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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented." The paper, titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans, concluded that Monsanto's glyphosate-based weed killers posed no health risks to humans -- no cancer risks, no reproductive risks, no adverse effects on development of endocrine systems in people or animals. Regulators around the world have cited the paper as evidence of the safety of glyphosate herbicides, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in this assessment (PDF). [...] In explaining the decision to retract the 25-year-old research paper, Van den Berg wrote: "Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors." He noted that the paper's conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate were solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, ignoring other outside, published research. "The retraction of this study is a long time coming," said Brent Wisner, one of the lead lawyers in the Roundup litigation and a key player in getting the internal documents revealed to the public. Wisner said the study was the "quintessential example of how companies like Monsanto could fundamentally undermine the peer-review process through ghostwriting, cherrypicking unpublished studies, and biased interpretations." "This garbage ghostwritten study finally got the fate it deserved,â Wisner added. "Hopefully, journals will now be more vigilant in protecting the impartiality of science on which so many people depend."

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Foreign secretary set to address senior diplomats later today

The UK's foreign secretary is calling for closer collaboration with Europe to combat the growing threat of information warfare as hybrid attacks target countries on the continent.…

Younger finance pros are just as loyal to Microsoft's venerable spreadsheet app as their elders

Despite its advancing years, Microsoft Excel is proving a hit with young finance professionals, many of whom reckon the aging number-cruncher has a bright future.…

Digital native? Cloud native? No, we need to be AI native, says Riyadh Air

IBM and Riyadh Air have upgraded their contracted agreement, meaning the Saudi operation will not be the world's first digitally native airline, but will instead be the first AI native operator.…

UK data watchdog demands public sector improves subject access request processing

UK public sector organizations need to improve access for those who want to see their own records of growing up in care, the Information Commissioner says.…

As Portugal gives researchers a pass under cybersecurity law

Portugal has become the latest country to carve out protections for researchers under its cybersecurity law.…

Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity. As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches. The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).

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Officials insist OBR relied on 'early estimate' and real figure won't emerge until next year

The head of the department delivering the UK government's digital identity scheme has rejected the £1.8 billion cost forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), but is not willing to provide an alternative until after a delayed consultation on the plans.…