• ACSA announces new JAE issue, edited by Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino, after Palestine edition fallout

    It has been 3 months since ACSA canceled the Fall 2025 Journal of Architectural Educationissue about Palestine and fired its interim executive editor, McClain Clutter. In response, the JAE editorial board resigned in protest.
    ACSA subsequently put out a solicitation for services to honor its contract with Taylor & Francis, who publishes JAE, and it sought new theme editors to publish an alternative Winter 2025 issue. ACSA also hired Maverick Publishing Specialists to conduct an independent review of JAE and ACSA editorial policy and practices related to the terminated 79.2 Palestine issue.

    University of Houston’s Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino of the Illinois Institute of Technology are the Winter 2025 JAE 79:2 editors. Their theme for the issue? “Educating Civic Architects.”
    The new call for papers situates itself in our “increasingly complex economic, environmental, and political reality.”
    Theme editors seek “contributions that explore the full range of expressions of civic architecture and community design—past, present, and future.” The word “civic” is repeated throughout the open call, which echoes the Trump administration’s recent mandate for “beautiful federal civic architecture.” 
    The open call asks:
    “How might educating civic-minded architects help inspire and guide the profession? How do architecture schools foster a culture of collaboration with community and city leaders? How can design research inform the evolving role that civic-minded architects can play? Beyond the design studio, what role should the teaching of history, theory, professional practice, policy, technology, and other disciplines play in educating civic architects?”
    The open call cites Luiz Paulo Conde, an architect who became the mayor of Rio de Janeiro; former Peruvian architect-turned-president ​​Fernando Belaúnde Terry; and Jaime Lerner, an architect-turned-mayor-turned-governor from Brazil as cases to emulate.
    Terry organized PREVI, an ambitious social housing competition in Lima in the 1970s, but he also launched a settler-colonial campaign in Peru’s Indigenous territories.Italian mayors Giulio Carlo Argan and Massimo Cacciari, of Rome and Venice, respectively, were other examples of aesthete politicians JAE cited.

    Domestic examples are also offered, like Joseph P. Riley Jr., former mayor of Charleston, South Carolina; Harvey Gantt, former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina; and Maurice Cox, who was mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, before going on to leadership roles in Detroit and Chicago city government.
    Practicing architects are cited, like Richard Rogers and Johanna Hurme of 5468796 Architecture. The editors also invite reflections on postmodernism as it led to “increased attention on contextual design, vernacular architecture, and perhaps more significantly a reinvigorated interest in urban design.”
    ACSA executive director Michael Monti told AN: “We solicited proposals from a number of potential editorial teams. The interim editorial team for the Fall 2025 issue was selected through a committee of the Board of Directors. They authored the theme and the Call for Papers.”
    “The organization continues with the next steps for the journal that we communicated to our membership in the spring. This includes an external assessment of decisions, processes, and structures related to JAE and ACSA,” Monti added. “We are also convening a special committee to provide guidance on broader threats and issues facing our member schools. Those steps will inform the appointment of a new Executive Editor and Editorial Board in the upcoming months as well as the direction of the journal.”

    Disclosure: The author previously responded to the JAE’s call for papers for its now-canceled issue on Palestine.
    #acsa #announces #new #jae #issue
    ACSA announces new JAE issue, edited by Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino, after Palestine edition fallout
    It has been 3 months since ACSA canceled the Fall 2025 Journal of Architectural Educationissue about Palestine and fired its interim executive editor, McClain Clutter. In response, the JAE editorial board resigned in protest. ACSA subsequently put out a solicitation for services to honor its contract with Taylor & Francis, who publishes JAE, and it sought new theme editors to publish an alternative Winter 2025 issue. ACSA also hired Maverick Publishing Specialists to conduct an independent review of JAE and ACSA editorial policy and practices related to the terminated 79.2 Palestine issue. University of Houston’s Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino of the Illinois Institute of Technology are the Winter 2025 JAE 79:2 editors. Their theme for the issue? “Educating Civic Architects.” The new call for papers situates itself in our “increasingly complex economic, environmental, and political reality.” Theme editors seek “contributions that explore the full range of expressions of civic architecture and community design—past, present, and future.” The word “civic” is repeated throughout the open call, which echoes the Trump administration’s recent mandate for “beautiful federal civic architecture.”  The open call asks: “How might educating civic-minded architects help inspire and guide the profession? How do architecture schools foster a culture of collaboration with community and city leaders? How can design research inform the evolving role that civic-minded architects can play? Beyond the design studio, what role should the teaching of history, theory, professional practice, policy, technology, and other disciplines play in educating civic architects?” The open call cites Luiz Paulo Conde, an architect who became the mayor of Rio de Janeiro; former Peruvian architect-turned-president ​​Fernando Belaúnde Terry; and Jaime Lerner, an architect-turned-mayor-turned-governor from Brazil as cases to emulate. Terry organized PREVI, an ambitious social housing competition in Lima in the 1970s, but he also launched a settler-colonial campaign in Peru’s Indigenous territories.Italian mayors Giulio Carlo Argan and Massimo Cacciari, of Rome and Venice, respectively, were other examples of aesthete politicians JAE cited. Domestic examples are also offered, like Joseph P. Riley Jr., former mayor of Charleston, South Carolina; Harvey Gantt, former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina; and Maurice Cox, who was mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, before going on to leadership roles in Detroit and Chicago city government. Practicing architects are cited, like Richard Rogers and Johanna Hurme of 5468796 Architecture. The editors also invite reflections on postmodernism as it led to “increased attention on contextual design, vernacular architecture, and perhaps more significantly a reinvigorated interest in urban design.” ACSA executive director Michael Monti told AN: “We solicited proposals from a number of potential editorial teams. The interim editorial team for the Fall 2025 issue was selected through a committee of the Board of Directors. They authored the theme and the Call for Papers.” “The organization continues with the next steps for the journal that we communicated to our membership in the spring. This includes an external assessment of decisions, processes, and structures related to JAE and ACSA,” Monti added. “We are also convening a special committee to provide guidance on broader threats and issues facing our member schools. Those steps will inform the appointment of a new Executive Editor and Editorial Board in the upcoming months as well as the direction of the journal.” Disclosure: The author previously responded to the JAE’s call for papers for its now-canceled issue on Palestine. #acsa #announces #new #jae #issue
    ACSA announces new JAE issue, edited by Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino, after Palestine edition fallout
    It has been 3 months since ACSA canceled the Fall 2025 Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) issue about Palestine and fired its interim executive editor, McClain Clutter. In response, the JAE editorial board resigned in protest. ACSA subsequently put out a solicitation for services to honor its contract with Taylor & Francis, who publishes JAE, and it sought new theme editors to publish an alternative Winter 2025 issue. ACSA also hired Maverick Publishing Specialists to conduct an independent review of JAE and ACSA editorial policy and practices related to the terminated 79.2 Palestine issue. University of Houston’s Rafael Longoria and Michelangelo Sabatino of the Illinois Institute of Technology are the Winter 2025 JAE 79:2 editors. Their theme for the issue? “Educating Civic Architects.” The new call for papers situates itself in our “increasingly complex economic, environmental, and political reality.” Theme editors seek “contributions that explore the full range of expressions of civic architecture and community design—past, present, and future.” The word “civic” is repeated throughout the open call, which echoes the Trump administration’s recent mandate for “beautiful federal civic architecture.”  The open call asks: “How might educating civic-minded architects help inspire and guide the profession? How do architecture schools foster a culture of collaboration with community and city leaders? How can design research inform the evolving role that civic-minded architects can play? Beyond the design studio, what role should the teaching of history, theory, professional practice, policy, technology, and other disciplines play in educating civic architects?” The open call cites Luiz Paulo Conde, an architect who became the mayor of Rio de Janeiro; former Peruvian architect-turned-president ​​Fernando Belaúnde Terry; and Jaime Lerner, an architect-turned-mayor-turned-governor from Brazil as cases to emulate. Terry organized PREVI, an ambitious social housing competition in Lima in the 1970s, but he also launched a settler-colonial campaign in Peru’s Indigenous territories. (Terry’s effort was outlined in his 1965 book Peru’s Own Conquest.) Italian mayors Giulio Carlo Argan and Massimo Cacciari, of Rome and Venice, respectively, were other examples of aesthete politicians JAE cited. Domestic examples are also offered, like Joseph P. Riley Jr., former mayor of Charleston, South Carolina; Harvey Gantt, former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina; and Maurice Cox, who was mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, before going on to leadership roles in Detroit and Chicago city government. Practicing architects are cited, like Richard Rogers and Johanna Hurme of 5468796 Architecture. The editors also invite reflections on postmodernism as it led to “increased attention on contextual design, vernacular architecture, and perhaps more significantly a reinvigorated interest in urban design.” ACSA executive director Michael Monti told AN: “We solicited proposals from a number of potential editorial teams. The interim editorial team for the Fall 2025 issue was selected through a committee of the Board of Directors. They authored the theme and the Call for Papers.” “The organization continues with the next steps for the journal that we communicated to our membership in the spring. This includes an external assessment of decisions, processes, and structures related to JAE and ACSA,” Monti added. “We are also convening a special committee to provide guidance on broader threats and issues facing our member schools. Those steps will inform the appointment of a new Executive Editor and Editorial Board in the upcoming months as well as the direction of the journal.” Disclosure: The author previously responded to the JAE’s call for papers for its now-canceled issue on Palestine.
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  • Drone Footage Shows What Appears to Be a Cheap Tesla Prototype Zooming Around a Test Track

    Are we on the cusp of truly affordable Teslas? A YouTuber flew a drone over Tesla's Fremont test track and saw what may be its new cheap model racing around it.As spotted by Teslarati, new flyover footage from an account that calls itself "Met God in Wildnerness" — which along with frequent Fremont flyovers also publishes what appear to be Christian missives in Chinese — there's a good chance that the disguised vehicle could be a prototype for Tesla's purported affordable model."A disguised Tesla car testing on test track," the video's caption reads. "We could be seeing the new low cost model."Though the blog describes the vehicle as resembling a "compact Model Y," the black-and-white machine looks to our eyes like an elongated Volkswagen Beetle. In the video, it's seen stopping and going on the track, which is located off to the side of Tesla's manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, followed by a disguised Cybertruck.In its writeup, Teslarati notes that although there's a possibility the car is the new performance version of the Model Y, its compact size suggests it could be a prototype for the long-teased affordable model.As InsideEVs pinpointed back in April, Tesla admitted in its abysmal first-quarter earnings report for 2025 that switching over production lines to make room for the new Performance Model Y, which resulted in "several weeks of lost production" on the upgrade, was also paramount as it seeks to produce cheaper versions of its cars."During the switchover, we also prepared our factories for the launch of new models later this year," the report's fine print read. "Given economic uncertainty resulting from changing trade policy, more affordable options are as critical as ever."When discussing that earnings report in an investor call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that production of the cheaper model — which may utilize design aspects of Model 3 and Model Y — is "planned for June."As with most of the company's timelines, we're taking that one with several grains of salt — especially because CEO Elon Musk was mocking the idea of a Tesla, which he'd been promised for years, less than a year ago.Right now, we don't know any specifics about what will constitute an "affordable" Tesla or when it will hit production lines or dealerships — but that flyover video could be our first glimpse of what's to come.More on Tesla: Tesla Can't Find Legal Places to Store All Its Unsold CybertrucksShare This Article
    #drone #footage #shows #what #appears
    Drone Footage Shows What Appears to Be a Cheap Tesla Prototype Zooming Around a Test Track
    Are we on the cusp of truly affordable Teslas? A YouTuber flew a drone over Tesla's Fremont test track and saw what may be its new cheap model racing around it.As spotted by Teslarati, new flyover footage from an account that calls itself "Met God in Wildnerness" — which along with frequent Fremont flyovers also publishes what appear to be Christian missives in Chinese — there's a good chance that the disguised vehicle could be a prototype for Tesla's purported affordable model."A disguised Tesla car testing on test track," the video's caption reads. "We could be seeing the new low cost model."Though the blog describes the vehicle as resembling a "compact Model Y," the black-and-white machine looks to our eyes like an elongated Volkswagen Beetle. In the video, it's seen stopping and going on the track, which is located off to the side of Tesla's manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, followed by a disguised Cybertruck.In its writeup, Teslarati notes that although there's a possibility the car is the new performance version of the Model Y, its compact size suggests it could be a prototype for the long-teased affordable model.As InsideEVs pinpointed back in April, Tesla admitted in its abysmal first-quarter earnings report for 2025 that switching over production lines to make room for the new Performance Model Y, which resulted in "several weeks of lost production" on the upgrade, was also paramount as it seeks to produce cheaper versions of its cars."During the switchover, we also prepared our factories for the launch of new models later this year," the report's fine print read. "Given economic uncertainty resulting from changing trade policy, more affordable options are as critical as ever."When discussing that earnings report in an investor call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that production of the cheaper model — which may utilize design aspects of Model 3 and Model Y — is "planned for June."As with most of the company's timelines, we're taking that one with several grains of salt — especially because CEO Elon Musk was mocking the idea of a Tesla, which he'd been promised for years, less than a year ago.Right now, we don't know any specifics about what will constitute an "affordable" Tesla or when it will hit production lines or dealerships — but that flyover video could be our first glimpse of what's to come.More on Tesla: Tesla Can't Find Legal Places to Store All Its Unsold CybertrucksShare This Article #drone #footage #shows #what #appears
    FUTURISM.COM
    Drone Footage Shows What Appears to Be a Cheap Tesla Prototype Zooming Around a Test Track
    Are we on the cusp of truly affordable Teslas? A YouTuber flew a drone over Tesla's Fremont test track and saw what may be its new cheap model racing around it.As spotted by Teslarati, new flyover footage from an account that calls itself "Met God in Wildnerness" — which along with frequent Fremont flyovers also publishes what appear to be Christian missives in Chinese — there's a good chance that the disguised vehicle could be a prototype for Tesla's purported affordable model."A disguised Tesla car testing on test track," the video's caption reads. "We could be seeing the new low cost model."Though the blog describes the vehicle as resembling a "compact Model Y," the black-and-white machine looks to our eyes like an elongated Volkswagen Beetle. In the video, it's seen stopping and going on the track, which is located off to the side of Tesla's manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, followed by a disguised Cybertruck.In its writeup, Teslarati notes that although there's a possibility the car is the new performance version of the Model Y, its compact size suggests it could be a prototype for the long-teased affordable model.As InsideEVs pinpointed back in April, Tesla admitted in its abysmal first-quarter earnings report for 2025 that switching over production lines to make room for the new Performance Model Y, which resulted in "several weeks of lost production" on the upgrade, was also paramount as it seeks to produce cheaper versions of its cars."During the switchover, we also prepared our factories for the launch of new models later this year," the report's fine print read. "Given economic uncertainty resulting from changing trade policy, more affordable options are as critical as ever."When discussing that earnings report in an investor call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that production of the cheaper model — which may utilize design aspects of Model 3 and Model Y — is "planned for June."As with most of the company's timelines, we're taking that one with several grains of salt — especially because CEO Elon Musk was mocking the idea of a $25,000 Tesla, which he'd been promised for years, less than a year ago.Right now, we don't know any specifics about what will constitute an "affordable" Tesla or when it will hit production lines or dealerships — but that flyover video could be our first glimpse of what's to come.More on Tesla: Tesla Can't Find Legal Places to Store All Its Unsold CybertrucksShare This Article
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  • Fantasy Author Called Out for Using AI After Leaving Prompt in Published Book: 'So Embarrassing'

    "Author Lena McDonald is blatantly using AI to mimic other popular author's writing styles"
    Reddit
    A fantasy romance author is facing backlash after readers discovered an AI-generated prompt accidentally left in the published version of her book, sparking renewed criticism of AI use in self-published fiction.With the rise of generative AI tools, more authors have turned to software for brainstorming, editing, or even drafting entire scenes. But when remnants of AI prompts make it into the final books, fans and fellow writers see it as both careless and unethical.Author Lena McDonald's AI slip-up came to light when readers noticed an editing note embedded in chapter three of her book "Darkhollow Academy: Year 2," referencing the style of another author."I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements," the passage read.The sentence, seemingly left over from an AI prompt, appeared in the middle of a romantic scene. While the book has since been quietly updated on Amazon to remove the passage, screenshots of the gaffe continue circulating on Reddit, where fans have dubbed the incident "so embarrassing." Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem

    Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem
    Additionally, the discovery sparked swift backlash from Goodreads commenters accusing the author of deceiving fans with "AI generated slop," dropping her rating drastically."Is this the author using AI to 'write' books? Because it seems she is. I urge people to do the research, people are posting screenshots of an AI prompt left in the text," one commenter said."This author is a blatant thief who uses generative AI to mimic other authors' voices," another added.McDonald, who also publishes under the name Sienna Patterson, has not responded publicly and appears to have no active online presence, making her difficult to reach for comment.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
    #fantasy #author #called #out #using
    Fantasy Author Called Out for Using AI After Leaving Prompt in Published Book: 'So Embarrassing'
    "Author Lena McDonald is blatantly using AI to mimic other popular author's writing styles" Reddit A fantasy romance author is facing backlash after readers discovered an AI-generated prompt accidentally left in the published version of her book, sparking renewed criticism of AI use in self-published fiction.With the rise of generative AI tools, more authors have turned to software for brainstorming, editing, or even drafting entire scenes. But when remnants of AI prompts make it into the final books, fans and fellow writers see it as both careless and unethical.Author Lena McDonald's AI slip-up came to light when readers noticed an editing note embedded in chapter three of her book "Darkhollow Academy: Year 2," referencing the style of another author."I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements," the passage read.The sentence, seemingly left over from an AI prompt, appeared in the middle of a romantic scene. While the book has since been quietly updated on Amazon to remove the passage, screenshots of the gaffe continue circulating on Reddit, where fans have dubbed the incident "so embarrassing." Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Additionally, the discovery sparked swift backlash from Goodreads commenters accusing the author of deceiving fans with "AI generated slop," dropping her rating drastically."Is this the author using AI to 'write' books? Because it seems she is. I urge people to do the research, people are posting screenshots of an AI prompt left in the text," one commenter said."This author is a blatant thief who uses generative AI to mimic other authors' voices," another added.McDonald, who also publishes under the name Sienna Patterson, has not responded publicly and appears to have no active online presence, making her difficult to reach for comment.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. #fantasy #author #called #out #using
    WWW.LATINTIMES.COM
    Fantasy Author Called Out for Using AI After Leaving Prompt in Published Book: 'So Embarrassing'
    "Author Lena McDonald is blatantly using AI to mimic other popular author's writing styles" Reddit A fantasy romance author is facing backlash after readers discovered an AI-generated prompt accidentally left in the published version of her book, sparking renewed criticism of AI use in self-published fiction.With the rise of generative AI tools, more authors have turned to software for brainstorming, editing, or even drafting entire scenes. But when remnants of AI prompts make it into the final books, fans and fellow writers see it as both careless and unethical.Author Lena McDonald's AI slip-up came to light when readers noticed an editing note embedded in chapter three of her book "Darkhollow Academy: Year 2," referencing the style of another author."I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements," the passage read.The sentence, seemingly left over from an AI prompt, appeared in the middle of a romantic scene. While the book has since been quietly updated on Amazon to remove the passage, screenshots of the gaffe continue circulating on Reddit, where fans have dubbed the incident "so embarrassing." Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Comment by u/fox_paw44 from discussion in ReverseHarem Additionally, the discovery sparked swift backlash from Goodreads commenters accusing the author of deceiving fans with "AI generated slop," dropping her rating drastically."Is this the author using AI to 'write' books? Because it seems she is. I urge people to do the research, people are posting screenshots of an AI prompt left in the text," one commenter said."This author is a blatant thief who uses generative AI to mimic other authors' voices," another added.McDonald, who also publishes under the name Sienna Patterson, has not responded publicly and appears to have no active online presence, making her difficult to reach for comment.© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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  • The Trump Administration's Chat Hack Is Starting to Sound Really Bad

    President Donald Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz has already been ousted for using a bottom-shelf Signal clone for official messaging — but the fallout from that debacle is still getting worse and worse.As Reuters reports, a hacker who accessed information from TeleMessage, an Israeli messaging app that was sold to the government to archive messages from Signal and other services, obtained data from way more Trump officials than previously thought.It's been an especially tough year for Waltz. After being caught accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, to a Signal group chat about Yemeni bombing plans, the Trump adviser was photographed using TeleMessage's Signal clone during a Cabinet meeting just before news broke that it had been hacked. Though Waltz was ultimately fired , the hits have continued in his absence.With the help of the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which publishes hacked information of interest to the public, Reuters found more than 60 government officials whose information had been accessed from TeleMessage.Those officials range from staffers with the State Department and the White House to disaster responders and Secret Service members, and although the messages the British wire reviewed were often fragmentary, its reporters were still able to see those federal employees' phone numbers.Outsiders are also corroborating. People outside the government, whose numbers were in the breached message cache, including one person who'd been applying for disaster aid and another from a financial service company, confirmed to Reuters that they had indeed been messaging with Trump administration officials.The White House, to its end, said in a statement that it was "aware of the cyber security incident" but didn't offer any additional details.As Wired reported when the TeleMessage photo was first published, it appears that the app's archiving capabilities essentially nullified any security promises from the app, which was recently purchased by an Oregon-based company called Smarsh.The person who hacked the government's Telemessage server told Wired in a followup story that breaching the app "wasn't much effort at all," and that it only took them about "15 or 20 minutes."As that hacker explained, an issue with the the app's "hashing," which is supposed to obfuscate passwords, accidentally made it easy to figure them out.Once they were in, the hacker was presented with a file literally titled "heapdump" that included the login credentials of people who used the app — and because is archiving effectively un-encrypted the messages sent, they partially accessed those too.Though the extent of this breach and other details about the scandal remain unclear, it's abundantly obvious that the Trump administration has a security problem so bad that it makes Hillary Clinton's private email server look like Fort Knox.More on Telemessage: Trump’s Deportation Airline Just Got Hacked by AnonymousShare This Article
    #trump #administration039s #chat #hack #starting
    The Trump Administration's Chat Hack Is Starting to Sound Really Bad
    President Donald Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz has already been ousted for using a bottom-shelf Signal clone for official messaging — but the fallout from that debacle is still getting worse and worse.As Reuters reports, a hacker who accessed information from TeleMessage, an Israeli messaging app that was sold to the government to archive messages from Signal and other services, obtained data from way more Trump officials than previously thought.It's been an especially tough year for Waltz. After being caught accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, to a Signal group chat about Yemeni bombing plans, the Trump adviser was photographed using TeleMessage's Signal clone during a Cabinet meeting just before news broke that it had been hacked. Though Waltz was ultimately fired , the hits have continued in his absence.With the help of the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which publishes hacked information of interest to the public, Reuters found more than 60 government officials whose information had been accessed from TeleMessage.Those officials range from staffers with the State Department and the White House to disaster responders and Secret Service members, and although the messages the British wire reviewed were often fragmentary, its reporters were still able to see those federal employees' phone numbers.Outsiders are also corroborating. People outside the government, whose numbers were in the breached message cache, including one person who'd been applying for disaster aid and another from a financial service company, confirmed to Reuters that they had indeed been messaging with Trump administration officials.The White House, to its end, said in a statement that it was "aware of the cyber security incident" but didn't offer any additional details.As Wired reported when the TeleMessage photo was first published, it appears that the app's archiving capabilities essentially nullified any security promises from the app, which was recently purchased by an Oregon-based company called Smarsh.The person who hacked the government's Telemessage server told Wired in a followup story that breaching the app "wasn't much effort at all," and that it only took them about "15 or 20 minutes."As that hacker explained, an issue with the the app's "hashing," which is supposed to obfuscate passwords, accidentally made it easy to figure them out.Once they were in, the hacker was presented with a file literally titled "heapdump" that included the login credentials of people who used the app — and because is archiving effectively un-encrypted the messages sent, they partially accessed those too.Though the extent of this breach and other details about the scandal remain unclear, it's abundantly obvious that the Trump administration has a security problem so bad that it makes Hillary Clinton's private email server look like Fort Knox.More on Telemessage: Trump’s Deportation Airline Just Got Hacked by AnonymousShare This Article #trump #administration039s #chat #hack #starting
    FUTURISM.COM
    The Trump Administration's Chat Hack Is Starting to Sound Really Bad
    President Donald Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz has already been ousted for using a bottom-shelf Signal clone for official messaging — but the fallout from that debacle is still getting worse and worse.As Reuters reports, a hacker who accessed information from TeleMessage, an Israeli messaging app that was sold to the government to archive messages from Signal and other services, obtained data from way more Trump officials than previously thought.It's been an especially tough year for Waltz. After being caught accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, to a Signal group chat about Yemeni bombing plans, the Trump adviser was photographed using TeleMessage's Signal clone during a Cabinet meeting just before news broke that it had been hacked. Though Waltz was ultimately fired , the hits have continued in his absence.With the help of the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which publishes hacked information of interest to the public, Reuters found more than 60 government officials whose information had been accessed from TeleMessage.Those officials range from staffers with the State Department and the White House to disaster responders and Secret Service members, and although the messages the British wire reviewed were often fragmentary, its reporters were still able to see those federal employees' phone numbers.Outsiders are also corroborating. People outside the government, whose numbers were in the breached message cache, including one person who'd been applying for disaster aid and another from a financial service company, confirmed to Reuters that they had indeed been messaging with Trump administration officials.The White House, to its end, said in a statement that it was "aware of the cyber security incident" but didn't offer any additional details.As Wired reported when the TeleMessage photo was first published, it appears that the app's archiving capabilities essentially nullified any security promises from the app, which was recently purchased by an Oregon-based company called Smarsh.The person who hacked the government's Telemessage server told Wired in a followup story that breaching the app "wasn't much effort at all," and that it only took them about "15 or 20 minutes."As that hacker explained, an issue with the the app's "hashing," which is supposed to obfuscate passwords, accidentally made it easy to figure them out.Once they were in, the hacker was presented with a file literally titled "heapdump" that included the login credentials of people who used the app — and because is archiving effectively un-encrypted the messages sent, they partially accessed those too.Though the extent of this breach and other details about the scandal remain unclear, it's abundantly obvious that the Trump administration has a security problem so bad that it makes Hillary Clinton's private email server look like Fort Knox.More on Telemessage: Trump’s Deportation Airline Just Got Hacked by AnonymousShare This Article
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  • The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025 - and I've tried many

    Artur Debat/Getty ImagesGenerative AI is an astonishing technology that's not only here to stay but promises to impact all sectors of work and business. It's already made unprecedented inroads into our daily lives.We all have a lot to learn about it. Spewing out a few prompts to ChatGPT may be easy, but before you can turn all these new capabilities into productive tools, you need to grow your skills. Fortunately, there is a wide range of classes that can help. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instantMany companies and schools will try to sell you on their AI education programs. But as I'll show in the following compendium of great resources, you can learn a ton about AI and even get some certifications -- all for free.I have taken at least one class from each of the providers below, and they've all been pretty good. Obviously, some teachers are more compelling than others, but it's been a very helpful process. When working on AI projects for ZDNET, I've also sometimes gone back and taken other classes to shore up my knowledge and understanding.So, I recommend you take a quick spin through my short reviews, possibly dig deeper into the linked articles, and bookmark all of these, because they're valuable resources. Let's get started. Course selection: Huge, more than 1,500AI coursesProgram pricing: Free trial, then /moLinkedIn Learning is one of the oldest online learning platforms, established in 1995 as Lynda.com. The company offers an enormous library of courses on a broad range of topics. There is a monthly fee, but many companies and schools have accounts for all their employees and students. Also: Want a top engineering job in 2025? Here are the skills you need, according to LinkedInLinkedIn Learning is probably the one online education site I've used more than any other -- starting back in the late 1990s. For years, I paid for a membership. Then, I got a membership as an alum of my grad school, which is how I use it now. With so many courses on so many topics, it's a great go-to learning resource.I took two classes on LinkedIn Learning. Here's my testimonial on one of them. I also took the two-hour Machine Learning with Python: Foundations course, which had a great instructor -- Prof. Frederick Nwanganga -- who was previously unknown to me. I have to hand it to LinkedIn. They choose people who know how to teach.I learned a lot in this course, especially about how to collect and prepare data for machine learning. I also was able to stretch my Python programming knowledge, specifically about how a machine learning model can be built in Python. In just two hours, I felt like I got a friendly and comprehensive brain dump.You can read more here: How LinkedIn's free AI course made me a better Python developer.Since there are so many AI courses, you're bound to find a helpful series. To get you started, I've picked three that might open some doors:ChatGPT Tips for the Help Desk: Learn to apply strategic planning, prompt engineering, and agent scripting, as well as other AI techniques, to AI operations.Machine Learning with Python: Foundations: Get step-by-step guidance on how to get started with machine learning via Python.Building Career Agility and Resilience in the Age of AI: Learn how to reimagine your career to adapt and find success in the age of AI. It's worth checking with your employer, agency, or school to see if you qualify for a free membership. Otherwise, you can pay by month or year.A company representative told ZDNET, "LinkedIn Learning has awarded nearly 500K professional certificates over the past 2.5 years. And, generative AI is one of the top topics represented."
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    View now at Linkedin Learning Course selection: 93Program pricing: Free during the Skills Fest, mostly free afterMicrosoft earned itself a Guinness World Record for its online training session called Skills Fest, which ran in April and May of 2025. This was a mixed combination of live and on-demand courses that anyone could take for free. The only cost was giving up your email account and registering with Microsoft.Also: You can get free AI skills training from Microsoft for a few more days, and I recommend you doHere are three courses I took. The Minecraft one was adorable, and I recommend it for a kids' intro to generative AI.AI Adventurers: A Minecraft Education presentation about the basics of generative AIBuilding applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode:AI for Organizational Leaders:Not all the courses are available on demand. After Skills Fest ends, you should be able to get to the course catalog by visiting this link. There's a Filters block on the left. Click On-Demand and then Apply Filters. You should see a bunch of courses still available for you to enjoy.
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    View now at Microsoft Skills Fest Course selection: Quite a lotProgram pricing: Many free, some on a paid subscriptionAmazon puts the demand in infrastructure on demand. Rather than building out their own infrastructure, many companies now rely on Amazon to provide scalable cloud infrastructure on demand. Nearly every aspect of IT technology is available for rent from Amazon's wide range of web services. This also includes a fairly large spectrum of individual AI services from computer vision to human-sounding speech to Bedrock, which "makes LLMs from Amazon and leading AI startups available through an API."Also: I spent a weekend with Amazon's free AI courses, and highly recommend you do tooAmazon also offers a wide range of training courses for all these services. Some of them are available for free, while others are available via a paid subscription. Here are three of the free courses you can try out:Foundations of Prompt Engineering: Learn about the principles, techniques, and best practices for designing effective prompts. Amazon Bedrock -- Getting Started: Learn about Amazon's service for building generative AI applications. Twitch Series: AWS Power Hour Introduction to Machine Learning for Developers: This is a recording of a Twitch-based learning chat series. It helps you learn the foundations of machine learning and get a practical perspective on what developers really need to know to get started with machine learning. In addition to classes located on Amazon's sites, the company also has quite a few classes on YouTube. I spent a fun and interesting weekend gobbling up the Generative AI Foundations series, which is an entire playlist of cool stuff to learn about AI.If you're using or even just considering AWS-based services, these courses are well worth your time.
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    View now Course selection: Fairly broad IT and career buildingProgram pricing: FreeIBM, of course, is IBM. It led the AI pack for years with its Watson offerings. Its generative AI solution is called Watsonx. It focuses on enabling businesses to deploy and manage both traditional machine learning and generative AI, tailored to their unique needs.Also: Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for freeThe company's SkillsBuild Learning classes offer a lot, providing basic training for a few key IT job descriptions -- including cybersecurity specialist, data analyst, user experience designer, and more. Right now, there's only one free AI credential, but it's one that excited a lot of our readers. That's the AI Fundamentals learning credential, which offers six courses. You need to be logged in to follow the link. But registration is easy and free. When you're done, you get an official credential, which you can list on LinkedIn. After I took the course, I did just that -- and, of course, I documented it for you.My favorite was the AI Ethics class, which is an hour and 45 minutes. Through real-world examples you'll learn about AI ethics, how they are implemented, and why AI ethics are so important in building trustworthy AI systems.
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    View now at IBM SkillsBuild Course selection: Nearly 90 AI-focused coursesProgram pricing: FreeDeepLearning is an education-focused company specializing in AI training. The company is constantly adding new courses that provide training, mostly for developers, in many different facets of AI technology. It partnered with OpenAIto create a number of pretty great courses.I took the ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers course below, which was my first detailed introduction to the ChatGPT API. If you're interested in how coders can use LLMs like ChatGPT, this course is worth your time. Interspersing traditional code with detailed prompts that look more like comments than commands can help you understand these two very different styles of coding.: I took this free AI course for developers in one weekend and highly recommend itThree courses I recommend you check out are:ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: Go beyond the chat box. Use API access to leverage LLMs into your own applications, and learn to build a custom chatbot.Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI Models Using Weights and Biases: Learn MLOps tools for managing, versioning, debugging, and experimenting in your ML workflow.Large Language Models with Semantic Search: Learn to use LLMs to enhance search and summarize results.With AI such a hot growth area, I am always amazed at the vast quantity of high-value courseware available for free. Definitely bookmark DeepLearning and keep checking back as it adds more courses.
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    View now at DeepLearning Google Generative AI Leader course Designed for business leaders Course selection: 5Program pricing: Free to learn, for a certificateGoogle is offering a 7-8 hour program that teaches generative AI concepts to business leaders. This is a pretty comprehensive set of courses, all of which you can watch for free. They include: Gen AI: Beyond the chatbot: Foundational overview of generative AIGen AI: Unlock foundational concepts: Core AI concepts explained Gen AI: Navigate the landscape: AI ecosystem and infrastructureGen AI Apps: Transform your work: Business-focused AI applicationsGen AI Agents: Transform your organization: Strategy and adoption of AIThere is a small catch here: If you want the actual certificate, you need to pony up and take a 90-minute exam. But if you're calling yourself a business leader and want the recognition, I figure is probably a fair price to pay for anointing yourselfas a generative AI business leader.Also: Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings includedI took the foundational learning module, which was mostly text-based with interactive quizzes and involvement devices. It provided a good overview for someone just getting into the field, and I'm sure the remainder of the classes are equally interesting.
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    Course selection: Thousands of courses on AI aloneProgram pricing: Free trial, then /mo. Courses are also sold individually.Udemy is a courseware aggregator that publishes courses produced by individual trainers. That makes course style and quality a little inconsistent, but the rating system does help the more outstanding trainers rise to the top. Udemy has a free trial, which is why it's on this list.  I spent some time in Steve Ballinger's Complete ChatGPT Course For Work 2023! and found it quite helpful. Clocking in at a little over two hours, it helps you understand how to balance ChatGPT with your work processes, while keeping in mind the ethics and issues that arise from using AI at work.Udemy offers a /month all-you-can-eat plan, and also sells individual courses. I honestly can't see why anyone would buy the courses individually, since most of them cost more for one course than the entire library does on a subscription.Also: I'm taking AI image courses for free on Udemy with this little trick - and you can tooHere are three courses you might want to check out:ChatGPT Masterclass: ChatGPT Guide for Beginners to Experts!: Gain a professional understanding of ChatGPT, and learn to produce high-quality content seamlessly and grow your earning potential.Discover, Validate & Launch New Business Ideas with ChatGPT: Learn how to generate startup ideas, evaluate their potential, and test them with customers in real life.Midjourney Mastery: Create Visually Stunning AI Art: Learn how to use Midjourney to create art.One of the more interesting aspects of Udemy is that you may find courses on very niche applications of AI, which might not suit vendors offering a more limited selection of mainstream courses. If you have a unique application need, don't hesitate to spend some extra time searching for just the right course.
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    View now at Udemy Course selection: One AI courseProgram pricing: FreeGoogle's Grow With Google program offers a fairly wide range of certificate programs, which are normally run through Coursera. Earning one of those certificates often requires paying a subscription fee. But we're specifically interested in one Grow With Google program, which is aimed at teachers, and does not involve any fees.The Generative AI for Educators class, developed in concert with MIT's Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education, is a 2-hour program designed to help teachers learn about generative AI, and how to use it in the classroom. Also: Google and MIT launch a free generative AI course for teachersGenerative AI is a big challenge in education because it can provide amazing support for students and teachers and, unfortunately, provide an easy way out for students to cheat on their assignments. So a course that can help teachers come up to speed on all the issues can be very powerful.The course provides a professional development certificate on completion, and this one is free.
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    View now at Google Why should you trust me? I've been working with AI for a very long time. I conducted one of the first-ever academic studies of AI ethics as a thesis project way back in the day. I created and launched an expert system development environment before the first link was connected on the World Wide Web. I did some of the first research of AI on RISC-based computing architectureswhen RISC processors were the size of refrigerators. I also wrote and deployed the AI Editor, a generative AI tool that built news and content dynamically. That may not seem like much today, but I did it way back in 2010, when I had to create a generative AI engine from scratch. At that point, to work, it had to be distributed across five individual servers, each running one agent of a team of clustered AI agents.Also: Six skills you need to become an AI prompt engineerI also have a master's degree in education, focusing on learning and technology. My specialty is adult online learning, so this kind of stuff is right up my alley. When it comes to the courses and programs I'm spotlighting here, there's no way I could take all of them. But I have taken at least one course from each vendor, in order to test them out and report back to you. And, given my long background in the world of AI, this is a topic that has fascinated and enthralled me for most of my academic and professional career.With all that, I will say that the absolute high point was when I could get an AI to talk like a pirate.
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    Some companies are promoting micro-degrees. They seem expensive, but fast, but are they any good? Let's be clear: A micro-degree is not a degree. It's a set of courses with a marketing name attached. Degrees are granted by accredited academic institutions, accredited by regional accrediting bodies. I'm not saying you won't learn anything in those programs. But they're not degrees and they may cost more than just-as-good courses that don't have a fancy marketing name attached.
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    So, do certificates have any value? Yes, but how much value they have depends on your prospective employer's perspective. A certificate says you completed a course of study successfully. That might be something of value to you, as well. Also: Want a job in AI? Check out these new AWS AI certificationsYou can set a goal to learn a topic, and if you get a credential, you can be fairly confident you have achieved some learning. Accredited degrees, by contrast, are an assurance that you not only learned the material but did so according to some level of standard and rigor common to other accredited institutions.My advice: If you can get a certificate, and the price for getting it doesn't overly stretch your budget, go ahead and get it. It still is a resume point. But don't fork over bucks on the scale of a college tuition for some promise that you'll get qualified for a job faster and easier than, you know, going to college.
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    Other learning resources you'll probably loveYou can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.Artificial Intelligence
    #best #free #courses #certificates #i039ve
    The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025 - and I've tried many
    Artur Debat/Getty ImagesGenerative AI is an astonishing technology that's not only here to stay but promises to impact all sectors of work and business. It's already made unprecedented inroads into our daily lives.We all have a lot to learn about it. Spewing out a few prompts to ChatGPT may be easy, but before you can turn all these new capabilities into productive tools, you need to grow your skills. Fortunately, there is a wide range of classes that can help. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instantMany companies and schools will try to sell you on their AI education programs. But as I'll show in the following compendium of great resources, you can learn a ton about AI and even get some certifications -- all for free.I have taken at least one class from each of the providers below, and they've all been pretty good. Obviously, some teachers are more compelling than others, but it's been a very helpful process. When working on AI projects for ZDNET, I've also sometimes gone back and taken other classes to shore up my knowledge and understanding.So, I recommend you take a quick spin through my short reviews, possibly dig deeper into the linked articles, and bookmark all of these, because they're valuable resources. Let's get started. Course selection: Huge, more than 1,500AI coursesProgram pricing: Free trial, then /moLinkedIn Learning is one of the oldest online learning platforms, established in 1995 as Lynda.com. The company offers an enormous library of courses on a broad range of topics. There is a monthly fee, but many companies and schools have accounts for all their employees and students. Also: Want a top engineering job in 2025? Here are the skills you need, according to LinkedInLinkedIn Learning is probably the one online education site I've used more than any other -- starting back in the late 1990s. For years, I paid for a membership. Then, I got a membership as an alum of my grad school, which is how I use it now. With so many courses on so many topics, it's a great go-to learning resource.I took two classes on LinkedIn Learning. Here's my testimonial on one of them. I also took the two-hour Machine Learning with Python: Foundations course, which had a great instructor -- Prof. Frederick Nwanganga -- who was previously unknown to me. I have to hand it to LinkedIn. They choose people who know how to teach.I learned a lot in this course, especially about how to collect and prepare data for machine learning. I also was able to stretch my Python programming knowledge, specifically about how a machine learning model can be built in Python. In just two hours, I felt like I got a friendly and comprehensive brain dump.You can read more here: How LinkedIn's free AI course made me a better Python developer.Since there are so many AI courses, you're bound to find a helpful series. To get you started, I've picked three that might open some doors:ChatGPT Tips for the Help Desk: Learn to apply strategic planning, prompt engineering, and agent scripting, as well as other AI techniques, to AI operations.Machine Learning with Python: Foundations: Get step-by-step guidance on how to get started with machine learning via Python.Building Career Agility and Resilience in the Age of AI: Learn how to reimagine your career to adapt and find success in the age of AI. It's worth checking with your employer, agency, or school to see if you qualify for a free membership. Otherwise, you can pay by month or year.A company representative told ZDNET, "LinkedIn Learning has awarded nearly 500K professional certificates over the past 2.5 years. And, generative AI is one of the top topics represented." Show more View now at Linkedin Learning Course selection: 93Program pricing: Free during the Skills Fest, mostly free afterMicrosoft earned itself a Guinness World Record for its online training session called Skills Fest, which ran in April and May of 2025. This was a mixed combination of live and on-demand courses that anyone could take for free. The only cost was giving up your email account and registering with Microsoft.Also: You can get free AI skills training from Microsoft for a few more days, and I recommend you doHere are three courses I took. The Minecraft one was adorable, and I recommend it for a kids' intro to generative AI.AI Adventurers: A Minecraft Education presentation about the basics of generative AIBuilding applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode:AI for Organizational Leaders:Not all the courses are available on demand. After Skills Fest ends, you should be able to get to the course catalog by visiting this link. There's a Filters block on the left. Click On-Demand and then Apply Filters. You should see a bunch of courses still available for you to enjoy. Show more View now at Microsoft Skills Fest Course selection: Quite a lotProgram pricing: Many free, some on a paid subscriptionAmazon puts the demand in infrastructure on demand. Rather than building out their own infrastructure, many companies now rely on Amazon to provide scalable cloud infrastructure on demand. Nearly every aspect of IT technology is available for rent from Amazon's wide range of web services. This also includes a fairly large spectrum of individual AI services from computer vision to human-sounding speech to Bedrock, which "makes LLMs from Amazon and leading AI startups available through an API."Also: I spent a weekend with Amazon's free AI courses, and highly recommend you do tooAmazon also offers a wide range of training courses for all these services. Some of them are available for free, while others are available via a paid subscription. Here are three of the free courses you can try out:Foundations of Prompt Engineering: Learn about the principles, techniques, and best practices for designing effective prompts. Amazon Bedrock -- Getting Started: Learn about Amazon's service for building generative AI applications. Twitch Series: AWS Power Hour Introduction to Machine Learning for Developers: This is a recording of a Twitch-based learning chat series. It helps you learn the foundations of machine learning and get a practical perspective on what developers really need to know to get started with machine learning. In addition to classes located on Amazon's sites, the company also has quite a few classes on YouTube. I spent a fun and interesting weekend gobbling up the Generative AI Foundations series, which is an entire playlist of cool stuff to learn about AI.If you're using or even just considering AWS-based services, these courses are well worth your time. Show more View now Course selection: Fairly broad IT and career buildingProgram pricing: FreeIBM, of course, is IBM. It led the AI pack for years with its Watson offerings. Its generative AI solution is called Watsonx. It focuses on enabling businesses to deploy and manage both traditional machine learning and generative AI, tailored to their unique needs.Also: Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for freeThe company's SkillsBuild Learning classes offer a lot, providing basic training for a few key IT job descriptions -- including cybersecurity specialist, data analyst, user experience designer, and more. Right now, there's only one free AI credential, but it's one that excited a lot of our readers. That's the AI Fundamentals learning credential, which offers six courses. You need to be logged in to follow the link. But registration is easy and free. When you're done, you get an official credential, which you can list on LinkedIn. After I took the course, I did just that -- and, of course, I documented it for you.My favorite was the AI Ethics class, which is an hour and 45 minutes. Through real-world examples you'll learn about AI ethics, how they are implemented, and why AI ethics are so important in building trustworthy AI systems. Show more View now at IBM SkillsBuild Course selection: Nearly 90 AI-focused coursesProgram pricing: FreeDeepLearning is an education-focused company specializing in AI training. The company is constantly adding new courses that provide training, mostly for developers, in many different facets of AI technology. It partnered with OpenAIto create a number of pretty great courses.I took the ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers course below, which was my first detailed introduction to the ChatGPT API. If you're interested in how coders can use LLMs like ChatGPT, this course is worth your time. Interspersing traditional code with detailed prompts that look more like comments than commands can help you understand these two very different styles of coding.: I took this free AI course for developers in one weekend and highly recommend itThree courses I recommend you check out are:ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: Go beyond the chat box. Use API access to leverage LLMs into your own applications, and learn to build a custom chatbot.Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI Models Using Weights and Biases: Learn MLOps tools for managing, versioning, debugging, and experimenting in your ML workflow.Large Language Models with Semantic Search: Learn to use LLMs to enhance search and summarize results.With AI such a hot growth area, I am always amazed at the vast quantity of high-value courseware available for free. Definitely bookmark DeepLearning and keep checking back as it adds more courses. Show more View now at DeepLearning Google Generative AI Leader course Designed for business leaders Course selection: 5Program pricing: Free to learn, for a certificateGoogle is offering a 7-8 hour program that teaches generative AI concepts to business leaders. This is a pretty comprehensive set of courses, all of which you can watch for free. They include: Gen AI: Beyond the chatbot: Foundational overview of generative AIGen AI: Unlock foundational concepts: Core AI concepts explained Gen AI: Navigate the landscape: AI ecosystem and infrastructureGen AI Apps: Transform your work: Business-focused AI applicationsGen AI Agents: Transform your organization: Strategy and adoption of AIThere is a small catch here: If you want the actual certificate, you need to pony up and take a 90-minute exam. But if you're calling yourself a business leader and want the recognition, I figure is probably a fair price to pay for anointing yourselfas a generative AI business leader.Also: Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings includedI took the foundational learning module, which was mostly text-based with interactive quizzes and involvement devices. It provided a good overview for someone just getting into the field, and I'm sure the remainder of the classes are equally interesting. Show more Course selection: Thousands of courses on AI aloneProgram pricing: Free trial, then /mo. Courses are also sold individually.Udemy is a courseware aggregator that publishes courses produced by individual trainers. That makes course style and quality a little inconsistent, but the rating system does help the more outstanding trainers rise to the top. Udemy has a free trial, which is why it's on this list.  I spent some time in Steve Ballinger's Complete ChatGPT Course For Work 2023! and found it quite helpful. Clocking in at a little over two hours, it helps you understand how to balance ChatGPT with your work processes, while keeping in mind the ethics and issues that arise from using AI at work.Udemy offers a /month all-you-can-eat plan, and also sells individual courses. I honestly can't see why anyone would buy the courses individually, since most of them cost more for one course than the entire library does on a subscription.Also: I'm taking AI image courses for free on Udemy with this little trick - and you can tooHere are three courses you might want to check out:ChatGPT Masterclass: ChatGPT Guide for Beginners to Experts!: Gain a professional understanding of ChatGPT, and learn to produce high-quality content seamlessly and grow your earning potential.Discover, Validate & Launch New Business Ideas with ChatGPT: Learn how to generate startup ideas, evaluate their potential, and test them with customers in real life.Midjourney Mastery: Create Visually Stunning AI Art: Learn how to use Midjourney to create art.One of the more interesting aspects of Udemy is that you may find courses on very niche applications of AI, which might not suit vendors offering a more limited selection of mainstream courses. If you have a unique application need, don't hesitate to spend some extra time searching for just the right course. Show more View now at Udemy Course selection: One AI courseProgram pricing: FreeGoogle's Grow With Google program offers a fairly wide range of certificate programs, which are normally run through Coursera. Earning one of those certificates often requires paying a subscription fee. But we're specifically interested in one Grow With Google program, which is aimed at teachers, and does not involve any fees.The Generative AI for Educators class, developed in concert with MIT's Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education, is a 2-hour program designed to help teachers learn about generative AI, and how to use it in the classroom. Also: Google and MIT launch a free generative AI course for teachersGenerative AI is a big challenge in education because it can provide amazing support for students and teachers and, unfortunately, provide an easy way out for students to cheat on their assignments. So a course that can help teachers come up to speed on all the issues can be very powerful.The course provides a professional development certificate on completion, and this one is free. Show more View now at Google Why should you trust me? I've been working with AI for a very long time. I conducted one of the first-ever academic studies of AI ethics as a thesis project way back in the day. I created and launched an expert system development environment before the first link was connected on the World Wide Web. I did some of the first research of AI on RISC-based computing architectureswhen RISC processors were the size of refrigerators. I also wrote and deployed the AI Editor, a generative AI tool that built news and content dynamically. That may not seem like much today, but I did it way back in 2010, when I had to create a generative AI engine from scratch. At that point, to work, it had to be distributed across five individual servers, each running one agent of a team of clustered AI agents.Also: Six skills you need to become an AI prompt engineerI also have a master's degree in education, focusing on learning and technology. My specialty is adult online learning, so this kind of stuff is right up my alley. When it comes to the courses and programs I'm spotlighting here, there's no way I could take all of them. But I have taken at least one course from each vendor, in order to test them out and report back to you. And, given my long background in the world of AI, this is a topic that has fascinated and enthralled me for most of my academic and professional career.With all that, I will say that the absolute high point was when I could get an AI to talk like a pirate. Show more Some companies are promoting micro-degrees. They seem expensive, but fast, but are they any good? Let's be clear: A micro-degree is not a degree. It's a set of courses with a marketing name attached. Degrees are granted by accredited academic institutions, accredited by regional accrediting bodies. I'm not saying you won't learn anything in those programs. But they're not degrees and they may cost more than just-as-good courses that don't have a fancy marketing name attached. Show more So, do certificates have any value? Yes, but how much value they have depends on your prospective employer's perspective. A certificate says you completed a course of study successfully. That might be something of value to you, as well. Also: Want a job in AI? Check out these new AWS AI certificationsYou can set a goal to learn a topic, and if you get a credential, you can be fairly confident you have achieved some learning. Accredited degrees, by contrast, are an assurance that you not only learned the material but did so according to some level of standard and rigor common to other accredited institutions.My advice: If you can get a certificate, and the price for getting it doesn't overly stretch your budget, go ahead and get it. It still is a resume point. But don't fork over bucks on the scale of a college tuition for some promise that you'll get qualified for a job faster and easier than, you know, going to college. Show more Other learning resources you'll probably loveYou can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.Artificial Intelligence #best #free #courses #certificates #i039ve
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    The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025 - and I've tried many
    Artur Debat/Getty ImagesGenerative AI is an astonishing technology that's not only here to stay but promises to impact all sectors of work and business. It's already made unprecedented inroads into our daily lives.We all have a lot to learn about it. Spewing out a few prompts to ChatGPT may be easy, but before you can turn all these new capabilities into productive tools, you need to grow your skills. Fortunately, there is a wide range of classes that can help. Also: I let Google's Jules AI agent into my code repo and it did four hours of work in an instantMany companies and schools will try to sell you on their AI education programs. But as I'll show in the following compendium of great resources, you can learn a ton about AI and even get some certifications -- all for free.I have taken at least one class from each of the providers below, and they've all been pretty good. Obviously, some teachers are more compelling than others, but it's been a very helpful process. When working on AI projects for ZDNET, I've also sometimes gone back and taken other classes to shore up my knowledge and understanding.So, I recommend you take a quick spin through my short reviews, possibly dig deeper into the linked articles, and bookmark all of these, because they're valuable resources. Let's get started. Course selection: Huge, more than 1,500(!) AI coursesProgram pricing: Free trial, then $39.99/moLinkedIn Learning is one of the oldest online learning platforms, established in 1995 as Lynda.com. The company offers an enormous library of courses on a broad range of topics. There is a monthly fee, but many companies and schools have accounts for all their employees and students. Also: Want a top engineering job in 2025? Here are the skills you need, according to LinkedInLinkedIn Learning is probably the one online education site I've used more than any other -- starting back in the late 1990s. For years, I paid for a membership. Then, I got a membership as an alum of my grad school, which is how I use it now. With so many courses on so many topics, it's a great go-to learning resource.I took two classes on LinkedIn Learning. Here's my testimonial on one of them. I also took the two-hour Machine Learning with Python: Foundations course, which had a great instructor -- Prof. Frederick Nwanganga -- who was previously unknown to me. I have to hand it to LinkedIn. They choose people who know how to teach.I learned a lot in this course, especially about how to collect and prepare data for machine learning. I also was able to stretch my Python programming knowledge, specifically about how a machine learning model can be built in Python. In just two hours, I felt like I got a friendly and comprehensive brain dump.You can read more here: How LinkedIn's free AI course made me a better Python developer.Since there are so many AI courses, you're bound to find a helpful series. To get you started, I've picked three that might open some doors:ChatGPT Tips for the Help Desk: Learn to apply strategic planning, prompt engineering, and agent scripting, as well as other AI techniques, to AI operations.Machine Learning with Python: Foundations: Get step-by-step guidance on how to get started with machine learning via Python.Building Career Agility and Resilience in the Age of AI: Learn how to reimagine your career to adapt and find success in the age of AI. It's worth checking with your employer, agency, or school to see if you qualify for a free membership. Otherwise, you can pay by month or year (the by-year option is about half price).A company representative told ZDNET, "LinkedIn Learning has awarded nearly 500K professional certificates over the past 2.5 years. And, generative AI is one of the top topics represented." Show more View now at Linkedin Learning Course selection: 93Program pricing: Free during the Skills Fest, mostly free afterMicrosoft earned itself a Guinness World Record for its online training session called Skills Fest, which ran in April and May of 2025. This was a mixed combination of live and on-demand courses that anyone could take for free. The only cost was giving up your email account and registering with Microsoft.Also: You can get free AI skills training from Microsoft for a few more days, and I recommend you doHere are three courses I took. The Minecraft one was adorable, and I recommend it for a kids' intro to generative AI.AI Adventurers: A Minecraft Education presentation about the basics of generative AIBuilding applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode:AI for Organizational Leaders:Not all the courses are available on demand. After Skills Fest ends, you should be able to get to the course catalog by visiting this link. There's a Filters block on the left. Click On-Demand and then Apply Filters. You should see a bunch of courses still available for you to enjoy. Show more View now at Microsoft Skills Fest Course selection: Quite a lotProgram pricing: Many free, some on a paid subscriptionAmazon puts the demand in infrastructure on demand. Rather than building out their own infrastructure, many companies now rely on Amazon to provide scalable cloud infrastructure on demand. Nearly every aspect of IT technology is available for rent from Amazon's wide range of web services. This also includes a fairly large spectrum of individual AI services from computer vision to human-sounding speech to Bedrock, which "makes LLMs from Amazon and leading AI startups available through an API."Also: I spent a weekend with Amazon's free AI courses, and highly recommend you do tooAmazon also offers a wide range of training courses for all these services. Some of them are available for free, while others are available via a paid subscription. Here are three of the free courses you can try out:Foundations of Prompt Engineering: Learn about the principles, techniques, and best practices for designing effective prompts. Amazon Bedrock -- Getting Started: Learn about Amazon's service for building generative AI applications. Twitch Series: AWS Power Hour Introduction to Machine Learning for Developers: This is a recording of a Twitch-based learning chat series. It helps you learn the foundations of machine learning and get a practical perspective on what developers really need to know to get started with machine learning. In addition to classes located on Amazon's sites, the company also has quite a few classes on YouTube. I spent a fun and interesting weekend gobbling up the Generative AI Foundations series, which is an entire playlist of cool stuff to learn about AI.If you're using or even just considering AWS-based services, these courses are well worth your time. Show more View now at Amazon Course selection: Fairly broad IT and career buildingProgram pricing: FreeIBM, of course, is IBM. It led the AI pack for years with its Watson offerings. Its generative AI solution is called Watsonx. It focuses on enabling businesses to deploy and manage both traditional machine learning and generative AI, tailored to their unique needs.Also: Have 10 hours? IBM will train you in AI fundamentals - for freeThe company's SkillsBuild Learning classes offer a lot, providing basic training for a few key IT job descriptions -- including cybersecurity specialist, data analyst, user experience designer, and more. Right now, there's only one free AI credential, but it's one that excited a lot of our readers. That's the AI Fundamentals learning credential, which offers six courses. You need to be logged in to follow the link. But registration is easy and free. When you're done, you get an official credential, which you can list on LinkedIn. After I took the course, I did just that -- and, of course, I documented it for you.My favorite was the AI Ethics class, which is an hour and 45 minutes. Through real-world examples you'll learn about AI ethics, how they are implemented, and why AI ethics are so important in building trustworthy AI systems. Show more View now at IBM SkillsBuild Course selection: Nearly 90 AI-focused coursesProgram pricing: FreeDeepLearning is an education-focused company specializing in AI training. The company is constantly adding new courses that provide training, mostly for developers, in many different facets of AI technology. It partnered with OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) to create a number of pretty great courses.I took the ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers course below, which was my first detailed introduction to the ChatGPT API. If you're interested in how coders can use LLMs like ChatGPT, this course is worth your time. Interspersing traditional code with detailed prompts that look more like comments than commands can help you understand these two very different styles of coding.Read more: I took this free AI course for developers in one weekend and highly recommend itThree courses I recommend you check out are:ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers: Go beyond the chat box. Use API access to leverage LLMs into your own applications, and learn to build a custom chatbot.Evaluating and Debugging Generative AI Models Using Weights and Biases: Learn MLOps tools for managing, versioning, debugging, and experimenting in your ML workflow.Large Language Models with Semantic Search: Learn to use LLMs to enhance search and summarize results.With AI such a hot growth area, I am always amazed at the vast quantity of high-value courseware available for free. Definitely bookmark DeepLearning and keep checking back as it adds more courses. Show more View now at DeepLearning Google Generative AI Leader course Designed for business leaders Course selection: 5Program pricing: Free to learn, $99 for a certificateGoogle is offering a 7-8 hour program that teaches generative AI concepts to business leaders. This is a pretty comprehensive set of courses, all of which you can watch for free. They include: Gen AI: Beyond the chatbot: Foundational overview of generative AIGen AI: Unlock foundational concepts: Core AI concepts explained Gen AI: Navigate the landscape: AI ecosystem and infrastructureGen AI Apps: Transform your work: Business-focused AI applicationsGen AI Agents: Transform your organization: Strategy and adoption of AIThere is a small catch here: If you want the actual certificate, you need to pony up $99 and take a 90-minute exam. But if you're calling yourself a business leader and want the recognition, I figure $99 is probably a fair price to pay for anointing yourself (with a Google seal of approval) as a generative AI business leader.Also: Google offers AI certification for business leaders now - free trainings includedI took the foundational learning module, which was mostly text-based with interactive quizzes and involvement devices. It provided a good overview for someone just getting into the field, and I'm sure the remainder of the classes are equally interesting. Show more Course selection: Thousands of courses on AI aloneProgram pricing: Free trial, then $20/mo. Courses are also sold individually.Udemy is a courseware aggregator that publishes courses produced by individual trainers. That makes course style and quality a little inconsistent, but the rating system does help the more outstanding trainers rise to the top. Udemy has a free trial, which is why it's on this list.  I spent some time in Steve Ballinger's Complete ChatGPT Course For Work 2023 (Ethically)! and found it quite helpful. Clocking in at a little over two hours, it helps you understand how to balance ChatGPT with your work processes, while keeping in mind the ethics and issues that arise from using AI at work.Udemy offers a $20/month all-you-can-eat plan, and also sells individual courses. I honestly can't see why anyone would buy the courses individually, since most of them cost more for one course than the entire library does on a subscription.Also: I'm taking AI image courses for free on Udemy with this little trick - and you can tooHere are three courses you might want to check out:ChatGPT Masterclass: ChatGPT Guide for Beginners to Experts!: Gain a professional understanding of ChatGPT, and learn to produce high-quality content seamlessly and grow your earning potential.Discover, Validate & Launch New Business Ideas with ChatGPT: Learn how to generate startup ideas, evaluate their potential, and test them with customers in real life.Midjourney Mastery: Create Visually Stunning AI Art: Learn how to use Midjourney to create art.One of the more interesting aspects of Udemy is that you may find courses on very niche applications of AI, which might not suit vendors offering a more limited selection of mainstream courses. If you have a unique application need, don't hesitate to spend some extra time searching for just the right course. Show more View now at Udemy Course selection: One AI courseProgram pricing: FreeGoogle's Grow With Google program offers a fairly wide range of certificate programs, which are normally run through Coursera. Earning one of those certificates often requires paying a subscription fee. But we're specifically interested in one Grow With Google program, which is aimed at teachers, and does not involve any fees.The Generative AI for Educators class, developed in concert with MIT's Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education, is a 2-hour program designed to help teachers learn about generative AI, and how to use it in the classroom. Also: Google and MIT launch a free generative AI course for teachersGenerative AI is a big challenge in education because it can provide amazing support for students and teachers and, unfortunately, provide an easy way out for students to cheat on their assignments. So a course that can help teachers come up to speed on all the issues can be very powerful.The course provides a professional development certificate on completion, and this one is free. Show more View now at Google Why should you trust me? I've been working with AI for a very long time. I conducted one of the first-ever academic studies of AI ethics as a thesis project way back in the day. I created and launched an expert system development environment before the first link was connected on the World Wide Web. I did some of the first research of AI on RISC-based computing architectures (the chips in your phone) when RISC processors were the size of refrigerators. I also wrote and deployed the AI Editor, a generative AI tool that built news and content dynamically. That may not seem like much today, but I did it way back in 2010, when I had to create a generative AI engine from scratch. At that point, to work, it had to be distributed across five individual servers, each running one agent of a team of clustered AI agents.Also: Six skills you need to become an AI prompt engineerI also have a master's degree in education, focusing on learning and technology. My specialty is adult online learning, so this kind of stuff is right up my alley. When it comes to the courses and programs I'm spotlighting here, there's no way I could take all of them. But I have taken at least one course from each vendor, in order to test them out and report back to you. And, given my long background in the world of AI, this is a topic that has fascinated and enthralled me for most of my academic and professional career.With all that, I will say that the absolute high point was when I could get an AI to talk like a pirate. Show more Some companies are promoting micro-degrees. They seem expensive, but fast, but are they any good? Let's be clear: A micro-degree is not a degree. It's a set of courses with a marketing name attached. Degrees are granted by accredited academic institutions, accredited by regional accrediting bodies. I'm not saying you won't learn anything in those programs. But they're not degrees and they may cost more than just-as-good courses that don't have a fancy marketing name attached. Show more So, do certificates have any value? Yes, but how much value they have depends on your prospective employer's perspective. A certificate says you completed a course of study successfully. That might be something of value to you, as well. Also: Want a job in AI? Check out these new AWS AI certificationsYou can set a goal to learn a topic, and if you get a credential, you can be fairly confident you have achieved some learning. Accredited degrees, by contrast, are an assurance that you not only learned the material but did so according to some level of standard and rigor common to other accredited institutions.My advice: If you can get a certificate, and the price for getting it doesn't overly stretch your budget, go ahead and get it. It still is a resume point. But don't fork over bucks on the scale of a college tuition for some promise that you'll get qualified for a job faster and easier than, you know, going to college. Show more Other learning resources you'll probably loveYou can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.Artificial Intelligence
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  • Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It

    Users
    Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It
    The TAKE IT DOWN Act passed with bipartisan support and glowing coverage. Experts warn that it threatens the very users it claims to protect.

    By

    Nitish Pahwa

    Enter your email to receive alerts for this author.

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    May 22, 20252:03 PM

    Donald and Melania Trump during the signing of the TAKE IT DOWN Act at the White House on Monday.
    Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

    Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
    Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose.
    The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images—known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym, the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated contenta heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported. These platforms have also been directed to set up on-site reporting systems by May 2026. Penalties for violations include prison sentences of two to three years and steep monetary fines.

    Public reception has been rapturous. CNN is gushing that “victims of explicit deepfakes will now be able to take legal action against people who create them.” A few local Fox affiliates are taking the government at its word that TAKE IT DOWN is designed to target revenge porn. Other outlets, like the BBC and USA Today, led off by noting first lady Melania Trump’s appearance at the bill signing.
    Yet these headlines and pieces ignore TAKE IT DOWN’s serious potential for abuse.Rarer still, with the exception of sites like the Verge, has there been any acknowledgment of Trump’s own stated motivation for passing the act, as he’d underlined in a joint address to Congress in March: “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”
    Sure, it’s typical for this president to make such serious matters about himself. But Trump’s blathering about having it “worse” than revenge-porn survivors, and his quip about “using that bill for myself,” is not a fluke. For a while now, activists who specialize in free speech, digital privacy, and even stopping child sexual abuse have attempted to warn that the bill will not do what it purports to do.
    Late last month, after TAKE IT DOWN had passed both the House and Senate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that the bill’s legislative mechanism “lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests.” For one, the 48-hour takedown deadline means that digital platformswill be forced to use automated filters that often flag legal content—because there won’t be “enough time to verify whether the speech is actually illegal.” The EFF also warns that TAKE IT DOWN requires monitoring that could reach into even encrypted messages between users. If this legislation has the effect of granting law enforcement a means of bypassing encrypted communications, we may as well bid farewell to the very concept of digital privacy.
    A February letter addressed to the Senate from a wide range of free-expression nonprofits—including Fight for the Future and the Authors Guild—also raised concerns over TAKE IT DOWN’s implications for content moderation and encryption. The groups noted that although the bill makes allowances for legal porn and newsworthy content, “those exceptions are not included in the bill’s takedown system.” They added that private tools like direct messages and cloud storage aren’t protected either, which could leave them open to invasive monitoring with little justification. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a signatory to the letter, later noted in a follow-up statement that the powers granted to the FTC in enforcing such a vague law could lead to politically motivated attacks, undermining progress in tackling actual nonconsensual imagery.
    Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote last month that TAKE IT DOWN is “so badly designed that the people it’s meant to help oppose it,” pointing to public statements from the advocacy group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims” of nonconsensual intimate imagery. CCRI has long criticized the bill’s takedown provisions and ultimately concluded that the nonprofit “cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.”“The concerns are not theoretical,” Masnick continued. “The bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.”

    Related From Slate

    Let’s be clear: No one here is at all opposed to sound legislation that tackles the inescapable, undeniable problem of nonconsensual sexual material. All 50 states, along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws criminalizing exploitative sexual photos and videos to varying degrees. TAKE IT DOWN extends such coverage to deepfake revenge porn, a change that makes the bill a necessary complement to these state laws—but its text is shockingly narrow on the digital front, criminalizing only A.I. imagery that’s deemed to be “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction.” This just leads to more vague language that hardly addresses the underlying issue.
    The CCRI has spent a full decade fighting for laws to address the crisis of nonconsensual sexual imagery, even drafting model legislation—parts of which did make it into TAKE IT DOWN. On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called this fact “bittersweet,” proclaiming that the long-overdue criminalization of exploitative sexual imagery is undermined by the final law’s “lack of adequate safeguards against false reports.” A few House Democrats looked to the group’s proposed fixes and attempted to pass amendments that would have added such safeguards, only to be obstructed by their Republican colleagues.
    This should worry everyone. These groups made concerted efforts to inform Congress of the issues with TAKE IT DOWN and to propose solutions, only to be all but ignored. As Masnick wrote in another Techdirt post, the United States already has enough of a problem with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the only other American law with a notice-and-takedown measure like TAKE IT DOWN’s, albeit designed to prevent the unauthorized spread of copyright works. Just ask any creatives or platform operators who’ve had to deal with abusive flurries of bad-faith DMCA takedown requests—even though the law includes a clause meant to protect against such weaponization. There’s no reason to believe that TAKE IT DOWN won’t be similarly exploited to go after sex workers and LGBTQ+ users, as well as anyone who posts an image or animation that another user simply doesn’t like and decides to report. It’s not dissimilar to other pieces of proposed legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, that purport to protect young netizens via wishy-washy terms that could criminalize all sorts of free expression.

    Popular in

    Technology

    Here’s a hypothetical: A satirical cartoonist comes up with an illustration of Trump as a baby and publishes it on a niche social media platform that they use to showcase their art. A Trump supporter finds this cartoon and decides to report it as abusive pornography, leading to a takedown notice on the cartoonist’s website. The artist and the platform do not comply, and a pissed-off Trump brings the full force of the law against this creator. The process of discovery leads prosecutors to break into the artist’s encrypted communications, revealing drafts of the drawing that the cartoonist had shared with friends. All of this gets the illustrator punished with a brief prison sentence and steep fine, fully sabotaging their bank account and career; the social media platform they used is left bankrupt and shutters. The artists are forced to migrate to another site, whose administrators see what happened to their former home and decide to censor political works. All the while, an underage user finds that their likeness has been used to generate a sexually explicit deepfake that has been spread all over Discord—yet their case is found to have no merit because the deepfake in question is not considered “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction,” despite all the Discord-based abusers recognizing exactly whom that deepfake is meant to represent.
    It’s a hypothetical—but not an unimaginable one. It’s a danger that too few Americans understand, thanks to congressional ignorance and the media’s credulous reporting on TAKE IT DOWN. The result is a law that’s supposedly meant to protect the vulnerable but ends up shielding the powerful—and punishing the very people it promised to help.

    Get the best of news and politics
    Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.
    #congress #passed #sweeping #freespeech #crackdownand
    Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It
    Users Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It The TAKE IT DOWN Act passed with bipartisan support and glowing coverage. Experts warn that it threatens the very users it claims to protect. By Nitish Pahwa Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. May 22, 20252:03 PM Donald and Melania Trump during the signing of the TAKE IT DOWN Act at the White House on Monday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose. The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images—known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym, the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated contenta heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported. These platforms have also been directed to set up on-site reporting systems by May 2026. Penalties for violations include prison sentences of two to three years and steep monetary fines. Public reception has been rapturous. CNN is gushing that “victims of explicit deepfakes will now be able to take legal action against people who create them.” A few local Fox affiliates are taking the government at its word that TAKE IT DOWN is designed to target revenge porn. Other outlets, like the BBC and USA Today, led off by noting first lady Melania Trump’s appearance at the bill signing. Yet these headlines and pieces ignore TAKE IT DOWN’s serious potential for abuse.Rarer still, with the exception of sites like the Verge, has there been any acknowledgment of Trump’s own stated motivation for passing the act, as he’d underlined in a joint address to Congress in March: “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.” Sure, it’s typical for this president to make such serious matters about himself. But Trump’s blathering about having it “worse” than revenge-porn survivors, and his quip about “using that bill for myself,” is not a fluke. For a while now, activists who specialize in free speech, digital privacy, and even stopping child sexual abuse have attempted to warn that the bill will not do what it purports to do. Late last month, after TAKE IT DOWN had passed both the House and Senate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that the bill’s legislative mechanism “lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests.” For one, the 48-hour takedown deadline means that digital platformswill be forced to use automated filters that often flag legal content—because there won’t be “enough time to verify whether the speech is actually illegal.” The EFF also warns that TAKE IT DOWN requires monitoring that could reach into even encrypted messages between users. If this legislation has the effect of granting law enforcement a means of bypassing encrypted communications, we may as well bid farewell to the very concept of digital privacy. A February letter addressed to the Senate from a wide range of free-expression nonprofits—including Fight for the Future and the Authors Guild—also raised concerns over TAKE IT DOWN’s implications for content moderation and encryption. The groups noted that although the bill makes allowances for legal porn and newsworthy content, “those exceptions are not included in the bill’s takedown system.” They added that private tools like direct messages and cloud storage aren’t protected either, which could leave them open to invasive monitoring with little justification. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a signatory to the letter, later noted in a follow-up statement that the powers granted to the FTC in enforcing such a vague law could lead to politically motivated attacks, undermining progress in tackling actual nonconsensual imagery. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote last month that TAKE IT DOWN is “so badly designed that the people it’s meant to help oppose it,” pointing to public statements from the advocacy group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims” of nonconsensual intimate imagery. CCRI has long criticized the bill’s takedown provisions and ultimately concluded that the nonprofit “cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.”“The concerns are not theoretical,” Masnick continued. “The bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.” Related From Slate Let’s be clear: No one here is at all opposed to sound legislation that tackles the inescapable, undeniable problem of nonconsensual sexual material. All 50 states, along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws criminalizing exploitative sexual photos and videos to varying degrees. TAKE IT DOWN extends such coverage to deepfake revenge porn, a change that makes the bill a necessary complement to these state laws—but its text is shockingly narrow on the digital front, criminalizing only A.I. imagery that’s deemed to be “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction.” This just leads to more vague language that hardly addresses the underlying issue. The CCRI has spent a full decade fighting for laws to address the crisis of nonconsensual sexual imagery, even drafting model legislation—parts of which did make it into TAKE IT DOWN. On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called this fact “bittersweet,” proclaiming that the long-overdue criminalization of exploitative sexual imagery is undermined by the final law’s “lack of adequate safeguards against false reports.” A few House Democrats looked to the group’s proposed fixes and attempted to pass amendments that would have added such safeguards, only to be obstructed by their Republican colleagues. This should worry everyone. These groups made concerted efforts to inform Congress of the issues with TAKE IT DOWN and to propose solutions, only to be all but ignored. As Masnick wrote in another Techdirt post, the United States already has enough of a problem with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the only other American law with a notice-and-takedown measure like TAKE IT DOWN’s, albeit designed to prevent the unauthorized spread of copyright works. Just ask any creatives or platform operators who’ve had to deal with abusive flurries of bad-faith DMCA takedown requests—even though the law includes a clause meant to protect against such weaponization. There’s no reason to believe that TAKE IT DOWN won’t be similarly exploited to go after sex workers and LGBTQ+ users, as well as anyone who posts an image or animation that another user simply doesn’t like and decides to report. It’s not dissimilar to other pieces of proposed legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, that purport to protect young netizens via wishy-washy terms that could criminalize all sorts of free expression. Popular in Technology Here’s a hypothetical: A satirical cartoonist comes up with an illustration of Trump as a baby and publishes it on a niche social media platform that they use to showcase their art. A Trump supporter finds this cartoon and decides to report it as abusive pornography, leading to a takedown notice on the cartoonist’s website. The artist and the platform do not comply, and a pissed-off Trump brings the full force of the law against this creator. The process of discovery leads prosecutors to break into the artist’s encrypted communications, revealing drafts of the drawing that the cartoonist had shared with friends. All of this gets the illustrator punished with a brief prison sentence and steep fine, fully sabotaging their bank account and career; the social media platform they used is left bankrupt and shutters. The artists are forced to migrate to another site, whose administrators see what happened to their former home and decide to censor political works. All the while, an underage user finds that their likeness has been used to generate a sexually explicit deepfake that has been spread all over Discord—yet their case is found to have no merit because the deepfake in question is not considered “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction,” despite all the Discord-based abusers recognizing exactly whom that deepfake is meant to represent. It’s a hypothetical—but not an unimaginable one. It’s a danger that too few Americans understand, thanks to congressional ignorance and the media’s credulous reporting on TAKE IT DOWN. The result is a law that’s supposedly meant to protect the vulnerable but ends up shielding the powerful—and punishing the very people it promised to help. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. #congress #passed #sweeping #freespeech #crackdownand
    SLATE.COM
    Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It
    Users Congress Passed a Sweeping Free-Speech Crackdown—and No One’s Talking About It The TAKE IT DOWN Act passed with bipartisan support and glowing coverage. Experts warn that it threatens the very users it claims to protect. By Nitish Pahwa Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. May 22, 20252:03 PM Donald and Melania Trump during the signing of the TAKE IT DOWN Act at the White House on Monday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose. The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images—known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated content (e.g., social media, message boards) a heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported. These platforms have also been directed to set up on-site reporting systems by May 2026. Penalties for violations include prison sentences of two to three years and steep monetary fines. Public reception has been rapturous. CNN is gushing that “victims of explicit deepfakes will now be able to take legal action against people who create them.” A few local Fox affiliates are taking the government at its word that TAKE IT DOWN is designed to target revenge porn. Other outlets, like the BBC and USA Today, led off by noting first lady Melania Trump’s appearance at the bill signing. Yet these headlines and pieces ignore TAKE IT DOWN’s serious potential for abuse. (Jezebel and Wired were perhaps the only publications to point out in both a headline and subhead that the law merely “claims to offer victims greater protections” and that “free speech advocates warn it could be weaponized to fuel censorship.”) Rarer still, with the exception of sites like the Verge, has there been any acknowledgment of Trump’s own stated motivation for passing the act, as he’d underlined in a joint address to Congress in March: “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.” Sure, it’s typical for this president to make such serious matters about himself. But Trump’s blathering about having it “worse” than revenge-porn survivors, and his quip about “using that bill for myself,” is not a fluke. For a while now, activists who specialize in free speech, digital privacy, and even stopping child sexual abuse have attempted to warn that the bill will not do what it purports to do. Late last month, after TAKE IT DOWN had passed both the House and Senate, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that the bill’s legislative mechanism “lacks critical safeguards against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests.” For one, the 48-hour takedown deadline means that digital platforms (especially smaller, less-resourced websites) will be forced to use automated filters that often flag legal content—because there won’t be “enough time to verify whether the speech is actually illegal.” The EFF also warns that TAKE IT DOWN requires monitoring that could reach into even encrypted messages between users. If this legislation has the effect of granting law enforcement a means of bypassing encrypted communications, we may as well bid farewell to the very concept of digital privacy. A February letter addressed to the Senate from a wide range of free-expression nonprofits—including Fight for the Future and the Authors Guild—also raised concerns over TAKE IT DOWN’s implications for content moderation and encryption. The groups noted that although the bill makes allowances for legal porn and newsworthy content, “those exceptions are not included in the bill’s takedown system.” They added that private tools like direct messages and cloud storage aren’t protected either, which could leave them open to invasive monitoring with little justification. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a signatory to the letter, later noted in a follow-up statement that the powers granted to the FTC in enforcing such a vague law could lead to politically motivated attacks, undermining progress in tackling actual nonconsensual imagery. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote last month that TAKE IT DOWN is “so badly designed that the people it’s meant to help oppose it,” pointing to public statements from the advocacy group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims” of nonconsensual intimate imagery. CCRI has long criticized the bill’s takedown provisions and ultimately concluded that the nonprofit “cannot support legislation that risks endangering the very communities it is dedicated to protecting, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, people of color, and other vulnerable groups.” (In a separate statement, the CCRI highlighted other oddities within the bill, like a loophole allowing for nonconsensual sexual media to be posted if the uploader happens to appear in the image, and the explicit inclusion of forums that specialize in “audio files,” despite otherwise focusing on visual materials.) “The concerns are not theoretical,” Masnick continued. “The bill’s vague standards combined with harsh criminal penalties create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse.” Related From Slate Let’s be clear: No one here is at all opposed to sound legislation that tackles the inescapable, undeniable problem of nonconsensual sexual material. All 50 states, along with the District of Columbia, have enacted laws criminalizing exploitative sexual photos and videos to varying degrees. TAKE IT DOWN extends such coverage to deepfake revenge porn, a change that makes the bill a necessary complement to these state laws—but its text is shockingly narrow on the digital front, criminalizing only A.I. imagery that’s deemed to be “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction.” This just leads to more vague language that hardly addresses the underlying issue. The CCRI has spent a full decade fighting for laws to address the crisis of nonconsensual sexual imagery, even drafting model legislation—parts of which did make it into TAKE IT DOWN. On Bluesky, CCRI President Mary Anne Franks called this fact “bittersweet,” proclaiming that the long-overdue criminalization of exploitative sexual imagery is undermined by the final law’s “lack of adequate safeguards against false reports.” A few House Democrats looked to the group’s proposed fixes and attempted to pass amendments that would have added such safeguards, only to be obstructed by their Republican colleagues. This should worry everyone. These groups made concerted efforts to inform Congress of the issues with TAKE IT DOWN and to propose solutions, only to be all but ignored. As Masnick wrote in another Techdirt post, the United States already has enough of a problem with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the only other American law with a notice-and-takedown measure like TAKE IT DOWN’s, albeit designed to prevent the unauthorized spread of copyright works. Just ask any creatives or platform operators who’ve had to deal with abusive flurries of bad-faith DMCA takedown requests—even though the law includes a clause meant to protect against such weaponization. There’s no reason to believe that TAKE IT DOWN won’t be similarly exploited to go after sex workers and LGBTQ+ users, as well as anyone who posts an image or animation that another user simply doesn’t like and decides to report. It’s not dissimilar to other pieces of proposed legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, that purport to protect young netizens via wishy-washy terms that could criminalize all sorts of free expression. Popular in Technology Here’s a hypothetical: A satirical cartoonist comes up with an illustration of Trump as a baby and publishes it on a niche social media platform that they use to showcase their art. A Trump supporter finds this cartoon and decides to report it as abusive pornography, leading to a takedown notice on the cartoonist’s website. The artist and the platform do not comply, and a pissed-off Trump brings the full force of the law against this creator. The process of discovery leads prosecutors to break into the artist’s encrypted communications, revealing drafts of the drawing that the cartoonist had shared with friends. All of this gets the illustrator punished with a brief prison sentence and steep fine, fully sabotaging their bank account and career; the social media platform they used is left bankrupt and shutters. The artists are forced to migrate to another site, whose administrators see what happened to their former home and decide to censor political works. All the while, an underage user finds that their likeness has been used to generate a sexually explicit deepfake that has been spread all over Discord—yet their case is found to have no merit because the deepfake in question is not considered “indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction,” despite all the Discord-based abusers recognizing exactly whom that deepfake is meant to represent. It’s a hypothetical—but not an unimaginable one. It’s a danger that too few Americans understand, thanks to congressional ignorance and the media’s credulous reporting on TAKE IT DOWN. The result is a law that’s supposedly meant to protect the vulnerable but ends up shielding the powerful—and punishing the very people it promised to help. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.
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  • A Public Health Researcher and Her Engineer Husband Found How Diseases Can Spread through Air Decades before the COVID Pandemic

    May 21, 202522 min readMildred Weeks Wells’s Work on Airborne Transmission Could Have Saved Many Lives—If the Scientific Establishment ListenedMildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke Dutton; Lily WhearAir-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science of airborne microorganisms. In this episode, we discover the story of two lost pioneers of the 1930s: physician and self-taught epidemiologist Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, sanitary engineer William Firth Wells. Together, they proved that infectious pathogens could spread through the air over long distances. But the two had a reputation as outsiders, and they failed to convince the scientific establishment, who ignored their findings for decades. What the pair figured out could have saved many lives from tuberculosis, SARS, COVID and other airborne diseases. The contributions of Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband were all but erased from history—until now.LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.TRANSCRIPTCarl Zimmer: Mildred is hired in the late 1920s to put together everything that was known about polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads.At the time, the idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just an obsolete superstition. Public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, and this goes totally against the consensus at the time.Carol Sutton Lewis: Hello, I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. Welcome to the latest episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, where we talk with authors and artists who've discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, and the visual arts.Today I'm joined by Carl Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist and the author of 15 books about science. His latest book, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, focuses on the last great biological frontier: the air. It presents the history of aerobiology, which is the science dealing with the occurrence, transportation, and effects of airborne microorganisms.The book chronicles the exploits of committed aerobiologists from the early pioneers through to the present day. Among these pioneers were Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, William Firth Wells.Airborne tells the story of how Mildred and William tried to sound the alarm about airborne infections, but for many reasons, their warnings went unheard.Welcome, Carl Zimmer. It's such a pleasure to have you with us to tell us all about this fascinating woman and her contributions to science.Can you please tell us about Mildred Weeks Wells—where and how she grew up and what led her to the field of aerobiology?Carl Zimmer: She was born in 1891, and she came from a very prominent Texas family—the Denton family. Her great-grandfather is actually whom the city of Denton, Texas is named after. Her grandfather was a surgeon for the Confederate Army in the Civil War, and he becomes the director of what was called then the State Lunatic Asylum.And he and the bookkeeper there, William Weeks, are both charged with embezzlement. It's a big scandal. The bookkeeper then marries Mildred's mother. Then, shortly after Mildred's born, her father disappears. Her mother basically abandons her with her grandmother. And she grows up with her sister and grandmother in Austin, Texas. A comfortable life, but obviously there's a lot of scandal hanging over them.She is clearly incredibly strong-willed. She goes to medical school at the University of Texas and graduates in 1915, one of three women in a class of 34. That is really something for a woman at that point—there were hardly any women with medical degrees in the United States, let alone someone in Texas.But she books out of there. She does not stick around. She heads in 1915 to Washington, D.C., and works at the Public Health Service in a lab called the Hygienic Laboratory. Basically, what they're doing is studying bacteria. You have to remember, this is the golden age of the germ theory of disease. People have been figuring out that particular bacteria or viruses cause particular diseases, and that knowledge is helping them fight those diseases.It's there in Washington at this time that she meets a man who will become her husband, William Firth Wells.Carol Sutton Lewis: Just a quick aside—because we at Lost Women of Science are always interested in how you discover the material in addition to what you've discovered. How were you able to piece together her story? What sources were you able to find? It seems like there wasn't a lot of information available.Carl Zimmer: Yeah, it was a tough process. There is little information that's really easy to get your hands on. I mean, there is no biography of Mildred Wells or her husband, William Firth Wells.At the Rockefeller archives, they had maybe 30 document boxes full of stuff that was just miraculously conserved there. There are also letters that she wrote to people that have been saved in various collections.But especially with her early years, it's really tough. You know, in all my work trying to dig down for every single scrap of information I could find of her, I have only found one photograph of her—and it's the photograph in her yearbook. That’s it.Carol Sutton Lewis: You talked about that photograph in the book, and I was struck by your description of it. You say that she's smiling, but the longer you look at her smile, the sadder it becomes. What do you think at that young age was the source of the sadness?Carl Zimmer: I think that Mildred grew up with a lot of trauma. She was not the sort of person to keep long journals or write long letters about these sorts of things. But when you've come across those clues in these brief little newspaper accounts, you can kind of read between the lines.There are reports in newspapers saying that Mildred's mother had come to Austin to pay a visit to Mildred because she had scarlet fever when she was 10, and then she goes away again. And when I look at her face in her yearbook, it doesn't surprise me that there is this cast of melancholy to it because you just think about what she had gone through just as a kid.Carol Sutton Lewis: Oh. Absolutely. And fast forward, she meets William and they marry. They have a son, and they start collaborating. How did that begin?Carl Zimmer: The collaboration takes a while. So William Wells is also working at the Public Health Service at the time. He is a few years older than Mildred and he has been trained at MIT as what was called then a sanitarian. In other words, he was going to take the germ theory of disease and was going to save people's lives.He was very clever. He could invent tests that a sanitarian could use, dip a little tube into a river and see whether the water was safe or not, things like that. He was particularly focused on keeping water clean of bacteria that could cause diseases like typhoid or cholera and he also, gets assigned by the government to study oysters because oysters, they sit in this water and they're filtering all day long. And you know, if there's bacteria in there, they're going to filter it and trap it in their tissues. And oysters are incredibly popular in the early nineteen hundreds and a shocking number of people are keeling over dying of typhoid because they're eating them raw. So William is very busy, figuring out ways to save the oyster industry. How do we purify oysters and things like that? They meet, they get married in 1917.In 1918 they have a child, William Jr. nicknamed Bud. But William is not around for the birth, because he is drafted into the army, and he goes off to serve. in World War I.Carol Sutton Lewis: So Mildred is at home with Bud and William's off at the war. But ultimately, Mildred returns to science. A few years later, where she is hired as a polio detective. Can you tell me a little bit about what the state of polio knowledge was at the time and what precisely a polio detective did?Carl Zimmer: It doesn't seem like polio really was a thing in the United States until the late 1800s. And then suddenly there's this mysterious disease that can strike children with no warning. These kids can't. walk, or suddenly these kids are dying. Not only are the symptoms completely terrifying to parents, but how it spreads is a complete mystery. And so Mildred, seems to have been hired at some point in the late 1920s To basically put together everything that was known about polio to help doctors to deal with their patients and to, you know, encourage future science to try to figure out what is this disease.You know, Mildred wasn't trained in epidemiology. So it's kind of remarkable that she taught herself. And she would turn out to be a really great epidemiologist. But, in any case, She gets hired by the International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis, that was the name then for polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads. Case studies where, in a town, like this child got polio, then this child did, and did they have contact and what sort of contact, what season was it? What was the weather like? All these different factors.And one thing that's really important to bear in mind is that, at this time, the prevailing view was that diseases spread by water, by food, by sex, by close contact. Maybe like someone just coughs and sprays droplets on you, but otherwise it's these other routes.The idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just obsolete superstition. for thousands of years, people talked about miasmas, somehow the air mysteriously became corrupted and that made people sick with different diseases. That was all thrown out in the late 1800s, early 1900s when germ theory really takes hold. And so public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless.Carol Sutton Lewis: But Mildred doesn't agree, does she?Carl Zimmer: Well, Mildred Wells is looking at all of this, data and she is starting to get an idea that maybe these public health experts have been too quick to dismiss the air. So when people are talking about droplet infections in the 1920s, they're basically just talking about, big droplets that someone might just sneeze in your face. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, are spreading long distances through the air.So Mildred is starting to make a distinction in her mind about what she calls airborne and droplet infections. So, and this is really the time that the Wellses collectively are thinking about airborne infection and it's Mildred is doing it. And William actually gives her credit for this later on.Carol Sutton Lewis: Right. and her results are published in a book about polio written entirely by female authors, which is quite unusual for the time.Carl Zimmer: Mm hmm. Right. The book is published in 1932, and the reception just tells you so much about what it was like to be a woman in science. The New England Journal of Medicine reviews the book, which is great. But, here's a line that they give, they say, it is interesting to note that this book is entirely the product of women in medicine and is the first book.So far as a reviewer knows. by a number of authors, all of whom are of the female sex. So it's this: Oh, look at this oddity. And basically, the virtue of that is that women are really thorough, I, guess. so it's a very detailed book. And the reviewer writes, no one is better fitted than a woman to collect data such as this book contains. So there's no okay, this is very useful.Carol Sutton Lewis: PatronizeCarl Zimmer: Yeah. Thank you very much. Reviewers were just skating over the conclusions that they were drawing, I guess because they were women. Yeah, pretty incredible.Carol Sutton Lewis: So she is the first to submit scientific proof about this potential for airborne transmission. And that was pretty much dismissed. It wasn't even actively dismissed.It was just, nah, these women, nothing's coming outta that, except William did pay attention. I believe he too had been thinking about airborne transmission for some time and then started seriously looking at Mildred's conclusion when he started teaching at Harvard.Carl Zimmer: Yeah. So, William gets a job as a low level instructor at Harvard. He's getting paid very little. Mildred has no income. He's teaching about hygiene and sanitation, but apparently he's a terrible teacher. But he is a clever, brilliant engineer and scientist; he very quickly develops an idea that probably originated in the work that Mildred had been doing on polio. that maybe diseases actually can spread long distances through the air. So there are large droplets that we might sneeze out and cough out and, and they go a short distance before gravity pulls them down. But physics dictates that below a certain size, droplets can resist gravity.This is something that's going totally against what all the, the really prominent public health figures are saying. William Wells doesn't care. He goes ahead and he starts to, invent a way to sample air for germs. Basically it's a centrifuge. You plug it in, the fan spins, it sucks in air, the air comes up inside a glass cylinder and then as it's spinning, if there are any droplets of particles or anything floating in the air, they get flung out to the sideS.And so afterwards you just pull out the glass which is coated with, food for microbes to grow on and you put it in a nice warm place. And If there's anything in the air, you'll be able to grow a colony and see it.Carol Sutton Lewis: Amazing.Carl Zimmer: It is amazing. This, this was a crucial inventionCarol Sutton Lewis: So we have William, who is with Mildred's help moving more towards the possibility of airborne infection, understanding that this is very much not where science is at the moment, and he conducts a really interesting experiment in one of his classrooms to try to move the theory forward. We'll talk more about that experiment when we come back after the break.MidrollCarol Sutton Lewis: Welcome back to Lost Women of Science Conversations. We left off as the Wellses were about to conduct an experiment to test their theories about airborne infections. Carl, can you tell us about that experiment?Carl Zimmer: Okay. it's 1934, It's a cold day. Students come in for a lecture from this terrible teacher, William Wells. The windows are closed. The doors are closed. It's a poorly ventilated room. About 20 minutes before the end of the class, he takes this weird device that's next to him, he plugs it into the wall, and then he just goes back and keeps lecturing.It's not clear whether he even told them what he was doing. But, he then takes this little pinch of sneezing powder. out of a jar and holds it in the sort of outflow from the fan inside the air centrifuge. So all of a sudden, poof, the sneezing powder just goes off into the air. You know, there are probably about a couple dozen students scattered around this lecture hall and after a while they start to sneeze. And in fact, people All the way in theback are sneezing too.So now Wells turns off his machine, puts in a new cylinder, turns it on, keeps talking. The thing is that they are actually sneezing out droplets into the air.And some of those droplets contain harmless bacteria from their mouths. And he harvests them from the air. He actually collects them in his centrifuge. And after a few days, he's got colonies of these bacteria, but only after he had released the sneezing powder, the one before that didn't have any.So, you have this demonstration that William Wells could catch germs in the air that had been released from his students at quite a distance away, And other people can inhale them, and not even realize what's happening. In other words, germs were spreading like smoke. And so this becomes an explanation for what Mildred had been seeing in her epidemiology..Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. That was pretty revolutionary. But how was it received?Carl Zimmer: Well, you know, At first it was received, With great fanfare, and he starts publishing papers in nineteen thirty he and Mildred are coauthors on these. And, Mildred is actually appointed as a research associate at Harvard, in nineteen thirty it's a nice title, but she doesn't get paid anything. And then William makes another discovery, which is also very important.He's thinking okay, if these things are floating in the air, is there a way that I can disinfect the air? And he tries all sorts of things and he discovers ultraviolet light works really well. In fact, you can just put an ultraviolet light in a room and the droplets will circulate around and as they pass through the ultraviolet rays, it kills the bacteria or viruses inside of them. So in 1936, when he's publishing these results, there are so many headlines in newspapers and magazines and stuff about this discovery.There's one headline that says, scientists fight flu germs with violet ray. And, there are these predictions that, we are going to be safe from these terrible diseases. Like for example, influenza, which had just, devastated the world not long beforehand, because you're going to put ultraviolet lights in trains and schools and trolleys and movie theaters.Carol Sutton Lewis: Did Mildred get any public recognition for her contributions to all of this?Carl Zimmer: Well not surprisingly, William gets the lion's share of the attention. I mean, there's a passing reference to Mildred in one article. The Associated Press says chief among his aides, Wells said, was his wife, Dr. Mildred Wells. So, William was perfectly comfortable, acknowledging her, but the reporters. Didn't care,Carol Sutton Lewis: And there were no pictures of herCarl Zimmer: Right. Mildred wasn't the engineer in that couple, but she was doing all the research on epidemiology. And you can tell from comments that people made about, and Mildred Wells is that. William would be nowhere as a scientist without Mildred. She was the one who kept him from jumping ahead to wild conclusions from the data he had so far. So they were, they're very much a team. She was doing the writing and they were collaborating, they were arguing with each other all the time about it And she was a much better writer than he was., but that wasn't suitable for a picture, so she was invisible.Carol Sutton Lewis: In the book, you write a lot about their difficult personalities and how that impacted their reputations within the wider scientific community. Can you say more about that?Carl Zimmer: Right. They really had a reputation as being really hard to deal with. People would politely call them peculiar. And when they weren't being quite so polite, they would talk about all these arguments that they would get in, shouting matches and so on. They really felt that they had discovered something incredibly important, but they were outsiders, you know, they didn't have PhDs, they didn't have really much formal training. And here they were saying that, you know, the consensus about infectious disease is profoundly wrong.Now, ironically, what happened is that once William Wells showed that ultraviolet light could kill germs, his superior at Harvard abruptly took an intense interest in all of this and said, Okay, you're going to share a patent on this with me. My name's going to be on the patent and all the research from now on is going to happen in my lab. I'm going to have complete control over what happens next. And Mildred took the lead saying no way we want total autonomy, get out of our face. She was much more aggressive in university politics, and sort of protecting their turf. And unfortunately they didn't have many allies at Harvard and pretty soon they were out, they were fired. And William Wells and his boss, Gordon Fair, were both named on a patent that was filed for using ultraviolet lamps to disinfect the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: So what happened when they left Harvard?Carl Zimmer: Well, it's really interesting watching them scrambling to find work, because their reputation had preceded them. They were hoping they could go back to Washington DC to the public health service. But, the story about the Wells was that Mildred, was carrying out a lot of the research, and so they thought, we can't hire William if it's his wife, who's quietly doing a lot of the work, like they, for some reason they didn't think, oh, we could hire them both.Carol Sutton Lewis: Or just her.Carl Zimmer: None of that, they were like, do we hire William Wells? His wife apparently hauls a lot of the weight. So no, we won't hire them. It's literally like written down. It’s, I'm not making it up. And fortunately they had a few defenders, a few champions down in Philadelphia.There was a doctor in Philadelphia who was using ultraviolet light to protect children in hospitals. And he was, really, inspired by the Wellses and he knew they were trouble. He wrote yes, I get it. They're difficult, but let's try to get them here.And so they brought them down to Philadelphia and Mildred. And William, opened up the laboratories for airborne infection at the University of Pennsylvania. And now actually Mildred got paid, for the first time, for this work. So they're both getting paid, things are starting to look betterCarol Sutton Lewis: So they start to do amazing work at the University of Pennsylvania.Carl Zimmer: That's right. That's right. William, takes the next step in proving their theory. He figures out how to actually give animals diseases through the air. He builds a machine that gets to be known as the infection machine. a big bell jar, and you can put mice in there, or a rabbit in there, and there's a tube connected to it.And through that tube, William can create a very fine mist that might have influenza viruses in it, or the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. And the animals just sit there and breathe, and lo and behold, They get tuberculosis, they get influenza, they get all these diseases,Now, meanwhile, Mildred is actually spending a lot of her time at a school nearby the Germantown Friends School, where they have installed ultraviolet lamps in some of the classrooms. And they're convinced that they can protect kids from airborne diseases. The biggest demonstration of what these lamps can do comes in 1940, because there's a huge epidemic of measles. In 1940, there's, no vaccine for measles. Every kid basically gets it.And lo and behold, the kids in the classrooms with the ultraviolet lamps are 10 times less likely to get measles than the kids just down the hall in the regular classrooms. And so this is one of the best experiments ever done on the nature of airborne infection and how you can protect people by disinfecting the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: Were they then finally accepted into the scientific community?Carl Zimmer: I know you keep waiting for that, that victory lap, but no. It's just like time and again, that glory gets snatched away from them. Again, this was not anything that was done in secret. Newspapers around Philadelphia were. Celebrating this wow, look at this, look at how we can protect our children from disease. This is fantastic. But other experts, public health authorities just were not budging. they had all taken in this dogma that the air can't be dangerous.And so again and again, they were hitting a brick wall. This is right on the eve of World War II.And so all sorts of scientists in World War II are asking themselves, what can we do? Mildred and William put themselves forward and say we don't want soldiers to get sick with the flu the way they did in World War I. They're both haunted by this and they're thinking, so we could put our ultraviolet lamps in the barracks, we could protect them. Soldiers from the flu, if the flu is airborne, like we think, not only that, but this could help to really convince all those skepticsCarol Sutton Lewis: mm.Carl Zimmer: But they failed. The army put all their money into other experiments, they were blackballed, they were shut out, and again, I think it was just because they were continuing to be just incredibly difficult. Even patrons and their friends would just sigh to each other, like, Oh my God, I've just had to deal with these, with them arguing with us and yelling at us. And by the end of World War II, things are bad, they have some sort of split up, they never get divorced, but it's just too much. Mildred, like she is not only trying to do this pioneering work in these schools, trying to keep William's labs organized, there's the matter of their son. Now looking at some documents, I would hazard a guess that he had schizophrenia because he was examined by a doctor who came to that conclusion.And so, she's under incredible pressure and eventually she cracks and in 1944 she resigns from the lab. She stops working in the schools, she stops collaborating with her husband, but she keeps doing her own science. And that's really amazing to me. What kinds of things did she do after this breakup? What kind of work did she conduct? And how was that received?Mildred goes on on her own to carry out a gigantic experiment, in hindsight, a really visionary piece of work. It's based on her experience in Philadelphia. Because she could see that the ultraviolet lamps worked very well at protecting children during a really intense measles epidemic. And so she thought to herself, if you want to really make ultraviolet light, and the theory of airborne infection live up to its true potential to protect people. You need to protect the air in a lot more places.So she gets introduced to the health commissioner in Westchester County, this is a county just north of New York City. And she pitches him this idea. She says, I want to go into one of your towns and I want to put ultraviolet lights everywhere. And this guy, William Holla, he is a very bold, flamboyant guy. He's the right guy to ask. He's like, yeah, let's do this. And he leaves it up to her to design the experiment.And so this town Pleasantville in New York gets fitted out with ultraviolet lamps in the train station, in the fountain shops, in the movie theater, in churches, all over the place. And she publishes a paper with Holla in 1950 on the results.The results are mixed though. You look carefully at them, you can see that actually, yeah, the lamps worked in certain respects. So certain diseases, the rates were lower in certain places, but sadly, this incredibly ambitious study really didn't move the needle. And yeah, it was a big disappointment and that was the last science that Mildred did.Carol Sutton Lewis: Even when they were working together, Mildred and William never really succeeded in convincing the scientific community to take airborne infection seriously, although their work obviously did move the science forward. So what did sway scientific opinion and when?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, Mildred dies in 1957. William dies in 1963. After the Wellses are dead, their work is dismissed and they themselves are quite forgotten. It really isn't until the early 2000s that a few people rediscover them.The SARS epidemic kicks up in 2003, for example, and I talked to a scientist in Hong Kong named Yuguo Li, and he was trying to understand how was this new disease spreading around? He's looking around and he finds references to papers by William Wells and Mildred Wells. He has no idea who they are and he sees that William Wells had published a book in 1955 and he's like, well, okay, maybe I need to go read the book.Nobody has the book. And the only place that he could find it was in one university in the United States. They photocopied it and shipped it to him in Hong Kong and he finally starts reading it. And it's really hard to read because again William was a terrible writer, unlike Mildred. But after a while it clicks and he's like, oh. That's it. I got it. But again, all the guidelines for controlling pandemics and diseases do not really give much serious attention to airborne infection except for just a couple diseases. And it's not until the COVID pandemic that things finally change.Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. If we had listened to Mildred and William earlier, what might have been different?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, I do try to imagine a world in which Mildred and William had been taken seriously by more people. If airborne infection was just a seriously recognized thing at the start of the COVID pandemic, we would have been controlling the disease differently from the start. We wouldn't have been wiping down our shopping bags obsessively. People would have been encouraged to open the windows, people would have been encouraged to get air purifiers, ultraviolet lamps might have been installed in places with poor ventilation, masks might not have been so controversial.And instead these intellectual grandchildren of William and Mildred Wells had to reinvent the wheel. They had to do new studies to persuade people finally that a disease could be airborne. And it took a long time. It took months to finally move the needle.Carol Sutton Lewis: Carl, what do you hope people will take away from Mildred's story, which you have so wonderfully detailed in your book, rendering her no longer a lost woman of science? And what do you hope people will take away from the book more broadly?Carl Zimmer: I think sometimes that we imagine that science just marches on smoothly and effortlessly. But science is a human endeavor in all the good ways and in all the not-so-good ways. Science does have a fair amount of tragedy throughout it, as any human endeavor does. I'm sad about what happened to the Wells by the end of their lives, both of them. But in some ways, things are better now.When I'm writing about aerobiology in the early, mid, even late—except for Mildred, it's pretty much all men. But who were the people during the COVID pandemic who led the fight to get recognized as airborne? People like Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, Kim Prather at University of California, San Diego, Lidia Morawska, an Australian researcher. Now, all women in science still have to contend with all sorts of sexism and sort of baked-in inequalities. But it is striking to me that when you get to the end of the book, the women show up.Carol Sutton Lewis: Well,Carl Zimmer: And they show up in force.Carol Sutton Lewis: And on that very positive note to end on, Carl, thank you so much, first and foremost, for writing this really fascinating book and within it, highlighting a now no longer lost woman of science, Mildred Weeks Wells. Your book is Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, and it's been a pleasure to speak with—Carl Zimmer: Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed talking about Mildred.Carol Sutton Lewis: This has been Lost Women of Science Conversations. Carl Zimmer's book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is out now. This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Our producer was Luca Evans, and Hansdale Hsu was our sound engineer. Special thanks to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger, our program manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf.Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. The episode art was created by Lily Whear and Lizzie Younan composes our music. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.If you've enjoyed this conversation, go to our website lostwomenofscience.org and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode—that's lostwomenofscience.org. And please share it and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, and please don't forget to click on the donate button—that helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists.I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. See you next time.HostCarol Sutton LewisProducerLuca EvansGuest Carl ZimmerCarl Zimmer writes the Origins column for the New York Times and has frequently contributed to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. His journalism has earned numerous awards, including ones from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering. He is the author of fourteen books about science, including Life's Edge.Further Reading:Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Carl Zimmer. Dutton, 2025Poliomyelitis. International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis. Williams & Wilkins Company, 1932 “Air-borne Infection,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 21; November 21, 1936“Air-borne Infection: Sanitary Control,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 22; November 28, 1936“Ventilation in the Spread of Chickenpox and Measles within School Rooms,” by Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 129, No. 3; September 15, 1945“The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill,” by Megan Molteni, in Wired. Published online May 13, 2021WATCH THIS NEXTScience journalist Carl Zimmer joins host Rachel Feltman to look back at the history of the field, from ancient Greek “miasmas” to Louis Pasteur’s unorthodox experiments to biological warfare.
    #public #health #researcher #her #engineer
    A Public Health Researcher and Her Engineer Husband Found How Diseases Can Spread through Air Decades before the COVID Pandemic
    May 21, 202522 min readMildred Weeks Wells’s Work on Airborne Transmission Could Have Saved Many Lives—If the Scientific Establishment ListenedMildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke Dutton; Lily WhearAir-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science of airborne microorganisms. In this episode, we discover the story of two lost pioneers of the 1930s: physician and self-taught epidemiologist Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, sanitary engineer William Firth Wells. Together, they proved that infectious pathogens could spread through the air over long distances. But the two had a reputation as outsiders, and they failed to convince the scientific establishment, who ignored their findings for decades. What the pair figured out could have saved many lives from tuberculosis, SARS, COVID and other airborne diseases. The contributions of Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband were all but erased from history—until now.LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.TRANSCRIPTCarl Zimmer: Mildred is hired in the late 1920s to put together everything that was known about polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads.At the time, the idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just an obsolete superstition. Public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, and this goes totally against the consensus at the time.Carol Sutton Lewis: Hello, I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. Welcome to the latest episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, where we talk with authors and artists who've discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, and the visual arts.Today I'm joined by Carl Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist and the author of 15 books about science. His latest book, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, focuses on the last great biological frontier: the air. It presents the history of aerobiology, which is the science dealing with the occurrence, transportation, and effects of airborne microorganisms.The book chronicles the exploits of committed aerobiologists from the early pioneers through to the present day. Among these pioneers were Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, William Firth Wells.Airborne tells the story of how Mildred and William tried to sound the alarm about airborne infections, but for many reasons, their warnings went unheard.Welcome, Carl Zimmer. It's such a pleasure to have you with us to tell us all about this fascinating woman and her contributions to science.Can you please tell us about Mildred Weeks Wells—where and how she grew up and what led her to the field of aerobiology?Carl Zimmer: She was born in 1891, and she came from a very prominent Texas family—the Denton family. Her great-grandfather is actually whom the city of Denton, Texas is named after. Her grandfather was a surgeon for the Confederate Army in the Civil War, and he becomes the director of what was called then the State Lunatic Asylum.And he and the bookkeeper there, William Weeks, are both charged with embezzlement. It's a big scandal. The bookkeeper then marries Mildred's mother. Then, shortly after Mildred's born, her father disappears. Her mother basically abandons her with her grandmother. And she grows up with her sister and grandmother in Austin, Texas. A comfortable life, but obviously there's a lot of scandal hanging over them.She is clearly incredibly strong-willed. She goes to medical school at the University of Texas and graduates in 1915, one of three women in a class of 34. That is really something for a woman at that point—there were hardly any women with medical degrees in the United States, let alone someone in Texas.But she books out of there. She does not stick around. She heads in 1915 to Washington, D.C., and works at the Public Health Service in a lab called the Hygienic Laboratory. Basically, what they're doing is studying bacteria. You have to remember, this is the golden age of the germ theory of disease. People have been figuring out that particular bacteria or viruses cause particular diseases, and that knowledge is helping them fight those diseases.It's there in Washington at this time that she meets a man who will become her husband, William Firth Wells.Carol Sutton Lewis: Just a quick aside—because we at Lost Women of Science are always interested in how you discover the material in addition to what you've discovered. How were you able to piece together her story? What sources were you able to find? It seems like there wasn't a lot of information available.Carl Zimmer: Yeah, it was a tough process. There is little information that's really easy to get your hands on. I mean, there is no biography of Mildred Wells or her husband, William Firth Wells.At the Rockefeller archives, they had maybe 30 document boxes full of stuff that was just miraculously conserved there. There are also letters that she wrote to people that have been saved in various collections.But especially with her early years, it's really tough. You know, in all my work trying to dig down for every single scrap of information I could find of her, I have only found one photograph of her—and it's the photograph in her yearbook. That’s it.Carol Sutton Lewis: You talked about that photograph in the book, and I was struck by your description of it. You say that she's smiling, but the longer you look at her smile, the sadder it becomes. What do you think at that young age was the source of the sadness?Carl Zimmer: I think that Mildred grew up with a lot of trauma. She was not the sort of person to keep long journals or write long letters about these sorts of things. But when you've come across those clues in these brief little newspaper accounts, you can kind of read between the lines.There are reports in newspapers saying that Mildred's mother had come to Austin to pay a visit to Mildred because she had scarlet fever when she was 10, and then she goes away again. And when I look at her face in her yearbook, it doesn't surprise me that there is this cast of melancholy to it because you just think about what she had gone through just as a kid.Carol Sutton Lewis: Oh. Absolutely. And fast forward, she meets William and they marry. They have a son, and they start collaborating. How did that begin?Carl Zimmer: The collaboration takes a while. So William Wells is also working at the Public Health Service at the time. He is a few years older than Mildred and he has been trained at MIT as what was called then a sanitarian. In other words, he was going to take the germ theory of disease and was going to save people's lives.He was very clever. He could invent tests that a sanitarian could use, dip a little tube into a river and see whether the water was safe or not, things like that. He was particularly focused on keeping water clean of bacteria that could cause diseases like typhoid or cholera and he also, gets assigned by the government to study oysters because oysters, they sit in this water and they're filtering all day long. And you know, if there's bacteria in there, they're going to filter it and trap it in their tissues. And oysters are incredibly popular in the early nineteen hundreds and a shocking number of people are keeling over dying of typhoid because they're eating them raw. So William is very busy, figuring out ways to save the oyster industry. How do we purify oysters and things like that? They meet, they get married in 1917.In 1918 they have a child, William Jr. nicknamed Bud. But William is not around for the birth, because he is drafted into the army, and he goes off to serve. in World War I.Carol Sutton Lewis: So Mildred is at home with Bud and William's off at the war. But ultimately, Mildred returns to science. A few years later, where she is hired as a polio detective. Can you tell me a little bit about what the state of polio knowledge was at the time and what precisely a polio detective did?Carl Zimmer: It doesn't seem like polio really was a thing in the United States until the late 1800s. And then suddenly there's this mysterious disease that can strike children with no warning. These kids can't. walk, or suddenly these kids are dying. Not only are the symptoms completely terrifying to parents, but how it spreads is a complete mystery. And so Mildred, seems to have been hired at some point in the late 1920s To basically put together everything that was known about polio to help doctors to deal with their patients and to, you know, encourage future science to try to figure out what is this disease.You know, Mildred wasn't trained in epidemiology. So it's kind of remarkable that she taught herself. And she would turn out to be a really great epidemiologist. But, in any case, She gets hired by the International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis, that was the name then for polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads. Case studies where, in a town, like this child got polio, then this child did, and did they have contact and what sort of contact, what season was it? What was the weather like? All these different factors.And one thing that's really important to bear in mind is that, at this time, the prevailing view was that diseases spread by water, by food, by sex, by close contact. Maybe like someone just coughs and sprays droplets on you, but otherwise it's these other routes.The idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just obsolete superstition. for thousands of years, people talked about miasmas, somehow the air mysteriously became corrupted and that made people sick with different diseases. That was all thrown out in the late 1800s, early 1900s when germ theory really takes hold. And so public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless.Carol Sutton Lewis: But Mildred doesn't agree, does she?Carl Zimmer: Well, Mildred Wells is looking at all of this, data and she is starting to get an idea that maybe these public health experts have been too quick to dismiss the air. So when people are talking about droplet infections in the 1920s, they're basically just talking about, big droplets that someone might just sneeze in your face. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, are spreading long distances through the air.So Mildred is starting to make a distinction in her mind about what she calls airborne and droplet infections. So, and this is really the time that the Wellses collectively are thinking about airborne infection and it's Mildred is doing it. And William actually gives her credit for this later on.Carol Sutton Lewis: Right. and her results are published in a book about polio written entirely by female authors, which is quite unusual for the time.Carl Zimmer: Mm hmm. Right. The book is published in 1932, and the reception just tells you so much about what it was like to be a woman in science. The New England Journal of Medicine reviews the book, which is great. But, here's a line that they give, they say, it is interesting to note that this book is entirely the product of women in medicine and is the first book.So far as a reviewer knows. by a number of authors, all of whom are of the female sex. So it's this: Oh, look at this oddity. And basically, the virtue of that is that women are really thorough, I, guess. so it's a very detailed book. And the reviewer writes, no one is better fitted than a woman to collect data such as this book contains. So there's no okay, this is very useful.Carol Sutton Lewis: PatronizeCarl Zimmer: Yeah. Thank you very much. Reviewers were just skating over the conclusions that they were drawing, I guess because they were women. Yeah, pretty incredible.Carol Sutton Lewis: So she is the first to submit scientific proof about this potential for airborne transmission. And that was pretty much dismissed. It wasn't even actively dismissed.It was just, nah, these women, nothing's coming outta that, except William did pay attention. I believe he too had been thinking about airborne transmission for some time and then started seriously looking at Mildred's conclusion when he started teaching at Harvard.Carl Zimmer: Yeah. So, William gets a job as a low level instructor at Harvard. He's getting paid very little. Mildred has no income. He's teaching about hygiene and sanitation, but apparently he's a terrible teacher. But he is a clever, brilliant engineer and scientist; he very quickly develops an idea that probably originated in the work that Mildred had been doing on polio. that maybe diseases actually can spread long distances through the air. So there are large droplets that we might sneeze out and cough out and, and they go a short distance before gravity pulls them down. But physics dictates that below a certain size, droplets can resist gravity.This is something that's going totally against what all the, the really prominent public health figures are saying. William Wells doesn't care. He goes ahead and he starts to, invent a way to sample air for germs. Basically it's a centrifuge. You plug it in, the fan spins, it sucks in air, the air comes up inside a glass cylinder and then as it's spinning, if there are any droplets of particles or anything floating in the air, they get flung out to the sideS.And so afterwards you just pull out the glass which is coated with, food for microbes to grow on and you put it in a nice warm place. And If there's anything in the air, you'll be able to grow a colony and see it.Carol Sutton Lewis: Amazing.Carl Zimmer: It is amazing. This, this was a crucial inventionCarol Sutton Lewis: So we have William, who is with Mildred's help moving more towards the possibility of airborne infection, understanding that this is very much not where science is at the moment, and he conducts a really interesting experiment in one of his classrooms to try to move the theory forward. We'll talk more about that experiment when we come back after the break.MidrollCarol Sutton Lewis: Welcome back to Lost Women of Science Conversations. We left off as the Wellses were about to conduct an experiment to test their theories about airborne infections. Carl, can you tell us about that experiment?Carl Zimmer: Okay. it's 1934, It's a cold day. Students come in for a lecture from this terrible teacher, William Wells. The windows are closed. The doors are closed. It's a poorly ventilated room. About 20 minutes before the end of the class, he takes this weird device that's next to him, he plugs it into the wall, and then he just goes back and keeps lecturing.It's not clear whether he even told them what he was doing. But, he then takes this little pinch of sneezing powder. out of a jar and holds it in the sort of outflow from the fan inside the air centrifuge. So all of a sudden, poof, the sneezing powder just goes off into the air. You know, there are probably about a couple dozen students scattered around this lecture hall and after a while they start to sneeze. And in fact, people All the way in theback are sneezing too.So now Wells turns off his machine, puts in a new cylinder, turns it on, keeps talking. The thing is that they are actually sneezing out droplets into the air.And some of those droplets contain harmless bacteria from their mouths. And he harvests them from the air. He actually collects them in his centrifuge. And after a few days, he's got colonies of these bacteria, but only after he had released the sneezing powder, the one before that didn't have any.So, you have this demonstration that William Wells could catch germs in the air that had been released from his students at quite a distance away, And other people can inhale them, and not even realize what's happening. In other words, germs were spreading like smoke. And so this becomes an explanation for what Mildred had been seeing in her epidemiology..Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. That was pretty revolutionary. But how was it received?Carl Zimmer: Well, you know, At first it was received, With great fanfare, and he starts publishing papers in nineteen thirty he and Mildred are coauthors on these. And, Mildred is actually appointed as a research associate at Harvard, in nineteen thirty it's a nice title, but she doesn't get paid anything. And then William makes another discovery, which is also very important.He's thinking okay, if these things are floating in the air, is there a way that I can disinfect the air? And he tries all sorts of things and he discovers ultraviolet light works really well. In fact, you can just put an ultraviolet light in a room and the droplets will circulate around and as they pass through the ultraviolet rays, it kills the bacteria or viruses inside of them. So in 1936, when he's publishing these results, there are so many headlines in newspapers and magazines and stuff about this discovery.There's one headline that says, scientists fight flu germs with violet ray. And, there are these predictions that, we are going to be safe from these terrible diseases. Like for example, influenza, which had just, devastated the world not long beforehand, because you're going to put ultraviolet lights in trains and schools and trolleys and movie theaters.Carol Sutton Lewis: Did Mildred get any public recognition for her contributions to all of this?Carl Zimmer: Well not surprisingly, William gets the lion's share of the attention. I mean, there's a passing reference to Mildred in one article. The Associated Press says chief among his aides, Wells said, was his wife, Dr. Mildred Wells. So, William was perfectly comfortable, acknowledging her, but the reporters. Didn't care,Carol Sutton Lewis: And there were no pictures of herCarl Zimmer: Right. Mildred wasn't the engineer in that couple, but she was doing all the research on epidemiology. And you can tell from comments that people made about, and Mildred Wells is that. William would be nowhere as a scientist without Mildred. She was the one who kept him from jumping ahead to wild conclusions from the data he had so far. So they were, they're very much a team. She was doing the writing and they were collaborating, they were arguing with each other all the time about it And she was a much better writer than he was., but that wasn't suitable for a picture, so she was invisible.Carol Sutton Lewis: In the book, you write a lot about their difficult personalities and how that impacted their reputations within the wider scientific community. Can you say more about that?Carl Zimmer: Right. They really had a reputation as being really hard to deal with. People would politely call them peculiar. And when they weren't being quite so polite, they would talk about all these arguments that they would get in, shouting matches and so on. They really felt that they had discovered something incredibly important, but they were outsiders, you know, they didn't have PhDs, they didn't have really much formal training. And here they were saying that, you know, the consensus about infectious disease is profoundly wrong.Now, ironically, what happened is that once William Wells showed that ultraviolet light could kill germs, his superior at Harvard abruptly took an intense interest in all of this and said, Okay, you're going to share a patent on this with me. My name's going to be on the patent and all the research from now on is going to happen in my lab. I'm going to have complete control over what happens next. And Mildred took the lead saying no way we want total autonomy, get out of our face. She was much more aggressive in university politics, and sort of protecting their turf. And unfortunately they didn't have many allies at Harvard and pretty soon they were out, they were fired. And William Wells and his boss, Gordon Fair, were both named on a patent that was filed for using ultraviolet lamps to disinfect the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: So what happened when they left Harvard?Carl Zimmer: Well, it's really interesting watching them scrambling to find work, because their reputation had preceded them. They were hoping they could go back to Washington DC to the public health service. But, the story about the Wells was that Mildred, was carrying out a lot of the research, and so they thought, we can't hire William if it's his wife, who's quietly doing a lot of the work, like they, for some reason they didn't think, oh, we could hire them both.Carol Sutton Lewis: Or just her.Carl Zimmer: None of that, they were like, do we hire William Wells? His wife apparently hauls a lot of the weight. So no, we won't hire them. It's literally like written down. It’s, I'm not making it up. And fortunately they had a few defenders, a few champions down in Philadelphia.There was a doctor in Philadelphia who was using ultraviolet light to protect children in hospitals. And he was, really, inspired by the Wellses and he knew they were trouble. He wrote yes, I get it. They're difficult, but let's try to get them here.And so they brought them down to Philadelphia and Mildred. And William, opened up the laboratories for airborne infection at the University of Pennsylvania. And now actually Mildred got paid, for the first time, for this work. So they're both getting paid, things are starting to look betterCarol Sutton Lewis: So they start to do amazing work at the University of Pennsylvania.Carl Zimmer: That's right. That's right. William, takes the next step in proving their theory. He figures out how to actually give animals diseases through the air. He builds a machine that gets to be known as the infection machine. a big bell jar, and you can put mice in there, or a rabbit in there, and there's a tube connected to it.And through that tube, William can create a very fine mist that might have influenza viruses in it, or the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. And the animals just sit there and breathe, and lo and behold, They get tuberculosis, they get influenza, they get all these diseases,Now, meanwhile, Mildred is actually spending a lot of her time at a school nearby the Germantown Friends School, where they have installed ultraviolet lamps in some of the classrooms. And they're convinced that they can protect kids from airborne diseases. The biggest demonstration of what these lamps can do comes in 1940, because there's a huge epidemic of measles. In 1940, there's, no vaccine for measles. Every kid basically gets it.And lo and behold, the kids in the classrooms with the ultraviolet lamps are 10 times less likely to get measles than the kids just down the hall in the regular classrooms. And so this is one of the best experiments ever done on the nature of airborne infection and how you can protect people by disinfecting the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: Were they then finally accepted into the scientific community?Carl Zimmer: I know you keep waiting for that, that victory lap, but no. It's just like time and again, that glory gets snatched away from them. Again, this was not anything that was done in secret. Newspapers around Philadelphia were. Celebrating this wow, look at this, look at how we can protect our children from disease. This is fantastic. But other experts, public health authorities just were not budging. they had all taken in this dogma that the air can't be dangerous.And so again and again, they were hitting a brick wall. This is right on the eve of World War II.And so all sorts of scientists in World War II are asking themselves, what can we do? Mildred and William put themselves forward and say we don't want soldiers to get sick with the flu the way they did in World War I. They're both haunted by this and they're thinking, so we could put our ultraviolet lamps in the barracks, we could protect them. Soldiers from the flu, if the flu is airborne, like we think, not only that, but this could help to really convince all those skepticsCarol Sutton Lewis: mm.Carl Zimmer: But they failed. The army put all their money into other experiments, they were blackballed, they were shut out, and again, I think it was just because they were continuing to be just incredibly difficult. Even patrons and their friends would just sigh to each other, like, Oh my God, I've just had to deal with these, with them arguing with us and yelling at us. And by the end of World War II, things are bad, they have some sort of split up, they never get divorced, but it's just too much. Mildred, like she is not only trying to do this pioneering work in these schools, trying to keep William's labs organized, there's the matter of their son. Now looking at some documents, I would hazard a guess that he had schizophrenia because he was examined by a doctor who came to that conclusion.And so, she's under incredible pressure and eventually she cracks and in 1944 she resigns from the lab. She stops working in the schools, she stops collaborating with her husband, but she keeps doing her own science. And that's really amazing to me. What kinds of things did she do after this breakup? What kind of work did she conduct? And how was that received?Mildred goes on on her own to carry out a gigantic experiment, in hindsight, a really visionary piece of work. It's based on her experience in Philadelphia. Because she could see that the ultraviolet lamps worked very well at protecting children during a really intense measles epidemic. And so she thought to herself, if you want to really make ultraviolet light, and the theory of airborne infection live up to its true potential to protect people. You need to protect the air in a lot more places.So she gets introduced to the health commissioner in Westchester County, this is a county just north of New York City. And she pitches him this idea. She says, I want to go into one of your towns and I want to put ultraviolet lights everywhere. And this guy, William Holla, he is a very bold, flamboyant guy. He's the right guy to ask. He's like, yeah, let's do this. And he leaves it up to her to design the experiment.And so this town Pleasantville in New York gets fitted out with ultraviolet lamps in the train station, in the fountain shops, in the movie theater, in churches, all over the place. And she publishes a paper with Holla in 1950 on the results.The results are mixed though. You look carefully at them, you can see that actually, yeah, the lamps worked in certain respects. So certain diseases, the rates were lower in certain places, but sadly, this incredibly ambitious study really didn't move the needle. And yeah, it was a big disappointment and that was the last science that Mildred did.Carol Sutton Lewis: Even when they were working together, Mildred and William never really succeeded in convincing the scientific community to take airborne infection seriously, although their work obviously did move the science forward. So what did sway scientific opinion and when?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, Mildred dies in 1957. William dies in 1963. After the Wellses are dead, their work is dismissed and they themselves are quite forgotten. It really isn't until the early 2000s that a few people rediscover them.The SARS epidemic kicks up in 2003, for example, and I talked to a scientist in Hong Kong named Yuguo Li, and he was trying to understand how was this new disease spreading around? He's looking around and he finds references to papers by William Wells and Mildred Wells. He has no idea who they are and he sees that William Wells had published a book in 1955 and he's like, well, okay, maybe I need to go read the book.Nobody has the book. And the only place that he could find it was in one university in the United States. They photocopied it and shipped it to him in Hong Kong and he finally starts reading it. And it's really hard to read because again William was a terrible writer, unlike Mildred. But after a while it clicks and he's like, oh. That's it. I got it. But again, all the guidelines for controlling pandemics and diseases do not really give much serious attention to airborne infection except for just a couple diseases. And it's not until the COVID pandemic that things finally change.Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. If we had listened to Mildred and William earlier, what might have been different?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, I do try to imagine a world in which Mildred and William had been taken seriously by more people. If airborne infection was just a seriously recognized thing at the start of the COVID pandemic, we would have been controlling the disease differently from the start. We wouldn't have been wiping down our shopping bags obsessively. People would have been encouraged to open the windows, people would have been encouraged to get air purifiers, ultraviolet lamps might have been installed in places with poor ventilation, masks might not have been so controversial.And instead these intellectual grandchildren of William and Mildred Wells had to reinvent the wheel. They had to do new studies to persuade people finally that a disease could be airborne. And it took a long time. It took months to finally move the needle.Carol Sutton Lewis: Carl, what do you hope people will take away from Mildred's story, which you have so wonderfully detailed in your book, rendering her no longer a lost woman of science? And what do you hope people will take away from the book more broadly?Carl Zimmer: I think sometimes that we imagine that science just marches on smoothly and effortlessly. But science is a human endeavor in all the good ways and in all the not-so-good ways. Science does have a fair amount of tragedy throughout it, as any human endeavor does. I'm sad about what happened to the Wells by the end of their lives, both of them. But in some ways, things are better now.When I'm writing about aerobiology in the early, mid, even late—except for Mildred, it's pretty much all men. But who were the people during the COVID pandemic who led the fight to get recognized as airborne? People like Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, Kim Prather at University of California, San Diego, Lidia Morawska, an Australian researcher. Now, all women in science still have to contend with all sorts of sexism and sort of baked-in inequalities. But it is striking to me that when you get to the end of the book, the women show up.Carol Sutton Lewis: Well,Carl Zimmer: And they show up in force.Carol Sutton Lewis: And on that very positive note to end on, Carl, thank you so much, first and foremost, for writing this really fascinating book and within it, highlighting a now no longer lost woman of science, Mildred Weeks Wells. Your book is Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, and it's been a pleasure to speak with—Carl Zimmer: Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed talking about Mildred.Carol Sutton Lewis: This has been Lost Women of Science Conversations. Carl Zimmer's book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is out now. This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Our producer was Luca Evans, and Hansdale Hsu was our sound engineer. Special thanks to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger, our program manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf.Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. The episode art was created by Lily Whear and Lizzie Younan composes our music. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.If you've enjoyed this conversation, go to our website lostwomenofscience.org and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode—that's lostwomenofscience.org. And please share it and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, and please don't forget to click on the donate button—that helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists.I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. See you next time.HostCarol Sutton LewisProducerLuca EvansGuest Carl ZimmerCarl Zimmer writes the Origins column for the New York Times and has frequently contributed to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. His journalism has earned numerous awards, including ones from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering. He is the author of fourteen books about science, including Life's Edge.Further Reading:Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Carl Zimmer. Dutton, 2025Poliomyelitis. International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis. Williams & Wilkins Company, 1932 “Air-borne Infection,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 21; November 21, 1936“Air-borne Infection: Sanitary Control,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 22; November 28, 1936“Ventilation in the Spread of Chickenpox and Measles within School Rooms,” by Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 129, No. 3; September 15, 1945“The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill,” by Megan Molteni, in Wired. Published online May 13, 2021WATCH THIS NEXTScience journalist Carl Zimmer joins host Rachel Feltman to look back at the history of the field, from ancient Greek “miasmas” to Louis Pasteur’s unorthodox experiments to biological warfare. #public #health #researcher #her #engineer
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    A Public Health Researcher and Her Engineer Husband Found How Diseases Can Spread through Air Decades before the COVID Pandemic
    May 21, 202522 min readMildred Weeks Wells’s Work on Airborne Transmission Could Have Saved Many Lives—If the Scientific Establishment ListenedMildred Weeks Wells and her husband figured out that disease-causing pathogens can spread through the air like smoke Dutton (image); Lily Whear (composite)Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer, charts the history of the field of aerobiology: the science of airborne microorganisms. In this episode, we discover the story of two lost pioneers of the 1930s: physician and self-taught epidemiologist Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, sanitary engineer William Firth Wells. Together, they proved that infectious pathogens could spread through the air over long distances. But the two had a reputation as outsiders, and they failed to convince the scientific establishment, who ignored their findings for decades. What the pair figured out could have saved many lives from tuberculosis, SARS, COVID and other airborne diseases. The contributions of Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband were all but erased from history—until now.LISTEN TO THE PODCASTOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.TRANSCRIPTCarl Zimmer: Mildred is hired in the late 1920s to put together everything that was known about polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads.At the time, the idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just an obsolete superstition. Public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, and this goes totally against the consensus at the time.Carol Sutton Lewis: Hello, I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. Welcome to the latest episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, where we talk with authors and artists who've discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, and the visual arts.Today I'm joined by Carl Zimmer, an award-winning New York Times columnist and the author of 15 books about science. His latest book, Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, focuses on the last great biological frontier: the air. It presents the history of aerobiology, which is the science dealing with the occurrence, transportation, and effects of airborne microorganisms.The book chronicles the exploits of committed aerobiologists from the early pioneers through to the present day. Among these pioneers were Mildred Weeks Wells and her husband, William Firth Wells.Airborne tells the story of how Mildred and William tried to sound the alarm about airborne infections, but for many reasons, their warnings went unheard.Welcome, Carl Zimmer. It's such a pleasure to have you with us to tell us all about this fascinating woman and her contributions to science.Can you please tell us about Mildred Weeks Wells—where and how she grew up and what led her to the field of aerobiology?Carl Zimmer: She was born in 1891, and she came from a very prominent Texas family—the Denton family. Her great-grandfather is actually whom the city of Denton, Texas is named after. Her grandfather was a surgeon for the Confederate Army in the Civil War, and he becomes the director of what was called then the State Lunatic Asylum.And he and the bookkeeper there, William Weeks, are both charged with embezzlement. It's a big scandal. The bookkeeper then marries Mildred's mother. Then, shortly after Mildred's born, her father disappears. Her mother basically abandons her with her grandmother. And she grows up with her sister and grandmother in Austin, Texas. A comfortable life, but obviously there's a lot of scandal hanging over them.She is clearly incredibly strong-willed. She goes to medical school at the University of Texas and graduates in 1915, one of three women in a class of 34. That is really something for a woman at that point—there were hardly any women with medical degrees in the United States, let alone someone in Texas.But she books out of there. She does not stick around. She heads in 1915 to Washington, D.C., and works at the Public Health Service in a lab called the Hygienic Laboratory. Basically, what they're doing is studying bacteria. You have to remember, this is the golden age of the germ theory of disease. People have been figuring out that particular bacteria or viruses cause particular diseases, and that knowledge is helping them fight those diseases.It's there in Washington at this time that she meets a man who will become her husband, William Firth Wells.Carol Sutton Lewis: Just a quick aside—because we at Lost Women of Science are always interested in how you discover the material in addition to what you've discovered. How were you able to piece together her story? What sources were you able to find? It seems like there wasn't a lot of information available.Carl Zimmer: Yeah, it was a tough process. There is little information that's really easy to get your hands on. I mean, there is no biography of Mildred Wells or her husband, William Firth Wells.At the Rockefeller archives, they had maybe 30 document boxes full of stuff that was just miraculously conserved there. There are also letters that she wrote to people that have been saved in various collections.But especially with her early years, it's really tough. You know, in all my work trying to dig down for every single scrap of information I could find of her, I have only found one photograph of her—and it's the photograph in her yearbook. That’s it.Carol Sutton Lewis: You talked about that photograph in the book, and I was struck by your description of it. You say that she's smiling, but the longer you look at her smile, the sadder it becomes. What do you think at that young age was the source of the sadness?Carl Zimmer: I think that Mildred grew up with a lot of trauma. She was not the sort of person to keep long journals or write long letters about these sorts of things. But when you've come across those clues in these brief little newspaper accounts, you can kind of read between the lines.There are reports in newspapers saying that Mildred's mother had come to Austin to pay a visit to Mildred because she had scarlet fever when she was 10, and then she goes away again. And when I look at her face in her yearbook, it doesn't surprise me that there is this cast of melancholy to it because you just think about what she had gone through just as a kid.Carol Sutton Lewis: Oh. Absolutely. And fast forward, she meets William and they marry. They have a son, and they start collaborating. How did that begin?Carl Zimmer: The collaboration takes a while. So William Wells is also working at the Public Health Service at the time. He is a few years older than Mildred and he has been trained at MIT as what was called then a sanitarian. In other words, he was going to take the germ theory of disease and was going to save people's lives.He was very clever. He could invent tests that a sanitarian could use, dip a little tube into a river and see whether the water was safe or not, things like that. He was particularly focused on keeping water clean of bacteria that could cause diseases like typhoid or cholera and he also, gets assigned by the government to study oysters because oysters, they sit in this water and they're filtering all day long. And you know, if there's bacteria in there, they're going to filter it and trap it in their tissues. And oysters are incredibly popular in the early nineteen hundreds and a shocking number of people are keeling over dying of typhoid because they're eating them raw. So William is very busy, figuring out ways to save the oyster industry. How do we purify oysters and things like that? They meet, they get married in 1917.In 1918 they have a child, William Jr. nicknamed Bud. But William is not around for the birth, because he is drafted into the army, and he goes off to serve. in World War I.Carol Sutton Lewis: So Mildred is at home with Bud and William's off at the war. But ultimately, Mildred returns to science. A few years later, where she is hired as a polio detective. Can you tell me a little bit about what the state of polio knowledge was at the time and what precisely a polio detective did?Carl Zimmer: It doesn't seem like polio really was a thing in the United States until the late 1800s. And then suddenly there's this mysterious disease that can strike children with no warning. These kids can't. walk, or suddenly these kids are dying. Not only are the symptoms completely terrifying to parents, but how it spreads is a complete mystery. And so Mildred, seems to have been hired at some point in the late 1920s To basically put together everything that was known about polio to help doctors to deal with their patients and to, you know, encourage future science to try to figure out what is this disease.You know, Mildred wasn't trained in epidemiology. So it's kind of remarkable that she taught herself. And she would turn out to be a really great epidemiologist. But, in any case, She gets hired by the International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis, that was the name then for polio. And she does this incredible study, where she basically looks for everything that she can find about how polio spreads. Case studies where, in a town, like this child got polio, then this child did, and did they have contact and what sort of contact, what season was it? What was the weather like? All these different factors.And one thing that's really important to bear in mind is that, at this time, the prevailing view was that diseases spread by water, by food, by sex, by close contact. Maybe like someone just coughs and sprays droplets on you, but otherwise it's these other routes.The idea that it could spread through the air was really looked at as being just obsolete superstition. for thousands of years, people talked about miasmas, somehow the air mysteriously became corrupted and that made people sick with different diseases. That was all thrown out in the late 1800s, early 1900s when germ theory really takes hold. And so public health experts would say, look, a patient's breath is basically harmless.Carol Sutton Lewis: But Mildred doesn't agree, does she?Carl Zimmer: Well, Mildred Wells is looking at all of this, data and she is starting to get an idea that maybe these public health experts have been too quick to dismiss the air. So when people are talking about droplet infections in the 1920s, they're basically just talking about, big droplets that someone might just sneeze in your face. But the epidemiology looks to her like these germs are airborne, are spreading long distances through the air.So Mildred is starting to make a distinction in her mind about what she calls airborne and droplet infections. So, and this is really the time that the Wellses collectively are thinking about airborne infection and it's Mildred is doing it. And William actually gives her credit for this later on.Carol Sutton Lewis: Right. and her results are published in a book about polio written entirely by female authors, which is quite unusual for the time.Carl Zimmer: Mm hmm. Right. The book is published in 1932, and the reception just tells you so much about what it was like to be a woman in science. The New England Journal of Medicine reviews the book, which is great. But, here's a line that they give, they say, it is interesting to note that this book is entirely the product of women in medicine and is the first book.So far as a reviewer knows. by a number of authors, all of whom are of the female sex. So it's this: Oh, look at this oddity. And basically, the virtue of that is that women are really thorough, I, guess. so it's a very detailed book. And the reviewer writes, no one is better fitted than a woman to collect data such as this book contains. So there's no okay, this is very useful.Carol Sutton Lewis: PatronizeCarl Zimmer: Yeah. Thank you very much. Reviewers were just skating over the conclusions that they were drawing, I guess because they were women. Yeah, pretty incredible.Carol Sutton Lewis: So she is the first to submit scientific proof about this potential for airborne transmission. And that was pretty much dismissed. It wasn't even actively dismissed.It was just, nah, these women, nothing's coming outta that, except William did pay attention. I believe he too had been thinking about airborne transmission for some time and then started seriously looking at Mildred's conclusion when he started teaching at Harvard.Carl Zimmer: Yeah. So, William gets a job as a low level instructor at Harvard. He's getting paid very little. Mildred has no income. He's teaching about hygiene and sanitation, but apparently he's a terrible teacher. But he is a clever, brilliant engineer and scientist; he very quickly develops an idea that probably originated in the work that Mildred had been doing on polio. that maybe diseases actually can spread long distances through the air. So there are large droplets that we might sneeze out and cough out and, and they go a short distance before gravity pulls them down. But physics dictates that below a certain size, droplets can resist gravity.This is something that's going totally against what all the, the really prominent public health figures are saying. William Wells doesn't care. He goes ahead and he starts to, invent a way to sample air for germs. Basically it's a centrifuge. You plug it in, the fan spins, it sucks in air, the air comes up inside a glass cylinder and then as it's spinning, if there are any droplets of particles or anything floating in the air, they get flung out to the sideS.And so afterwards you just pull out the glass which is coated with, food for microbes to grow on and you put it in a nice warm place. And If there's anything in the air, you'll be able to grow a colony and see it.Carol Sutton Lewis: Amazing.Carl Zimmer: It is amazing. This, this was a crucial inventionCarol Sutton Lewis: So we have William, who is with Mildred's help moving more towards the possibility of airborne infection, understanding that this is very much not where science is at the moment, and he conducts a really interesting experiment in one of his classrooms to try to move the theory forward. We'll talk more about that experiment when we come back after the break.MidrollCarol Sutton Lewis: Welcome back to Lost Women of Science Conversations. We left off as the Wellses were about to conduct an experiment to test their theories about airborne infections. Carl, can you tell us about that experiment?Carl Zimmer: Okay. it's 1934, It's a cold day. Students come in for a lecture from this terrible teacher, William Wells. The windows are closed. The doors are closed. It's a poorly ventilated room. About 20 minutes before the end of the class, he takes this weird device that's next to him, he plugs it into the wall, and then he just goes back and keeps lecturing.It's not clear whether he even told them what he was doing. But, he then takes this little pinch of sneezing powder. out of a jar and holds it in the sort of outflow from the fan inside the air centrifuge. So all of a sudden, poof, the sneezing powder just goes off into the air. You know, there are probably about a couple dozen students scattered around this lecture hall and after a while they start to sneeze. And in fact, people All the way in the [00:16:00] back are sneezing too.So now Wells turns off his machine, puts in a new cylinder, turns it on, keeps talking. The thing is that they are actually sneezing out droplets into the air.And some of those droplets contain harmless bacteria from their mouths. And he harvests them from the air. He actually collects them in his centrifuge. And after a few days, he's got colonies of these bacteria, but only after he had released the sneezing powder, the one before that didn't have any.So, you have this demonstration that William Wells could catch germs in the air that had been released from his students at quite a distance away, And other people can inhale them, and not even realize what's happening. In other words, germs were spreading like smoke. And so this becomes an explanation for what Mildred had been seeing in her epidemiology..Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. That was pretty revolutionary. But how was it received?Carl Zimmer: Well, you know, At first it was received, With great fanfare, and he starts publishing papers in nineteen thirty he and Mildred are coauthors on these. And, Mildred is actually appointed as a research associate at Harvard, in nineteen thirty it's a nice title, but she doesn't get paid anything. And then William makes another discovery, which is also very important.He's thinking okay, if these things are floating in the air, is there a way that I can disinfect the air? And he tries all sorts of things and he discovers ultraviolet light works really well. In fact, you can just put an ultraviolet light in a room and the droplets will circulate around and as they pass through the ultraviolet rays, it kills the bacteria or viruses inside of them. So in 1936, when he's publishing these results, there are so many headlines in newspapers and magazines and stuff about this discovery.There's one headline that says, scientists fight flu germs with violet ray. And, there are these predictions that, we are going to be safe from these terrible diseases. Like for example, influenza, which had just, devastated the world not long beforehand, because you're going to put ultraviolet lights in trains and schools and trolleys and movie theaters.Carol Sutton Lewis: Did Mildred get any public recognition for her contributions to all of this?Carl Zimmer: Well not surprisingly, William gets the lion's share of the attention. I mean, there's a passing reference to Mildred in one article. The Associated Press says chief among his aides, Wells said, was his wife, Dr. Mildred Wells. So, William was perfectly comfortable, acknowledging her, but the reporters. Didn't care,Carol Sutton Lewis: And there were no pictures of herCarl Zimmer: Right. Mildred wasn't the engineer in that couple, but she was doing all the research on epidemiology. And you can tell from comments that people made about, and Mildred Wells is that. William would be nowhere as a scientist without Mildred. She was the one who kept him from jumping ahead to wild conclusions from the data he had so far. So they were, they're very much a team. She was doing the writing and they were collaborating, they were arguing with each other all the time about it And she was a much better writer than he was., but that wasn't suitable for a picture, so she was invisible.Carol Sutton Lewis: In the book, you write a lot about their difficult personalities and how that impacted their reputations within the wider scientific community. Can you say more about that?Carl Zimmer: Right. They really had a reputation as being really hard to deal with. People would politely call them peculiar. And when they weren't being quite so polite, they would talk about all these arguments that they would get in, shouting matches and so on. They really felt that they had discovered something incredibly important, but they were outsiders, you know, they didn't have PhDs, they didn't have really much formal training. And here they were saying that, you know, the consensus about infectious disease is profoundly wrong.Now, ironically, what happened is that once William Wells showed that ultraviolet light could kill germs, his superior at Harvard abruptly took an intense interest in all of this and said, Okay, you're going to share a patent on this with me. My name's going to be on the patent and all the research from now on is going to happen in my lab. I'm going to have complete control over what happens next. And Mildred took the lead saying no way we want total autonomy, get out of our face. She was much more aggressive in university politics, and sort of protecting their turf. And unfortunately they didn't have many allies at Harvard and pretty soon they were out, they were fired. And William Wells and his boss, Gordon Fair, were both named on a patent that was filed for using ultraviolet lamps to disinfect the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: So what happened when they left Harvard?Carl Zimmer: Well, it's really interesting watching them scrambling to find work, because their reputation had preceded them. They were hoping they could go back to Washington DC to the public health service. But, the story about the Wells was that Mildred, was carrying out a lot of the research, and so they thought, we can't hire William if it's his wife, who's quietly doing a lot of the work, like they, for some reason they didn't think, oh, we could hire them both.Carol Sutton Lewis: Or just her.Carl Zimmer: None of that, they were like, do we hire William Wells? His wife apparently hauls a lot of the weight. So no, we won't hire them. It's literally like written down. It’s, I'm not making it up. And fortunately they had a few defenders, a few champions down in Philadelphia.There was a doctor in Philadelphia who was using ultraviolet light to protect children in hospitals. And he was, really, inspired by the Wellses and he knew they were trouble. He wrote yes, I get it. They're difficult, but let's try to get them here.And so they brought them down to Philadelphia and Mildred. And William, opened up the laboratories for airborne infection at the University of Pennsylvania. And now actually Mildred got paid, for the first time, for this work. So they're both getting paid, things are starting to look betterCarol Sutton Lewis: So they start to do amazing work at the University of Pennsylvania.Carl Zimmer: That's right. That's right. William, takes the next step in proving their theory. He figures out how to actually give animals diseases through the air. He builds a machine that gets to be known as the infection machine. a big bell jar, and you can put mice in there, or a rabbit in there, and there's a tube connected to it.And through that tube, William can create a very fine mist that might have influenza viruses in it, or the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. And the animals just sit there and breathe, and lo and behold, They get tuberculosis, they get influenza, they get all these diseases,Now, meanwhile, Mildred is actually spending a lot of her time at a school nearby the Germantown Friends School, where they have installed ultraviolet lamps in some of the classrooms. And they're convinced that they can protect kids from airborne diseases. The biggest demonstration of what these lamps can do comes in 1940, because there's a huge epidemic of measles. In 1940, there's, no vaccine for measles. Every kid basically gets it.And lo and behold, the kids in the classrooms with the ultraviolet lamps are 10 times less likely to get measles than the kids just down the hall in the regular classrooms. And so this is one of the best experiments ever done on the nature of airborne infection and how you can protect people by disinfecting the air.Carol Sutton Lewis: Were they then finally accepted into the scientific community?Carl Zimmer: I know you keep waiting for that, that victory lap, but no. It's just like time and again, that glory gets snatched away from them. Again, this was not anything that was done in secret. Newspapers around Philadelphia were. Celebrating this wow, look at this, look at how we can protect our children from disease. This is fantastic. But other experts, public health authorities just were not budging. they had all taken in this dogma that the air can't be dangerous.And so again and again, they were hitting a brick wall. This is right on the eve of World War II.And so all sorts of scientists in World War II are asking themselves, what can we do? Mildred and William put themselves forward and say we don't want soldiers to get sick with the flu the way they did in World War I. They're both haunted by this and they're thinking, so we could put our ultraviolet lamps in the barracks, we could protect them. Soldiers from the flu, if the flu is airborne, like we think, not only that, but this could help to really convince all those skepticsCarol Sutton Lewis: mm.Carl Zimmer: But they failed. The army put all their money into other experiments, they were blackballed, they were shut out, and again, I think it was just because they were continuing to be just incredibly difficult. Even patrons and their friends would just sigh to each other, like, Oh my God, I've just had to deal with these, with them arguing with us and yelling at us. And by the end of World War II, things are bad, they have some sort of split up, they never get divorced, but it's just too much. Mildred, like she is not only trying to do this pioneering work in these schools, trying to keep William's labs organized, there's the matter of their son. Now looking at some documents, I would hazard a guess that he had schizophrenia because he was examined by a doctor who came to that conclusion.And so, she's under incredible pressure and eventually she cracks and in 1944 she resigns from the lab. She stops working in the schools, she stops collaborating with her husband, but she keeps doing her own science. And that's really amazing to me. What kinds of things did she do after this breakup? What kind of work did she conduct? And how was that received?Mildred goes on on her own to carry out a gigantic experiment, in hindsight, a really visionary piece of work. It's based on her experience in Philadelphia. Because she could see that the ultraviolet lamps worked very well at protecting children during a really intense measles epidemic. And so she thought to herself, if you want to really make ultraviolet light, and the theory of airborne infection live up to its true potential to protect people. You need to protect the air in a lot more places.So she gets introduced to the health commissioner in Westchester County, this is a county just north of New York City. And she pitches him this idea. She says, I want to go into one of your towns and I want to put ultraviolet lights everywhere. And this guy, William Holla, he is a very bold, flamboyant guy. He's the right guy to ask. He's like, yeah, let's do this. And he leaves it up to her to design the experiment.And so this town Pleasantville in New York gets fitted out with ultraviolet lamps in the train station, in the fountain shops, in the movie theater, in churches, all over the place. And she publishes a paper with Holla in 1950 on the results.The results are mixed though. You look carefully at them, you can see that actually, yeah, the lamps worked in certain respects. So certain diseases, the rates were lower in certain places, but sadly, this incredibly ambitious study really didn't move the needle. And yeah, it was a big disappointment and that was the last science that Mildred did.Carol Sutton Lewis: Even when they were working together, Mildred and William never really succeeded in convincing the scientific community to take airborne infection seriously, although their work obviously did move the science forward. So what did sway scientific opinion and when?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, Mildred dies in 1957. William dies in 1963. After the Wellses are dead, their work is dismissed and they themselves are quite forgotten. It really isn't until the early 2000s that a few people rediscover them.The SARS epidemic kicks up in 2003, for example, and I talked to a scientist in Hong Kong named Yuguo Li, and he was trying to understand how was this new disease spreading around? He's looking around and he finds references to papers by William Wells and Mildred Wells. He has no idea who they are and he sees that William Wells had published a book in 1955 and he's like, well, okay, maybe I need to go read the book.Nobody has the book. And the only place that he could find it was in one university in the United States. They photocopied it and shipped it to him in Hong Kong and he finally starts reading it. And it's really hard to read because again William was a terrible writer, unlike Mildred. But after a while it clicks and he's like, oh. That's it. I got it. But again, all the guidelines for controlling pandemics and diseases do not really give much serious attention to airborne infection except for just a couple diseases. And it's not until the COVID pandemic that things finally change.Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. If we had listened to Mildred and William earlier, what might have been different?Carl Zimmer: Yeah, I do try to imagine a world in which Mildred and William had been taken seriously by more people. If airborne infection was just a seriously recognized thing at the start of the COVID pandemic, we would have been controlling the disease differently from the start. We wouldn't have been wiping down our shopping bags obsessively. People would have been encouraged to open the windows, people would have been encouraged to get air purifiers, ultraviolet lamps might have been installed in places with poor ventilation, masks might not have been so controversial.And instead these intellectual grandchildren of William and Mildred Wells had to reinvent the wheel. They had to do new studies to persuade people finally that a disease could be airborne. And it took a long time. It took months to finally move the needle.Carol Sutton Lewis: Carl, what do you hope people will take away from Mildred's story, which you have so wonderfully detailed in your book, rendering her no longer a lost woman of science? And what do you hope people will take away from the book more broadly?Carl Zimmer: I think sometimes that we imagine that science just marches on smoothly and effortlessly. But science is a human endeavor in all the good ways and in all the not-so-good ways. Science does have a fair amount of tragedy throughout it, as any human endeavor does. I'm sad about what happened to the Wells by the end of their lives, both of them. But in some ways, things are better now.When I'm writing about aerobiology in the early, mid, even late—except for Mildred, it's pretty much all men. But who were the people during the COVID pandemic who led the fight to get recognized as airborne? People like Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, Kim Prather at University of California, San Diego, Lidia Morawska, an Australian researcher. Now, all women in science still have to contend with all sorts of sexism and sort of baked-in inequalities. But it is striking to me that when you get to the end of the book, the women show up.Carol Sutton Lewis: Well,Carl Zimmer: And they show up in force.Carol Sutton Lewis: And on that very positive note to end on, Carl, thank you so much, first and foremost, for writing this really fascinating book and within it, highlighting a now no longer lost woman of science, Mildred Weeks Wells. Your book is Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, and it's been a pleasure to speak with—Carl Zimmer: Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed talking about Mildred.Carol Sutton Lewis: This has been Lost Women of Science Conversations. Carl Zimmer's book Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe is out now. This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Our producer was Luca Evans, and Hansdale Hsu was our sound engineer. Special thanks to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger, our program manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Katie Hafner and Amy Scharf.Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, Scientific American. The episode art was created by Lily Whear and Lizzie Younan composes our music. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We're distributed by PRX.If you've enjoyed this conversation, go to our website lostwomenofscience.org and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode—that's lostwomenofscience.org. And please share it and give us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, and please don't forget to click on the donate button—that helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists.I'm Carol Sutton Lewis. See you next time.HostCarol Sutton LewisProducerLuca EvansGuest Carl ZimmerCarl Zimmer writes the Origins column for the New York Times and has frequently contributed to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Time, and Scientific American. His journalism has earned numerous awards, including ones from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering. He is the author of fourteen books about science, including Life's Edge.Further Reading:Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Carl Zimmer. Dutton, 2025Poliomyelitis. International Committee for the Study of Infantile Paralysis. Williams & Wilkins Company, 1932 “Air-borne Infection,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 21; November 21, 1936“Air-borne Infection: Sanitary Control,” by William Firth Wells and Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 107, No. 22; November 28, 1936“Ventilation in the Spread of Chickenpox and Measles within School Rooms,” by Mildred Weeks Wells, in JAMA, Vol. 129, No. 3; September 15, 1945“The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill,” by Megan Molteni, in Wired. Published online May 13, 2021WATCH THIS NEXTScience journalist Carl Zimmer joins host Rachel Feltman to look back at the history of the field, from ancient Greek “miasmas” to Louis Pasteur’s unorthodox experiments to biological warfare.
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  • Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle

    The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real, lauded novelist — but “Nightshade Market,” “a riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy,” isn’t one of her works. Rebecca Makkai, a Chicago local, is credited for a fake book called “Boiling Point” that the article claims is about a climate scientist whose teenage daughter turns on her.In a post on Bluesky, the Sun-Times said it was “looking into how this made it into print,” noting that it wasn’t editorial content and wasn’t created or approved by the newsroom. Victor Lim, senior director of audience development, added in an email to The Verge that “it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate,” saying more information will be provided soon. It’s not clear if the content is sponsored — the cover page for the section bears the Sun-Times logo and simply calls it “Your guide to the best of summer.”The book list appears without a byline, but a writer named Marco Buscaglia is credited for other pieces in the summer guide. Buscaglia’s byline appears on a story about hammock culture in the US that quotes several experts and publications, some of whom do not appear to be real. It references a 2023 Outside magazine article by Brianna Madia, a real author and blogger, that I was unable to find. The piece also cites an “outdoor industry market analysis” by Eagles Nest Outfitters that I was unable to find online. Also quoted is “Dr. Jennifer Campos, professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado,” who does not appear to exist. Buscaglia did not immediately respond to a request for comment but admitted to 404 Media that he uses AI “for background at times” and always checks the material. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he told 404. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”Another uncredited article titled “Summer food trends” features similar seemingly nonexistent experts, including a “Dr. Catherine Furst, food anthropologist at Cornell University.” Padma Lakshmi is also attributed in the piece for a quote she doesn’t appear to have said.News outlets have repeatedly run AI-generated content next to their actual journalism, often blaming the issue on third-party content creators. High-profile incidents of AI-generated content at Gannett and Sports Illustrated raised questions about the editorial process, and in both cases, a third-party marketing firm was behind the AI sludge. Newsrooms’ defense is typically that they had nothing to do with the content — but the appearance of AI-generated work alongside real reporting and writing by human staffers damages trust all the same. See More:
    #chicago #suntimes #publishes #madeup #books
    Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle
    The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real, lauded novelist — but “Nightshade Market,” “a riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy,” isn’t one of her works. Rebecca Makkai, a Chicago local, is credited for a fake book called “Boiling Point” that the article claims is about a climate scientist whose teenage daughter turns on her.In a post on Bluesky, the Sun-Times said it was “looking into how this made it into print,” noting that it wasn’t editorial content and wasn’t created or approved by the newsroom. Victor Lim, senior director of audience development, added in an email to The Verge that “it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate,” saying more information will be provided soon. It’s not clear if the content is sponsored — the cover page for the section bears the Sun-Times logo and simply calls it “Your guide to the best of summer.”The book list appears without a byline, but a writer named Marco Buscaglia is credited for other pieces in the summer guide. Buscaglia’s byline appears on a story about hammock culture in the US that quotes several experts and publications, some of whom do not appear to be real. It references a 2023 Outside magazine article by Brianna Madia, a real author and blogger, that I was unable to find. The piece also cites an “outdoor industry market analysis” by Eagles Nest Outfitters that I was unable to find online. Also quoted is “Dr. Jennifer Campos, professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado,” who does not appear to exist. Buscaglia did not immediately respond to a request for comment but admitted to 404 Media that he uses AI “for background at times” and always checks the material. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he told 404. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”Another uncredited article titled “Summer food trends” features similar seemingly nonexistent experts, including a “Dr. Catherine Furst, food anthropologist at Cornell University.” Padma Lakshmi is also attributed in the piece for a quote she doesn’t appear to have said.News outlets have repeatedly run AI-generated content next to their actual journalism, often blaming the issue on third-party content creators. High-profile incidents of AI-generated content at Gannett and Sports Illustrated raised questions about the editorial process, and in both cases, a third-party marketing firm was behind the AI sludge. Newsrooms’ defense is typically that they had nothing to do with the content — but the appearance of AI-generated work alongside real reporting and writing by human staffers damages trust all the same. See More: #chicago #suntimes #publishes #madeup #books
    WWW.THEVERGE.COM
    Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle
    The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.Alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, a summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real, lauded novelist — but “Nightshade Market,” “a riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy,” isn’t one of her works. Rebecca Makkai, a Chicago local, is credited for a fake book called “Boiling Point” that the article claims is about a climate scientist whose teenage daughter turns on her.In a post on Bluesky, the Sun-Times said it was “looking into how this made it into print,” noting that it wasn’t editorial content and wasn’t created or approved by the newsroom. Victor Lim, senior director of audience development, added in an email to The Verge that “it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate,” saying more information will be provided soon. It’s not clear if the content is sponsored — the cover page for the section bears the Sun-Times logo and simply calls it “Your guide to the best of summer.”The book list appears without a byline, but a writer named Marco Buscaglia is credited for other pieces in the summer guide. Buscaglia’s byline appears on a story about hammock culture in the US that quotes several experts and publications, some of whom do not appear to be real. It references a 2023 Outside magazine article by Brianna Madia, a real author and blogger, that I was unable to find. The piece also cites an “outdoor industry market analysis” by Eagles Nest Outfitters that I was unable to find online. Also quoted is “Dr. Jennifer Campos, professor of leisure studies at the University of Colorado,” who does not appear to exist. Buscaglia did not immediately respond to a request for comment but admitted to 404 Media that he uses AI “for background at times” and always checks the material. “This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” he told 404. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”Another uncredited article titled “Summer food trends” features similar seemingly nonexistent experts, including a “Dr. Catherine Furst, food anthropologist at Cornell University.” Padma Lakshmi is also attributed in the piece for a quote she doesn’t appear to have said.News outlets have repeatedly run AI-generated content next to their actual journalism, often blaming the issue on third-party content creators. High-profile incidents of AI-generated content at Gannett and Sports Illustrated raised questions about the editorial process, and in both cases, a third-party marketing firm was behind the AI sludge. Newsrooms’ defense is typically that they had nothing to do with the content — but the appearance of AI-generated work alongside real reporting and writing by human staffers damages trust all the same. See More:
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  • Moxon Architects completes composite timber bridge in Germany

    Source: Simon Kennedy
    Moxon Architects and engineering practice Ingenieurbüro Miebach have completed a new timber and concrete pedestrian bridge for the town of Baiersbronn in southern Germany. The project seeks to strengthen connections within the town centre and forms part of a garden show, a regional event that spans 8km between Baiersbronn and neighbouring Freudenstadt.
    The Baiersbronn Bridge is designed to provide pedestrian and cycle access across the Murg River, as well as allowing occasional vehicular traffic. The structure reuses the abutments of a previous crossing, which had fallen into disrepair, helping to reduce costs and limit the overall carbon footprint.
    Ben Addy, founding director of Moxon Architects, described the bridge as “an expression of creative symbioses: the interdependence of timber and concrete; of site and geometry; and a process of continual innovation with our partners IB Miebach.”
    The 25-metre-long bridge is constructed using block laminated timber beams with a stepped bottom edge. The beams were manufactured off-site and transported to site where they were used as permanent formwork for an in-situ concrete deck. This composite approach aims to combine the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of timber.
    Ezra Groskin, director at Moxon Architects, said: “Everything falls into place with this design. It is a story of two materials: the way they behave and interact structurally, functionally and formally.”

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    Source: Simon Kennedy

    1/7
    show caption

    The glulam beams lean outward to reduce exposure to wind-driven rain, with edge detailing and the concrete deck intended to protect the timber from the elements.
    The scheme follows the 2022 completion of Balingen Footbridge and is Moxon Architects’ second bridge in collaboration with timber specialist IB Miebach. The Baiersbronn Bridge was the result of an invited design competition launched in 2021.
    Frank Miebach, director of IB Miebach, said: “Wood can do even more - this is just the beginning.”
    >> Also read: Moxon completes ‘hockey stick’ bridge crossing the River Severn
    >> Also read: New images of Acme’s £1bn Liverpool Street station plans as City publishes planning application

    Project team:
    Client: Gemeinde Baiersbronn
    Architect: Moxon Architects
    Engineer: Ingenieurbüro Miebach
    Main contractor: Rendler Bau GmbH
    Timber works: Schaffitzel Holzindustrie GmbH 
    #moxon #architects #completes #composite #timber
    Moxon Architects completes composite timber bridge in Germany
    Source: Simon Kennedy Moxon Architects and engineering practice Ingenieurbüro Miebach have completed a new timber and concrete pedestrian bridge for the town of Baiersbronn in southern Germany. The project seeks to strengthen connections within the town centre and forms part of a garden show, a regional event that spans 8km between Baiersbronn and neighbouring Freudenstadt. The Baiersbronn Bridge is designed to provide pedestrian and cycle access across the Murg River, as well as allowing occasional vehicular traffic. The structure reuses the abutments of a previous crossing, which had fallen into disrepair, helping to reduce costs and limit the overall carbon footprint. Ben Addy, founding director of Moxon Architects, described the bridge as “an expression of creative symbioses: the interdependence of timber and concrete; of site and geometry; and a process of continual innovation with our partners IB Miebach.” The 25-metre-long bridge is constructed using block laminated timber beams with a stepped bottom edge. The beams were manufactured off-site and transported to site where they were used as permanent formwork for an in-situ concrete deck. This composite approach aims to combine the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of timber. Ezra Groskin, director at Moxon Architects, said: “Everything falls into place with this design. It is a story of two materials: the way they behave and interact structurally, functionally and formally.” Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy 1/7 show caption The glulam beams lean outward to reduce exposure to wind-driven rain, with edge detailing and the concrete deck intended to protect the timber from the elements. The scheme follows the 2022 completion of Balingen Footbridge and is Moxon Architects’ second bridge in collaboration with timber specialist IB Miebach. The Baiersbronn Bridge was the result of an invited design competition launched in 2021. Frank Miebach, director of IB Miebach, said: “Wood can do even more - this is just the beginning.” >> Also read: Moxon completes ‘hockey stick’ bridge crossing the River Severn >> Also read: New images of Acme’s £1bn Liverpool Street station plans as City publishes planning application Project team: Client: Gemeinde Baiersbronn Architect: Moxon Architects Engineer: Ingenieurbüro Miebach Main contractor: Rendler Bau GmbH Timber works: Schaffitzel Holzindustrie GmbH  #moxon #architects #completes #composite #timber
    WWW.BDONLINE.CO.UK
    Moxon Architects completes composite timber bridge in Germany
    Source: Simon Kennedy Moxon Architects and engineering practice Ingenieurbüro Miebach have completed a new timber and concrete pedestrian bridge for the town of Baiersbronn in southern Germany. The project seeks to strengthen connections within the town centre and forms part of a garden show, a regional event that spans 8km between Baiersbronn and neighbouring Freudenstadt. The Baiersbronn Bridge is designed to provide pedestrian and cycle access across the Murg River, as well as allowing occasional vehicular traffic. The structure reuses the abutments of a previous crossing, which had fallen into disrepair, helping to reduce costs and limit the overall carbon footprint. Ben Addy, founding director of Moxon Architects, described the bridge as “an expression of creative symbioses: the interdependence of timber and concrete; of site and geometry; and a process of continual innovation with our partners IB Miebach.” The 25-metre-long bridge is constructed using block laminated timber beams with a stepped bottom edge. The beams were manufactured off-site and transported to site where they were used as permanent formwork for an in-situ concrete deck. This composite approach aims to combine the compressive strength of concrete with the tensile strength of timber. Ezra Groskin, director at Moxon Architects, said: “Everything falls into place with this design. It is a story of two materials: the way they behave and interact structurally, functionally and formally.” Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy Source: Simon Kennedy 1/7 show caption The glulam beams lean outward to reduce exposure to wind-driven rain, with edge detailing and the concrete deck intended to protect the timber from the elements. The scheme follows the 2022 completion of Balingen Footbridge and is Moxon Architects’ second bridge in collaboration with timber specialist IB Miebach. The Baiersbronn Bridge was the result of an invited design competition launched in 2021. Frank Miebach, director of IB Miebach, said: “Wood can do even more - this is just the beginning.” >> Also read: Moxon completes ‘hockey stick’ bridge crossing the River Severn >> Also read: New images of Acme’s £1bn Liverpool Street station plans as City publishes planning application Project team: Client: Gemeinde Baiersbronn Architect: Moxon Architects Engineer: Ingenieurbüro Miebach Main contractor: Rendler Bau GmbH Timber works: Schaffitzel Holzindustrie GmbH 
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  • Trump signs bill criminalizing revenge porn and explicit deepfakes

    President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act on Monday, a bipartisan law that enacts stricter penalties for distributing nonconsensual explicit images, including deepfakes and revenge porn. 
    The bill criminalizes the publication of such images, whether they’re authentic or AI-generated. Whoever publishes the photos or videos can face criminal penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and restitution. 
    Under the new law, social media companies and online platforms must remove such material within 48 hours of notice from the victim. The platforms also have to take steps to delete duplicate content. 
    Many states have already banned sexually explicit deepfakes and revenge porn, but this will be the first time federal regulators step in to impose restrictions on internet companies. 
    First Lady Melania Trump lobbied for the bill, which was sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruzand Amy Klobuchar. Cruz said he was inspired to act after hearing that Snapchat refused for nearly a year to remove an AI-generated deepfake of a 14-year-old girl. 
    Free speech advocates and digital rights groups have raised concerns, saying the law is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, like legal pornography, as well as government critics.
    #trump #signs #bill #criminalizing #revenge
    Trump signs bill criminalizing revenge porn and explicit deepfakes
    President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act on Monday, a bipartisan law that enacts stricter penalties for distributing nonconsensual explicit images, including deepfakes and revenge porn.  The bill criminalizes the publication of such images, whether they’re authentic or AI-generated. Whoever publishes the photos or videos can face criminal penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and restitution.  Under the new law, social media companies and online platforms must remove such material within 48 hours of notice from the victim. The platforms also have to take steps to delete duplicate content.  Many states have already banned sexually explicit deepfakes and revenge porn, but this will be the first time federal regulators step in to impose restrictions on internet companies.  First Lady Melania Trump lobbied for the bill, which was sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruzand Amy Klobuchar. Cruz said he was inspired to act after hearing that Snapchat refused for nearly a year to remove an AI-generated deepfake of a 14-year-old girl.  Free speech advocates and digital rights groups have raised concerns, saying the law is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, like legal pornography, as well as government critics. #trump #signs #bill #criminalizing #revenge
    TECHCRUNCH.COM
    Trump signs bill criminalizing revenge porn and explicit deepfakes
    President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act on Monday, a bipartisan law that enacts stricter penalties for distributing nonconsensual explicit images, including deepfakes and revenge porn.  The bill criminalizes the publication of such images, whether they’re authentic or AI-generated. Whoever publishes the photos or videos can face criminal penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and restitution.  Under the new law, social media companies and online platforms must remove such material within 48 hours of notice from the victim. The platforms also have to take steps to delete duplicate content.  Many states have already banned sexually explicit deepfakes and revenge porn, but this will be the first time federal regulators step in to impose restrictions on internet companies.  First Lady Melania Trump lobbied for the bill, which was sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). Cruz said he was inspired to act after hearing that Snapchat refused for nearly a year to remove an AI-generated deepfake of a 14-year-old girl.  Free speech advocates and digital rights groups have raised concerns, saying the law is too broad and could lead to censorship of legitimate images, like legal pornography, as well as government critics.
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