Our new study, published today in the journal Information Research, suggests that leaving all your emails in the inbox is likely to leave you dissatisfied with your personal records management.

In an exploratory survey, we asked participants how they dealt with their personal records such as bills, online subscriptions and similar items. Many of these arrive by email.

We found that most respondents left their electronic records in their email. Only half saved items such as bills and other documents to other locations, like their computer or the cloud. But having a disorganised inbox also led to problems, including missing bills and losing track of important correspondence.

The risk of losing track of your emails

Receiving bills, insurance renewals and other household documents by email saves time and money, and reduces unnecessary paper use.

However, there are risks involved if you don’t stay on top of your electronic records. Respondents in our research reported issues such as lapsed vehicle registration, failing to cancel unwanted subscriptions, and overlooking tax deductions because it was too much trouble finding the receipts.

This suggests late fines and other email oversights could be costing people hundreds of dollars each year.

In addition to the financial costs, research suggests that not sorting and managing electronic records makes it more difficult to put together the information needed at tax time, or for other high-stakes situations, such as loan applications.

What did we find?

We surveyed over 300 diverse respondents on their personal electronic records management. Most of them were from Australia, but we also received responses from other countries, such as the United Kingdom, United States, Switzerland, Portugal and elsewhere.

Two-thirds of the respondents used their email to manage personal records, such as bills, receipts, subscriptions and more. Of those, we found that once respondents had dealt with their email, about half of them would sort the emails into folders, while the other half would leave everything in the inbox.

While most sorted their workplace email into folders, they were much less likely to sort their personal email in the same way.

The results also showed that only half (52%) of respondents who left all their email in the inbox were satisfied with their records management, compared to 71% of respondents who sorted their email into folders.

Of the respondents who saved their paperwork in the cloud (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox and similar), 83% reported being satisfied with their home records management.

The study was exploratory, so further research will be needed to see if our findings apply more universally. However, our statistical analysis did reveal practices associated with more satisfactory outcomes, and ones that might be better to avoid.

What can go wrong with an inbox-only approach?

Based on the responses, we have identified three main problems with leaving all your email in the inbox.

First, users can lose track of the tasks that need to be done. For example, a bill that needs to be paid could slip down the line unnoticed, drowned by other emails.

Second, relying on search to re-find emails means you need to know exactly what you’re looking for. For example, at tax time searching for charity donation receipts depends on remembering what to search for, as well as the exact wording in the email containing the receipt.

Read More: Stop emailing yourself: the best file sharing options across devices

Third, many bills and statements are not sent as attachments to emails, but rather as hyperlinks. If you change your bank or another service provider, those hyperlinks may not be accessible at a later date. Not being able to access missing payslips from a former employer can also cause issues, as shown by the Robodebt scandal or the recent case of the Australian Tax Office reviving old debts.

4 tips for better records management

When we asked respondents to nominate a preferred location for keeping their personal records, they tended to choose a more organised format than their current behaviour. Ideally, only 8% of the respondents would leave everything in their email inbox, unsorted.

Our findings suggest a set of practices that can help you get on top of your electronic records and prevent stress or financial losses:

• sort your email into category folders, or save records in folders in the cloud or on a computer
• download documents that are not attached to emails or sent to you – such as utility bills and all your payslips
• put important renewals in your calendar as reminders, and
• delete junk mail and unsubscribe, so that your inbox can be turned into a to-do list.

• Matt Balogh is an Adjunct Lecturer, University of New England
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

Struggling to find relevant sources for your review? Inciteful will list suitable articles with just the click of a button. Are your human research participants too expensive or complicated to manage? Not a problem – try synthetic participants instead.

Each of these tools suggests AI could be superior to humans in outlining and explaining concepts or ideas. But can humans be replaced when it comes to qualitative research?

This is something we recently had to grapple with while carrying out unrelated research into mobile dating during the COVID-19 pandemic. And what we found should temper enthusiasm for artificial responses over the words of human participants.

The rise of AI in academia sparks a debate: How do we balance technological advancement with ethical integrity in research? Misidentification and casual accusations highlight the fragile line between innovation and authenticity. Nature https://t.co/JuB9ZoV2jI

— Genetic Literacy Project (@GeneticLiteracy) March 15, 2024

Encountering AI in our research

Our research is looking at how people might navigate mobile dating during the pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our aim was to explore broader social responses to mobile dating as the pandemic progressed and as public health mandates changed over time.

As part of this ongoing research, we prompt participants to develop stories in response to hypothetical scenarios.

In 2021 and 2022 we received a wide range of intriguing and quirky responses from 110 New Zealanders recruited through Facebook. Each participant received a gift voucher for their time.

Participants described characters navigating the challenges of “Zoom dates” and clashing over vaccination statuses or wearing masks. Others wrote passionate love stories with eyebrow-raising details. Some even broke the fourth wall and wrote directly to us, complaining about the mandatory word length of their stories or the quality of our prompts.

These responses captured the highs and lows of online dating, the boredom and loneliness of lockdown, and the thrills and despair of finding love during the time of COVID-19.

But, perhaps most of all, these responses reminded us of the idiosyncratic and irreverent aspects of human participation in research – the unexpected directions participants go in, or even the unsolicited feedback you can receive when doing research.

But in the latest round of our study in late 2023, something had clearly changed across the 60 stories we received.

This time many of the stories felt “off”. Word choices were quite stilted or overly formal. And each story was quite moralistic in terms of what one “should” do in a situation.

Using AI detection tools, such as ZeroGPT, we concluded participants – or even bots – were using AI to generate story answers for them, possibly to receive the gift voucher for minimal effort.

Contrary to claims that AI can sufficiently replicate human participants in research, we found AI-generated stories to be woeful.

We were reminded that an essential ingredient of any social research is for the data to be based on lived experience.

Is AI the problem?

Perhap the biggest threat to human research is not AI, but rather the philosophy that underscores it.

It is worth noting the majority of claims about AI’s capabilities to replace humans come from computer scientists or quantitative social scientists. In these types of studies, human reasoning or behaviour is often measured through scorecards or yes/no statements.

This approach necessarily fits human experience into a framework that can be more easily analysed through computational or artificial interpretation.

In contrast, we are qualitative researchers who are interested in the messy, emotional, lived experience of people’s perspectives on dating. We were drawn to the thrills and disappointments participants originally pointed to with online dating, the frustrations and challenges of trying to use dating apps, as well as the opportunities they might create for intimacy during a time of lockdowns and evolving health mandates.

Read More: Emotion-tracking AI on the job: Workers fear being watched – and misunderstood

In general, we found AI poorly simulated these experiences.

Some might accept generative AI is here to stay, or that AI should be viewed as offering various tools to researchers. Other researchers might retreat to forms of data collection, such as surveys, that might minimise the interference of unwanted AI participation.

But, based on our recent research experience, we believe theoretically-driven, qualitative social research is best equipped to detect and protect against AI interference.

There are additional implications for research. The threat of AI as an unwanted participant means researchers will have to work longer or harder to spot imposter participants.

Academic institutions need to start developing policies and practices to reduce the burden on individual researchers trying to carry out research in the changing AI environment.

Regardless of researchers’ theoretical orientation, how we work to limit the involvement of AI is a question for anyone interested in understanding human perspectives or experiences. If anything, the limitations of AI reemphasise the importance of being human in social research.

• Alexandra Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
• Alex Beattie is a Research Fellow, School of Health, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, is currently writing a book on fibre optic cables and digital connectivity. She spent time in late 2023 aboard the ship whose crew is responsible for maintaining most of Africa’s undersea network. She spoke to The Conversation Africa about the importance of these cables.

1. What’s the geographical extent of Africa’s current undersea network?

Fibre optic cables now literally encircle Africa, though some parts of the continent are far better connected than others. This is because both public and private organisations have made major investments in the past ten years.

Based on an interactive map of fibre optic cables, it’s clear that South Africa is in a relatively good position. When the breakages happened, the network was affected for a few hours before the internet traffic was rerouted; a technical process that depends both on there being alternative routes available and corporate agreements in place to enable the rerouting. It’s the same as driving using a tool like Google Maps. If there’s an accident on the road it finds another way to get you to your destination.

But, in several African countries – including Sierra Leone and Liberia – most of the cables don’t have spurs (the equivalent of off-ramps on the road), so only one fibre optic cable actually comes into the country. Internet traffic from these countries basically stops when the cable breaks.

Naturally that has huge implications for every aspect of life, business and even politics. Whilst some communication can be rerouted via satellites, satellite traffic accounts for only about 1% of digital transmissions globally. Even with interventions such as satellite-internet distribution service Starlink it’s still much slower and much more expensive than the connection provided by undersea cables.

Basically all internet for regular people relies on fibre optic cables. Even landlocked countries rely on the network, because they have agreements with countries with landing stations – highly-secured buildings close to the ocean where the cable comes up from underground and is plugged into terrestrial systems. For example southern Africa’s internet comes largely through connections in Melkbosstrand, just outside Cape Town, and Mtunzini in northern KwaZulu-Natal, both in South Africa. Then it’s routed overland to various neighbours.

Each fibre optic cable is extremely expensive to build and to maintain. Depending on the technical specifications (cables can have more or fewer fibre threads and enable different speeds for digital traffic) there are complex legal agreements in place for who is responsible for which aspects of maintenance.

2. What prompted you to write a book about the social history of fibre optic cables in Africa?

I first visited Angola in 2011 to start work for my PhD project. The internet was all but non-existent – sending an email took several minutes at the time. Then I went back in 2013, after the South Atlantic Cable System went into operation. It made an incredible difference: suddenly Angola’s digital ecosystem was up and running and everybody was online.

At the time I was working on social mobility and how people in Angola were improving their lives after a long war. Unsurprisingly, having digital access made all sorts of things possible that simply weren’t imaginable before. I picked up my interest again once I was professionally established, and am now writing it up as a book, Capricious Connections. The title refers to the fact that the cables wouldn’t do anything if it wasn’t for the infrastructure that they plug into at various points.

Landing centres such as Sangano in Angola are fascinating both because of what they do technically (connecting and routing internet traffic all over the country) and because they often highlight the complexities of the digital divide.

For example, Sangano is a remarkable high-tech facility run by an incredibly competent and socially engaged company, Angola Cables. Yet the school a few hundred metres from the landing station still doesn’t have electricity.

When we think about the digital divide in Africa, that’s often still the reality: you can bring internet everywhere but if there’s no infrastructure, skills or frameworks to make it accessible, it can remain something abstract even for those who live right beside it.

In terms of history, fibre optic cables follow all sorts of fascinating global precedents. The 2012 cable that connected one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other is laid almost exactly over the route of the transatlantic slave trade, for example. Much of the basic cable map is layered over the routes of the copper telegraph network that was essential for the British empire in the 1800s.

Most of Africa’s cables are maintained at sea by the remarkable crew of the ship Léon Thévenin. I joined them in late 2023 during a repair operation off the coast of Ghana. These are uniquely skilled artisans and technicians who retrieve and repair cables, sometimes from depths of multiple kilometres under the ocean.

When I spent time with the crew last year, they recounted once accidentally retrieving a section of Victorian-era cable when they were trying to “catch” a much more recent fibre optic line. (Cables are retrieved in many ways; one way is with a grapnel-like hook that is dragged along the ocean bed in roughly the right location until it snags the cable.)

There are some very interesting questions emerging now about what is commonly called digital colonialism. In an environment where data is often referred to with terms like “the new oil”, we’re seeing an important change in digital infrastructure.

Previously cables were usually financed by a combination of public and private sector partnerships, but now big private companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Huawei are increasingly financing cable infrastructure. That has serious implications for control and monitoring of digital infrastructure.

Given we all depend so much on digital tools, poorer countries often have little choice but to accept the terms and conditions of wealthy corporate entities. That’s potentially incredibly dangerous for African digital sovereignty, and is something we should be seeing a lot more public conversation about.

• Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah is an Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

The global smart ring market is expected to grow from USD$314.52 billion (£246.3 billion) in 2023 to USD$2,570.30 billion (£2,012 billion) by 2030. So it is no surprise that Apple is now rumoured to be applying for its smart ring patents and is expected to have the product ready in time to compete with Samsung’s release.

But it might be surprising to learn that neither Samsung nor Apple are pioneers in this new wearable technology. Oura was launched in 2015 with a Kickstarter campaign for the first-generation ring.

Now on its third generation, with the fourth one expected in 2024, this smart ring can measure respiratory rate, heart rate, health rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen levels, and body temperature. The ring also has an accelerator that logs the user’s activity and movement. However, the main question is: is wearable technology worth it?

What is wearable technology?

Wearable devices come in many shapes and sizes, including smartwatches and sports watches, fitness trackers, head-mounted displays, smart jewellery, smart clothing, and even implantable devices.

Technological advances have enabled manufacturers to access low-cost, low-power sensor technology and develop this variety of devices. At a minimum, wearable devices are equipped with sensors, software and connecting technology.

The sensors gather information from the person wearing the device, and the software gathers the data and sends it to a device with processing capacity via a wireless connection. The ecosystem on which wearable technology works is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It is the same principle as smart technology used at home, on devices such as thermostats that can be operated from a mobile device outside the home, or smart speakers, but applied at a personal level. It is important to note that mobile devices do not process the data; it is usually sent to “the cloud” for processing, and the mobile device displays the data to the user.

What makes an IoT solution even more attractive is the interpretation of the data gathered by the sensors. For example, the Oura Ring and the Oura Membership allow users to monitor their sleep, manage stress and predict when they might get sick by monitoring body temperature and heart rate. This is all possible due to analysis of the data collected by the ring.

With advances in artificial intelligence (AI), it is expected that in 2024, there will be a boost in health tracking.

Benefits and drawbacks

Smart rings come with sensors similar to those of a smartwatch. However, because of their proximity to large blood vessels in the fingers, smart rings can provide more accurate readings than smartwatches, because they can use the capillaries (small blood vessels) in your finger to get their readings. Another advantage of smart rings is that they have a longer battery life than smartwatches. However, smart rings are unlikely to come with GPS or a screen.

In terms of price, the cheapest version of the Oura ring starts at £299 and users must pay a membership fee of £5.99 per month, with the first month free. This is required to get all the benefits of data analysis. However, the ring will still work with the Oura mobile app. The most affordable version of the AppleWatch, the SE version, starts at £219, while the Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Bluetooth starts at £239.

Smart rings can’t and won’t be able to replicate the functionality offered by a smartwatch. However, they represent an attractive choice for users interested in health tracking, who also want a simple device with minimalistic features. Bryan Ma, the Vice President of devices research at International Data Corporation, has said: “The idea behind such rings is not so much about being cheaper than smartwatches, but instead being a much smaller and discrete device for use in cases like sleep tracking.”

The future of wearable technology?

Wearable technology will continue evolving, with a strong focus on health monitoring. For example, Microsoft has been exploring smart tattoos as the next generation of wearable tech since 2016. However, due to the labour-intensive fabrication technique for gold leaf, which is used in the tattoos, researchers are now focusing on more robust, advanced, and inexpensive materials.

Researchers at the University of Washington have also developed the thermal earring. This was able to measure the user’s earlobe temperature but shows promise for other areas of monitoring, including for eating and exercise. Although not commercially available, this device demonstrates how engineers are developing new ideas for wearable devices.

Under Armour already sells running shoes embedded with Bluetooth and sensors that track run statistics such as distance and pace. The shoes also measure running from metrics such as cadence (steps per minute), ground contact time, foot strike angle and stride length.

The app provides real-time audio coaching, but only focuses on cadence. In future, we can expect to see advances in smart contact lenses, smart nails, smart buttons, and many more.

Is wearable technology worth it?

The expected increase in the market size of this technology shows users’ interest in monitoring their health and improving their lifestyle. Developments in the Internet of Things, in general, have improved our way of life and supported our well-being.

Connected devices collect, track, and store user data, which is the primary purpose of the technology. What users need to know is that many wearable devices share data with third-party apps and services, and it is often unclear how this data is being used. The data can be sold to other companies or utilised for different purposes without the user’s knowledge or consent. Moreover, wearable devices can be hacked.

Read More: Apple’s MacBook Air gets a stealthy M3 processor upgrade

With this in mind, and as we have done with all new technology, users must consider the advantages of wearable technology and determine if the risks are worth taking. If security and data privacy are a concern, users are encouraged to follow all security recommendations provided by experts and manufacturers to protect their devices and research more on how their data is used and shared.

• Erika Sanchez-Velazquez is a Deputy Head of School, Computing and Information Science, Anglia Ruskin University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

But this year, Boeing has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. In January, an emergency door plug blew off a Boeing 737 MAX in mid flight, triggering an investigation from United States federal regulators.

More recently, we have seen a Boeing plane lose a tyre while taking off, another flight turned back as the plane was leaking fluid, an apparent engine fire, a landing gear collapse, a stuck rudder pedal, and a plane “dropping” in flight and injuring dozens of passengers. A Boeing engineer who had raised concerns regarding quality control during the manufacturing process on the company’s 787 and 737 MAX planes also died earlier this week, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

As members of the travelling public, should we be concerned? Well, yes and no.

Many problems, but not all can be blamed on Boeing

The recent parade of events has certainly been dramatic – but not all of them can be blamed on Boeing. Five incidents occurred on aircraft owned and operated by United Airlines and were related to factors outside the manufacturer’s control, like maintenance issues, potential foreign object debris, and possible human error.

A United Airlines 777 flying from San Francisco to Japan lost a tyre on takeoff, a maintenance issue not related to Boeing. The aircraft landed safely in Los Angeles.

They’re called Boeing because that’s the sound their wheels make when they fall off the plane

— 7/11 Truther (@DaveMcNamee3000) March 12, 2024

A United Airlines flight from Sydney to Los Angeles had to return to Sydney due to a “maintenance issue” after a fluid was seen leaking from the aircraft on departure.

A United Airlines 737-900 flying from Texas to Florida ended up with some plastic bubble wrap in the engine, causing a suspected compressor stall. This is a disruption of air flow to an operating engine, making it “backfire” and emit flames.

A United Airlines 737 Max flying from Tennessee to Texas suffered a gear collapse after a normal landing. The pilot continued to the end of the runway before exiting onto a taxiway – possibly at too high a speed – and the aircraft ended up in the grass and the left main landing gear collapsed.

The fifth event occurred on a United Airlines 737-8 flight from the Bahamas to New Jersey. The pilots reported that the rudder pedals, which control the left and right movement of the aircraft in flight, were stuck in the neutral position during landing.

Manufacturing quality concerns

The exit door plug failure in January occurred on an Alaska Airlines flight. US regulators are currently investigating the company’s manufacturing quality assurance as a result.

The door plug was installed by a Boeing subcontractor called Spirit AeroSystem. The door plug bolts were not properly secured and the plug door fell off in flight. The same aircraft had a series of pressurisation alarms on two previous flights, and was scheduled for a maintenance inspection at the completion of the flight.

Spirit got its start after Boeing shut down its own manufacturing operations in Kansas and Oklahoma, and Boeing is now in the process of buying the company to improve quality oversight. Spirit currently works with Airbus, as well, though that may change.

Read More: Boeing confirms it was the victim of a ransomware attack

What changed

Critics say the culture at Boeing has changed since Airbus became a major competitor in the early 2000s. The company has been accused of shifting its focus to profit at the expense of quality engineering.

Former staff have raised concerns over tight production schedules, which increased the pressure on employees to finish the aircraft. This caused many engineers to question the process, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fine Boeing for lapses in quality oversight after tools and debris were found on aircraft being inspected.

Several employees have testified before US Congress on the production issues regarding quality control. Based on the congressional findings, the FAA began to inspect Boeing’s processes more closely.

Several Boeing employees noted there was a high staff turnover rate during the COVID pandemic. This is not unique to Boeing, as all manufacturing processes and airline maintenance facilities around the globe were also hit with high turnover.

As a result, there is an acute shortage of qualified maintenance engineers, as well as pilots. These shortages have created several issues with the airline industry successfully returning to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Airlines and maintenance training centres around the globe are working hard to train replacements, but this takes time as one cannot become a qualified engineer or airline pilot overnight.

So, is it still safe to fly on these planes? Yes it is. Despite dramatic incidents in the news and social media posts poking fun at the company, air travel is still extremely safe, and that includes Boeing.

We can expect these issues with Boeing planes now will be corrected. The financial impact has been significant – so even a profit-driven company will demand change.

• Doug Drury is a Professor/Head of Aviation, CQUniversity Australia
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

But because of the literal groundwork the rovers are performing, scientists are finally investigating, in-depth and in unprecedented detail, the planet’s evidence for life, known as its “biosignatures.” This search is remarkably complicated, and in the case of Mars, it is spanning decades.

As a geologist, I have had the extraordinary opportunity to work on both the Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions. Yet as much as scientists are learning from them, it will take another robotic mission to figure out if Mars has ever hosted life. That mission will bring Martian rocks back to Earth for analysis. Then – hopefully – we will have an answer.

From habitable to uninhabitable

While so much remains mysterious about Mars, there is one thing I am confident about. Amid the thousands of pictures both rovers are taking, I’m quite sure no alien bears or meerkats will show up in any of them. Most scientists doubt the surface of Mars, or its near-surface, could currently sustain even single-celled organisms, much less complex forms of life.

Instead, the rovers are acting as extraterrestrial detectives, hunting for clues that life may have existed eons ago. That includes evidence of long-gone liquid surface water, life-sustaining minerals and organic molecules. To find this evidence, Curiosity and Perseverance are treading very different paths on Mars, more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from each other.

These two rovers will help scientists answer some big questions: Did life ever exist on Mars? Could it exist today, perhaps deep under the surface? And would it be only microbial life, or is there any possibility it might be more complex?

The Mars of today is nothing like the Mars of several billion years ago. In its infancy, Mars was far more Earth-like, with a thicker atmosphere, rivers, lakes, maybe even oceans of water, and the essential elements needed for life. But this period was cut short when Mars lost its magnetic field and nearly all of its atmosphere – now only 1% as dense as the Earth’s.

The change from habitable to uninhabitable took time, perhaps hundreds of millions of years; if life ever existed on Mars, it likely died out a few billion years ago. Gradually, Mars became the cold and dry desert that it is today, with a landscape comparable to the dry valleys of Antarctica, without glaciers and plant or animal life. The average Martian temperature is minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 62 degrees Celsius), and its meager atmosphere is nearly all carbon dioxide.

Early exploration

Robotic exploration of the Martian surface began in the 1970s, when life-detection experiments on the Viking missions failed to find any conclusive evidence for life.

Sojourner, the first rover, landed in 1997 and demonstrated that a moving robot could perform experiments. In 2004, Spirit and Opportunity followed; both found evidence that liquid water once existed on the Martian surface.

The Curiosity rover landed in 2012 and began ascending Mount Sharp, the 18,000-foot-high mountain located inside Gale Crater. There is a reason why NASA chose it as an exploration site: The mountain’s rock layers show a dramatic shift in climate, from one with abundant liquid water to the dry environment of today.

So far, Curiosity has found evidence in several locations of past liquid water, minerals that may provide chemical energy, and intriguingly, a variety of organic carbon molecules.

While organic carbon is not itself alive, it is a building block for all life as we know it. Does its presence mean that life once existed on Mars?

Not necessarily. Organic carbon can be abiotic – that is, unrelated to a living organism. For example, maybe the organic carbon came from a meteorite that crashed on Mars. And though the rovers carry wonderfully sophisticated instruments, they can’t definitively tell us if these organic molecules are related to past life on Mars.

But laboratories here on Earth likely can. By collecting rock and soil samples from the Martian surface, and then returning them to Earth for detailed analysis with our state-of-the-art instruments, scientists may finally have the answer to an age-old question.

Perseverance

Enter Perseverance, NASA’s newest flagship mission to Mars. For the past three years – it landed in February 2021 – Perseverance has been searching for signs of bygone microbial life in the rocks within Jezero crater, selected as the landing site because it once contained a large lake.

Perseverance is the first step of the Mars Sample Return mission, an international effort to collect Martian rock and soil for return to Earth.

Read More: A NASA mission that collided with an asteroid didn’t just leave a dent – it reshaped the space rock

The instrument suite onboard Perseverance will help the science team choose the rocks that seem to promise the most scientific return. This will be a careful process; after all, there would be only 30 seats on the ride back to Earth for these geological samples.

Budget woes

NASA’s original plan called for returning those samples to Earth by 2033. But work on the mission – now estimated to cost between US$8 billion to $11 billion – has slowed due to budget cuts and layoffs. The cuts are severe; a request for $949 million to fund the mission for fiscal 2024 was trimmed to $300 million, although efforts are underway to restore at least some of the funding.

The Mars Sample Return mission is critical to better understand the potential for life beyond Earth. The science and the technology that will enable it are both novel and expensive. But if NASA discovers life once existed on Mars – even if it’s by finding a microbe dead for a billion years – that will tell scientists that life is not a fluke one-time event that only happened on Earth, but a more common phenomenon that could occur on many planets.

That knowledge would revolutionize the way human beings see ourselves and our place in the universe. There is far more to this endeavour than just returning some rocks.

• Amy J. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Geology, University of Florida
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

But why is Google considering Gemini as such an important milestone, and what does this mean for users of Google’s services? And generally speaking, what does it mean in the context of the current hyperfast-paced developments of AI?

AI everywhere

Google is betting on Gemini to transform most of its products by enhancing current functionalities and creating new ones for services such as search, Gmail, YouTube and its office productivity suite. This would also allow improvements to their online advertising business — their main source of revenue — as well as for Android phone software, with trimmed versions of Gemini running on limited capacity hardware.

For users, Gemini means new features and improved capacities that would make Google services harder to shun, strengthening an already dominant position in areas such as search engines. The potential and opportunities for Google are considerable, given the bulk of their software is easily upgradable cloud services.

But the huge and unexpected success of ChatGPT attracted a lot of attention and enhanced the credibility of OpenAI. Gemini will allow Google to reinstate itself as a major player in AI in the public view. Google is a powerhouse in AI, with large and strong research teams at the origin of many major advances of the last decade.

There is public discussion about these new technologies, both on the benefits they provide and the disruption they create in fields such as education, design and health care.

Strengthening AI

At its core, Gemini relies on transformer networks. Originally devised by a research team at Google, the same technology is used to power other LLMs such as GPT-4.

A distinctive element of Gemini is its capacity to deal with different data modalities: text, audio, image and video. This provides the AI model with the capacity to execute tasks over several modalities, like answering questions regarding the content of an image or conducting a keyword search on specific types of content discussed in podcasts.

But more importantly, that the models can handle distinct modalities enables the training of globally superior AI models, compared to distinct models trained independently for each modality. Indeed, such multimodal models are deemed to be stronger since they are exposed to different perspectives of the same concepts.

For example, the concept of birds may be better understood through learning from a mix of birds’ textual descriptions, vocalizations, images and videos. This idea of multimodal transformer models has been explored in previous research at Google, Gemini being the first full-fledged commercial implementation of the approach.

Such a model is seen as a step in the direction of stronger generalist AI models, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Risks of AGI

Given the rate at which AI is advancing, the expectations that AGI with superhuman capabilities will be designed in the near future generates discussions in the research community and more broadly in the society.

On one hand, some anticipate the risk of catastrophic events if a powerful AGI falls into the hands of ill-intentioned groups, and request that developments be slowed down.

Others claim that we are still very far from such actionable AGI, that the current approaches allow for a shallow modelling of intelligence, mimicking the data on which they are trained, and lack an effective world model — a detailed understanding of actual reality — required to achieve human-level intelligence.

On the other hand, one could argue that focusing the conversation on existential risk is distracting attention from more immediate impacts brought on by recent advances of AI, including perpetuating biases, producing incorrect and misleading content — prompting Google to pause its Gemini image generator, increasing environmental impacts and enforcing the dominance of Big Tech.

Read More: Google Gemini replaces Bard as catch-all AI platform

The line to follow lies somewhere in between all of these considerations. We are still far from the advent of actionable AGI — additional breakthroughs are required, including introducing stronger capacities for symbolic modelling and reasoning.

In the meantime, we should not be distracted from the important ethical and societal impacts of modern AI. These considerations are important and should be addressed by people with diverse expertise, spanning technological and social science backgrounds.

Nevertheless, although this is not a short-term threat, achieving AI with superhuman capacity is a matter of concern. It is important that we, collectively, become ready to responsibly manage the emergence of AGI when this significant milestone is reached.

• Christian Gagné is a Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université Laval
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

What can get into my water that will make me sick?

Two things.

You can have chemicals in the water that are toxic, or you can have pathogenic organisms which can make you ill. These lead to different diseases and have different treatment strategies.

As a general rule, South Africa’s water works are able to remove almost all chemicals such that the water is safe to drink. The water treatment works also disinfect the water, killing harmful bacteria and viruses. This is primarily done with chlorine, but the water is overdosed slightly. This leaves a little chlorine in the water for “residual” disinfection. The residual chlorine travels with the water down the pipe to the reservoir and into your home, keeping the water pathogen-free. Pathogens include viruses, bacteria and small animals such as worms and larvae.

This is why the water from taps sometimes smells a little like chlorine. This is a good thing. It means your water is safe.

Is my tap water safe to drink?

As a rule, the answer here is yes, but probably only if you live in a big city. If there is a continuous supply of water, the pressure in the pipe prevents contaminants from entering the pipeline. And if the water has residual chlorine in it, that means the supply to your home is good.

Unfortunately, this relies on drinking water treatment works functioning properly, which is not always the case. The department of water and sanitation runs an auditing process of the water treatment works and the water they supply. The results are released as Blue Drop reports. Johannesburg has been classified as having excellent quality of supply, both chemically and microbiologically. However, the overall scores in Gauteng, the province Johannesburg is located in, are dropping even though they are still high.

Across the country 46% of drinking water is classified as “unacceptable” and scores of towns and cities have substantially declined in the last decade. The latest Blue Drop report shows a decreasing quality of drinking water supply across South Africa.

My water supply has been interrupted a lot. Is my tap water safe to drink?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question may not be yes, depending on a range of factors.

If there is no water in the pipe, and there is an underground sewage leak near the water pipe, or contaminated storm water near the pipe, there’s a real possibility that contaminated water can enter the pipe. Or, if maintenance work is done on a pipeline, as happens after any major leak, there is no real way to prevent soil and external untreated water entering the pipeline.

As water supply returns, this “first flush” down the pipe has the potential to contain contaminants. Because there is no way to know what it looks like underground around the pipe, it is sensible to protect yourself as water returns. You can protect yourself by flushing your taps until the water is fully clear. I would recommend that you wait until after the air has finished exiting the pipe and give it another minute or so, or until fully clear. Collect this water in a bucket for watering plants or flushing toilets. Once the water is clear, your quality should be similar to the bulk supply.

If you are worried, boil the water before use.

If your water remains brown or discoloured, report it and drink purified water.

I get my water from a mobile water tanker. Is this safe to drink?

Here the answer is supposed to be yes. But there are far too many instances of unscrupulous, roaming water tanker suppliers selling water, especially in areas with no access to safe tap water.

Since water supplies have become less dependable, the state has turned to businesses to supply water to communities. This has developed into a big business, as is clear from the size of one of Johannesburg’s tenders for vacuum trucks (honeysuckers) and water tankers. As a result, fraud and collusion are on the rise.

Read More: From waste to clean water: tiny carbon particles can do the job

Unfortunately having no access to piped tap water is the daily reality more than 4 million South Africans. If this is the case, it is sensible to purify the water.

What are the diseases that make drinking water unsafe? How are they spread?

There are a number of water-borne diseases that can cause very serious illness and death.

When water is sent to a laboratory for testing, the first test is for an organism called Escherichia coli, or E. coli.

E. coli is found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals. It does not necessarily cause disease. But if it is found in the water, there is absolute certainty that the water has been contaminated with faecal matter which has not been properly treated. This is why it is used as a screening tool for more serious diseases which are also spread through faecal matter.

Not all water that has E. coli will have pathogens. But the presence of E. coli is a serious warning that there is a high chance of other pathogenic organisms in the water such as cholera.

Cholera is caused by a bacterium found in the faecal matter of sick people. It is highly contagious and can spread by contact mainly from drinking contaminated water, food or from unwashed hands. The symptoms of cholera are watery diarrhoea (runny tummy), vomiting and leg cramps.

If I store water in bottles, how long before it’s unsafe to drink?

This is a really tricky question to answer. There are too many factors that can cause your water quality to deteriorate. For example, is the cap of the bottle open? How warm is the water? Is the container very clean or just rinsed? Water safety cannot be fully assured without analysing the actual water.

At the Centre of Water Research and Development we are doing research partly funded through the Water Research Commission to develop test strips to give a rapid analysis of drinking water quality that can easily be understood by the general public.

But I’d recommend that you try not to keep water for too long. Preferably not more than a day. And if you do, then boil or purify the water before drinking it.

Is purifying water difficult?

At the University of the Witwatersrand we commissioned a short animation in all of South Africa’s 11 official languages as well as French and Portuguese on how to prevent cholera transmission and how to purify your water to ensure you stay safe.

We have also shared guidance on how to purify your water to make it safe.

• Craig Sheridan is a Professor, University of the Witwatersrand
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

A wide range of industries already use emotional AI, including call centres, finance, banking, nursing and caregiving. Over 50% of large employers in the U.S. use emotional AI aiming to infer employees’ internal states, a practice that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, call centres monitor what their operators say and their tone of voice.

Scholars have raised concerns about emotion AI’s scientific validity and its reliance on contested theories about emotion. They have also highlighted emotion AI’s potential for invading privacy and exhibiting racial, gender and disability bias.

Some employers use the technology as though it were flawless, while some scholars seek to reduce its bias and improve its validity, discredit it altogether or suggest banning emotional AI, at least until more is known about its implications.

I study the social implications of technology. I believe that it is crucial to examine emotion AI’s implications for people subjected to it, such as workers – especially those marginalized by their race, gender or disability status.

Workers’ concerns

To understand where emotion AI used in the workplace is going, my colleague Karen Boyd and I set out to examine inventors’ conceptions of emotion AI in the workplace. We analyzed patent applications that proposed emotion AI technologies for the workplace. Purported benefits claimed by patent applicants included assessing and supporting employee well-being, ensuring workplace safety, increasing productivity and aiding in decision-making, such as making promotions, firing employees and assigning tasks.

We wondered what workers think about these technologies. Would they also perceive these benefits? For example, would workers find it beneficial for employers to provide well-being support to them?

My collaborators Shanley Corvite, Kat Roemmich, Tillie Ilana Rosenberg and I conducted a survey partly representative of the U.S. population and partly oversampled for people of colour, trans and nonbinary people and people living with mental illness. These groups may be more likely to experience harm from emotion AI. Our study had 289 participants from the representative sample and 106 participants from the oversample. We found that 32% of respondents reported experiencing or expecting no benefit to them from emotion AI use, whether current or anticipated, in their workplace.

While some workers noted potential benefits of emotion AI use in the workplace like increased well-being support and workplace safety, mirroring benefits claimed in patent applications, all also expressed concerns. They were concerned about harm to their well-being and privacy, harm to their work performance and employment status, and bias and mental health stigma against them.

For example, 51% of participants expressed concerns about privacy, 36% noted the potential for incorrect inferences employers would accept at face value, and 33% expressed concern that emotion AI-generated inferences could be used to make unjust employment decisions.

Participants’ voices

One participant who had multiple health conditions said: “The awareness that I am being analyzed would ironically have a negative effect on my mental health.” This means that despite emotion AI’s claimed goals to infer and improve workers’ well-being in the workplace, its use can lead to the opposite effect: well-being diminished due to a loss of privacy. Indeed, other work by my colleagues Roemmich, Florian Schaub and I suggests that emotion AI-induced privacy loss can span a range of privacy harms, including psychological, autonomy, economic, relationship, physical and discrimination.

On concerns that emotional surveillance could jeopardize their job, a participant with a diagnosed mental health condition said: “They could decide that I am no longer a good fit at work and fire me. Decide I’m not capable enough and not give a raise, or think I’m not working enough.”

Participants in the study also mentioned the potential for exacerbated power imbalances and said they were afraid of the dynamic they would have with employers if emotion AI were integrated into their workplace, pointing to how emotion AI use could potentially intensify already existing tensions in the employer-worker relationship. For instance, a respondent said: “The amount of control that employers already have over employees suggests there would be few checks on how this information would be used. Any ‘consent’ [by] employees is largely illusory in this context.”

Lastly, participants noted potential harms, such as emotion AI’s technical inaccuracies potentially creating false impressions about workers, and emotion AI creating and perpetuating bias and stigma against workers. In describing these concerns, participants highlighted their fear of employers relying on inaccurate and biased emotion AI systems, particularly against people of colour, women and trans individuals.

For example, one participant said: “Who is deciding what expressions ‘look violent,’ and how can one determine people as a threat just from the look on their face? A system can read faces, sure, but not minds. I just cannot see how this could actually be anything but destructive to minorities in the workplace.”

Participants noted that they would either refuse to work at a place that uses emotion AI – an option not available to many – or engage in behaviours to make emotion AI read them favourably to protect their privacy. One participant said: “I would exert a massive amount of energy masking even when alone in my office, which would make me very distracted and unproductive,” pointing to how emotion AI use would impose additional emotional labour on workers.

Worth the harm?

These findings indicate that emotion AI exacerbates existing challenges experienced by workers in the workplace, despite proponents claiming emotion AI helps solve these problems.

If emotion AI does work as claimed and measures what it claims to measure, and even if issues with bias are addressed in the future, there are still harms experienced by workers, such as the additional emotional labour and loss of privacy.

Read More: Demand for computer chips fuelled by AI could reshape global politics and security

If these technologies do not measure what they claim or they are biased, then people are at the mercy of algorithms deemed to be valid and reliable when they are not. Workers would still need to expend the effort to try to reduce the chances of being misread by the algorithm or to engage in emotional displays that would read favourably to the algorithm.

Either way, these systems function as panopticon-like technologies, creating privacy harms and feelings of being watched.

• Nazanin Andalibi is an Assistant Professor of Information, University of Michigan
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

Much depends on the applications you use and the encryption standards the apps uphold. End-to-end encryption is a digital safeguard for online interactions. It’s used by many of the more popular messaging apps. Understanding end-to-end encryption is crucial for maintaining privacy in people’s increasingly digital lives.

While end-to-end encryption effectively secures messages, it is not foolproof against all cyberthreats and requires users to actively manage their privacy settings. As a cybersecurity researcher, I believe that continuous advancements in encryption are necessary to safeguard private communications as the digital privacy landscape evolves.

How end-to-end encryption works

When you send a message via an app using end-to-end encryption, your app acts as a cryptographer and encodes your message with a cryptographic key. This process transforms your message into a cipher – a jumble of seemingly random characters that conceal the true essence of your message.

This ensures that the message remains a private exchange between you and your recipient, safeguarded against unauthorized access, whether from hackers, service providers or surveillance agencies. Should any eavesdroppers intercept it, they would see only gibberish and would not be able to decipher the message without the decryption key.

When the message reaches its destination, the recipient’s app uses the corresponding decryption key to unlock the message. This decryption key, securely stored on the recipient’s device, is the only key capable of deciphering the message, translating the encrypted text back into readable format.

This form of encryption is called public key, or asymmetric, cryptography. Each party who communicates using this form of encryption has two encryption keys, one public and one private. You share your public key with whoever wants to communicate securely with you, and they use it to encrypt their messages to you. But that key can’t be used to decrypt their messages. Only your private key, which you do not share with anyone, can do that.

In practice, you don’t have to think about sharing keys. Messaging apps that use end-to-end encryption handle that behind the scenes. You and the party you are communicating securely with just have to use the same app.

Who has end-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption is used by major messaging apps and services to safeguard users’ privacy.

Apple’s iMessage integrates end-to-end encryption for messages exchanged between iMessage users, safeguarding them from external access. However, messages sent to or received from non-iMessage users such as SMS texts to or from Android phones do not benefit from this level of encryption.

Google has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption for Google Messages, the default messaging app on many Android devices. The company is aiming to modernize traditional SMS with more advanced features, including better privacy. However, this encryption is currently limited to one-on-one chats.

Facebook Messenger also offers end-to-end encryption, but it is not enabled by default. Users need to start a “Secret Conversation” to encrypt their messages end to end. End-to-end encrypted chats are currently available only in the Messenger app on iOS and Android, not on Facebook chat or messenger.com.

Read More: What is credential stuffing and how can I protect myself? A cybersecurity researcher explains

WhatsApp stands out for its robust privacy features, implementing end-to-end encryption by default for all forms of communication within the app.

Signal, often heralded by cybersecurity experts as the gold standard for secure communication, offers end-to-end encryption across all its messaging and calling features by default. Signal’s commitment to privacy is reinforced by its open-source protocol, which allows independent experts to verify its security.

Telegram offers a nuanced approach to privacy. While it provides strong encryption, its standard chats do not use end-to-end encryption. For that, users must initiate “Secret Chats.”

It’s essential to not only understand the privacy features offered by these platforms but also to manage their settings to ensure the highest level of security each app offers. With varying levels of protection across services, the responsibility often falls on the user to choose messaging apps wisely and to opt for those that provide end-to-end encryption by default.

Is end-to-end encryption effective?

The effectiveness of end-to-end encryption in safeguarding privacy is a subject of much debate. While it significantly enhances security, no system is entirely foolproof. Skilled hackers with sufficient resources, especially those backed by security agencies, can sometimes find ways around it.

Additionally, end-to-end encryption does not protect against threats posed by hacked devices or phishing attacks, which can compromise the security of communications.

The coming era of quantum computing poses a potential risk to end-to-end encryption, because quantum computers could theoretically break current encryption methods, highlighting the need for continuous advancements in encryption technology.

Nevertheless, for the average user, end-to-end encryption offers a robust defense against most forms of digital eavesdropping and cyberthreats. As you navigate the evolving landscape of digital privacy, the question remains: What steps should you take next to ensure the continued protection of your private conversations in an increasingly interconnected world?

• Robin Chataut is an Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity and Computer Science, Quinnipiac University
• This article first appeared in The Conversation