Sunday, January 12, 2025

Plants and trees are able to predict volcano eruptions

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste.


The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a phrase woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

The Year of the Wolves Montana Free Press

Plants and trees are able to predict volcano eruptionsEarth.com



People living near airports face increased heart attack risk: Study Anadolu Agency




You Are What Your Ancestors Didn’t Eat Nautilus 


New World Literature Today

       The January/February issue of World Literature Today is now out, with a focus on 'Ananda Devi: 2024 Neustadt Prize Laureate'.
       And, as always, there's the extensive book review section.


Beware Of Shadow AI – Shadow IT’s Less Well-Known Brother - SecurityWeek : “While AI tools can enable employees to be innovative and productive, significant data privacy risks can stem from their usage. Shadow IT is a fairly well-known problem in the cybersecurity industry. It’s where employees use unsanctioned systems and software as a workaround to bypass official IT processes and restrictions. Similarly, with AI tools popping up for virtually every business use case or function, employees are increasingly using unsanctioned or unauthorized AI tools and applications without the knowledge or approval of IT or security teams – a new phenomenon known as Shadow AI.  Research shows that from 50 to 75% of employees are using non-company issued AI tools and the number of these apps is growing substantially. A visibility problem emerges. Do companies know what is happening on their own networks? According to our research, beyond the popular use of general AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini, another set of more niche AI applications being used at organizations include:

  • Bodygram (a body measurement app)
  • Craiyon (an image generation tool)
  • Otter.ai (a voice transcription and note taking tool)
  • Writesonic (a writing assistant)
  • Poe (a chatbot platform by Quora)
  • HIX.AI (a writing tool)
  • Fireflies.ai (a note taker and meeting assistant)
  • PeekYou (a people search engine)
  • Character.AI (creates virtual characters) and
  • Luma AI (3D capture and reconstruction).

Why Shadow AI Is A Major Cybersecurity Risk  – Even though AI brings great productivity, Shadow AI introduces different risks: Data leakage, Compliance risks, Vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, Lack of oversight, and Legal risks…”


  Dutch privacy laws shielded the names from public view until the end of 2024: “A massive trove of documents about suspected Nazi collaborators in the Netherlands is now open to the public for the first time. For the past seven decades, only researchers and relatives of those accused of collaborating with the Nazis could access the information held by the Dutch Central Archives of the Special Administration of Justice.

 But two years ago, The War in Court, a Dutch consortium devoted to preserving history, announced that it would make the records available online when they were no longer shielded by the country’s privacy laws. That went into effect this month, and visitors to the consortium’s website can now view a list of 425,000 people investigated for potential collaboration during the Holocaust. Dossiers about the people, including what investigators found, can be viewed in person at the Dutch National Archive in the Hague. 

About a quarter of the archive has been digitized so far. The impending availability of the material has been controversial in the Netherlands because relatively few of the people in the database were ever formally charged with crimes. Not all even faced formal investigations…”