508: “Click to Cancel” canceled, plus the latest information science updates

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Brian Reeves: Welcome to Information Changes Everything. Join us as we take a snappy look at the latest news about information and technology changing our world. This podcast is produced by the University of Michigan School of Information – UMSI.

I’m Brian Reeves.

Alicia Myers: and I’m Alicia Myers.

Brian Reeves: As always, we'd love your feedback at [email protected]. And remember, we link to every story in our show notes. Let’s jump in...

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Alicia Myers: Just days before it was set to have gone into effect in July, a federal appeals court blocked the Click to Cancel rule. The PBS Newshour explained that this proposed change by the Federal Trade Commission would have made it easier for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships. The court claimed that the FTC hadn’t followed proper procedure in researching the financial impact of the plan. Which we construe to mean the financial impact on companies, not consumers.

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Brian Reeves: In the age of Ozempic, some commercial weight-loss programs are seeking new ways to attract and retain clients. Quartz reported that Noom, a behavior-mod program, is adding gamification to its quiver of tactics. Think streaks, badges, and bite-size wins – the sort of dopamine hits that have made Duolingo “one of the most effective behavior-change tools on the planet”.

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Alicia Myers: According to Smithsonian Magazine, Wildlife biologists in Florida are testing robot rabbits to lure invasive Burmese pythons so they can be captured and euthanized. Using real rabbits as bait required care and maintenance. With robot rabbits, they can just set it and forget it. Plus, it spares a real rabbit the trauma of seeing a 15-foot python gliding toward its cage. 

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Brian Reeves: No doubt about it, online puzzles are hot. Major media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post draw players in with their daily challenges, and new puzzles seem to pop up every month. How-To Geek has collected the seven best puzzle games you can play in your browser, whenever you need a little escape. Ooh, did someone say “escape”? 

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Alicia Myers: The William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan recently made available a digital collection of over 60,000 postcards featuring locations from every corner of Michigan and dating from the 1840s to the mid-twentieth century. The “postcard craze” of the early 1900s offered an affordable, easy way for people to send messages and stay in touch–an early form of social media, in fact. The digitized collection is easy to search, thanks to transcription help from over 4,000 volunteers.

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Brian Reeves: For World Emoji Day in July, the Unicode Consortium previewed nine new emojis coming this fall with the release of Unicode 17.0. Users can look forward to an apple core, ballet dancer and a Bigfoot-ish “hairy creature,” among others. According to Mashable, iOS users may have to wait a bit longer for the new emojis since Apple takes more time to design its own versions of the icons–six months or so, if past performance is anything to go by. 

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Alicia Myers: A 1,000 year old abbey in Hungary is fighting an infestation of book-eating beetles found chomping through a quarter of its 400,000 book library. The abbey houses the oldest collections of books in the country as well as important written records. NPR described the disinfection, which involves moving the books to hermetically sealed plastic bags to stop the advance of these data-destroying pests.

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Brian Reeves: If you’ve ever bought something you don’t really need, just because it’s cute and cheap (Hello, Temu), here’s another temptation, a little desktop robot for just $299. Hugging Face has created Reachy Mini, whose antennae and mis-matched eyes are as cute as its name. According to TechSpot, The open-source OS “offers an entry point for developers, educators and hobbyists to experiment with AI-powered machines”.

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Alicia Myers: If you don’t have an Instagram account, it’s difficult to access information on the site. Lifehacker has found a side door that lets you browse Instagram to your heart’s content without logging in. Imginn is an ad-supported “anonymous web instagram stories viewer” where you can also download images and reels. And when they say “ad-supported,” they aren’t kidding; Imginn contains a veritable forest of ads.

(04:35)

Brian Reeves: AI is being incorporated in ever-growing ways in film-making, from script writing to trailers to editing. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern decided to try her own hand at movie-making with AI tools Runway and Google’s Veo3. Her light-hearted video about an overbearing life coach robot was nearly 100% AI-generated. The video includes a behind-the-scenes look at how she did it.

Brian Reeves: For links to all these stories, make sure to check out our show notes.

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Now, some news from UMSI.

Alicia Myers: Be.FM, short for Behavioral Foundation Model, is a new AI system developed by researchers at the University of Michigan, Stanford University and MobLab. Be.FM is one of the first AI systems designed specifically to predict, simulate and reason about human actions.

Unlike traditional models that rely on generic text corpuses, Be.FM is trained on behavioral science-specific data—from controlled experiments to surveys and academic studies.

Yutong Xie, a doctoral student in information science at U-M and the study’s lead author, said quote “We’re not feeding it Wikipedia. We built a behavioral dataset—more than 68,000 subjects from experimental data, approximately 20,000 survey respondents and thousands of scientific studies—to help the model reason about why people act the way they do.”

Alicia Myers: Click the link in our show notes to learn more about all the great things going on at UMSI.

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Brian Reeves: We’re sharing the latest information science news and research every day! Keep your finger on the pulse by following UMSI on X, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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This podcast is written and edited by Glenda Bullock and the Marketing & Communications team at UMSI. Pirate Audio is powered by humans and AI and provides hosting, production, and distribution. 

Thanks again for tuning in, and remember: Information changes everything. See you next time!