich functionality – however serious the challenges this presents. And despite the effort going into Wayland, X11 is not going away. The blog says: “In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.” Perhaps it’s paranoia, but it seems to us that there’s some subtext here, which we interpret as the next version will still support X11 – but after that, all bets are off. We hope we’re wrong on that front. ®

A staff member sent the personal details of around 150 women who were in contact with a Scottish NHS Trust’s maternity services to their own personal email account, the Trust has revealed. NHS Forth Valley, the health board that oversees NHS services in the region between Edinburgh and Glasgow, said it is investigating the matter and has contacted the women affected. “An internal investigation is underway after a member of staff transferred a spreadsheet containing an extract of data from our maternity system to their personal email address,” a spokesperson said. "While the majority of information in the spreadsheet is unidentifiable, it contained some lines of data relating to a number of women who had accessed local maternity services. "There is no evidence that the information has been shared any wider at this stage, and the member of staff has also advised that they have now deleted the data.” NHS Forth Valley has contacted to data subjects directly and informed a number of other relevant organizations, including the UK Information Commissioner. A new mum who was one of the circa 150 women affected by the data mishap, told the Fakirk Herald, which first reported the story, that she was experiencing anxiety that her details were out in the public domain. The woman reportedly was told by NHS Forth Valley that the information was transferred for analytical purposes and concerned a fully qualified, non-clinical staff member, and not a junior. She was also informed that the data in the spreadsheet included full names, dates of birth, NHS numbers, pregnancy treatment information, and the patients’ total number of children. NHS Forth Valley said it had made Police Scotland and the Information Commissioner’s Office aware of what happened. The UK’s health service, for all its merits, has a far from sparkling record when it comes to email-based data breaches. Between bungled Freedom of Information responses to the BCC function proving too difficult for staff members, the NHS and wider UK public sector have been the subject of their fair share of blunders in recent years. Two separate Trusts – Chelsea and Westminster and NHS Highland – failed to protect HIV patients’ data when bulk-sending responses via the CC field instead of the BCC field in recent years. Between 2020 and 2021, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust was also found exposing extraneous data in spreadsheets sent as part of FoI responses. And perhaps our favorite NHS clanger of all, the service’s Digital division, no less, exposed hundreds of email addresses via a failed BCC attempt when sending four separate emails to attendees of a cybersecurity event. ®

Jante Wortels eetstoornis kwam voort uit een gebrek aan controle in haar leven. „Ik had een project nodig waarbij ik zelf kon bepalen of het lukt of niet.” Dat werd eten.

NRC-columnist Floor Rusman kreeg in september te horen dat ze eierstokkanker had. Deze zomer schrijft ze wekelijks over wat er in haar hoofd gebeurde toen haar lichaam een bedreiging werd.

Nadat er in het weekend ongeregeldheden waren na de wedstrijd van Marokko tegen Canada, werd er bij programma’s als ‘Vandaag Inside’ in apocalyptische woorden vooruitgeblikt op de wedstrijd van donderdagavond. Blijft Amsterdam overeind?

De autoriteiten in Spanje houden er rekening mee dat veel slachtoffers van de dodelijke natuurbrand in de Zuid-Spaanse provincie Almería uit het buitenland komen.

Deze zomer luncht NRC mee bij organisaties en bedrijven in het buitenland. Deze week: India. „Mijn eten moet een human touch hebben. Ik vind het fijn dat het door iemand gemaakt wordt die ik vertrouw en die weet wat ik lekker vind.”

"I've loved the sickbay on Star Trek: The Next Generation since I was a teenager... Cortical stimulators that revive the unconscious, no matter how traumatising their injuries. Biobeds that enclose patients within sensor arrays, short metal tunnels that scan and analyse —all, I imagine, while keeping sick and hurt beings warm... Our delivery suite has a pseudo-dot-matrix printer, a team of blue scrubs, and the promise of a scalpel."

What the attack on Monticello cost was not the truth. The truth is in the ground, in the archive, in the oral histories collected beginning in 1993, in the names Stanton and Swann-Wright recovered, in the descendants' faces in the photographs taken on the West Lawn steps. Those things were put in the record by specific people doing specific work over three decades, and they remain; the work was done carefully enough that it survives the institution's retreat from it. What the attack cost was the institution's willingness to stand in front of that truth without flinching. That is a real cost.

jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:

In the afternoon at my village(Tallawong), Sydney, Australia.
God bless you.