Inked?

It's Free for All Friday!

It’s Free for ALL Friday!

Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (100% legal) hocus-pocus.

This week, I added a poll at the end, I’m curious how my readers will react to the last item.

Photo by Seyi Ariyo on Unsplash

Haley Joel Osment Sees Contentment

Twenty-five years after breaking through in the smash “Sixth Sense,” the actor has worked steadily, finding a balance that has eluded some child stars.

Haley Joel Osment’s childhood memories are not like other people’s. He remembers the kindness with which Tom Hanks treated him, when he was 5 and playing Hanks’s son in “Forrest Gump.” And the time Russell Crowe adjusted his bow tie at an awards show when Osment, not yet 12, was Oscar-nominated for his breakout performance in “The Sixth Sense.” The in-depth conversations he had with Steven Spielberg about the future as they were filming “A.I.” that same year.

Osment is now 36; he has been a working actor for nearly nine-tenths of his life, in drama, comedy, fantasy, animation, period pieces, video games and oddball stuff. He has enough credits that when a cast was made of his arm for the Amazon superhero series “The Boys,” he was able to use it again, seasons later, to beat someone in the FX vampire satire “What We Do in the Shadows.”

“I feel like that’s sort of a symbol of a lot of what my career has been,” he said. “I’ve been around for long enough to where I’ve got some arms in storage, if we need to use them."

Link: The New York Times

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Those Online Accounts You No Longer Use? For Your Own Safety, Get Rid of Them

You may have forgotten about these ‘zombie’ accounts, but their servers haven’t—leaving your information vulnerable to hackers.

Remember the Myspace page you crafted in 2005? Or the Tumblr blog from 2009? What about the Ticketmaster account you created to go to that concert four years ago?

Most of us have online accounts we no longer use but that still exist—zombies that live on long after we need them. We may forget about them, but these accounts pose a risk. They make us more vulnerable to criminals who want to steal the personal data stored there, from our passwords to our contact information to even our credit-card numbers.

The danger might be greatest for those who tend to use the same logins on multiple sites, experts say. That’s because hackers who breach a service with little or no valuable information—say, an old photos app with a handful of cat pictures—could apply your credentials on more-important sites, such as your bank’s. Indeed, a 2021 study by MIT unearthed a cache of stolen data for sale on the dark web that included more than three billion usernames, many paired with passwords.

Here is a strategy to find and delete zombie accounts.

Link: WSJ

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AI Cheating Is Getting Worse

Colleges still don’t have a plan.

Kyle jensen, the director of Arizona State University’s writing programs, is gearing up for the fall semester. The responsibility is enormous: Each year, 23,000 students take writing courses under his oversight. The teachers’ work is even harder today than it was a few years ago, thanks to AI tools that can generate competent college papers in a matter of seconds.

A mere week after ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, The Atlantic declared that “The College Essay Is Dead.” Two school years later, Jensen is done with mourning and ready to move on. The tall, affable English professor co-runs a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded project on generative-AI literacy for humanities instructors, and he has been incorporating large language models into ASU’s English courses. Jensen is one of a new breed of faculty who want to embrace generative AI even as they also seek to control its temptations. He believes strongly in the value of traditional writing but also in the potential of AI to facilitate education in a new way—in ASU’s case, one that improves access to higher education.

But his vision must overcome a stark reality on college campuses. The first year of AI college ended in ruin, as students tested the technology’s limits and faculty were caught off guard. Cheating was widespread.

Faculty asked their students not to use AI, or at least to say so when they did, and hoped that might be enough. It wasn’t.

Link: The Atlantic

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Dodge City

A Chinese businessman persuaded officials to establish a special economic zone in a remote part of Laos. The gamblers arrived first. Then came the drug runners and human traffickers.

The Golden Triangle, the mountainous region where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet, is wild and remote, distant in every sense of the word from the centers of all three countries. Away from the few towns, settlement gives way to small plantations of coffee and bananas and then to thick, steeply graded forest. The main thoroughfare is the Mekong, the silty river that runs from the Tibetan Plateau across Indochina all the way to tropical southern Vietnam.

It’s startling, then, to descend a winding road from the highlands and suddenly see skyscrapers, shopping areas, a casino and an artificial lake, dropped as though by magic onto the Laotian side of the river. Just down the bank, cranes hover over another crop of towers that are advancing toward completion. After dark, thumping electronic beats from buildings illuminated with dancing spotlights and neon accents can be heard across the Mekong in Thailand.

This is the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone, a vast development project founded by a Chinese businessman named Zhao Wei.

Behind the glassy facades, however, more is going on. The GTSEZ operates as a self-governed enclave, and for the better part of a decade investigators have warned that it’s a hub for criminal activity of every description—a legal no-man’s land.

Link: Bloomberg

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Big Banks Watched as Con Men Wiped Out a Widow’s Life Savings

Financial frauds are exploding across the country as criminals target the record wealth controlled by elderly Americans.

Across the Hudson River Valley, the trees were turning yellow and red when 83-year-old Annette Manes began showing up at JPMorgan Chase & Co. branches, draining them of cash.

Her first try failed. The widowed social worker entered the bank’s brick building in the college town of New Paltz and asked to withdraw $39,000 in $100 bills — more than the tellers could scrape together. Over a week, she returned to Chase a few more times, taking a total of $169,000 out of her account. It was barely the start.

Nine months later, her son, Peter, was in Singapore for a medical conference, bleary-eyed from jet lag. The Yale University physician was heading to his hotel room after dinner when he glanced at his phone and saw an urgent message from adult protective services.

That’s how Peter learned that his mother, who had raised him alone, had quietly socked away enough money to become a multimillionaire — and that con artists impersonating JPMorgan’s fraud department and US agents had tricked her into handing them about $1.4 million. They also saddled her with six figures of credit-card debt and a crushing tax liability. Now 85, her nest egg is gone.

Frauds like these are exploding across the country as criminals target the record wealth controlled by elderly Americans.

It’s raising a burning question: How should a bank react if a customer’s behavior abruptly changes and their money starts whooshing out the door in a series of withdrawals, wire transfers and lavish international spending sprees?

Link: Bloomberg

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Yoga for the Brain: It May Sharpen Your Mind, and Protect Against Cognitive Decline

Yoga provides physical and mental health benefits through four main components: breathing, physical relaxation, mindfulness meditation and postures.

Yoga has long been associated with better physical flexibility and health, and now it is being linked to improved cognition as well, according to growing research.

A recent study also suggests that yoga may benefit some older people at risk for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

The holistic mind-body practice of yoga provides physical and mental health benefits through four main components: breathing, physical relaxation, mindfulness meditation and postures.

Together, they make up a “smorgasbord” that allows people to reap benefits and gravitate to what speaks to them the most, said Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and editor in chief of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. “It’s about optimizing your functioning and performance as a human being on all levels,” Khalsa said.

Link: The Washington Post (Please let me know if you have trouble with this link. I think I’ve fixed the problem but there’s only one way to know for sure!)

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The Price of Getting Inked

Whether it’s the expense of getting tattooed or the cost to have one removed, Americans are paying for their ink.

Once considered countercultural — something for sailors and misfits — tattoos are now culturally ubiquitous: Nearly one-third of American adults have at least one, according to a survey by Pew Research.

And business is booming like never before. The global tattoo market, which currently brings in about $2.2 billion, is expected to grow to more than $4 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights, a market research firm. There are over 20,000 tattoo parlors in the United States. Kari Barba, 64, is a tattoo artist and the owner of Outer Limits, which has two locations in California. She opened her first shop in 1983.

Even with an uptick in business, the artists themselves don’t always benefit. “When I first opened, people didn’t open a shop within about 30 miles of each other, out of respect to other tattoo artists,” Ms. Barba said. “Now, the closest shops are about three blocks away. A lot of seasoned artists struggle at this point because there’s so many tattoo artists."

Link: The New York Times

(Plus a poll below, feel free to vote and/or leave a comment!)