Literature reviews on how social media use affects adolescent mental health have accumulated at an unprecedented rate of late. Yet, a higher-level integration
of the evidence is still lacking.
We fill this gap with an up-to-date umbrella review, a review of reviews published between 2019 and mid-2021. Our search yielded 25 reviews: 7 meta-analyses, 9
systematic, and 9 narrative reviews. Results showed that most reviews interpreted the associations between social media use and mental health as ‘weak’ or
‘inconsistent,’ whereas a few qualified the same associations as ‘substantial’ and ‘deleterious.’
We summarize the gaps identified in the reviews, provide an explanation for their diverging interpretations, and suggest several avenues for future
research.
…Main findings of the reviews: As Table 1 shows, 5 meta-analyses yielded associations of general use of social network sites
(SNS use) with higher levels of adolescent ill-being that ranged from very small to moderate (r = 0.05 to
r = 0.17)[14, 17, 18, 19, 20], and one did not find such an association (r = 0.02 ns[15]). As for
well-being, one meta-analysisfound
that SNS use was weakly associated with higher levels of well-being (r = +0.05),19 whereas another
found that it was weakly related to lower levels of well-being (r = −0.06).17 However, the latter study aggregated well-being outcomes
(e.g. happiness, life satisfaction) with ill-being outcomes (e.g. reversed depression and anxiety scores) in a composite ‘well-being’ score. When this
meta-analysis analyzed happiness, life satisfaction, and depression separately, it found that SNS use was associated with both higher levels of well-being and ill-being.17
In all, the available meta-analytic evidence suggests that SNS use is weakly associated with higher levels of
ill-being [14, 17, 18, 19, 20] but also with higher levels of well-being[17,19], a result that suggests that ill-being is
not simply the flip-side of well-being and vice versa, and that both outcomes should be investigated in their own right [11,39]. Finally, all
meta-analyses reported considerable variability in the reported associations. For example, in the meta-analysis by Ivie et al 2020,14the reported associations of SMU with depressive symptoms ranged from r = −0.10 to r =
+0.33.
[earlier: studio diip’s“Fish on
Wheels”] Navigation is a critical ability for animal survival and is important for food foraging, finding shelter, seeking mates and a variety of other
behaviors. Given their fundamental role and universal function in the animal kingdom, it makes sense to explore whether space representation and navigation
mechanisms are dependent on the species, ecological system, brain structures, or whether they share general and universal properties.
One way to explore this issue behaviorally is by domain transfer methodology, where one species is embedded in another species’ environment and must
cope with an otherwise familiar (in our case, navigation) task. Here we push this idea to the limit by studying the navigation ability of a fish in a terrestrial
environment.
For this purpose, we trained goldfish to use a Fish Operated Vehicle(FOV), a wheeled terrestrial
platform that reacts to the fish’s movement characteristics, location and orientation in its water tank to change the vehicle’s; i.e., the water tank’s,
position in the arena. The fish were tasked to “drive” the FOV towards a visual target in the terrestrial
environment, which was observable through the walls of the tank.
Figure 1: The fish operated vehicle.A. The fish operated vehicle is composed of a chassis with 4
electric motors equipped with omni wheels, and a camera together with a LIDAR to collect data on fish position and vehicle position in space, respectively.
B. View of a fish from the camera: fish contour (blue), tail (yellow), direction vector (green) are automatically extracted from the image and fed to the control system of the wheels. C. The fish operated robot and arena, bird’s-eye-view. The enclosure was created by the room walls and a curtain where the target was
placed. D. Instance of fish quadrant location and direction correlating; as a result, the vehicle moves in the direction of the
arrow. E. Fish location is far from the water tank wall; the vehicle motors do not generate movement.
The fish were indeed able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding
dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.
These results demonstrate how a fish was able to transfer its space representation and navigation skills to a wholly different terrestrial environment, thus
supporting the hypothesis that the former possess a universal quality that is species-independent.
[Video of goldfish driving the robot: diagram, indoors, outdoors, to targets inside a room, and correcting its position (source)]
[bar graph titled “Typical Response Latency” showing 3 major sections]
[section 1: Automated Steps: 800 ms]
[section 2: Someone Copies and Pastes From a Thing Into Another Thing: 2–15 minutes (more if the person on call is busy)]
[section 3: Automated Steps: 200ms]
Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase ‘by the next business
day.’
4 preregistered studies show that beauty increases trust in graphs from scientific papers, news, and
social media.
Scientists, policymakers, and the public increasingly rely on data visualizations—such as COVID tracking charts, weather forecast maps, and
political polling graphs—to inform important decisions. The aesthetic decisions of graph-makers may produce graphs of varying visual appeal, independent of data
quality.
Here we tested whether the beauty of a graph influences how much people trust it. Across 3 studies, we sampled graphs from social media, news reports, and
scientific publications, and consistently found that graph beauty predicted trust. In a 4th study, we manipulated both the graph beauty and
misleadingness.
We found that beauty, but not actual misleadingness, causally affected trust.
These findings reveal a source of bias in the interpretation of quantitative data and indicate the importance of promoting data literacy in education.
[Particularly worrisome given how effective statistics design is ignored by designers optimizing only for beauty.]
[Keywords: aesthetics, beauty-is-good stereotype/halo
effect, causal effects, data visualizations, publication bias, public trust]
…Here we test the hypothesis that the beauty of data visualizations influences how much people trust them. We first examined the correlation between perceived
beauty and trust in graphs. To maximize the generalizability and external
validity of our findings, we systematically sampled graphs (Figure 1) of diverse types and topics (Figure 2) from
the real world. These graphs spanned a wide range of domains, including social media (Study 1), news reports (Study 2), and scientific publications
(Study 3). We asked participants how beautiful they thought the graphs looked and how much they trusted the graphs. We also measured how much participants found
the graphs interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative, to control for potential confounds (Figure 3A). In addition to predicting trust
ratings, we also examined whether participants’ beauty ratings predicted real-world impact. We measured impact using indices including the number of comments the
graphs received on social media, and the number of citations the graphs’ associated papers had. Finally, we tested the causal effect of graph beauty on trust by
generating graphs using arbitrary data (Study 4). We orthogonally manipulated both the beauty and the actual misleadingness of these graphs and measured how these
manipulations affected trust.
…Results: Beauty correlates with trust across domains. We found that participants’ trust in graphs was associated with how beautiful
participants thought the graphs looked for graphs across all 3 domains (Figure 3B): social media posts on Reddit (Pearson’s r = 0.45,
p = 4.15×10−127 in Study 1a; r = 0.41, p = 3.28×10−231 in Study 1b), news reports (r = 0.43,
p = 1.14×10−278 in Study 2), and scientific papers (r = 0.41, p = 6.×10−234 in Study 3). These findings
indicate that, across diverse contents and sources of the graphs, perceived beauty and trust in graphs are reliably correlated in the minds of perceivers. The
association between beauty and trust remained robust when controlling for factors that might influence both perceived beauty and trust, including how much
participants thought the graphs were interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative (linear mixed modeling: b = 0.19, standardized 𝛽 = 0.22,
p = 1.05×10−30 in Study 1a; b = 0.14, 𝛽 = 0.16, p = 8.81×10−46 in Study 1b; b = 0.14, 𝛽 = 0.15,
p = 5.35×10−35 in Study 2; b = 0.10, 𝛽 = 0.12, p = 1.85×10−25 in Study 3; see Figure 1:
for the coefficients of covariates). These findings indicate that beautiful visualizations predict increased trust even when controlling for the effects of
interesting topics, understandable presentation, confirmation
bias, and negativity bias.
Figure 3: Correlations between beauty and trust in Studies 1–3. (A) Participants viewed each
graph (top; an example from Study 3) and rated each graph on 6 aspects (bottom; the order was randomized). (B)
The frequency of ratings (colored; presented with 2D kernel density) on the beauty and trust of the graphs in Studies 1a,
1b, 2, and 3 (from top to bottom), and univariate correlations between the 2 variables (line for linear
regression, text for Pearson’s correlation, asterisks indicate statistical-significance: ✱✱✱ for p < 0.001; n = 2,681 in Study 1a; n = 5,780 in
Study 1b; n = 6,204 in Study 2; n = 6,030 in Study 3).
Beauty predicts real-world popularity: We found that the real-world popularity of the graphs was associated with how beautiful participants
thought they were. The more beautiful graphs from Reddit were associated with higher numbers of comments in both Study 1a (b = 0.04, 𝛽 = 0.04,
p = 0.011) and Study 1b (b = 0.11, 𝛽 = 0.12, p = 2.84×10−22). The more beautiful graphs from scientific journals were
associated with papers that had higher numbers of citations in Study 3 (b = 0.07, 𝛽 = 0.05, p = 0.001; but not higher numbers of views,
b = 0.03, 𝛽 = 0.02, p = 0.264). The association between the perceived beauty of a paper’s graphs and the paper’s number of citations remained
robust when controlling for the paper’s publication date and how much participants thought the graphs were interesting, understandable, surprising, and negative
(b = 0.05, 𝛽 = 0.04, p = 0.005). These findings suggest that people’s bias in favor of trusting beautiful graphs has real-world consequences.
Figure 4: Causal effects of beauty on trust in Study 4. (A) Manipulations of an example graph of a
specific type and topic in 4 experimental conditions. (B) Manipulation check of beauty. linear mixed model regression of beauty ratings (7-point Likert scale) on
beauty manipulations (binary), while controlling for the manipulations of misleadingness and the random effects of participants, graph types, and graph topics
(n = 2,574 observations). (C) Causal effects of beauty and misleadingness. Linear mixed model regression of trust
ratings (7-point Likert scale) on beauty and misleadingness manipulations (binary), while controlling for the random effects of participants, graph types, and
graph topics (n = 2,574 observations).
…Discussion: …A second, non-mutually exclusive, explanation suggests that this apparent bias may be rooted in rational thinking. More beautiful
graphs may indicate that the data is of higher quality and that the graph maker is more skillful [Steele & Iliinsky 2010, Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the
Eyes of Experts]. However, our results suggest that this reasoning may not be accurate. It does not require sophisticated techniques to make beautiful
graphs: we reliably made graphs look more beautiful simply by increasing their resolution and color saturation, and using a legible, professional font
(Figure 4A–B). Findings from the real-world graphs (Studies 1–3) also suggest that one could make a very basic graph such as
a bar plot look very beautiful (Figure S2F). Visual inspection of the more and less beautiful real-world graphs suggests that people perceive
graphs with more colors (eg. rainbow colors), shapes (eg. cartoons, abstract shapes), and meaningful text (eg. a title explaining the meaning of the graph) as more
beautiful. It also does not require high quality data to make a beautiful graph either: we generated graphs that were perceived as beautiful using arbitrary data
(Figure 4B). Therefore, our findings highlight that the beauty of a graph may not be an informative cue for its quality. Even if beauty was
correlated with actual data quality in the real-world, this would be a dangerous and fallible heuristic to rely upon for evaluating research and media.
Synthetic fat has substantial potential as resilient food for catastrophes.
Fat requirements of the global population could be fulfilled in 1–2 years.
16–100% of the global fat requirements could be fulfilled by the end of the first year.
The product would be affordable at an expected retail cost between US$3–$9/kg.
A roadmap for the development of synthetic fat as food for catastrophes is proposed.
Human civilization’s food production system is unprepared for global catastrophic risks (GCRs). Catastrophes capable
of abruptly transforming global climate such as supervolcanic eruption,
asteroid/comet impact or nuclear winter, which could completely collapse the
agricultural system. Responding by producing resilient foods requiring little to no sunlight is more cost effective than increasing food stockpiles, given the long
duration of these scenarios (6–10 years).
This preliminary techno-economic assessment uncovers substantial potential for synthetic fat from petroleum as a resilient food source in the case of an abrupt
sunlight reduction catastrophe, the most severe food shock scenario. To this end, the following are roughly quantified based on literature data: global production
potential, capital and operating expenditures, material and energy requirements, ramp-up rates and retail prices. Potential resource bottlenecks are reviewed.
Synthetic fat production capacity would be slower to ramp up compared to low-tech food production alternatives, but provides the fat macronutrient, largely
absent from these. Using 24/7 construction of facilities, 16–100% of global fat requirements could be fulfilled at the end of the first year, potentially
taking up to 2 years to fully meet the requirements. Substantial uncertainty remains on several topics including production potential, capital expenditure, food
safety, transferability of labor and equipment construction. A technology roadmap is proposed to address these concerns and develop the potential of synthetic fat
as a catastrophe-resilient food.
…Historical context: This work is inspired by the historic precedent found in World War 2 Germany. In 1939, during a fat shortage, a
non-biological process was developed to convert byproducts of the conversion from coal to liquid fuels into edible fat for human consumption. This byproduct, known
as “gatsch” or paraffin wax, is a waxy fraction of the Fischer-Tropsch liquid product containing mostly alkane compounds, also known as paraffinic hydrocarbons or paraffins. These can be subjected to
a chemical reaction known as paraffin oxidation, causing the rupture of the
alkanes into “synthetic” fatty acids (SFAs). Mostof these SFAs were
dedicated to soap production, but a part was processed into human food. These were subjected to purification and esterification with glycerol to produce triglycerides that could be refined into a
synthetic margarine-like product. This was known as butter aus kohle or “coal butter”(BIOS 1946;
Asinger 1968; Frankenfeld 1968).
In normal conditions, fats of agrichemical origin are more economical to produce than SFAs due to the capital
intensity of the latter. However, during the shortage conditions in WW2 Germany the “coal butter” was allegedly cheaper to produce than regular butter (Eagle Valley Enterprise 1946), presumably due to the very high price of butter in
Germany at the time. Pricing data from 1939 indicate the large retailer price of margarine at 1.74 Reichsmark (RM) per kilogram (Statistichen Reichsamt 1939), which would be approximately equivalent to 13 USD in 2020.
Production of edible synthetic fat was discontinued completely during the 1950s, but SFA production continued to
develop. In 1959 the USSR decided to replace 40% of the natural fatty acids used for soap production via
SFA synthesis (Zilch 1968). In 1978, over 500,000 t ofSFAs were
obtained via continuous paraffin oxidation processes inEastern Europe (Fineberg 1979). However, SFA
production eventually fell out of use due to the lower cost and higher quality of agrichemical fatty acids, and has not been economical for several decades
(Anneken et al 2006).
…Over a thousand animal trials were performed to prove the fat was neither toxic nor irritant and could be successfully digested. Later, experiments were
performed on 6,000 human subjects over 3 years, which showed the product to be a satisfactory substitute for natural fat (BIOS 1946). There are reports of people allegedly consuming the synthetic fat in considerable amounts for over a year with no ill
effects (Frankenfeld 1968). The synthetic fat was used by the German soldiers fighting in the African campaign and on submarines. It was also used in heavy
labor rations, food for prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates and in canteen meals in hospitals (Reith & Pelzer-Reith 2002). The taste and calorific
value were reportedly similar to those of butter (Der Spiegel 1947).
Despite the importance and pervasiveness of Wikipedia as one of the largest platforms for open knowledge, surprisingly little is known about how people navigate
its content when seeking information. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic large-scale analysis of how readers browse Wikipedia. Using billions of
page requests from Wikipedia’s server logs, we measure how readers reach articles, how they transition between articles, and how these patterns combine into more
complex navigation paths. We find that navigation behavior is characterized by highly diverse structures. Although most navigation paths are shallow, comprising a
single pageload, there is much variety, and the depth and shape of paths vary systematically with topic, device type, and time of day. We show that Wikipedia
navigation paths commonly mesh with external pages as part of a larger online ecosystem, and we describe how naturally occurring navigation paths are distinct from
targeted navigation in lab-based settings. Our results further suggest that navigation is abandoned when readers reach low-quality pages. These findings not only
help in identifying potential improvements to reader experience on Wikipedia, but also in better understanding of how people seek knowledge on the Web.
As we get closer to the release date of the Steam Deck, now scheduled for
February 2022 (for those who were able to pre-order a unit as part of the first wave), Valve is sharing more information on the PC handheld device and on their future plans for it.
A newly updated FAQ page dedicated to developers confirms
that there won’t be any exclusive games for the Steam Deck, for example. Valve doesn’t believe that would make sense, as this is a PC after all and it should just
play PC games…SteamOS will eventually be released as a separate operating system; non-Steam apps and games can be easily installed on the Steam Deck; and Valve is
working closely with Unity, Epic, and even Godot to improve these engines’ support of the platform.
Q. Is Steam working closely with leading game engine developers, like Epic
Games and Unity on Steam Deck?
A. Yes, we’re working with both Unity and Epic on making sure Unreal and Unity engines have integrations that make the development experience for
Deck as smooth as possible. And going forward we expect there will be improvements rolling into those engines over time to further integrate with our development
tools and to make those engines a great target for Steam Deck. Already there’s a pretty good experience for Unity and Unreal developers from the start.
Q. You mentioned that you’re talking with Unity and Epic, are you also talking to Godot?
A. Yes, we’re talking to Godot as well and are actively supporting them and want their engine to work well with Steam Deck.
Mass selection into groups of like-minded individuals may be fragmenting and polarizing online society,
particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to
measure the social makeup of online communities and in turn, to understand the social organization of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous,
unstructured and large-scale nature of digital discussion.
Here we develop a neural-embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along social dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of
aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 5.1 billion comments made in 10,000 communities over 14 years on Reddit, we measure how the macroscale community structure is organized with respect to age, gender and US political
partisanship.
Examining political content, we find that Reddit underwent a substantial polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new users. Political polarization on
Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry,
with the sharp increase in polarization in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity.
This methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online interaction, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding
the social contexts of online behaviour, and quantifying the dynamics and mechanisms of online polarization.
The relationship between mental health and social media has received substantial research and policy attention. However, there is little population
representative data about who social media users are which limits understanding of confounding in associations between mental health and social media.
We find that users of different platforms and frequencies are not homogenous. User groups differ primarily by sex and YouTube users are the most likely to have
poorer mental health outcomes. Instagram and Snapchat users tend to have higher well-being. Relationships between use-frequency and well-being differ depending on
the specific well-being construct measured. The reproducibility of future research may be improved by stratifying by sex and being specific about the well-being
constructs used.
[Keywords: ALSPAC, cohort, digital health, mental health, social media, social networking,
well-being]
The monocopter is a type of micro aerial vehicle largely inspired from the flight of
botanical samaras (Acer palmatum). A large section of its fuselage forms the
single wing where all its useful aerodynamic forces are generated, making it achieve a highly efficient mode of flight. However, compared to a multi-rotor of
similar weight, monocopters can be large and cumbersome for transport, mainly due to their large and rigid wing structure.
In this work, a monocopter with a foldable, semi-rigid wing is proposed and its resulting flight performance is studied. The wing is non-rigid when not in
flight and relies on centrifugal forces to become straightened during flight. The wing construction uses a special technique for its lightweight and semi-rigid
design, and together with a purpose-designed autopilot board, the entire craft can be folded into a compact pocketable form factor, decreasing its footprint by
69%. Furthermore, the proposed craft accomplishes a controllable flight in 5° of freedom by using only one thrust unit. It achieves altitude control by regulating
the force generated from the thrust unit throughout multiple rotations. Lateral control is achieved by pulsing the thrust unit at specific instances during each
cycle of rotation. A closed-loop feedback control is achieved using a motion-captured camera system, where a hybrid proportional stabilizer controller and
proportional-integral position controller are applied.
Waypoint tracking, trajectory tracking and flight time tests were performed and analyzed. Overall, the vehicle weighs 69g, achieves a maximum lateral speed of
about 2.37 m/s−1, an average power draw of 9.78 W and a flight time of 16 min with its semi-rigid wing.
Meguro Ward plans to put all work involving floppies and other physical storage media online in fiscal 2021, and Chiyoda Ward plans a similar transition within
the next few years. Minato Ward moved its payment procedures from floppies to online systems in 2019.
…This system survived even after floppies themselves disappeared from the market. Sony, one of the earliest suppliers of 3.5-inch floppy disks, stopped making
them a decade ago. Floppies can be reused, and the ward had plenty on hand, giving it little reason to deal with the time and expense of upgrading to new
systems.
That changed in 2019, when Mizuho Bank informed the ward that it would begin charging 50,000 yen ($438 at current rates) per month for use of physical storage
media, including floppies.
The bank cited the end of production and the cost of maintaining disk readers and pointed out the relative inefficiency and risk of lost data involved compared
with online banking.
The prospect of spending roughly an extra $5,000 a year pushed the ward to make the switch for all work involving outside systems. “This will save us the time
of having each department save data to floppy disks and carry them around”, Ono said…A full switch to digital services remains a long way off, given the time that
will be needed to handle tasks such as digitizing paper contracts. “There are a lot of little things that need to be handled in fine detail”, according to Chiyoda
Ward accounting chief Shogo Hoshina.
Dexterous magnetic manipulation of ferromagnetic objects is well established, with 3 to 6° of freedom possible depending on object geometry1. There are objects
for which non-contact dexterous manipulation is desirable that do not contain an appreciable amount of ferromagnetic material but do contain electrically
conductive material.
Time-varying magnetic fields generate eddy currents in conductive materials,
with resulting forces and torques due to the interaction of the eddy currents with the magnetic field. This phenomenon has previously been used to induce drag to
reduce the motion of objects as they pass through a static field, or to apply force on an object in a single direction using a dynamic field, but has not been used
to perform the type of dexterous manipulation of conductive objects that has been demonstrated with ferromagnetic objects.
Here we show that manipulation, with 6° of freedom, of conductive objects is possible by using multiple rotating magnetic dipole fields. Using dimensional
analysis, combined with multiphysics numerical simulations and experimental verification, we characterize the forces and torques generated on a conductive sphere
in a rotating magnetic dipole field.
With the resulting model, we perform dexterous manipulation in simulations and physical experiments.
Magnetic manipulation has the benefit of being contactless, which is particularly attractive when there is a risk of destructive collision between the
manipulator and target. Such is the case with space debris, a considerable problem facing humanity owing to the Kessler syndrome. Most artificial space objects are fabricated primarily from
aluminium, a non-magnetic but conductive material on which forces and torques can be generated by inducing eddy currents. The most commonly proposed application of
this phenomenon is detumbling satellites by applying a static magnetic field to a rotating target. There exist numerical solutions for induced forces and/or
torques on spinning solid and thin-walled spheres in uniform and non-uniform magnetic fields. An alternative method of detumbling satellites uses rotating Halbach
arrays near the target. Rotating Halbach arrays have also been proposed as a means of traversing the exterior of the International Space Station (modelled as an
infinite flat plate) using forces induced by eddy currents. This technique is similar to that used in eddy-current separation of non-magnetic materials. Methods
based on eddy currents are distinct from those based on diamagnetism or ferrofluid environments, neither of which are applicable to manipulation of objects at a
distance.
Here we show that dexterous manipulation of conductive objects is achievable using multiple static (in position) magnetic dipole-field sources capable of
continuous dipole rotation about arbitrary axes. We demonstrate manipulation with 6° of freedom (6-DOF manipulation)
innumerical microgravity simulations and 3-DOF manipulation in experimental microgravity simulations. This
manipulation does not rely on dynamic motion of the conductive object itself; rather, the manipulation can be performed quasistatically. Both electromagnet and
permanent-magnet devices have been developed to serve as field sources capable of generating continuously rotating magnetic dipole fields about arbitrary axes.
Rotating magnetic dipole fields have been used previously to remotely actuate ferromagnetic devices that transduce the resulting magnetic torque into some form of
rotational motion, such as micromachines and magnetic capsule endoscopes.
The sudden arrival of compositeracquets affected tennis player productivity, entry, and exit.
Young players at the time benefited at the expense of older players.
The empirical patterns are consistent with a model of skill-altering technological change.
Technological innovation can raise the returns to some skills while making others less valuable or even obsolete. [cf. talkies, Adobe
Flash]
We study the effects of such skill-altering technological change in the context of men’s professional tennis, which was unexpectedly transformed by the
invention of composite racquets during the late 1970s. We explore the consequences of this innovation on player productivity, entry, and exit.
We find that young players benefited at the expense of older players and that the disruptive effects of the new racquets persisted over 2 to 4 generations.
[Keywords: technological change, human capital, tennis]
…At the same time, at least since Ricardo, economists have recognized that innovation can also be disruptive. As Acemoglu 2002 vividly states, “in 19th-century Britain, skilled artisans destroyed
weaving, spinning, and threshing machines during the Luddite and
Captain Swing riots, in the belief that the new machines would make
their skills redundant. They were right: the artisan shop was replaced by the factory and later by interchangeable parts and the assembly line.” New technologies
disrupt the labor market when they raise the returns to some skills while making others less valuable or obsolete.
We develop a theory, inspired by MacDonald & Weisbach 2004, of this phenomenon, which we call skill-altering technical change. Our theory emphasizes
that workers endogenously invest in a portfolio of skills over their life cycle. We show that new technologies that change the relative values of skills can hurt
older workers, who have spent a lifetime investing in the old, ideal skill mix, and better workers, who, by definition, possess more of the skills that were
previously more valuable.
…To test our model’s predictions empirically and quantify the effects of skill-altering technical change, we exploit the introduction of composite racquets in
men’s professional tennis during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These new racquets drastically changed the way the game was played, increasing the importance of
hitting with spin and power relative to control. There are 4 reasons this episode in men’s professional tennis is a useful setting to study the effects of
skill-altering technological change on workers. First, we have detailed panel data on multiple cohorts of individual workers (players), allowing us to track the
impacts of skill-altering change over multiple generations of workers. Such data is difficult to obtain in most settings. Second, the new technology arrived
suddenly and unexpectedly and was adopted universally within a few years.
…Until the mid-1970s, tennis racquets were made nearly exclusively of wood, and this technology had been stable for decades. Although alternative materials were
tried, such as the steel Wilson T-2000, which a few players used, most players continued to play with wood racquets. Then a retired engineer, Howard Head, started playing tennis and discovered he was terrible at the
game. He decided that the fault lay with his racquet, and in 1976, he took it upon himself to invent a new one, the Prince Classic. “With…my racket I was inventing
not to just make money, but to help me.”2
Although initial reactions to Head’s new racquet were laughter and scorn, the racquet had much to offer recreational players.3 The Prince Classic had
a larger string bed and sweet spot that made it easier for players to make good contact with the ball and generate more power and spin, but it achieved these gains
at the expense of stiffness and control, making the racquet unacceptable for professional players. Racquet makers quickly found a solution; they developed methods
for constructing the racquet frame out of a composite material consisting of a mixture of carbon fibers and resin. Composite frames allowed both a larger string
bed and a stiff frame, giving players more power and control. The first composite racquet that professionals used, the Prince Pro, hit the market in 1978, and
composite racquets quickly replaced wood ones as professional players found that their familiar wood racquets were no match for the combination of power and
control afforded by the new composite racquets.
…by 1984, composite racquets had taken over the tour. The introduction of composite racquets substantially changed the way men’s professional tennis was played.
When tennis players strike the ball, they often try to impart topspin…Although composite racquets allow players to generate much more topspin and power, taking full advantage of this
potential required large changes to players’ strokes and play style. Older players in particular, who had invested years in learning to play with a wood racquet,
faced the daunting challenge of adjusting to composite racquets. Players began altering their stances and swings to generate more topspin and power. They rotated
their grips to generate more spin and help them return balls that were bouncing higher because of the increased topspin of their opponents. These seemingly subtle
changes in technique and strategy resulted in a much more physical and faster-paced game. As Cross observed,
The modern game of tennis is played at a furious pace compared with the old days when everyone used wood racquets. Just watch old film from the 1950s and you
will see that the game is vastly different. Ken Rosewall and
Lew Hoad barely broke into a sweat. Today’s game has players grunting
and screaming on every shot, calling for the towel every third shot, and launching themselves off the court with the ferocity of their strokes.
…We find that the introduction of the new composite racquets substantially disrupted the tour, with repercussions lasting for between 2 and 4 generations. It
temporarily reduced the rank correlation in player quality over time, helped younger players at the expense of older ones, reduced the average age of tennis
players, and increased exit rates of older players relative to younger ones. We find that inter-generational inequality rose, though we find mixed evidence for the
new racquets’ effects on cross-sectional inequality. We also consider competing explanations, but we conclude that they cannot explain many of the other patterns
we find. Moreover, when we compare the ages of tennis players with other Olympic athletes, we do not find a similar drop in the ages of Olympic athletes during the
same time period.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the development of unconventional computing paradigms inspired by the abilities and energy efficiency of the brain.
The human brain excels especially in computationally intensive cognitive tasks, such as pattern recognition and classification.
A long-term goal is de-centralized neuromorphic computing, relying on
a network of distributed cores to mimic the massive parallelism of the brain, thus rigorously following a nature-inspired approach for information processing.
Through the gradual transformation of interconnected computing blocks into continuous computing tissue, the development of advanced forms of matter exhibiting
basic features of intelligence can be envisioned, able to learn and process information in a delocalized manner. Such intelligent matter would interact with the
environment by receiving and responding to external stimuli, while internally adapting its structure to enable the distribution and storage (as memory) of
information.
We review progress towards implementations of intelligent matter using molecular systems, soft materials or solid-state materials, with respect to applications
in soft robotics, the development of adaptive artificial skins and distributed neuromorphic computing.
Personality Computing (PC) is a burgeoning field at the intersection of personality and computer science that seeks to extract
personality-relevant information (eg. on Big Five personality
trait levels) from sensor-assessed information (eg. written texts, digital footprints, smartphone usage, non-verbal behavior, speech patterns, game-play,
etc.). Such sensor-based personality assessment promises novel and often technologically sophisticated ways to unobtrusively measure individual differences in a
highly precise, granular, and faking-resistant manner.
We review the different conceptual underpinnings of PC; survey how well different types of sensors can capture different types of personality-relevant
information; discuss the evaluation of PC performance and psychometric issues (reliability and validity) of sensor-derived scores as well as ethical, legal, and
societal implications; and highlight how modern personality and computer science can be married more effectively to provide practically useful personality
assessment.
Together, this review aims to introduce readers to the opportunities, challenges, pitfalls, and implications of PC.
E-commerce and online advertisement are growing trends.
The overall impact of ad blockers is unclear.
Using survey data, the effect of ad blocker use on online purchases is quantified.
The analysis reveals a positive effect of ad blocker use on e-commerce.
In the light of the results stakeholders should consider if the present online ads formats are the most suitable.
The use of ad blocking software has risen
sharply with online advertising and is recognized as challenging the survival of the ad supported web. However, the effects of ad blocking on consumer behavior have been studied scarcely.
This paper uses propensity score matching techniques on a
longitudinal survey of 4411 Internet users in Spain to show that ad blocking has a causal positive effect on their number of online purchases. This could be
attributed to the positive effects of ad blocking, such as a safer and enhanced navigation.
This striking result reinforces the controversial debate of whether current online ads are too bothersome for consumers.
[Keywords: Ad blockers, advertising avoidance, e-commerce, propensity score matching]
…This study employs a rich dataset coming from a longitudinal survey. The source of the data is a survey conducted by the Spanish Markets and Competition
Authority on the same sample of interviewees in the 4th quarter of 2017 and in the second quarter of 2018 ([dataset]CNMCData, 2019). The sample was designed to be representative of the population living in private households in Spain. The
information was provided by 4411 Internet users ≥16 years old. At the baseline time point (fourth quarter of 2017) these individuals were asked if they regularly
used ad blocking tools when navigating the web. Additionally, the survey collected information on their socio-demographic
characteristics (age, gender, education level and employment status) and on how they used Internet (frequency of use of online services like: GPS navigation services, instant messaging, mobile gaming, social networks, e-mail and watching videos on the phone). 6 months later
(second quarter of 2018), the same individuals were asked how many online purchases they had made during the previous 6 months (these included goods and services
purchases, irrespective of the form of payment). Thus, the outcome variable (number of online purchases) occurred later than the collection of the ad blocking
information and the rest of variables (our X covariates).
Analysis
N
Treated
Controls
Difference (ATT)
95% LCI
95% UCI
p-value
Unmatched
4411
5.084
2.735
2.348
—
—
—
PSM—NN
1648
5.084
3.325
1.759
0.994
2.523
<0.001
PSM—KM
4411
5.084
3.733
1.351
0.658
2.044
<0.001
Stratification on PS quintiles
4411
5.084
3.686
1.398
0.724
2.072
<0.001
Stratification on PS deciles
4411
5.084
3.774
1.310
0.626
1.994
<0.001
PSM—NN after CEM pruning (1)
1160
4.979
3.773
1.206
0.165
2.246
0.023
PSM—NN after CEM pruning (2)
1622
5.082
3.476
1.605
0.830
2.380
<0.001
Table 2: Estimated average treatment effects of ad blockers on online shopping (number of purchases in 6 months). [ATT: averagetreatment effect on the treated. PSM: propensity score matching. NN:nearest neighbor. KM: kernel matching. PS: propensity scores. CEM:coarsened exact matching. LCI: lowerconfidence
interval.UCI: upperconfidence interval. (1) CEM pruning by using
use of Internet appscovariates. (2) CEM pruning by using socio-demographic covariates.]
The past decade has seen rapid growth in research linking stable psychological characteristics (ie., traits) to digital records of online behavior in
Online Social Networks (OSNs) like Facebook and Twitter, which has implications for basic and applied behavioral
sciences. Findings indicate that a broad range of psychological characteristics can be predicted from various behavioral residue online, including language used in
posts on Facebook (Park et al 2015) and Twitter (Reece et al 2017), and which pages a person ‘likes’ on Facebook (eg.
Kosinski,
Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). The present study examined the extent to which the accounts a user follows on Twitter can be used to predict individual
differences in self-reported anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and anger. Followed accounts on Twitter offer distinct theoretical and practical
advantages for researchers; they are potentially less subject to overt impression management and may better capture passive users. Using an approach designed to
minimize overfitting and provide unbiased estimates of predictive accuracy, our results indicate that each of the four constructs can be predicted with modest
accuracy (out-of-sample r’s of approximately 0.2). Exploratory analyses revealed that anger, but not the other constructs, was distinctly reflected in
followed accounts, and there was some indication of bias in predictions for women (vs. men) but not for racial/ethnic minorities (vs. majorities). We
discuss our results in light of theories linking psychological traits to behavior online, applications seeking to infer psychological characteristics from records
of online behavior, and ethical issues such as algorithmic bias and users’ privacy.
…As planned in the initial pre-registered protocol, we evaluated both selected and non-selected models in the holdout data. For our central research question,
estimating how well mental health can be predicted by followed accounts, we found that the selected models achieved moderate, nontrivial accuracy for all four
outcomes. For depression, the correlation between predicted and observed score was r = 0.24, for anxiety it was r = 0.20, for post-traumatic
stress it was r = 0.19, and for anger it was r = 0.23. Figure 6 shows these estimates.
To aid in interpretation, Figure 6 also shows two relevant estimates from prior work to serve as comparative benchmarks: the predictive
accuracies for well-being and neuroticism from Kosinski and colleagues’ (2013) paper predicting psychological constructs from Facebook like-ties. As seen in
Figure 6, the present estimates are between these two prior estimates, suggesting that twitter friends predict mental health about as well as
Facebook likes predict related constructs.
Figure 6: Out-of-Sample Accuracy for Selected Models
The correlations from both the selected and non-selected models are shown in Figure 7. This allows us to evaluate how effective the
model-selection process was in picking the best-performing model. The selected model out-performed the eleven non-selected models for anger and post-traumatic
stress, was second best for depression, and fourth best for anxiety. When one or more non-selected models outperformed the selected ones, it was by a relatively
small margin, but the lowest-performing non-selected models were substantially worse than the selected ones.
The correlations from both the selected and non-selected models are shown in Figure 7. This allows us to evaluate how effective the
model-selection process was in picking the best-performing model. The selected model out-performed the eleven non-selected models for anger and post-traumatic
stress, was second best for depression, and fourth best for anxiety. When one or more non-selected models outperformed the selected ones, it was by a relatively
small margin, but the lowest-performing non-selected models were substantially worse than the selected ones.
Figure 7: Out-of-sample Accuracy for Selected and Non-Selected Models
As for figuring out demand before offering for pre-order… man, my error bars were from 50 to 50,000. We’ve never sold such highly designed high print quality
books like this before, our colleagues at MIRI have focused on ebooks and print-on-demand books at like $1–$10
apiece, I really didn’t know which way it would go. Seems like we’re just got 100 sales in the last 2 hours on MR, so I guess seems like the market is quite
big.
[talk by
author of Intermedia; blog: “Hypertext
tools from the 80s”] In the late 1980s, before the WWW came to be,hypertext was a hot new field. Brown University’s Institute for Information and Scholarship
(IRIS) developedIntermedia, a networked, multiuser, multi application hypermedia system that was well-known and oft demoed at conferences (and used by the
speaker for his keynote at Hypertext ’89). Its most lasting contribution has been the speaker’s coining of the word “anchor” to represent the “sticky selection” that is the source or destination of a
link within documents. Anchors generalized these link endpoints to include any media type.
Intermedia’s development began in 1985. Its paradigm was the integration of bi-directional hypermedia links between different applications in what was then the
graphical desktop interface introduced by Apple only a year earlier.
Intermedia had many features, some of which have since become mainstream—anchors (links to a span of text or a set of objects, rather than just a point),
full-text indexing, dictionary lookup, links in different media type—and some still yet to be common in web browser-based systems– such as bi-directional links,
integrated annotation capabilities, tracking of anchors in edited documents, and simultaneous linking by multiple individuals across the network.
Two years ago, the Computer History Museum asked if the speaker could resurrect Intermedia to show at the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the
Doug Engelbart’sMother-of-All-Demos. It was believed that all the backup disks and tapes had
deteriorated, but through the intervention of the hypertext gods, a disk was found that worked and had a full-installation of Intermedia, along with demo
files—including the Hypertext ’89 keynote content.
The speaker procured some Macintosh IIci machines, monitors, mice, and
keyboards on eBay and amazingly, Intermedia ran.
In this presentation, you will see a fully-operational hypermedia system running quite nicely on a computer that is 250,000× slower than today’s high-end
PCs.
In 2010, Steve Jobs announced that [“Thoughts On Flash”, TOF]Apple would no longer support
Adobe Flash—a popular set of tools for creating Internet
applications. After the announcement, the use of Flash declined precipitously.
We show there was no reduction in Flash hourly wages because of a rapid supply response: Flash specialists, especially those who were younger, were less
specialized, or had good “fall back” skills quickly transitioned away from Flash; new market entrants also avoided Flash, leaving the effective supply per Flash
job opening unchanged.
As such, there was no factor market reason for firms to stay with Flash longer.
…Perhaps the best contemporary indicators of software developer interest in a given technology are the questions being asked on Stack Overflow, an enormously popular programming Q&A site. The left facet of Figure 1 shows the volume of questions per month for Flash and for comparison, a basket of
popular IT skills, all normalized to 1 in the TOF month.3 The y-axis is on a log scale. We can
see from this comparison that the numbers of questions about Flash and our chosen basket of skills are growing more or less in lockstep pre-TOF,reflecting growth in the Q&A platform and the wider IT industry, butthat after TOF, Flash shows a clear absolute decline. There is some delay in this drop, likely reflecting the
diffusion of the news of Apple’s plans as well as the completion of already-planned projects.
To study how the decline in Flash affected workers specializing in Flash, we use data from a large online labor market (Horton 2010). The decline in Flash is also readily
apparent in the longitudinal data from this market: the right facet of Figure 1 plots the number of job openings posted per month for jobs requiring Flash
skills and for those requiring PHP (one
of the “basket skills” from the left facet of Figure 1). Both Flash and PHP are normalized to 1 for the TOF-month. For comparison, we truncate the data to the first year of the Stack Overflow data (in 2008), even though the online labor
market is considerably older. As we saw with the Stack Overflow data, both Flash and PHP move closely together
pre-TOF and then diverge. Following TOF,the number of Flash job openings
began to decline relative to PHP, falling by more than 80% between 2010 and 2015.
As we will show, despite a large decline in the number of Flash openings posted, very little else about the market for Flash changed. There is no evidence
employers were inundated with applications from out-of-work Flash programmers—the number of applicants per opening remained roughly constant.4 There was
no increase in the likelihood that Flash openings were filled, nor was there a reduction in the wages paid to hired Flash programmers. In short, despite a roughly
80% reduction in posted Flash jobs, we observe a reduction in the quantity of hours-worked, but no reduction in the price.
…There is heterogeneity in the choices made by individual workers and their outcomes. Although there was no decline in wages on average, workers who were older
seemed to have experienced wage declines, whereas younger workers experienced modest wage increases. Older workers also experienced declines in hours-worked that
younger workers did not. We also observe that younger workers increasingly demanded a premium to work with Flash post-TOF, whereas older workers did not.
This research documents a perfection premium in evaluative judgments wherein individuals disproportionately reward perfection on an attribute compared
to near-perfect values on the same attribute.
For example, individuals consider a student who earns a perfect score of 36 on the American College Test to be more intelligent than a student who earns a
near-perfect 35, and this difference in perceived intelligence is substantially greater than the difference between students whose scores are 35 versus 34. The
authors also show that the perfection premium occurs because people spontaneously place perfect items into a separate mental category than other items. As a result
of this categorization process, the perceived evaluative distance between perfect and near-perfect items is exaggerated. Four experiments provide evidence in favor
of the perfection premium and support for the proposed underlying mechanism in both social cognition and decision-making contexts.
[Keywords: perfection, categorization, numerical cognition, social cognition]
…In four experiments, we find that even when the objective numerical gap between two values is equal, people perceive the difference between individuals and
items to be greater if one has a perfect attribute value or rating. For example, the perceived difference in intelligence of two students scoring100% versus 99% on
an exam exceeds the perceived gap between students scoring 99% versus 98%, even though the scores differ by 1% in both cases.
[Part of this is just a ceiling effect: if one hits the ceiling on a
test by scoring a perfect score rather than falling short slightly, that represents a lower bound—the person scores at least that high, and so
likely scores higher, and if the test is not an extremely good one, then potentially arbitrarily much higher. For example, if someone scores 128 on an IQ test with
a ceiling of 130 (+2SD), another 129, and another scores the max of 130, then the expected scores are 128/129/136, and the expected differences are
not 1/1/1 but 1/1/7. (You can calculate the truncated normal
expectation using truncNormMean(2) in my dog cloning page).]
…The benefits are obvious: fast turnaround time between spotting a problem and getting it to the customer, very low cost of distribution and last but definitely
not least: automatic updates are now a thing…And that’s exactly the downside: your software will be more than happy to install a broken, changed, reduced,
functionally no longer equivalent, spyware, malware, data loss inducing or outright dangerous piece of software right over the top of the one that you were using
happily until today. More often than not automatic updates are not done with the interest of the user in mind. They are abused to the point where many users—me
included—would rather forego all updates (let alone automatic ones) simply because we apparently can not trust the party on the other side of this transaction to
have our, the users, interests at heart.
It isn’t rare at all to be greeted by a piece of software that no longer reads the data that was perfectly legible until yesterday because of an upgrade
(I had a CAD system like that). Regressing back to the previous version and you’ll find that it tells you the data is
also no longer legible by that version because the newer one has touched it. Restore from backup and get caught in an automatic update war that you can only stop
by telling your computer that the automatic update host does not exist any more. It shouldn’t take that level of sophistication to keep a system running reliably,
especially not when your livelihood depends on it.
…The list of these transgressions is endless, and software vendors the world over still don’t seem to get it. If updating software is so easy, why are users so
reluctant to do it? That’s because all you software vendors collectively
royally messed it up. You’ve burned your users trust on so many occasions, not thinking from their perspective but from your own almost exclusively
leading to people locking down their systems and foregoing critical security updates because they are scared that they will end up with a lot of extra work or a
much worse situation if they let you have your way.
So, software vendors, automatic updates:
should always keep the user centric
should be incremental and security or bug fixes only
should never update a user interface without allowing the previous one to be used as the default
should never be used to install telemetry or spyware or to re-enable it if it was previously switched off
should never be used to install other software packages without the users explicit consent and knowledge
should never change the format of data already stored on the system
should never cause a system to become unusable or unstable
must allow a revert to the previous situation
must be disablable, in an easy and consistent manner for instance on mobile devices
should never cause the system to become inaccessible or restarted without user consent
should always be signed by the vendor to ensure that the update mechanism does not become a malware vector
should never cause commercial messages or other fluff to be included
should never cause configuration details to be lost
should always be backwards compatible with previous plug-ins or other third party add ons
While on my most recent break from writing, I pondered a bunch of things that keep seeming to come up in issues of reliability or maintainability in software.
At least one of them is probably not going to make me many friends based on the reactions I’ve had to the concept in its larval form. Still, I think it needs to be
explored.
In short, I think it’s become entirely too easy for people using certain programming languages to use libraries from the wide world of clowns that is the
Internet. Their ecosystems make it very very easy to become reliant on this stuff. Trouble is, those libraries are frequently shit. If something about it is
broken, you might not be able to code around it, and may have to actually deal with them to get it fixed. Repeat 100 times, and now you have a real problem
brewing.
…When you ran it [the buggy library], it just opened the file and did a write. If you ran it a bunch of times in parallel, they’d all stomp all over each other,
and unsurprisingly, the results sometimes yielded a config file that was not entirely parseable. It could have used flock() or something like that. It
didn’t. It could have written to the result from a mktemp() type function and then used rename() to atomically drop it into place. It
didn’t. Expecting that, I got a copy of their source and went looking for the spot which was missing the file-writing paranoia stuff. I couldn’t find it. All I
found was some reference to this library that did config file reading and writing, and a couple of calls into it. The actual file I/O was hidden away in that
other library which lived somewhere on the Internet…The only way to fix it would be in this third-party library. That would mean either forking it and maintaining
it from there, or working with the upstream and hoping they’d take me seriously and accept it.
…It seems to boil down to this: people rely on libraries. They turn out to be mostly crap. The more you introduce, the more likely it is that you will get
something really bad in there. So, it seems like the rational approach would be to be very selective about these things, and not grab too many, if at all. But, if
you work backwards, you can see that making it very easy to add some random library means that it’s much more likely that someone will. Think of it as an
“attractive nuisance”. That turns the crank and the next thing you know, you have breathtaking dependency trees chock-full of dumb little foibles and lacking best
practices.
Now we have this conundrum. That one library lowered the barrier to entry for someone to write that tool. True. Can’t deny that. It let someone ship something
that sometimes works. Also true. But, it gave them a false sense of completion and safety, when it is neither done nor safe. The tool will fail eventually given
enough use, and (at least until they added the “ignore the failed read” thing), will latch itself into a broken state and won’t ever work again without manual
intervention.
Ask yourself: is that really a good thing? Do you want people being able to ship code like that without understanding the finer points of
what’s going on? Yeah, we obviously have to make the point that the systems should not be so damned complicated underneath, and having to worry about atomic writes
and locking is annoying as hell, but it’s what exists. If you’re going to use the filesystem directly, you have to solve for it. It’s part of the
baggage which comes with the world of POSIX-ish filesystems.
2020-roscioli.pdf: “How hair deforms steel”, Gianluca Roscioli, Seyedeh Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, Cemal Cem Tasan (2020-08-07; similar):
A hair-splitting way to get dull: Razors eventually become dull after shaving even though the blade is about 50× harder than the hair. Whereas edge
rounding and brittle cracking of a blade’s hard coating were thought to be responsible, a detailed microstructural investigation by Roscioli et al shows a
different mechanism. A combination of out-of-plane bending, microstructural heterogeneity, and asperities—microscopic chips along the smooth edge—sometimes caused
fracture to occur if the conditions lined up. This fracture originated at the hair-edge asperity interface and created chipping that dulled a blade faster than
other processes.
Steels for sharp edges or tools typically have martensitic microstructures, high carbide contents, and various coatings to exhibit high hardness and wear
resistance. Yet they become practically unusable upon cutting much softer materials such as human hair, cheese, or potatoes. Despite this being an everyday
observation, the underlying physical micromechanisms are poorly understood because of the structural complexity of the interacting materials and the complex
boundary conditions of their co-deformation. To unravel this complexity, we carried out interrupted tests and in situ electron microscopy cutting experiments with
two micromechanical testing setups. We investigated the findings analytically and numerically, revealing that the spatial variation of lath martensite structure
plays the key role leading to a mixed-mode II-III cracking phenomenon before appreciable wear.
Email and text-based communication have become ubiquitous. Although recent findings indicate emotional equivalence between face-to-face and email communication,
there is limited evidence of nonverbal behaviors in text-based communication, especially the kinds of unintentional displays central to emotion perception in
face-to-face interactions. We investigate whether unintentional emotion cues occur in text-based communication by proposing that communication mistakes (eg. typos)
influence emotion perception. Across six studies, we show that communication errors amplify perceptions of email sender’s emotions—both negative
(Studies 1A–2, 4, 5) and positive (Study 3). Furthermore, by contrasting perceptions of message senders who make mistakes in emotional versus unemotional
contexts (Study 5), we show that people partially excuse message sender communication errors in emotional (versus unemotional) contexts, attributing such mistakes
to the sender’s emotional state rather than solely their intelligence level. These studies suggest that nonverbal behavior in text-based and face-to-face
communication may be more comparable than previously thought.
It came out in 2004, but try an online search for the Prophecy Anthology today and barely a mention of this toweringly ambitious project can be
located, much less an Amazon listing. The initial idea was an ongoing magazine, with the early era of online communication and transfer enabling contributions to
be simply solicited from around the world. That never came off, but editor Doug Miers managed to combine the received strips into 188 oversized pages…Almost all
the highlights over 188 pages are from the already established creators or those who would later carve a career. Prophecy is admirable in opening the
doors to the world, but an inevitable consequence is a lot of raw talent and enthusiasm, but very few strips that are the finished article. Even that wouldn’t be a
fatal flaw in a standard anthology, as new creators have to be encouraged, but people paying $47$302004 for an
oversized publication have a right to expect professional content. Of the newcomers Sam Chivers impresses the most, and it’s not any great surprise that he’s
forged a career in digital illustration. “Headcase” is 14 pages, most featuring 30 small square panels, about an unfortunate day in the life of a humanoid robot.
It’s funny, touching and creative…
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large
corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task. While typically task-agnostic in architecture, this method still requires task-specific fine-tuning
datasets of thousands or tens of thousands of examples. By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple
instructions—something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do.
Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior
state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with
175 billion parameters, 10× more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text
interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performanceon many NLP
datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such
as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic. At the same time, we also identify some datasets where
GPT-3’s few-shotlearning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora.
Finally, we find that GPT-3 can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty
distinguishing from articles written by humans. We discuss broader societal impacts of this finding and of GPT-3 in
general.
…The precise architectural parameters for each model are chosen based on computational efficiency and load-balancing in the layout of models across
GPU’s. Previous work[KMH+20] suggests that
validation loss is not strongly sensitive to these parameters within a reasonably broad range.
Can the human brain, a complex interconnected structure of over 80 billion neurons learn to control itself at the most elemental scale—a single neuron. We
directly linked the firing rate of a single (direct) neuron to the position of a box on a screen, which participants tried to control. Remarkably, all subjects
upregulated the firing rate of the direct neuron in memory structures of their brain. Learning was accompanied by improved performance over trials, simultaneous
decorrelation of the direct neuron to local neurons, and direct neuron to beta frequency oscillation phase-locking. Such previously unexplored neuroprosthetic
skill learning within memory related brain structures, and associated beta frequency phase-locking implicates the ventral striatum. Our demonstration that humans
can volitionally control neuronal activity in mnemonic structures, may provide new ways of probing the function and plasticity of human memory without exogenous
stimulation.
Radio remains popular, delivering an audience reach of over 90 percent, but radio ratings may overestimate real advertising exposure. Little is known about
audience and media factors affecting radio-advertising avoidance. Many advertisers have believed as much as one-third of the audience switch stations during
radio-advertising breaks. In the current study, the authors combined Canadian portable people-meter data ratings to measure loss of audience during advertising.
They discovered a new benchmark of 3% (across conditions) for mechanical (or actual physical) avoidance of radio advertising, such as switching stations or turning
off the radio. This rate is about one-tenth of current estimates, but was higher for music versus talk stations, out-of-home versus in-home listening, and early
versus late dayparts.
Technologies to measure gaze direction and pupil reactivity have become efficient, cheap, and compact and are finding increasing use in many fields, including
gaming, marketing, driver safety, military, and healthcare. Besides offering numerous useful applications, the rapidly expanding technology raises serious privacy
concerns. Through the lens of advanced data analytics, gaze patterns can reveal much more information than a user wishes and expects to give away. Drawing from a
broad range of scientific disciplines, this paper provides a structured overview of personal data that can be inferred from recorded eye activities. Our analysis
of the literature shows that eye tracking data may implicitly contain information about a user’s biometric identity, gender, age, ethnicity, body weight,
personality traits, drug consumption habits, emotional state, skills and abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences. Certain eye tracking measures may
even reveal specific cognitive processes and can be used to diagnose various physical and mental health conditions. By portraying the richness and sensitivity of
gaze data, this paper provides an important basis for consumer education, privacy impact assessments, and further research into the societal implications of eye
tracking.
Javascript library for creating a theme widget controlling page appearance, toggling between automatic (OS-set), and manual ‘light’ vs ‘dark mode’. This library
saves the setting to local storage, and avoids the bugs of cruder inversion-based dark-mode JS libraries where setting dark-mode during the day means it’ll
automatically set light-mode at night.
Because many users do not have access to a browser/OS which explicitly supports dark mode, cannot modify the browser/OS setting without undesired
side-effects, wish to opt in only for specific websites, or simply forget that they turned on dark mode & dislike it, we make dark mode controllable by providing a
widget at the top of the page.
Physical locks are one of the most prevalent mechanisms for securing objects such as doors. While many of these locks are vulnerable to lock-picking, they are
still widely used as lock-picking requires specific training with tailored instruments, and easily raises suspicion. In this paper, we propose SpiKey, a
novel attack that substantially lowers the bar for an attacker as opposed to the lock-picking attack, by requiring only the use of a smartphone microphone to infer
the shape of victim’s key, namely bittings (or cut depths) which form the secret of a key. When a victim inserts his/her key into the lock, the emitted
sound is captured by the attacker’s microphone. SpiKey leverages the time difference between audible clicks to ultimately infer the bitting information,
ie., shape of the physical key. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a simulation, based on real-world recordings, and demonstrate a substantial reduction in search
space from a pool of more than 330,000 keys to 3 candidate keys for the most frequent case.
Covariant.ai has developed a platform that consists of off-the-shelf robot arms equipped with cameras, a special gripper, and plenty of computer power for
figuring out how to grasp objects tossed into warehouse bins. The company, emerging from stealth Wednesday, announced the first commercial installations of its
AI-equipped robots: picking boxes and bags of products for a German electronics retailer called Obeta.
…The company was founded in 2017 by Pieter Abbeel, a prominent AI professor at UC Berkeley, and several of his students. Abbeel pioneered the application of
machine learning to robotics, and he made a name for himself in academic circles in 2010 by developing a robot capable of folding laundry (albeit very slowly).
Covariant uses a range of AI techniques to teach robots how to grasp unfamiliar objects. These include reinforcement learning, in which an algorithm trains
itself through trial and error, a little like the way animals learn through positive and negative feedback…Besides reinforcement learning, Abbeel says his
company’s robots make use of imitation learning, a way of learning by observing demonstrations of perception and grasping by another algorithm, and meta-learning,
a way of refining the learning process itself. Abbeel says the system can adapt and improve when a new batch of items arrive. “It’s training on the fly”, he says.
“I don’t think anybody else is doing that in the real world.”
…But reinforcement learning is finicky and needs lots of computer power. “I used to be skeptical about reinforcement learning, but I’m not anymore”, says Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto who also works part time at Google.
Hinton says the amount of computer power needed to make reinforcement learning work has often seemed prohibitive, so it is
striking to see commercial success. He says it is particularly impressive that Covariant’s system has been running in a commercial setting for a prolonged
period.
…Peter Puchwein, vice president of innovation at Knapp, says he is particularly impressed by the way Covariant.ai’s robots can grasp even products in
transparent bags, which can be difficult for cameras to perceive. “Even as a human being, if you have a box with 20 products in poly bags, it’s really hard to take
just one out”, he says…Late last year, the international robot maker ABB ran a contest. It invited 20 companies to
design software for its robot arms that could sort through bins of random items, from cubes to plastic bags filled with other objects. Ten of the companies were
based in Europe, and the other half were in the United States. Most came nowhere close to passing the test. A few could handle most tasks but failed on the
trickier cases. Covariant was the only company that could handle every task as swiftly and efficiently as a human. “We were trying to find weaknesses”, said Marc
Segura, managing director of service robotics at ABB. “It is easy to reach a certain level on these tests, but it
is super difficult not to show any weaknesses.”
The impact of online video advertisement has an evolving and undeniable influence on the success of online video streaming. A successful online video
advertisement campaign deployment necessitates: “targeting appropriate marketing audience, determining optimum intervals to insert advertisement, associating the
production quality of the content while considering advertisement conceptual features, matching the relevance of advertisement context to the content theme,
calculating the applicable number of ads for stitching into the content, and correlating the ratio of advertisement length to total active watch duration”. This
paper proposes a novel model for inserting advertisement into online video that considers content and commercial specific properties while optimizing Quality of
Experience (QoE) by estimating suitable duration for advertisement, number of splits and content relation. The proposed model has been evaluated in a controlled
on-line video test environment so that the success rate of this platform has been compared with the advertisement insertion strategies of technology frontrunners
YouTube and Vimeo. In terms of medium and long length online videos, advertisements located within the content provides a better QoE compared to the ones that are
located at the beginning of the video. For short length online videos, the general expectation of the audience tends to see the content immediately and any
advertisement insertion related delay results in a corresponding customer behavior where 25% tend to quit after 3 seconds and another 25% after 5 seconds.
“Legacy code is bad and if you keep using it, it’s really your own fault.” There are many variations of the same thing floating around in Open Source
communities and it always comes down to the same thing: at one point something is being declared old and it has to be replaced by something newer which is better.
That better typically has some really good arguments on its side: we learned from our mistakes, it was wrong to begin with or something along the lines of it being
impure or that it propagated bad ideas…Some communities as a whole for instance are suffering from this a whole lot. Every few years a library or the entire
ecosystem of that community is thrown away and replaced by something new and support for the old one ends abruptly and arbitrarily. This has happened to the
packaging ecosystem, the interpreter itself, modules in the standard library etc.
…This largely works because the way open source communities are managing migrations is by cheating and the currency of payment is emotional distress. Since
typically money is not involved (at least not in the sense that a user would pay for the product directly) there is no obvious monetary impact of people not
migrating. So if you cause friction in the migration process it won’t hurt you as a library maintainer. If anything the churn of some users might actually be
better in the long run because the ones that don’t migrate are likely also some of the ones that are the most annoying in the issue tracker…Since the migration
causes a lot of emotional distress, the cheat is carried happily by the entire community…I have been a part of the Python 3 migration and I can tell you that it
sucked out all my enjoyment of being a part of that community. No matter on which side you were during that migration I heard very little positive about that
experience.
…A big reason why this all happens in the first place is because as an Open Source maintainer the standard response which works against almost all forms of
criticism is “I’m not paid for this and I no longer want to maintain the old version of X”. And in fact this is a pretty good argument because it’s both true, and
very few projects actually are large enough that a fork by some third party would actually survive. Python for instance currently has a fork of 2.7 called Tauthon
which got very little traction.
There are projects which are clearly managing such forceful transitions, but I think what is often forgotten is that with that transition many people love the
community who do not want to participate in it or can’t…I honestly believe a lot of Open Source projects would have an easier time existing if they would
acknowledge that these painful migrations are painful for everybody involved.
…if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not. Limiting your search process to uploading a photograph in its
original form to just images.google.com may give you useful results for the most obviously stolen or popular images, but for most any sophisticated research
project, you need additional sites at your disposal—along with a lot of creativity.
This guide will walk through detailed strategies to use reverse image search in digital investigations, with an eye towards identifying people and locations,
along with determining an image’s progeny. After detailing the core differences between the search engines, Yandex, Bing, and Google are tested on five test images
showing different objects and from various regions of the world.
…Reverse image search engines have progressed dramatically over the past decade, with no end in sight. Along with the ever-growing amount of indexed material, a
number of search giants have enticed their users to sign up for image hosting services, such as Google Photos, giving these search algorithms an
endless amount of material for machine learning. On top of this, facial recognition AI is entering the consumer space with products like FindClone and may already be used in some search algorithms, namely with Yandex. There are no publicly available facial recognition
programs that use any Western social network, such as Facebook or Instagram, but perhaps it is only a matter of time until something like this emerges, dealing a
major blow to online privacy while also (at that great cost) increasing digital research functionality.
If you skipped most of the article and are just looking for the bottom line, here are some easy-to-digest tips for reverse image searching:
Use Yandex first, second, and third, and then try Bing and Google if you still can’t find your desired
result.
If you are working with source imagery that is not from a Western or former Soviet country, then you may not have much luck. These search
engines are hyper-focused on these areas, and struggle for photographs taken in South America, Central America/Caribbean, Africa, and much of Asia.
Increase the resolution of your source image, even if it just means doubling or tripling the resolution until it’s a pixelated mess. None of
these search engines can do much with an image that is under 200×200.
Try cropping out elements of the image, or pixelating them if it trips up your results. Most of these search engines will
focus on people and their faces like a heat-seeking missile, so pixelate them to focus on the background elements.
If all else fails, get really creative: mirror your image horizontally, add some color filters, or use the
clonetool on your image editor to fill in elements on your image that are disrupting searches.
Web applications can implement procedures for studying the speed of mental processes (mental chronometry) and can be administered via web browsers on most commodity desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. This approach to
conducting mental chronometry offers various opportunities, such as increased scale, ease of data collection, and access to specific samples. However, validity and
reliability may be threatened by less accurate timing than specialized software and hardware can offer.
We examined how accurately web applications time stimuli and register response times (RTs) on commodity touchscreen and keyboard devices running a range of
popular web browsers. Additionally, we explored the accuracy of a range of technical innovations for timing stimuli, presenting stimuli, and estimating stimulus
duration.
The results offer some guidelines as to what methods may be most accurate and what mental chronometry paradigms may suitably be administered via web
applications:
In controlled circumstances, as can be realized in a lab setting, very accurate stimulus timing and moderately accurate RT measurements could be achieved on
both touchscreen and keyboard devices, though RTs were consistently overestimated.
In uncontrolled circumstances, such as researchers may encounter online, stimulus presentation may be less accurate, especially when brief durations are
requested (of up to 100 ms).
Differences in RT overestimation between devices might not substantially affect the reliability with which group differences can be found, but they may affect
reliability for individual differences. In the latter case, measurement via absolute RTs can be more affected than measurement via relative RTs (ie. differences in
a participant’s RTs between conditions).
The article shows the main factors of adblocking software usage. The study was based on data obtained by a web questionnaire. The research was focused on
evaluation of ad blocking (adblock) software usage factors in five categories: (1) gender, age, and education; (2) use of
advertising and sources of knowledge about advertising; (3) technical and social reasons for blocking online advertisements;
(4) usage of an adblock-wall; and (5) type of online advertisement. An evaluation of adblock usage factors revealed four main technical reasons for adblock usage
connected with website technology and web development problems—interruption, amount of ads, speed, and security; and one social reason for adblock usage, namely,
the problem of privacy.
[Keywords: adblock software, web advertisement, website, security, privacy]
…These days, if you have decent connection, you are seconds away from finding almost any public knowledge in the internet. However, there is another aspect of
information: personal and specific to your needs, work and hobbies. It’s your todo list, your private notes, books you are
reading. Of course, it’s not that well integrated with the outside world, hence the tooling and experience of interacting with it is very different.
Some examples:
To find something from my Messenger history with a friend, I need to be online, open Facebook, navigate to search and use the interface Facebook’s
employees thought convenient (spoiler: it sucks). It’s my information, something that came out from my brain. Why can’t I have it available anywhere,
anytime, presented the way I prefer?
To find something in my Kobo ebook, I need to reach my device physically and type the query using the virtual keyboard (yep, e-ink lag!). Not a
very pleasant experience. It’s something I own and have read. Why does it have to be so hard?
Such things are pretty frustrating to me, so I’ve been working on making them easier. Search has to be incremental, fast and as convenient to use as possible. I’ll be sharing some of
workflows, tricks and thoughts in this post.
The post is geared towards using Emacs and Org-mode, but hopefully you’ll find some useful tricks for your current tools
and workflow even if you don’t. There is (almost) nothing inherently special about Emacs, I’m sure you can achieve similar workflows in other modern text editors
given they are flexible enough.
Note: throughout the post I will link to my emacs config snippets. To prevent code references from going
stale, I use permalinks, but check master branch as well in case of patches or more comments in code.
What do I search?
I’ll write about searching in
my personal notes, tasks and knowledge repository (this blog included)
all digital trace I’m leaving (tweets, internet comments, annotations)
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all
observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
…Taken to its logical extreme, this leads to the following observation, colloquially referred to as “The Law of Implicit Interfaces”: Given enough use, there is
no such thing as a ‘private’
implementation. That is, if an interface has enough consumers, they will collectively depend on every aspect of the implementation, intentionally or not. This
effect serves to constrain changes to the implementation, which must now conform to both the explicitly documented interface, as well as the implicit interface
captured by usage. We often refer to this phenomenon as “bug-for-bug compatibility.”
The creation of the implicit interface usually happens gradually, and interface consumers generally aren’t aware as it’s happening. For example, an interface
may make no guarantees about performance, yet consumers often come to expect a certain level of performance from its implementation. Those expectations become part
of the implicit interface to a system, and changes to the system must maintain these performance characteristics to continue functioning for its consumers.
…I’m a Software Engineer at Google, working on large-scale code change tooling and infrastructure. Prior to that, I spent 5 years improving Google’s core
C++ libraries. The above observation grew out of experiences when even
the simplest library change caused failures in some far off system.
Some languages specifically randomize hash ordering between
library versions or even between execution of the same program in an attempt to prevent dependencies. But even this still allows for some Hyrum’s Law surprises:
there is code that uses hash iteration ordering as an inefficient random-number generator. Removing such randomness now would break those users. Just as entropy increases in every
thermodynamic system, Hyrum’s Law applies to every observable behavior.
An SLO is aservice level
objective: a target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI. A natural structure
for SLOs is thus SLI ≤ target, orlower bound ≤ SLI ≤ upper bound. For example, we might decide that we will return Shakespeare search results “quickly”, adopting an
SLO that our average search request latency should be less than 100 milliseconds…Choosing and publishing
SLOs to users sets expectations about how a service will perform. This strategy can reduce unfounded complaints to
service owners about, for example, the service being slow. Without an explicit SLO, users often develop their
own beliefs about desired performance, which may be unrelated to the beliefs held by the people designing and operating the service. This dynamic can lead to
both over-reliance on the service, when users incorrectly believe that a service will be more available than it actually is (as happened with Chubby: see “The
Global Chubby Planned Outage”), and under-reliance, when prospective users believe a system is flakier and less reliable than it actually is.
“The Global Chubby Planned Outage”
[Written by Marc Alvidrez]
Chubby [Bur06] is Google’s lock service for loosely coupled
distributed systems. In the global case, we distribute Chubby instances such that each replica is in a different geographic region. Over time, we found that
the failures of the global instance of Chubby consistently generated service outages, many of which were visible to end users. As it turns out, true global
Chubby outages are so infrequent that service owners began to add dependencies to Chubby assuming that it would never go down. Its high reliability provided a
false sense of security because the services could not function appropriately when Chubby was unavailable, however rarely that occurred.
The solution to this Chubby scenario is interesting: SRE makes sure that global Chubby meets, but does not substantially exceed, its service level objective. In any given quarter, if a
true failure has not dropped availability below the target, a controlled outage will be synthesized by intentionally taking down the system. In this way, we
are able to flush out unreasonable dependencies on Chubby shortly after they are added. Doing so forces service owners to reckon with the reality of
distributed systems sooner rather than later.
…Don’t overachieve:
Users build on the reality of what you offer, rather than what you say you’ll supply, particularly for infrastructure services. If your service’s actual
performance is much better than its stated SLO, users will come to rely on its current performance. You can avoid
over-dependence by deliberately taking the system offline occasionally (Google’s Chubby service introduced planned outages in response to being overly
available),18 throttling some requests, or designing the system so that it isn’t faster under light loads.]
I then analyze transition’s effect on actor employment, and find it to be associated with a substantial increase in career terminations, not only among major
stars (which film scholars emphasize), but also among more minor actors. Furthermore, I find that sound raised hazard rates generally. Finally, I calculate that
the number of actors employed in movies increased substantially in the sound era…Examining the IMDb’s genre categorizations, I find evidence that plots became more complex with sound;
consistently, the average number of credited actors per film rose. The number of films released also rose, so that the net effect was a substantial sound-era
increase in the annual employment of motion picture actors
…Despite the success of The Jazz Singer in late 1927,
many industry pundits initially regarded sound as a fad, and even supporters expected talking and silent films to coexist indefinitely. The author of a Harvard
case study of a cinema considering the conversion to sound in 1928 wrote, “It was difficult to judge the permanence of the appeal of sound pictures. Theatrical
managers were convinced that the appeal at first was largely one of curiosity” (Clayton Theater 1930, 491). Jack Warner, the champion of the talking picture, said as late as 1928 that
he expected most future films to be part sound and part silent (Crafton 1997, 174). Adolph Zukor, President of Paramount Pictures, was quoted in late 1928 as saying,
“By no means is the silent picture gone or even diminished in importance. … there always have been subjects which could not be augmented in value or strength
by the addition of sound and dialogue.” (The Film Daily 1929 Yearbook, 513)12
This paper provides a large scale, empirical evaluation of unintended effects from invoking the precautionary principle after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
accident. After the accident, all nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an exogenous increase in
electricity prices. This increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that
the increase in mortality from higher electricity prices outnumbers the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production has
contributed to more deaths than the accident itself.
popups.js: standalone Javascript library for creating ‘popups’ which display link metadata (typically, title/author/date/summary), for
extremely convenient reference/abstract reading, with mobile and YouTube support. Whenever any such link is mouse-overed by the user, popups.js will pop up a
large tooltip-like square with the contents of the attributes. This is particularly intended for references, where it is extremely convenient to autopopulate links
such as to Arxiv.org/Biorxiv.org/Pubmed/PLOS/gwern.net/Wikipedia with the link’s
title/author/date/abstract, so the reader can see it instantly.
popups.jsparses a HTML document and looks for<a> links which have the
docMetadata attribute class, and the attributes data-popup-title, data-popup-author, data-popup-date,
data-popup-doi, data-popup-abstract. (These attributes are expected to be populated already by the HTML document’s compiler, however, they can also be done dynamically. See wikipedia-popups.js for an example of a library which does Wikipedia-only dynamically on page
loads.)
For an example of a Hakyll library which generates annotations for Wikipedia/Biorxiv/Arxiv/PDFs/arbitrarily-defined links, seeLinkMetadata.hs.
The understanding, quantification and evaluation of individual differences in behavior, feelings and thoughts have always been central topics in psychological
science. An enormous amount of previous work on individual differences in behavior is exclusively based on data from self-report questionnaires. To date, little is
known about how individuals actually differ in their objectively quantifiable behaviors and how differences in these behaviors relate to big five personality
traits. Technological advances in mobile computer and sensing technology have now created the possibility to automatically record large amounts of data about
humans’ natural behavior. The collection and analysis of these records makes it possible to analyze and quantify behavioral differences at unprecedented scale and
efficiency. In this study, we analyzed behavioral data obtained from 743 participants in 30 consecutive days of smartphone sensing (25,347,089 logging-events). We
computed variables (15,692) about individual behavior from five semantic categories (communication & social behavior, music listening behavior, app usage behavior,
mobility, and general daytime & nighttime activity). Using a machine learning approach (random forest, elastic net), we show how these variables can be used to predict self-assessments of the big five
personality traits at the factor and facet level. Our results reveal distinct behavioral patterns that proved to be differentially-predictive of big five
personality traits. Overall, this paper shows how a combination of rich behavioral data obtained with smartphone sensing and the use of machine learning techniques
can help to advance personality research and can inform both practitioners and researchers about the different behavioral patterns of personality.
Security conscious individuals may take considerable measures to disable sensors in order to protect their privacy. However, they often overlook the
cyberphysical attack surface exposed by devices that were never designed to be sensors in the first place. Our research demonstrates that the mechanical components
in magnetic hard disk drives behave as microphones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human speech. These unintentional microphones sense speech with
high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive. This proof of concept attack sheds light on the possibility of
invasion of privacy even in absence of traditional sensors. We also present defense mechanisms, such as the use of ultrasonic aliasing, that can mitigate acoustic
eavesdropping by synthesized microphones in hard disk drives.
In 2014, Georgia Tech launched an online campus for its
Master of Science in Computer Science
program. The degree, equal in stature and accreditation to its on-campus counterpart, offered a notably lower cost of attendance. Its design emphasized flexibility
in both geography and time, allowing students from around the world to earn a highly-ranked MSCS without taking
time off work or moving to campus.
Five years later, the program enrolls over 8000 students per semester and has graduated 1500 alumni. It is believed to be the largest program of its kind and
has received recognition from national organizations on professional education. Existing research on the pro-gram has focused on challenges and opportunities to
scale that are agnostic to the content itself.
In this reflection, we look at the creation and growth of the program as it relates to graduate-level CS instruction. In particular, we note a unique and
powerful unity of content and platform: the online delivery of the program dovetails with the technical skillsets of the professors and students that it draws,
putting both in the position to contribute and innovate.
Experimental Pandoc module for implementing automatic inflation adjustment of nominal date-stamped dollar or Bitcoin amounts to provide real prices; Bitcoin’s exchange rate has moved by multiple orders of
magnitude over its early years (rendering nominal amounts deeply unintuitive), and this is particularly critical in any economics or technology discussion where a
nominal price from 1950 is 11× the 2019 real price!
Years/dates are specified in a variant of my interwiki link syntax; for example: $50 or [₿0.5](₿2017-01-01), giving link
adjustments which compile to something like like <span class="inflationAdjusted" data-originalYear="2017-01-01" data-originalAmount="50.50"
data-currentYear="2019" data-currentAmount="50,500">₿50.50<span class="math
inline"><sub>2017</sub><sup>$50,500</sup></span></span>.
Dollar amounts use year, and Bitcoins use full dates, as the greater temporal resolution is necessary. Inflation
rates/exchange rates are specified as constants and need to be manually updated every once in a while; if out of date, the last available rate is carried forward
for future adjustments.
This article examines the extent to which Victorian investors were short-sale
constrained. While previous research suggests that there were relatively few limits on arbitrage, this article argues that short-sales of stocks outside the
Official List were indirectly constrained by the risk of being cornered. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from three corners in cycle company shares [during the
1890s bicycle mania] which occurred in 1896–1897, two of which resulted in
substantial losses for short-sellers. Legal efforts to retrieve funds lost in a corner were unsuccessful, and the court proceedings reveal a widespread contempt
for short-sellers, or ‘bears’, among the general public. Consistent with the hypothesis that these episodes affected the market, this study’s findings show that
cycle companies for which cornering risk was greater experienced disproportionately lower returns during a subsequent crash in the market for cycle shares. This
evidence suggests that, under certain circumstances, short-selling shares in Britain prior to 1900 could have been much riskier than previously thought.
…Cycle share prices are found to have risen by over 200% in the early months of 1896, and remained at a relatively high level until March 1897. This boom
was accompanied by the promotion of many new cycle firms, with 363 established in 1896 and another 238 during the first half of 1897. This was followed by a crash,
with cycle shares losing 76% of their peak value by the end of 1898. The financial press appears to have been aware that a crash was imminent, repeatedly advising
investors to sell cycle shares during the first half of 1897. Interestingly, however, these articles never explicitly recommended short-selling cycle
shares…Between 1890 and 1896, a succession of major technological innovations substantially increased the demand for British bicycles.37 Bicycle
production increased in response, with the number of British cycle companies in existence quadrupling between 1889 and 1897.38 Cycle firms, most of
which were based in and around Birmingham, took advantage of the boom of 1896 by going public, resulting in the successful promotion of £17.3 million worth of
cycle firms in 1896 and a further £7.4 million in 1897.39 By 1897 there was an oversupply problem in the trade, which was worsened by an
exponential increase in the number of bicycles imported from the US.40 The bicycle industry entered recession, and the number of Birmingham-based cycle
firms fell by 54% between 1896 and 1900.41
…The total paid for the 200 shares [by the short-trader Hamlyn] was £2,550, to be delivered at a price of £231.25, for a loss of £2,318.75. To put this loss in
context, Hamlyn’s barrister noted that, had he succeeded in obtaining the shares at allotment, the profit would have been only £26.
Figure 1: Cycle share index vs. subsequent reported dividends, 1895–1898
Accelerometers are sensors for measuring acceleration forces. They can be found embedded in many types of mobile devices, including tablet PCs, smartphones, and
smartwatches. Some common uses of built-in accelerometers are automatic image stabilization, device orientation detection, and shake detection. In contrast to
sensors like microphones and cameras, accelerometers are widely regarded as not privacy-intrusive. This sentiment is reflected in protection policies of current
mobile operating systems, where third-party apps can access accelerometer data without requiring security permission.
It has been shown in experiments, however, that seemingly innocuous sensors can be used as a side channel to infer highly sensitive information about people in
their vicinity. Drawing from existing literature, we found that accelerometer data alone may be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder’s location,
activities, health condition, body features, gender, age, personality traits, and emotional state. Acceleration signals can even be used to uniquely identify a
person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device, including passwords.
In the light of these possible inferences, we suggest that accelerometers should urgently be re-evaluated in terms of their privacy implications, along with
corresponding adjustments to sensor protection mechanisms.
[Keywords: accelerometer, sensor, privacy, side channel, inference attack]
Up-to-date representation of the current status of global energy storage capacity.
Comprehensive and updated research of several energy storage technologies.
Comparison tables of all storage technologies by several characteristics.
Overview of grid-scale applications of different energy storage technologies.
Analysis of different hybrid energy storage combinations and applications.
Renewable Energy Sources have been growing rapidly over the last few years. The spreading of renewables has become stronger due to the increased air pollution,
which is largely believed to be irreversible for the environment. On the other hand, the penetration of renewable energy technologies causes major problems to the
stability of the grid. Along with the fluctuations of the renewable energy technologies production, storage is important for power and voltage smoothing. Energy
storage is also important for energy management, frequency regulation, peak shaving, load leveling, seasonal storage and standby generation during a fault. Thus, storage technologies have gained an increased attention and have
become more than a necessity nowadays.
This paper presents an up to date comprehensive overview of energy storage technologies. It incorporates characteristics and functionalities of each storage
technology, as well as their advantages and disadvantages compared with other storage technologies. Comparison tables with several characteristics of each storage
method are included, while different applications of energy storage technologies are described as well. Finally, several hybrid energy storage applications are
analyzed and different combinations of energy storage technologies are reviewed.
[Paper: Small et al 2021] That was when a group of government officials and
activists decided to take the question to a new online discussion platform called vTaiwan. Starting in early March 2016, about 450 citizens went to
vtaiwan.tw, proposed solutions, and voted on them…Three years after its founding, vTaiwan hasn’t exactly taken Taiwanese politics by storm. It has
been used to debate only a couple of dozen bills, and the government isn’t required to heed the outcomes of those debates (though it may be if a new law passes
later this year). But the system has proved useful in finding consensus on deadlocked issues such as the alcohol sales law, and its methods are now being applied
to a larger consultation platform, called Join, that’s being tried out in some local government settings.
…vTaiwan relies on a hodgepodge of open-source tools for soliciting proposals, sharing information, and holding polls, but one of the key parts is
Pol.is, created by Megill and a couple of friends in Seattle after the events of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011. On Pol.is, a topic is put up
for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people’s comments.
That may sound much like any other online forum, but 2 things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their
ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll”, Tang says. “The opposing sides had never
had a chance to actually interact with each other’s ideas.”
The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to
generate a kind of map [using PCA/UMAP for
dimensionality reduction clustering] of all the
participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded
groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win
votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.
“The visualization is very, very helpful”, Tang says. “If you show people the face of the crowd, and if you take away the reply button, then people stop wasting
time on the divisive statements.”
In one of the platform’s early successes, for example, the topic at issue was how to regulate the ride-hailing company Uber, which had—as in many places around the world—run into fierce
opposition from local taxi drivers. As new people joined the online debate, they were shown and asked to vote on comments that ranged from calls to ban Uber or
subject it to strict regulation, to calls to let the market decide, to more general statements such as “I think that Uber is
a business model that can create flexible jobs.”
Within a few days, the voting had coalesced to define 2 groups, one pro-Uber and one, about twice as large,
anti-Uber. But then the magic happened: as the groups sought to attract more supporters, their members started posting
comments on matters that everyone could agree were important, such as rider safety and liability insurance. Gradually, they refined them to garner more votes. The
end result was a set of 7 comments that enjoyed almost universal approval, containing such recommendations as “The government should set up a fair regulatory
regime”, “Private passenger vehicles should be registered”, and “It should be permissible for a for-hire driver to join multiple fleets and platforms.” The divide
between pro-Uber and anti-Uber camps had been replaced by consensus on how to create
a level playing field for Uber and the taxi firms, protect consumers, and create more competition. Tang herself took those
suggestions into face-to-face talks with Uber, the taxi drivers, and experts, which led the government to adopt new
regulations along the lines vTaiwan had produced.
Jason Hsu, a former activist, and now an opposition legislator, helped bring the vTaiwan platform into being. He says its big flaw is that the government is not
required to heed the discussions taking place there. vTaiwan’s website boasts that as of August 2018, it had been used in 26 cases, with 80% resulting in
“decisive government action.” As well as inspiring regulations for Uber and for online alcohol sales, it has led to an act
that creates a “fintech sandbox”, a space for small-scale technological experiments within Taiwan’s otherwise tightly regulated financial system.
“It’s all solving the same problem: essentially saying, ‘What if we’re talking about things that are emergent, [for which] there are only a handful of early
adopters?’” Tang says. “That’s the basic problem we were solving at the very beginning with vTaiwan.”
Anxiety levels have increased for several decades, despite objective indicators of historically unprecedented safety. A perceived inability to tolerate
uncertainty or distress motivates individuals experiencing anxiety to engage in safety behaviors. Mobile phones provide unrestricted access to safety cues intended
to reduce uncertainty and therein anxiety; however, recurrent engagement in reassurance seeking behaviors paradoxically increases anxiety.
The current research was designed to assess whether self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU) levels may have been increasing and, if so, whether the
increases correlate positively with mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. A cross-temporal meta-analysis was conducted using data from 52 North American
studies exploring IU as well as social indicator data from several public sources. A statistically-significant increase in IU levels occurred from 1999 to 2014,
correlated with increases in mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. As hypothesized, IU levels appeared to be increasing over time and the increases
correlate positively with mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. The results support the possibility that mobile phones increase reassurance seeking, acting
as safety cues, and reducing spontaneous, everyday exposures to uncertainty, which may ultimately potentiate psychopathology by increasing IU and anxiety.
Subsequent experimental research to assess for causality appears warranted. Limitations and directions for future research are presented.
[Keywords: Intolerance of uncertainty, meta-analysis, exposure, mobile phones, longitudinal]
In this paper we discuss policy iteration methods for approximate solution of a finite-state discounted Markov decision problem, with a focus on feature-based
aggregation methods and their connection with deep reinforcement learning schemes. We introduce features of the states of
the original problem, and we formulate a smaller “aggregate” Markov decision problem, whose states relate to the features. We discuss properties and possible
implementations of this type of aggregation, including a new approach to approximate policy iteration. In this approach the policy improvement operation combines
feature-based aggregation with feature construction using deep neural networks or other calculations. We argue that the cost function of a policy may be
approximated much more accurately by the nonlinear function of the features provided by aggregation, than by the linear function of the features provided by neural
network-based reinforcement learning, thereby potentially leading to more effective policy improvement.
If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable
today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other
known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate
event.
A recent study by contentpass indicates that more than 25% of all ad blockers on desktop devices use the EasyPrivacy blocklist and are therefore invisible to
common website analytics software…The by far most popular filter list to block ads is the so-called “Easylist”. It is activated by default in popular ad blockers
like Adblock Plus, Adblock or uBlock Origin and focuses on blocking ads both on a network—and on a visual level. Even the
built-in ad blocker of Google Chrome uses this list.
While EasyPrivacy users are now “invisible” to our service as well, we recently integrated our solution under the first party domain on a popular German IT news
website. As a consequence of this first party integration the statistics about ad blocker usage were sent to a different URL, which was initially not being blocked by EasyPrivacy. It took about two weeks for the EasyPrivacy community to put the
statistics URL of the first party domain on a filter list again.
These two weeks of unfiltered data allow us to get an idea of how many people use an ad blocker with EasyPrivacy activated (be it Adblock Plus/Adblock where
the user manually activated EasyPrivacy or uBlock Origin where EasyPrivacy is activated by default).
Our data suggests that over 25% of all users with active ad blocking software on desktop devices use EasyPrivacy and are thus invisible to major web analytics
software. In this specific case the true ad blocking rate on desktop was 37% while analytics software that is blocked by EasyPrivacy would only report
what corresponds to 27% of ad blocking. Or from a different perspective: 10% of the total desktop traffic on this website is not analyzed and counted by common
third party analytics software. Historical data from the time where our service was initially added to EasyPrivacy suggests similar proportions on other sites and
verticals.
Serendipity can come in different forms and come about in a variety of ways.
The Merton archives were used as a starting point for gathering literature and examples.
We identify 4 types of serendipity together with 4 mechanisms of serendipity.
Policy and theory implications vary by type and mechanism of serendipity.
Serendipity does not necessarily strengthen basic research rationales.
Serendipity does not necessarily weaken rationales for targeted research.
Serendipity, the notion of researchers making unexpected and beneficial discoveries, has played an important role in debates about the feasibility and
desirability of targeting public R&D investments. The purpose of this paper is to show that serendipity can come in
different forms and come about in a variety of ways. The archives of Robert K.
Merton, who introduced the term to the social sciences, were used as a starting point for gathering literature and examples. I identify 4 types of serendipity
(Walpolian, Mertonian, Bushian, Stephanian) together with 4 mechanisms of serendipity (Theory-led, Observer-led, Error-borne, Network-emergent). I also discuss
implications of the different types and mechanisms for theory and policy.
Virtual reality users wearing head-mounted displays can experience the illusion of walking in any direction for infinite distance while, in reality, they are
walking a curvilinear path in physical space. This is accomplished by introducing unnoticeable rotations to the virtual environment—a technique called
redirected walking. This paper gives an overview of the research that has been performed since redirected walking was first practically demonstrated 15
years ago.
Gidding hints that the house itself is doing the haunting, implying that the architectural environment is responsible for reflecting back the fears of
those within, teasing out their vulnerabilities, feeding upon them, and making them manifest. The house becomes a monster, a maleficent presence that resents its
human tenants. If the house can be read as a metaphor for the body, as is often the case in Gothic mansions and castles, then the occupants become its
consciousness, the archetypes inhabiting its ego and id. Then the house inevitably suffers from a mental schism, a multiple personality disorder. The characters
become those internal voices of nagging doubt and paranoia for the house… and it eventually suffers a mental breakdown.
Despite filming in England, the setting remained as New England. Ettington Park in Stratford-upon-Avon was the spooky mansion that Robert Wise chose for Hill
House’s exteriors, reputedly selected from a list he sourced from the British Psychical Research Society of buildings considered to be genuinely haunted.
This is the first ‘character’ to appear in the film, emerging out of darkness and looking very eerie indeed, due to the inventive use of infra-red film stock.
It’s been argued that the house is the true star of the film, and I have to admit it turns in a memorable ‘performance’. This, though, has more to do with
marvellous production design by Elliot Scott and the huge labyrinthine sets built at Borehamwood. Corridors were made to converge or open out, creating a subtly
expressionistic feel and rooms were constructed slightly askew, sometimes with walls that angled inward. Scott went on to design Labyrinth (1986) and the
first two Indiana Jones sequels.
…The Haunting is regularly included in Top 10 lists of the scariest films ever made. But the special effects are limited to only a few ingenious
mechanical effects, as the terror is mostly the result of brilliant sound-design, clever use of shadows, and inventive camerawork.
Wise chose to shoot the film in Panavision’s wide format and every shot makes full use of it, with beautiful compositions and plenty of visual interest across
every inch of the screen. The otherworldly atmosphere and ominous tracking shots, enhanced by special lenses, work in tandem with the subtly distorted sets.
Wise had some problems sourcing the wide-angle lenses he needed, mainly because they didn’t exist at that time. He wanted the interior to look deep, dark, and
foreboding, seeming to move as if we were within a living thing. The available lenses just weren’t cutting it for him. He badgered Bob Gottschalk, president of
Panavision, until he let slip that wider-lenses were in development at their optics labs. Gottschalk explained that they were early prototypes and the lenses
caused unacceptable distortions. This was exactly what Wise wanted! After signing a disclaimer to waive any legal repercussions, he became the first
director to use such wide angles, imbuing Hill House with its unique and disquieting visual personality.
The unique look of the film goes a long way to creating the brooding atmosphere, but the sound design was the real breakthrough. The slightest creak of
floorboard or sigh of draught makes audiences hold their breath to better listen, and then cacophonous groans and thuds really get the heart racing.
…Of course, our emotional involvement hinges on the performances of the actors. It seems that the personal circumstances and attitudes of the actors already
reflected the characters they were to play. Harris admits that she was suffering from a bout of depression during filming, and this inadvertently helped her play
the central role of the sensitive Eleanor, who feels isolated and shunned by her colleagues, and so becomes victim to the seductively malign atmosphere of the
house. Her performance is both fragile and disturbingly unhinged in turns. The voice-over she provides, to share her character’s paranoia, might have looked corny
on paper to those American studio executives, but Harris delivers it so perfectly that it draws the sympathies of the audience. We feel for her, even as she seems
to succumb to madness and becomes the willing victim.
The Haunting stands alongside Night of the Demon (1957) and The Innocents (1961) as a defining classic in the cinema of the
supernatural. It has never been surpassed and its ‘presence’ is palpable in most intelligent psychological horror films to this day. If special effects had been
used more extensively, then it surely would have dated, but keeping the focus on mood and the psychological aspects of the narrative has ensured it remains as
effective as ever.
He measures 21 keyboard latencies using a logic analyzer, finding a range of 15–60ms (!), representing a waste of a large fraction of the available ~100–200ms
latency budget before a user notices and is irritated (“the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the
70s.”). The latency estimates are surprising, and do not correlate with advertised traits. They simply have to be measured empirically.]
We can see that, even with the limited set of keyboards tested, there can be as much as a 45ms difference in latency between keyboards. Moreover, a modern
computer with one of the slower keyboards attached can’t possibly be as responsive as a quick machine from the 70s or 80s because the keyboard alone is slower than
the entire response pipeline of some older computers. That establishes the fact that modern keyboards contribute to the latency bloat we’ve seen over the past
forty years…Most keyboards add enough latency to make the user experience noticeably worse, and keyboards that advertise speed aren’t necessarily faster. The two
gaming keyboards we measured weren’t faster than non-gaming keyboards, and the fastest keyboard measured was a minimalist keyboard from Apple that’s marketed more
on design than speed.
The increasing use of ad blocking software poses a major threat for publishers in loss of online ad revenue, and for
advertisers in the loss of audience. Major publishers have adopted various anti-ad blocking strategies such as denial of access to website content and asking users
to subscribe to paid ad-free versions. However, publishers are unsure about the true impact of these strategies2, 3. We posit that the real problem
lies in the measurement of effectiveness because the existing methods compare metrics after implementation of such strategies with that of metrics just before
implementation, making them error prone due to sampling bias. The errors arise due to differences in group compositions across before and after periods, as well as
differences in time-period selection for the before measurement. We propose a novel algorithmic method which modifies the difference-in-differences approach to
address the sampling bias due to differences in time-period selection. Unlike difference-in-differences, we choose the time-period for comparison in an endogenous
manner, as well as, exploit differences in ad blocking tendencies among visitors’ arriving on the publisher’s site to allow
cluster specific choice of the control time-period. We evaluate the method on both synthetic data (which we make available) and proprietary real data from an
online publisher and find good support.
In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that
machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that machines could even come to exceed human size by a significant margin. However, there
are at least seven distinct arguments that preclude this outcome. We show that it is not only implausible that machines will ever exceed human size, but in fact
impossible.
The trial transcripts were there, 12 neatly bound volumes…I needed a copy, I said. “Sure”, she replied warmly before noting that all transcript copies must come
directly from the court reporter at a price of $1 per page. The transcript I wanted was 2,400 pages.
The court reporter, Twyla, picked up on the first ring. I pleaded poor journalist and poor grad student, but she, a veteran of the field, was unmoved. Twyla
informed me that the rate was governed by law, and besides, she was entitled to that money—in fact, she needed it to be fairly compensated for her work. Could that
be? It could. The West Virginia State Code of Civil Procedure dictates that a court reporter must provide on request a trial transcript for $2.85 per page, with
any subsequent copies of that same transcript to be supplied for $1 per page. The cost is even higher in other states. In Georgia, for instance, the rate is $6 per
page.
The rates are set that way to compensate court reporters for expenses they must pay themselves. Twyla explained to me that, while the state of West Virginia
provides an office in the courthouse and a telephone for court reporters, it does not pay for most of the tools and equipment she needs to do her job. Laptops,
note-taking machines and software, paper, and pencils are necessary items for professional transcription. All of it—which could cost as much as $13,000 a
year—comes out of court reporters’ pockets, she said. It’s a huge expense for professionals earning an average $50,000 per year but can be worth it if a court
reporter sells one or two copies of her transcripts. Twyla says she’s heard of some women (89 percent of court reporters in the United States are female) making up
to $90,000 a year between their salaries and the sale of transcripts they’ve created—more than decent pay in a rural area like Greenbrier County, where the median
household income is just shy of $40,000.
Using fees to subsidize court reporter pay works in theory, but in practice it makes trial transcripts too expensive for an average citizen or journalist to
afford. It also can put a barrier between trial transcripts and individuals who should be entitled to them. I learned later that the defendant in the case I was
researching paid more than $7,000 to obtain a copy of the transcript from his own trial so his lawyers could analyze it for grounds for appeal…For Twyla, the
current law demands that she jealously guard each page of her work to ensure she makes a decent living. For those tried and convicted of crimes, this means ponying
up thousands of dollars for a record of their experience in the courts. For journalists like me, it means not learning why a jury of a man’s peers found him guilty
of murder—unless we can spare $2,400, which I still can’t.
The trial transcripts were there, 12 neatly bound volumes…I needed a copy, I said. “Sure”, she replied warmly before noting that all transcript copies must come
directly from the court reporter at a price of $1 per page. The transcript I wanted was 2,400 pages.
The court reporter, Twyla, picked up on the first ring. I pleaded poor journalist and poor grad student, but she, a veteran of the field, was unmoved. Twyla
informed me that the rate was governed by law, and besides, she was entitled to that money—in fact, she needed it to be fairly compensated for her work. Could that
be? It could. The West Virginia State Code of Civil Procedure dictates that a court reporter must provide on request a trial transcript for $2.85 per page, with
any subsequent copies of that same transcript to be supplied for $1 per page. The cost is even higher in other states. In Georgia, for instance, the rate is $6 per
page.
The rates are set that way to compensate court reporters for expenses they must pay themselves. Twyla explained to me that, while the state of West Virginia
provides an office in the courthouse and a telephone for court reporters, it does not pay for most of the tools and equipment she needs to do her job. Laptops,
note-taking machines and software, paper, and pencils are necessary items for professional transcription. All of it—which could cost as much as $13,000 a
year—comes out of court reporters’ pockets, she said. It’s a huge expense for professionals earning an average $50,000 per year but can be worth it if a court
reporter sells one or two copies of her transcripts. Twyla says she’s heard of some women (89% of court reporters in the United States are female) making up to
$90,000 a year between their salaries and the sale of transcripts they’ve created—more than decent pay in a rural area like Greenbrier County, where the median
household income is just shy of $40,000.
Using fees to subsidize court reporter pay works in theory, but in practice it makes trial transcripts too expensive for an average citizen or journalist to
afford. It also can put a barrier between trial transcripts and individuals who should be entitled to them. I learned later that the defendant in the case I was
researching paid more than $7,000 to obtain a copy of the transcript from his own trial so his lawyers could analyze it for grounds for appeal…For Twyla, the
current law demands that she jealously guard each page of her work to ensure she makes a decent living. For those tried and convicted of crimes, this means ponying
up thousands of dollars for a record of their experience in the courts. For journalists like me, it means not learning why a jury of a man’s peers found him guilty
of murder—unless we can spare $2,400, which I still can’t.
Bio-mimetic approaches to restoring sensory function show great promise in that they rapidly produce perceptual experience, but have the disadvantage of being
invasive. In contrast, sensory substitution approaches are non-invasive, but may lead to cognitive rather than perceptual experience.
Here we introduce a new non-invasive approach that leads to fast and truly perceptual experience like bio-mimetic techniques. Instead of building on existing
circuits at the neural level as done in bio-mimetics, we piggy-back on sensorimotor contingencies at the stimulus level. We convey head orientation to geomagnetic
North, a reliable spatial relation not normally sensed by humans, by mimicking sensorimotor contingencies of distal sounds via head-related transfer functions.
We demonstrate rapid and long-lasting integration into the perception of self-rotation. Short training with amplified or reduced rotation gain in the magnetic
signal can expand or compress the perceived extent of vestibular self-rotation, even with the magnetic signal absent in the test. We argue that it is the
reliability of the magnetic signal that allows vestibular spatial recalibration, and the coding scheme mimicking sensorimotor contingencies of distal sounds that
permits fast integration.
Hence we propose that contingency-mimetic feedback has great potential for creating sensory augmentation devices that achieve fast and genuinely perceptual
experiences.
…Our novel iPhone based sensory augmentation device [hearSpace] measures head orientation to North via orientation sensors (compass, gyro,
accelerometer) integrated into a headphone and transforms their output into a spatial sound using a sound engine based on head-related transfer functions
(HRTF) (Figure 1A, Figure 1B). A recording of a waterfall serves as the
sound source which provides the ecological semantics of a natural sound coming from a distance. Further, the sound has a pink-noise like frequency spectrum which
is pleasant to hear. The waterfall sound is reliably situated in the direction of magnetic North, moving in such a way as to compensate the movements of the head.
This artificial sensorimotor contingency: (1) allows aligning the head with a global reference, creating a reliably stable artificial external reference for the
eyes, ears and the vestibular system, and (2) provides an intuitive sensory code that mimics the acoustic characteristics of distal sounds.
In 2012, “A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media
Environment” described the effects of the steady dissolution of North Korea’s information blockade. Precipitated by the collapse of the state economy during
the famine of the 1990s, North Korea’s once strict external and internal controls on the flow of information atrophied as North Korean citizens traded with one
another, and goods and people flowed across the border with China. Activities unthinkable in Kim Il Sung’s day became normalized, even if many remained technically
illegal. A decade into the 21st century, North Korea was no longer perfectly sealed off from the outside world and its citizens were much more connected
to each other. Continued research suggests that many of the trends toward greater information access and sharing detailed in “A Quiet Opening” persist today. Yet,
over the last four years, since Kim Jong Un’s emergence as leader, the picture has become more complicated.
It is tempting to view the dynamics surrounding media access and information flow in North Korea as a simple tug-of-war: North Korean citizens gain greater
access to a broader range of media and communication devices, and unsanctioned content. The North Korean government, realizing this, responds through crackdowns in
an attempt to reconstitute its blockade on foreign information and limit the types of media and communication devices its citizens can access. However, the reality
is not so neatly binary. As the North Korean economic situation rebounded after the famine and achieved relative stability, 2 authorities developed strategies to
establish new, more modern forms of control within an environment that was fundamentally altered from its pre-famine state.
Among the most important trends to emerge in the North Korean information environment under Kim Jong Un is the shift toward greater media digitization and the
expansion of networked communications. The state has ceded and now sanctioned a considerably greater level of interconnectedness between private North Korean
citizens. This, at least in part, may be an acknowledgement the market economy in North Korea is here to stay, and thus the communications channels that enable the
processes of a market economy must be co-opted and supported rather than rolled back.3 Although the government continues to make efforts to monitor
communications and dictate what subjects are off-limits, it is allowing average citizens far greater access to communications technologies. Greater digitization
and digital network access are already having profound effects on the basic dynamics and capabilities that define the information space in North Korea.
The expansion and catalyzation of person-to-person communication through mobile phones and other networked digital technologies is in many ways a promising
development. However, as this report will document, from both a user and technical perspective, expanding network connectivity to a broad swath of the population
is arming the North Korean government with a new array of censorship and surveillance tools that go beyond what is observed even in other authoritarian states or
closed media environments. It is clear that the state’s information control strategy, while changing, is not ad hoc or ill-considered. Recent technological
innovations and policy changes, on balance, may be giving the North Korean government more control than they are ceding.
…Data Sources: This study primarily draws from:
The 2015 Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Survey of North Korea Refugees, Defectors and Travelers
(n = 350)
A qualitative study comprised of 34 interviews with specifically recruited recent defectors conducted in May and June of 2016 specifically for this
report
Technical analyses of available North Korean software and hardware
[The details on NK use of digital censorship is interesting: steady progress in locking down Bluetooth and WiFi by software and then hardware
modifications; use of Android security system/DRM to install audit logs + regular screenshots to capture foreign media
consumption; a whitelist/signed-media system to block said foreign media from ever being viewed, with auto-deletion of offending files; watermarking (courtesy of
an American university’s misguided outreach) of media created on desktops to trace them; network blocking and surveillance;
and efforts towards automatic bulk surveillance of text messages for ‘South-Korean-style’ phrases/words. Stallman’s warnings about DRM are quite prophetic in the NK context—the system is secured against the user…For these reasons & poverty, radio
(including foreign radios like Voice of America) is—surprisingly to me—the top source of information for North Koreans.]
This whitepaper presents the primary findings of new research by Professor Benjamin Shiller (Brandeis University), Professor Joel Waldfogel (University of
Minnesota and the National Bureau of Economic Research), and Dr. Johnny Ryan (PageFair).
Research of 2,574 websites over 3 years reveals that adblock has a hidden cost: it not only reduces small and medium publishers’ revenue, it also reduces their
traffic.
Studying the changing rate of desktop adblock usage and traffic rank from April 2013—June 2016 reveals that adblock usage is undermining many
websites’ ability to invest in content. Affected websites then attract fewer visitors, and so their traffic declines. The full paper is available from
NBER, the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research.
This is the adblock paradox: users may avoid ads in the short term, but ultimately undermine the value they can derive from the web. To reverse this phenomenon,
publishers must listen to users’ legitimate grievances about online ads and respond by fixing the problems. Once they have remedied the users’ grievances,
publishers can choose to serve their ads using technology that adblock companies cannot tamper with.
Users are more tolerant of minor usability issues when they find an interface visually appealing. This aesthetic-usability effect can mask UI problems and can
prevent issue discovery during usability testing. Identify instances of the aesthetic-usability effect in your user research by watching what your users do, as
well as listening to what they say.
It’s a familiar frustration to usability-test moderators: You watch a user struggle through a suboptimal UI, encountering many errors and obstacles. Then, when
you ask the user to comment on her experience, all she can talk about is the site’s great color scheme:
During usability testing, one user encountered many issues while shopping on the FitBit site, ranging from minor annoyances in the interaction design to
serious flaws in the navigation. She was able to complete her task, but with difficulty. However, in a post-task questionnaire, she rated the site very highly in
ease of use. “It’s the colors they used”, she said. “Looks like the ocean, it’s calm. Very good photographs.” The positive emotional response caused by the
aesthetic appeal of the site helped mask its usability issues.
Instances like this are often the result of the aesthetic-usability effect.
Definition: The aesthetic-usability effect refers to users’ tendency to perceive attractive products as more
usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better—even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient.
We often identify people using face images. This is true in occupational settings such as passport control as well as in everyday social environments. Mapping
between images and identities assumes that facial appearance is stable within certain bounds. For example, a person’s apparent age, gender and ethnicity change
slowly, if at all. It also assumes that deliberate changes beyond these bounds (ie. disguises) would be easy to spot. Hyper-realistic face masks overturn these
assumptions by allowing the wearer to look like an entirely different person. If unnoticed, these masks break the link between facial appearance and personal
identity, with clear implications for applied face recognition. However, to date, no one has assessed the realism of these masks, or specified conditions under
which they may be accepted as real faces. Herein, we examined incidental detection of unexpected but attended hyper-realistic masks in both photographic and live
presentations. Experiment 1 (UK; n = 60) revealed no evidence for overt detection of hyper-realistic masks among real face photos, and little evidence of
covert detection. Experiment 2 (Japan; n = 60) extended these findings to different masks, mask-wearers and participant pools. In Experiment 3 (UK and Japan;
n = 407), passers-by failed to notice that a live confederate was wearing a hyper-realistic mask and showed limited evidence of covert detection, even at close
viewing distance (5 vs. 20 m). Across all of these studies, viewers accepted hyper-realistic masks as real faces. Specific countermeasures will be
required if detection rates are to be improved.
The purpose of this article is to collect and consolidate a list of these alternative methods of working with displays, light and optics. This will by no means
be an exhaustive list of the possibilities available—depending on how you categorize, there could be dozens or hundreds of ways. There are historical mainstays,
oddball one-offs, expensive failures and techniques that are only beginning to come into their own.
[Survey of visual display technologies going beyond the familiar CRTor LED display. See alsoMasia et al 2013. Contents:
Notes on Standard Displays
Brief Note on Holograms
Pepper’s Ghost
Projection on Static Transparent Materials/Scrims
Projection on Water or Fog
Volumetric Projection
Diffusion and Distortion Techniques
Transparent LCD/OLED
LCDs with modified polarization layers
Volumetric Displays (Mechanical/Persistence of Vision)
[Discussion with screenshots of the classic Ridley Scott SF movie Blade Runner, which employs typography to disconcert the viewer, with unexpected
choices, random capitalization and small caps, corporate branding/advertising, and the mashed-up creole multilingual landscape of noir cyberpunk LA (plus
discussion of the buildings and sets, and details such as call costs being correctly inflation-adjusted).]
[Post-Heartbleed/Shellshock discussion of the economics of funding open source software: universally used & economically invaluable as a public good anyone
can & does use, it is also essentially completely unfunded, leading to serious problems in long-term maintenance & improvement, exemplified by the Heartbleed
bug—core cryptographic code run by almost every networked device on the planet could not fund more than a part-time developer.]
Our modern society—everything from hospitals to stock markets to newspapers to social media—runs on software. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the
tools we use to build software are buckling under demand…Nearly all software today relies on free, public code (called “open source” code), written and maintained
by communities of developers and other talent. Much like roads or bridges, which anyone can walk or drive on, open source code can be used by anyone—from companies
to individuals—to build software. This type of code makes up the digital infrastructure of our society today. Just like physical infrastructure, digital
infrastructure needs regular upkeep and maintenance. In the United States, over half of government spending on transportation and water infrastructure goes just to
maintenance.1 But financial support for digital infrastructure is much harder to come by. Currently, any financial support usually comes through
sponsorships, direct or indirect, from software companies. Maintaining open source code used to be more manageable. Following the personal computer revolution of
the early 1980s, most commercial software was proprietary, not shared. Software tools were built and used internally by companies, and their products were licensed
to customers. Many companies felt that open source code was too nascent and unreliable for commercial use. In their view, software was meant to be charged for, not
given away for free. Today, everybody uses open source code, including Fortune 500 companies, government, major software companies and startups. Sharing, rather
than building proprietary code, turned out to be cheaper, easier, and more efficient.
This increased demand puts additional strain on those who maintain this infrastructure, yet because these communities are not highly visible, the rest of the
world has been slow to notice. Most of us take opening a software application for granted, the way we take turning on the lights for granted. We don’t think about
the human capital necessary to make that happen. In the face of unprecedented demand, the costs of not supporting our digital infrastructure are numerous. On the
risk side, there are security breaches and interruptions in service, due to infrastructure maintainers not being able to provide adequate support. On the
opportunity side, we need to maintain and improve these software tools in order to support today’s startup renaissance, which relies heavily on this
infrastructure. Additionally, open source work builds developers’ portfolios and helps them get hired, but the talent pool is remarkably less diverse than in tech
overall. Expanding the pool of contributors can positively affect who participates in the tech industry at large.
No individual company or organization is incentivized to address the problem alone, because open source code is a public good. In order to support our digital
infrastructure, we must find ways to work together. Current examples of efforts to support digital infrastructure include the Linux Foundation’s Core
Infrastructure Initiative and Mozilla’s Open Source Support (MOSS) program, as well as numerous software companies
in various capacities. Sustaining our digital infrastructure is a new topic for many, and the challenges are not well understood. In addition, infrastructure
projects are distributed across many people and organizations, defying common governance models. Many infrastructure projects have no legal entity at all. Any
support strategy needs to accept and work with the decentralized, community-centric qualities of open source code. Increasing awareness of the problem, making it
easier for institutions to contribute time and money, expanding the pool of open source contributors, and developing best practices and policies across
infrastructure projects will all go a long way in building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem.
Selecting among alternative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific
research projects. We argue that the “intellectual distance” between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator’s own expertise systematically
relates to the evaluations given. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a grant proposal process at a leading research university in which we
randomized the assignment of evaluators and proposals to generate 2,130 evaluator-proposal pairs. We find that evaluators systematically give lower scores to
research proposals that are closer to their own areas of expertise and to those that are highly novel. The patterns are consistent with biases associated with
boundedly rational evaluation of new ideas. The patterns are inconsistent with intellectual distance simply contributing “noise” or being associated with private
interests of evaluators. We discuss implications for policy, managerial intervention, and allocation of resources in the ongoing accumulation of scientific
knowledge.
…So in the car alarm, we have a device that’s both ineffective and annoying. It’s also unneeded: it’s nearly impossible to start a modern car without the key.
If anyone wants to steal a car nowadays, says Robert Sinclair of AAA, “they’re going to have to bring a
truck.”
Starting in 1996, auto manufacturers were required to equip vehicles with OBD-II, a computerized engine diagnostics system that links the engine systems in a car (it’s that port to
the left of the steering column where mechanics plug in to asses car issues). That’s when cars went from having flat metal keys to the keys with RFID immobilizers. No longer could you go to a hardware store to duplicate a key, and hot-wiring didn’t work like the movies. Car
theft rates have been since declining ever since, going from about 1.6 million annual incidents in the 1990s to around 800,000 in 2014, according to the National
Insurance Crime Bureau, which analyzes crime like break-ins and grand theft auto…No one steals radios anymore, and cars have gotten impossible to steal (except via
sophisticated hacking), which brings us to a wonderfully evolved era where, it seems, we’ve stifled some noise pollution, and gotten rid of something that doesn’t
work.
…I asked automakers how the alarms on their 2016 models work. Generally, the only way they trigger is if the car has been locked and the doors are opened from
the inside—that is, if someone breaks the window and opens the door from the inside handle, then it’ll sound. That’s a big change from cars a few years back. Davis
Adams, who works at Honda and drives an S2000, told me about a Lotus Elise he used to own that had a motion sensor. “If you locked the door, and moved your hand in
the open air”, he said, “the alarm would go off. So if you left a dog in the car, or someone leaned in the open convertible to look, it’d trigger the alarm.”
If you’ve been hearing fewer errant car alarms lately, there’s a reason. Back in the early 2000s, advocacy groups took legal action to make alarms less
sensitive and quieter. Manufacturers have since, it seems, taken heed. “My impression is that there are far fewer false alarms now, and that this started around
that same time, when the [New York] City Council held some hearings on the issue”, says Professor Mateo Taussig-Rubbo of SUNY Buffalo Law School. He authored a 2003 paper called “Alarmingly Useless: The Case for Banning Car Alarms in New York City”. “I would speculate that the industry, especially the aftermarket
sector, which may have had more problems, made the alarms less sensitive in order to get out ahead of any potential legislation”, he says. Mercifully, that seems
to be correct, (though you can still find it in some cars like the 2015 Escalade).
Nearly twenty years ago, Dunitz and Bernstein described a selection of intriguing cases of polymorphs that disappear. The inability to obtain a crystal form
that has previously been prepared is indeed a frustrating and potentially serious problem for solid-state scientists. This Review discusses recent occurrences and
examples of disappearing polymorphs (as well as the emergence of elusive crystal forms) to demonstrate the enduring relevance of this troublesome, but always
captivating, phenomenon in solid-state research. A number of these instances have been central issues in patent litigations. This Review, therefore, also
highlights the complex relationship between crystal chemistry and the law.
Easter bunnies aren’t what they used to be. The plush toys on store shelves these days are cheaper, often safer, and much, much softer than in bygone days. They
represent a small example of a pervasive phenomenon: goods whose quality has improved gradually but substantially over time, without corresponding price increases
and or public recognition.
If you shop around, you can find a stuffed Easter bunny for three dollars, as you could in the 1970s. My neighborhood Target is selling two models at that
price, the cheapest in a lineup of plush Easter toys that includes offerings for $6.32$4.992015,
$12.65$9.992015 and
$25.32$19.992015
(for a giant rabbit). Back in 1970, when I myself was young enough for Easter baskets, Walgreens advertised “plush bunnies in ‘hot’ colors” for $14.42$2.971970,
along with others for $10.64$2.191970 and
$18.31$3.771970. The
$14.42$2.971970 bunny
from 1970 was probably bigger than today’s $14.52$2.991970 model, but keep in mind that these prices are not corrected for inflation. The 1970 bunny would cost
$22.76$17.972015 in
today’s dollars. Or, to use another benchmark, the federal minimum wage in 1970 was $7.04$1.451970—about
half the price of one of those Walgreens bunnies—compared with today’s minimum of $9.18$7.252015, more
than double the price of the Target ones. Earning enough to buy the 1970 bunny required 123 minutes of minimum-wage labor versus about 25 minutes today.
Three-dollar bunnies are low-profit items designed to get people in the store and stimulate impulse buying. But the broad pattern applies to more expensive stuffed
animals as well: Prices have stayed low. For that, you can thank intense international competition.
…Consumers have come to expect low prices. But inexpensive doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap.” The quality of stuffed toys has also improved. “It’s a better
product than it was years ago, and it’s not that much more expensive”, said Steven Meyer, the third-generation owner of Mary Meyer Corp., a Vermont-based toy
company. Meyer joined the company in 1986, helping his father weather the tough transition to manufacturing in Korea.
For example, Meyer explained, Korean and Taiwanese toymakers introduced safety procedures, later copied in China, to assure the toys didn’t contain hidden
hazards. “Every one of our toys is put through a metal detector before it goes into a box, and that’s because a little shard of a sewing needle can break off and
go into the toy”, Meyer said. “We never thought of that when we produced in the United States.”
More immediately apparent is how the toys feel. A stuffed animal that would have delighted a baby boomer now seems rigid and rough. Today’s toys are stuffed
with soft, fibrous polyester rather than the foam rubber, sawdust or ground nut shells of the past. Plush outer fabrics no longer have stiff backings; the yarns
are knitted to one another rather than attached to a rigid fabric like a carpet. “The whole stuffed toy feels softer and slouchier”, Meyer said. The real magic,
however, is in that silky faux fur. I first noticed it about a dozen years ago while buying Christmas presents for my nephew, who has super-sensitive skin and
hates clothing tags and scratchy fabrics. Stuffed animals, I discovered, were as different from my childhood toys as a wickable polyester workout T-shirt is from a
sweat-sticky polyester disco suit. The secret to both wickable T-shirts and softer Easter bunnies lies in polyester microfibers. These high-tech textiles have
replaced the acrylic and polyester plushes that once covered stuffed toys just as they’ve nudged aside cotton for exercise apparel.
…Textile fibers, including polyester filaments, are measured in decitex or deniers, almost equivalent units unique to the business. For reference: Silk measures
about 1.1 to 1.3 decitex, while human hair is 30 to 50. A microfiber is anything less than 1 decitex. Although polyester microfibers date to Toray Industries’
development of Ultrasuede in 1970, they have become widespread only in recent years, thanks in part to massive plant investments in China that have swamped the
polyester market and driven down prices. Back when I was buying toys for my nephew, polyester fibers of around 3 decitex “were considered fine”, said Frank Horn,
president of the Fiber Economics Bureau, the statistical collection and publication arm of the American Fiber Manufacturers Association. But over the past decade
or so, true microfibers have “become ubiquitous.” Now, Horn estimated, the average is about 0.5 decitex—a reduction of about 85%—and some popular microfibers are
as fine as 0.3 decitex. The finer the fiber, the softer the final fabric—making today’s stuffed animals extraordinarily silky. Largely unheralded outside the
textile business, this progress was “not one particular technology but many”, explained textile chemist Phil Brown of Clemson University’s materials science and
engineering school. “Some involved changing fiber shape, some involved using chemical treatments to reduce fiber size, some involved new fiber extrusion
technologies in which fibers have more than one polymer component.”
Recumbent bicycles have never truly been associated with international
cycling. Conventional safety (upright) bicycles have long been at the center of the cycling world, for both sport and transportation. This is despite the fact that
recumbent bicycles are faster more comfortable, and more efficient than the upright bicycles. The aim of this article is to explain the historical and social
perspectives that led to the rejection of the recumbent bicycle by utilizing the theory of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Bijker’s 2 power theory, providing a contrast with the adoption of the safety bicycle.
…Almost half a century later, another technological innovation grabbed cyclists’ attention. Francis Faure, known to be far from the fastest rider, broke the one-hour record on a Velocar, a type of recumbent bike invented by Charles Mochet.
“At the finish line, the crowd’s reaction was similar to that of the crowd that witnessed the initial display of superiority of the safety bicycle: dominated by
shock and anger”, Ahmed, Qureshi, and Khan write.
Some racers latched on to the speedier bike, but many did not. Instead, they viewed it as an impostor. The question of who was right fell to the Union Cycliste Internationale(UCI), formed in 1900 to set international rules for bike racing. This came to include defining the acceptable parameters of racing
bikes. In 1914, for example, it banned fairings (coverings designed to make bikes more aerodynamic).
By the 1930s, the UCI had some reasons to be skittish about technological changes to the bicycle. The authors
write that it was under pressure from bike manufacturers, which were ramping up production of safety bicycles to satisfy a growing Depression-era demand for cheap
transportation.
“It is also likely that the UCI viewed potential identity or shape changes to the meaning of cycling dangerous
to the cycling world as a whole”, they write. “We suspect that the UCI prioritized supporting the cycling world as
a whole, as opposed to supporting promising new innovations in cycling technologies.”
The upshot was that even though Mochet had specifically designed the Velocar to fit existing UCI rules, the
organization upheld a 1935 challenge to the use of the model with little explanation. It went on to publish a new definition of “bicycle” that set out
standard dimensions, clarifying the Velocycle’s out-of-bounds position.
The authors identify this moment as a ‘rhetorical closure’, in which a dominant technology became viewed as the only option, with no need for
better-designed competitors. UCI’s position as an arbiter of biking protocol ensured that neither racers nor other
riders adopted recumbent bikes in large numbers. Ultimately, only 800 Velocars sold. Even today, recumbent bikes are a specialty product, with no cheap options
that might encourage riders to try out a faster, more comfortable ride.
Design principles and operational modes are explored that underlie the information processing capacity of the human brain.
The hypothesis is put forward that in higher organisms, especially in primates, the complexity of the neural circuitry of the cerebral cortex is the neural
correlate of the brain’s coherence and predictive power, and, thus, a measure of intelligence. It will be argued that with the evolution of the human brain we have
nearly reached the limits of biological intelligence.
[Keywords: biological intelligence, cognition, consciousness, cerebral cortex, primates, information processing, neural networks, cortical
design, human brain evolution]
In the third annual ad blocking report, PageFair, with the help of Adobe, provides updated data on the scale and growth
of ad blocking software usage and highlights the global and regional economic impact associated with it. Additionally, this report explores the early indications
surrounding the impact of ad blocking within the mobile advertising space and how mobile will change the ad blocking
landscape.
Table of Contents: · 1. Introduction · 2. Table of Contents · 3. Key insights · 4. Global ad blocking
growth · 5. Usage of ad blocking software in the United States · 6. Usage of ad blocking software in Europe · 7. The cost of
blocking ads · 8. Effect of ad blocking by industry · 9. Google Chrome still the main
driver of ad block growth · 10. Mobile is yet to be a factor in ad blocking growth · 11. Mobile will facilitate future ad
blocking growth · 12. Reasons to start using an ad blocker · 13. Afterword · 14. Background · 15. Methodology · 16. Tables ·
17. Tables
Key Insights: More consumers block ads, continuing the strong growth rates seen during 2013 and 2014. The findings:
Globally, the number of people using ad blocking software grew by 41% year over year.
16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015.
Ad block usage in the United States grew 48% during the past year, increasing to 45 millionmonthly active users (MAUs) during Q2 2015.
Ad block usage in Europe grew by 35% during the past year, increasing to 77 million monthly active users during Q2 2015.
The estimated loss of global revenue due to blocked advertising during 2015 was $27.61$21.802015B.
With the ability to block ads becoming an option on the new iOS 9, mobile is starting to get into the ad blocking
game. Currently Firefox and Chrome lead the mobile space with 93% share of mobile ad blocking.
Over the past 10+ years, online companies large and small have adopted widespread A/B testing as a robust data-based method for evaluating potential product
improvements. In online experimentation, it is straightforward to measure the short-term effect, ie., the impact observed during the experiment. However, the
short-term effect is not always predictive of the long-term effect, ie., the final impact once the product has fully launched and users have changed their behavior
in response. Thus, the challenge is how to determine the long-term user impact while still being able to make decisions in a timely manner.
We tackle that challenge in this paper by first developing experiment methodology for quantifying long-term user learning. We then apply this methodology to ads
shown on Google search, more specifically, to determine and quantify the drivers of ads blindness and sightedness, the phenomenon of users changing their inherent
propensity to click on or interact with ads.
We use these results to create a model that uses metrics measurable in the short-term to predict the long-term. We learn that user satisfaction is paramount:
ads blindness and sightedness are driven by the quality of previously viewed or clicked ads, as measured by both ad relevance and landing page quality. Focusing on
user satisfaction both ensures happier users but also makes business sense, as our results illustrate. We describe two major applications of our findings: a
conceptual change to our search ads auction that further increased the importance of ads quality, and a 50% reduction of the ad load on Google’s mobile search
interface.
The results presented in this paper are generalizable in two major ways. First, the methodology may be used to quantify user learning effects and to evaluate
online experiments in contexts other than ads. Second, the ads blindness/sightedness results indicate that a focus on user satisfaction could help to reduce the
ad load on the internet at large with long-term neutral, or even positive, business impact.
We propose a RF fingerprint approach for device identification in wireless networks.
Based on the extraction and analysis of the preamble RF fingerprint of a device.
Techniques for feature reduction such as PCA and PLS are used.
Experimentation with commercial WiFi devices is done and results are provided.
This document proposes a radiofrequency (RF) fingerprinting strategy for the proper identification of wireless devices in mobile and wireless networks.
The proposed identification methods are based on the extraction of the preamble RF fingerprint of a device and its comparison with a set of already known device
RF fingerprints. The identification method combines techniques for feature reduction such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares regression (PLS), both based on subspace transformation, along
with a similarity-based analysis. In this work, a complete procedure for RF fingerprint data extraction and analysis is provided. In addition, some experimentation
with commercial Wi-Fi devices is carried out for the methods validation.
…Acknowledgement: This work has been carried out despite the economic difficulties of the authors’ country. The authors want to overall remark
the clear contribution of the Spanish Government in destroying the R&D horizon of Spain and the future of an
entire generation.
Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to personality. We describe a method for assessing
personality using an open-vocabulary analysis of language from social media.
We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a
predictive model of personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate sample of 4,824 Facebook users,
examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the domain-level and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits;
(c) agreement with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (eg. number of friends, political attitudes,
impulsiveness); and (e) test-retest reliability over 6-month intervals.
Results indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with self-reports and informant reports of personality,
added incremental validity over informant reports, adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar to
those found with self-reported personality, and were stable over 6-month intervals. Analysis of predictive language can provide rich portraits of the mental life
associated with traits.
This approach can complement and extend traditional methods, providing researchers with an additional measure that can quickly and cheaply assess large groups
of participants with minimal burden.
[Keywords: language, personality assessment, measurement, big data, social media]
Of the many facets of the criminal world, few have captured society’s fascination and awe as has that of high stakes robbery. The combination of meticulousness,
cunning, and audacity required to execute a real-life Ocean’s Eleven
may be uncommon among criminals, but it is fortunately common enough to extract a wealth of lessons for the protection of high-value assets. To assist in informing
the analyses and decisions of security professionals, this paper surveys 23 sophisticated and high-value heists of cash, gold, gems, artwork, and other valuables
that have occurred or been attempted across the world, particularly over the past 3 decades.
The results are compiled in a Heist Methods and Characteristics Database and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively, with the goals of both identifying
common characteristics and characterizing the range and diversity of criminal methods used. The analysis is focused in 6 areas:
Defeated Security Measures and Devices,
Deception Methods,
Timing,
Weapons,
Resources, and
Insiders.
Key lessons are identified in each focus area.
…Several key lessons are identified in each focus area, and an overview of the commonalities and bounds of criminal team characteristics and capabilities is
provided. In brief, the typical criminal is a 30–39 year old man and experienced career criminal who is native to the country whose valuables he is targeting. The
typical on-scene criminal team consists of 2–8 accomplices, typically perpetrating the robbery as a single team, although breaking into multiple sub-teams is not
uncommon. Use of weapons is typical but in many cases not required for success. Thieves are willing to devote substantial resources to planning, spending in some
cases more than 2 years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and procuring transportation for thousands of pounds of loot. Thieves are frequently thorough and
innovative in their planning, developing security defeat methods that are physically simple but highly targeted toward vulnerabilities the thieves have identified
in advance of the heist. In the identification and exploitation of these vulnerabilities, deceptions and insiders almost always play a role. Multiple insiders,
unwillingly or willingly colluding, are not uncommon; and while insiders span a variety of origins and roles, by far the most common type is the coerced insider
who unwillingly assists in the crime, often upon threat of losing his own life or the lives of his family members.
I recently came across a big pile of The Buffalo News front sections
from 1991, every day for the first 3 months of the year… collected as the First Gulf War unfolded…The back page of the front section on Saturday, February 16,
1991 was 4⁄5ths covered with a Radio Shack ad.
There are 15 electronic gizmo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket…So here’s the
list of what I’ve replaced with my iPhone.
All weather personal stereo, $28.88$11.881991. · I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box [rugged iPhone case]
AM/FM clock radio, $33.75$13.881991.
· iPhone.
In-Ear Stereo Phones, $19.16$7.881991. · Came with iPhone.
Microthin calculator, $11.87$4.881991. · Swipe up on iPhone.
Tandy 1000 TL/3, $3,888$1,5991991. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. · I now do most of
both of those things on my phone.
Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $72.82$29.951991.
· I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
Bonus Replacement: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?
You’d have spent $7,427.36$3,054.821991 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly
equivalent to about $6,855$5,1002012 in
2012 dollars.
The only 2 items on the page that my phone really can’t replace:
Tiny Dual-SuperhetRadar Detector, $194.39$79.951991. But when is the last time you heard the term “fuzzbuster” anyway?
3-Way speaker with massive 15-inch Woofer, $364.58$149.951991.
It’s nothing new, but it’s a great example of the technology of only 2 decades ago now replaced by the 3.95 ounce bundle of plastic, glass, and processors in
our pockets.
Some online display advertisements are annoying. Although publishers know the payment they receive to run annoying ads, little is known about the cost that such
ads incur (eg. causing website abandonment). Across three empirical studies, the authors address two primary questions: (1) What is the economic cost of annoying
ads to publishers? and (2) What is the cognitive impact of annoying ads to users? First, the authors conduct a preliminary study to identify sets of more and less
annoying ads. Second, in a field experiment, they calculate the compensating differential, that is, the amount of money a publisher would need to pay users to
generate the same number of impressions in the presence of annoying ads as it would generate in their absence. Third, the authors conduct a mouse-tracking study to
investigate how annoying ads affect reading processes. They conclude that in plausible scenarios, the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it
earns.
We review the state of the art on computational displays.
The survey is organized according to the dimensions of the plenoptic function.
For each dimension, we discuss related perceptual considerations.
Hardware architectures and software approaches for content generation are discussed.
Display technology has undergone great progress over the last few years. From higher contrast to better temporal resolution or more accurate color reproduction,
modern displays are capable of showing images which are much closer to reality. In addition to this trend, we have recently seen the resurrection of stereo
technology, which in turn fostered further interest on automultiscopic displays. These advances share the common objective of improving the viewing experience by
means of a better reconstruction of the plenoptic function along any of its dimensions. In addition, one usual strategy is to leverage known aspects of the
human visual system (HVS) to provide apparent enhancements, beyond the physical limits of the display. In this survey,
we analyze these advances, categorize them along the dimensions of the plenoptic function, and present the relevant aspects of human perception on which they
rely.
[Keywords: HDR display, wide color gamut, high definition, stereoscopic, autostereoscopic,
automultiscopic]
As displays in public space are augmented with sensors, such as the Kinect, they enable passersby to interact with the content on the screen. As of today,
feedback on the user action in such environments is usually limited to the visual channel. However, we believe that more immediate and intense forms, in particular
haptic feedback, do not only increase the user experience, but may also have a strong impact on user attention and memorization of the content encountered during
the interaction. Haptic feedback can today be achieved through vibration on the mobile phone, which is strongly dependent on the location of the device. We
envision that fabrics, such as underwear, can in the future be equipped with electrical muscle stimulation, thus providing a more natural and direct way of haptic
feedback. In this demo we aim to showcase the potential of applying electrical muscle stimulation as direct haptic feedback during interaction in public spaces in
the context of a Kinect-based game for public displays.
[Keywords: interactivity, tactile feedback, EMS, public spaces]
[video] The ways in which we leave graffiti have not changed much in thousands of years. Humans have
felt the need to anonymously leave messages to one another for centuries.
In this paper, we introduce StallTalk (www.stalltalk.info [defunct]), an anonymous location-based micro blogging website that uses QR codes posted
in bathroom stalls. StallTalk allows users to leave digital graffiti on bathroom walls without actually causing permanent damage. Users scan the QR codes, which
are unique to each stall, and write short messages to each other.
We deployed StallTalk in over 500 locations and have had almost 9,000 unique visitors to our website.
After a few months of planning, several weeks of work, and possibly a few kilometres of aimless pacing through the living room, I’m happy to present “Palm: I’m
ready to wallow now”. This massive article (22,000 words) covers countless aspects of Palm, its devices, its operating system, and the company’s importance to the
mobile industry. I start with a detailed look at the history of handwriting recognition, after which I move on to the four hardware products I believe are crucial
in understanding Palm as a company. Of course, I also dive into Palm OS, covering the kernel, its filesystem (or lack thereof), ‘multitasking’ capabilities, user
experience, and much more. Important Palm OS licensees like Sony and Handspring make an appearance, and I cover the failed attempt at modernising the Palm OS: Palm
OS 6 Cobalt. Finally, the conclusion ties it all together.
Introduction
History of handwriting recognition
First steps
Stylator
The holy GRAIL
Going to market
Driving the point home
Palm’s hardware
GRiDPad
Zoomer
Palm Pilot
Palm V
Defining Palm
The Palm operating system
The kernel
There is no file
Single-tasking (but not quite)
Graffiti
The user experience
Zen of Palm [more Apple than Apple then]
Palm OS’ legacy Miscellaneous
Licensing Palm OS
Where to go from here (if here is 2004): Palm OS 6 ‘Cobalt’
Apple keeps doing things in the Mac OS that leave the user-experience (UX) community scratching its collective head, things like hiding the scroll bars and
placing invisible controls inside the content region of windows on computers.
Apple’s mobile devices are even worse: It can take users upwards of 5 seconds to accurately drop the text pointer where they need it, but Apple refuses to add
the arrow keys that have belonged on the keyboard from day-one.
Apple’s strategy is exactly right—up to a point:
Apple’s decisions may look foolish to those schooled in UX, but balance that against the fact that Apple consistently makes more money than the next several
leaders in the industry combined.
While it’s true Apple is missing something—arrow keys—we in the UX community are missing something, too: Apple’s razor-sharp focus on a user many of us often
fail to even consider: The potential user, the buyer. During the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from
the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank.
…What do most buyers not want? They don’t want to see all kinds of scary-looking controls surrounding a media player. They don’t want to see a whole bunch of
buttons they don’t understand. They don’t want to see scroll bars. They do want to see clean screens with smooth lines. Buyers want to buy Ferraris, not tractors,
and that’s exactly what Apple is selling.
… Let me offer two examples of Apple objects that aid in selling products, but make life difficult for users thereafter.
The Apple Dock: The Apple Dock is a superb device
for selling computers for pretty much the same reasons that it fails miserably as a day-to-day device: A single glance at the Dock lets the potential buyer
know that this a computer that is beautiful, fun, approachable, easy to conquer, and you don’t have to do a lot of reading. Of course, not one of these
attributes is literally true, at least not if the user ends up exploiting even a fraction of the machine’s potential, but such is the nature of merchandizing,
and the Mac is certainly easier than the competition.
The real problem with the Dock is that Apple simultaneously stripped out functionality that was far superior, though less flashy, when they put the Dock
in.
Invisible Scroll Bars:
“Gee, the screen looks so clean! This computer must be easy to use!” So goes the thinking of the buyer when seeing a document open in an Apple store,
exactly the message Apple intends to impart. The problem right now is that Apple’s means of delivering that message is actually making the computer
less easy to use!
…the scroll bar has become a vital status device as well, letting you know at a glance the size of and your current position within a document…Hiding the
scroll bar, from a user’s perspective, is madness. If the user wants to actually scroll, it’s bad enough: He or she is now forced to use a thumbwheel or
gesture to invoke scrolling, as the scroll bar is no longer even present. However, if the user simply wants to see their place within the document, things can
quickly spiral out of control: The only way to get the scroll bar to appear is to initiate scrolling, so the only way to see where you are right now in a
document is to scroll to a different part of the document! It may only require scrolling a line or two, but it is still crazy on the face of it! And many
windows contain panels with their own scroll bars as well, so trying to trick the correct one into turning on, if you can do so at all (good luck with Safari!)
can be quite a challenge…(The scroll bars, even when turned on, are hard to see with their latest mandatory drab gray replacing bright blue and are now so thin
they take around twice as long to target as earlier scroll bars. When a company ships products either before user testing or after ignoring the results of that
testing, both their product and their users suffer.)
…Industrial design: Borrow the aesthetic, ignore the limitation
While Apple has copied over the aesthetics of industrial design into the software world, they have also copied over its limitation: Whether it be a tractor,
Ferrari, or electric toaster, that piece of hardware, in the absence of upgradeable software, will look and act the same the first time you use it as the
thousandth time. Software doesn’t share that natural physical limitation, and Apple must stop acting as though it does.
Sensory neuroprostheses show great potential for
alleviating major sensory deficits. It is not known, however, whether such devices can augment the subject’s normal perceptual range.
Here we show that adult rats can learn to perceive otherwise invisible infrared light
through a neuroprosthesis that couples the output of a head-mounted infrared sensor to their somatosensory cortex (S1) via intracortical microstimulation. Rats readily learn to use this new information source, and generate active
exploratory strategies to discriminate among infrared signals in their environment. S1 neurons in these infrared-perceiving rats respond to both whisker deflection
and intracortical microstimulation, suggesting that the infrared representation does not displace the original tactile representation.
Hence, sensory cortical prostheses, in addition to restoring normal neurological functions, may serve to expand natural perceptual capabilities in mammals.
“Dear Valentine, this is to tell you that you are my friend as well as my Valentine, and that I intend to write you lots of letters”, says the user
guide of the familiar red typewriter. This purposefully heartwarming greeting sets the tone for Ettore Sottsass’ typewriter. The blood-red Valentine was a
fun, light-hearted and smooth-operating symbol of the 1960s Pop era, and its use of bright, playful casing for a piece of traditional office equipment was arguably
a precursor to Apple’s 1998 Bondi Blue iMac. “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism”, said Sottsass. “It’s not
enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”
The Valentine—created for the Italian brand Olivetti—was designed in collaboration with the British designer Perry King and entered production in 1969.
It was not a commercial success. The Valentine was technically mediocre, expensive and failed to sell to a mass audience, yet still became a design
classic. Valentines can be found in the permanent collections of London’s Design Museum and MoMA, the typewriter being accepted into the latter just two
years after its launch. The product’s critical success was unhindered by its functional limitations because its design focused as much on its emotional connection
to users as it did on practical ease of use.
Sottsass set out his stall early on. One of the initial advertising campaigns for the design featured posters by the graphic designer and founder of New
York magazine, Milton Glaser. Glaser used a detail of Piero di Cosimo’s renaissance painting, Satyr Mourning over Nymph. In the poster, the
Valentine typewriter is placed next to a red setter, an elegant, rambunctious dog; man’s best friend. The suggestion was that Sottsass’ portable accessory
could be just as loyal and convivial. How the product performed was arguably irrelevant. It was about how it made you feel.
The Valentine was available in white, green and blue, but its most famous form was red: lipstick-bright ABS
plastic casing, with black plastic keys and white lettering. “Every colour has a history”, said Sottsass, “Red is the color of the Communist flag, the
colour that makes a surgeon move faster and the color of passion.”
The distinctive colour was calculated to bring vibrancy and fun into the office world of the 1960s. Sottsass said that the Valentine “was invented for
use any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country
or to provide a highly coloured object on a table in a studio apartment.” The ideas that later manifested themselves in Sottsass’ 1970s Memphis movement—the Milan
design group known for its brightly coloured postmodern furniture—were already evident in the Valentine typewriter. Sottsass gave a standardised piece of
office equipment personality.
Although, the designer would later dismiss the Valentine—comparing it to “a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up”—its design was an
elegant summation of his belief that successful, long-lasting product design was not solely connected to performance, but rather owed as much to the emotional
force of a design.
Forecasting technological progress is of great interest to engineers, policy makers, and private investors. Several models have been proposed for predicting
technological improvement, but how well do these models perform? An early hypothesis made by Theodore Wright in 1936 is that cost decreases as a power law of cumulative production. An alternative hypothesis is
Moore’s law, which can be generalized to say that technologies improve exponentially with time. Other alternatives were proposed by Goddard, Sinclair et al and
Nordhaus. These hypotheses have not previously been rigorously tested. Using a new database on the cost and production of 62 different technologies, which is the
most expansive of its kind, we test the ability of six different postulated laws to predict future costs. Our approach involves hindcasting and developing a
statistical model to rank the performance of the postulated laws. Wright’s law produces the best forecasts, but Moore’s law is not far behind. We discover a
previously unobserved regularity that production tends to increase exponentially. A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in
production would make Moore’s law and Wright’s law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are
observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the
square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories
of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.
The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late 19th century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a
strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and
social transformation.
As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices
would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Today, you’d probably have to schedule an
electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
“Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education”, Plotnick explains.
“Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’
attempts at managing fears of electricity.”
… Between 1880 and 1920, hundreds of patent applications were made for “electric buttons” or “push-buttons.”
At the end of the 19th century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the
relationship between the 2”, according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be
“simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the
rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.
Ultimately, the idea that electricity was a kind of magic would triumph over a more hands-on, demystifying approach.
Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on
behind the button.” That resonates now, more than a century later, when technology is even more complicated and even more intimately entwined with our lives. The
“black box” reigns supreme.]
We examine the cost for an attacker to pay users to execute arbitrary code—potentially malware. We asked users at home to download and run an executable we
wrote without being told what it did and without any way of knowing it was harmless. Each week, we increased the payment amount. Our goal was to examine whether
users would ignore common security advice—not to run untrusted executables—if there was a direct incentive, and how much this incentive would need to be. We
observed that for payments as low as $0.01$0.012012, 22% of the people who viewed the task ultimately ran our executable. Once increased to $1.34$1.002012, this
proportion increased to 43%. We show that as the price increased, more and more users who understood the risks ultimately ran the code. We conclude that users are
generally unopposed to running programs of unknown provenance, so long as their incentives exceed their inconvenience.
The decades surrounding the Second World War saw an intense wave of interest in pictographic communication, with social scientists and graphic designers
promoting the potential of universal pictographic “language” to bring about international understanding and co-operation. This article explores the historical
relationship between pictographic design and internationalist politics in this era through the work of Rudolf Modley, a pioneering designer of information graphics
whose career spanned from the socialist experiments of 1920s Vienna to humanist advocacy projects in late-1960s America. Tracing the complex relationship between
visual communication, commerce and politics in mid-twentieth-century design, this article further reflects on the decline of the pictographic project after the
1970s, when pictographs at once gained a broad global currency and lost their political thrust just as the dream of an international visual language was ironically
realized in the triumph of a global traffic in mass-consumable images.
[Keywords: pictographic design, internationalism, information design, Rudolf Modley, Otto Neurath, Margaret Mead]
New technologies have led to increased television advertising avoidance. In particular, mechanical avoidance in the form of zipping and zapping has gained
momentum in recent years. Channel switching or “commercial zapping” studies employ diverse methodologies, including self reports, electronic monitoring,
laboratory, and in-home observation which has led to a diversity of reported results. This article proposes advancing and standardizing the methodology to comprise
a two-phase hidden observation and survey method. A number of research phases have led to the development of this method to collect both mechanical and behavioral
avoidance data. The study includes a detailed outline of the hidden observation approach. The survey phase opens up the potential for the collection of viewer data
that may further illuminate television advertising avoidance behavior.
In recent years, a number of online labor markets have emerged that allow workers from around the world to sell their labor to an equally global pool of buyers.
The creators of these markets play the role of labor market intermediary by providing institutional support and remedying informational asymmetries.
In this paper, I explore market creators’ choices of price structure, price level and investment in platforms. I also discuss competition among markets and the
business strategies employed by market creators.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the productivity and welfare effects of online labor.
The Great Firewall of China. A massive system of centralized censorship purging the Chinese version of the Internet of all potentially subversive content.
Generally agreed to be a great technical achievement and political success even by the vast majority of people who find it morally abhorrent. I spent a few days in
China. I got around it at the Internet cafe by using a free online proxy. Actual Chinese people have dozens of ways of getting around it with a minimum of
technical knowledge or just the ability to read some instructions.
The Chinese government isn’t losing any sleep over this (although they also don’t lose any sleep over murdering political dissidents, so maybe they’re just very
sound sleepers). Their theory is that by making it a little inconvenient and time-consuming to view subversive sites, they will discourage casual exploration. No
one will bother to circumvent it unless they already seriously distrust the Chinese government and are specifically looking for foreign websites, and these people
probably know what the foreign websites are going to say anyway.
Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental
emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for
it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for “how to set up proxy” before viewing their anti-government website.
…But these trivial inconveniences have major policy implications. Countries like China that want to oppress their citizens are already using “soft” oppression
to make it annoyingly difficult to access subversive information. But there are also benefits for governments that want to help their citizens.
In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about
quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear
operator behaves very much like a “cobordism”. Similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic, where they represent proofs, and computation, where they
represent programs. With the rise of interest in quantum cryptography and quantum computation, it became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between
physics, topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of these analogies precise using the concept of “closed symmetric monoidal
category”. We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or computer science.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or
baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
…I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something
that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.
Which topics engage people’s identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of
the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably
wouldn’t. No one would know what side to be on. So it’s not politics that’s the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated
into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people’s identities. [1: When that happens, it tends to happen fast, like
a core going critical. The threshold for participating goes down to zero, which brings in more people. And they tend to say incendiary things, which draw more and
angrier counterarguments.]
…More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and
religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And
there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn’t safely talk about with others.
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to
consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
Architecture that is hard to describe by being immaterial, irrelevant, and unintended may engage us in a narrative rather than a visual sense. 3 examples of
anonymous architecture are presented where stories regarding interfaces between existence and nonexistence emerge. They are all places where people can vanish and
taken together tell stories of death, hell, and heaven. In these unexpected places, the deeper issues of life may be obliquely and ironically experienced.
[Geoff Manaugh:
While the entirety of the paper is worth reading, I want to highlight a specific moment, wherein Crompton introduces us to the colossal western bellmouth drain of the Ladybower reservoir in Derbyshire, England.
His description of this “inverted infrastructural monument”, as InfraNet Lab described it in their own post about
Crompton’s paper—adding that spillways like this “maintain 2 states: (1) in use they disappear and are minimally obscured by flowing water, (2) not in use they are
sculptural oddities hovering ambiguously above the water line”—is spine-tingling.
“What is down that hole is a deep mystery”, Crompton begins, and the ensuing passage deserves quoting in full:
Not even Google Earth can help you since its depths are in shadow when photographed from above. To see for yourself means going down the steps as far as you
dare and then leaning out to take a look. Before attempting a descent, you might think it prudent to walk around the hole looking for the easiest way down. The
search will reveal that the workmanship is superb and that there is no weakness to exploit, nowhere to tie a rope and not so much as a pebble to throw down the
hole unless you brought it with you in the boat. The steps of this circular waterfall are all 18 inches high. This is an awkward height to descend, and most
people, one imagines, would soon turn their back on the hole and face the stone like a climber. How far would you be willing to go before the steps became too
small to continue? With proper boots, it is possible to stand on a sharp edge as narrow as a quarter of an inch wide; in such a position, you will risk your life
twisting your cheek away from the stone to look downward because that movement will shift your center of gravity from a position above your feet, causing you to
pivot away from the wall with only friction at your fingertips to hold you in place. Sooner or later, either your nerves or your grip will fail while diminishing
steps accumulate below preventing a vertical view. In short, as if you were performing a ritual, this structure will first make you walk in circles, then make
you turn your back on the thing you fear, then give you a severe fright, and then deny you the answer to a question any bird could solve in a moment. When you do
fall, you will hit the sides before hitting the bottom. Death with time to think about it arriving awaits anyone who peers too far into that hole.
“What we have here”, he adds, “is a geometrical oddity: an edge over which it is impossible to look. Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both
below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the
sun into which we cannot see.”]
De Leval reviewed all the arterial switch procedures done in the United Kingdom over a two-year period with a psychologist watching the operation. Once
again, the journey from the operating room to the ICU was demonstrated to be a high risk factor. Staff came to accept
that there was an element of danger associated with what they were doing, so they were receptive to change.
Quality Solutions: In Formula One motor racing, the pit stop team completes the complex task of changing tires and fueling the car in about
seven seconds. The doctors saw this as analogous to the team effort of surgeons, anesthetist, and ICU staff to transfer
the patient, equipment, and information safely and quickly from operating room to ICU.
GOSH doctors visited and observed the pit crew handoff in Italy, noting the value of process mapping, process
description, and trying to work out what people’s tasks should be. Following their trip, the GOSH team videotaped the
handover in the surgery unit and sent it to be reviewed by the Formula One team. From the analysis came a new handover protocol with more sophisticated
procedures and better choreographed teamwork.
The GOSH researchers also noted the importance of the role of the lollipop man, the one who waves the car in
and coordinates the pit stop. Under the new handover process, the anesthetist was given overall responsibility for coordinating the team until it was transferred
to the intensivist at the termination of the handover. These same two individuals were charged with the responsibility of periodically stepping back to look at the
big picture and to make safety checks of the handover.
Results: The real gain for patients was safety. Results showed that the new handover procedure had broken a link between technical and
informational errors. Before the new handover protocol, approximately 30% of patient errors occurred in both equipment and information. Afterward, only 10%
occurred in both areas.
The provision of electricity has been a great benefit to society, particularly in health terms, but it also carries health costs. Comparison of different forms
of commercial power generation by use of the fuel cycle methods developed in European studies shows the health burdens to be greatest for power stations that most
pollute outdoor air (those based on lignite, coal, and oil). The health burdens are appreciably smaller for generation from natural gas, and lower still for
nuclear power. This same ranking also applies in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions and thus, potentially, to long-term health, social, and economic effects arising
from climate change. Nuclear power remains controversial, however, because of public concern about storage of nuclear waste, the potential for catastrophic
accident or terrorist attack, and the diversion of fissionable material for weapons production. Health risks are smaller for nuclear fusion, but commercial
exploitation will not be achieved in time to help the crucial near-term reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The negative effects on health of electricity
generation from renewable sources have not been assessed as fully as those from conventional sources, but for solar, wind, and wave power, such effects seem to be
small; those of biofuels depend on the type of fuel and the mode of combustion. Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage is increasingly being
considered for reduction of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants, but the health effects associated with this technology are largely unquantified and
probably mixed: efficiency losses mean greater consumption of the primary fuel and accompanying increases in some waste products. This paper reviews the state of
knowledge regarding the health effects of different methods of generating electricity.
Effective resizing of images should not only use geometric constraints, but consider the image content as well. We present a simple image operator called
seam carving that supports content-aware image resizing for both reduction and expansion. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels on a
single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams
in one direction we can change the aspect ratio of an image. By applying these operators in both directions we can retarget the image to a new size. The selection
and order of seams protect the content of the image, as defined by the energy function. Seam carving can also be used for image content enhancement and object removal. We support various visual saliency
measures for defining the energy of an image, and can also include user input to guide the process. By storing the order of seams in an image we create
multi-size images, that are able to continuously change in real time to fit a given size.
We conducted an experiment with different forms and types of ads. An artificial Web site was created for the experiment that contained images, prices, and
descriptions of familiar products and product categories. The products were those that would be carried by a general store and included food, health care, and
household products. Nine search tasks were assigned to participants that would force them to traverse a variety of portions of the site…The experimental websites
were accessed over the Internet in a controlled laboratory setting by 536 undergraduate students.
…This study provides clear support for an assertion that users will adopt more negative intentions when a site displays advertisements than when the site does
not. It is also clear that advertisements interfere with retention of site content and that features of advertisements also have important effects on retaining
both site and ad content. Inline ads permit both site and ad content to be remembered more clearly than popups and popunders, a finding that is most interesting
because it suggests the action of closing the advertisement window distracts users from the site, and further, it is visible for a shorter time. When ads are
markedly different from the content of the site, they theoretically stimulate more effort as users work toward an important goal, and users remember more about
both the Web site and the advertisement. It is interesting to note that while these effects might on the surface appear small, they are quite consistent and highly
statistically-significant. Extrapolating to millions of site visitors, even small differences can amount to an urgent problem for management. Finally, it is also
clear that popups and popunders are considered to be more intrusive than inline ads. Users seem to prefer not to have to divert their attention from their
searching task or take additional steps to close the popup or pop-under windows.
In 1915, when Lawrence Bragg was a 25-year-old Second Lieutenant in the
Royal Horse Artillery, seconded to ‘Maps GHQ’, he learned that he and his father had shared the Nobel Prize in physics.
Lawrence’s equation was crucial for winning the prize and he had been wounded by his father’s early dissemination of their work with casual attribution to ‘my
son’. Lawrence was responsible for developing methods for pinpointing the position of enemy artillery pieces by recording the boom of their firing with an array of
microphones. It was a simple idea but difficult to implement. Step by step, Bragg and the group he assembled solved the problems and developed a system that
worked. Sound-ranging was valuable in the British victory at Cambrai in
1917 and vital for that at Amiens in 1918: the ‘black day of the German Army’. He received the MC and the OBE. His Army
service manifested both his scientific leadership and administrative skills, which culminated in the demonstrations of the validity of the dream he
enunciated in his Nobel lecture: that X-rays could be used to resolve the structure of the most complicated molecules.
…We had new applications like the Web, email, instant messaging, and bulletin boards, all of which were about humans communicating with one another through
software. Now, suddenly, when you create software, it isn’t sufficient to think about making it possible to communicate; you have to think about making
communication socially successful. In the age of usability, technical design decisions had to be taken to make software easier for a mass audience to use; in the
age of social software, design decisions must be taken to make social groups survive and thrive and meet the goals of the group even when they contradict the goals
of the individual. A discussion group designed by a usability expert might be optimized to make it easy to post spam about Viagra. But in social software design
it’s pretty obvious that the goal is to make certain things harder, not easier, and if you can make it downright impossible to post spam, you’ve done your job.
Features need to be designed to make the group successful, not the individual.
Today, hardly anybody really studies how to design software for human-to-human interaction. The field of social software design is in its infancy. In fact,
we’re not even at the point yet where the software developers developing social software realize that they need to think about the sociology and the anthropology
of the group that will be using their software, so many of them just throw things together and allow themselves to be surprised by the social interactions that
develop around their software. Clay Shirky has been a pioneer
in this field, and his talk “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” will be remembered as a watershed in the widespread realization that in this new era, sociology and
anthropology are just as crucial to software design as usability was in the last. —Joel Spolsky
People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like
programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we
would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and
responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need
to have some rules.” It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.” And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social
software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogeneous groups. “The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually
get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.” As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to
think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets
very, very high.
You cannot completely separate technical and social issues
Members [power users] are different than users.
The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
…if you don’t accept them upfront, they’ll happen to you anyway. And then you’ll end up writing one of those documents that says “Oh, we launched this and we
tried it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we’re documenting it so future ages won’t make this mistake.”
…If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design
for is handles the user can invest in.
you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts
appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or “member since.”
Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels.
There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way
conversations.
[Early webcomic by British artist Sam Chivers. Notable for being a
Flash webcomic, originally hosted at www.realitytax.com, but apparently removed when published in the 2004 comics anthology Prophecies:
Volume 1 (Sequent Media, ISBN: 0974653101).
“Headcase” is a wordless narrative in a Moebius-like style set in a grim dystopian
cyberpunk future where an initially hopeful working-class robot (reminiscent of a crash test dummy) struggles to get to his job, survive his shift, and the indignities of the day (such as stepping on poop), becoming
progressively ground down and broken; he adopts the spirit of a monkey, whose prank precipitates his beating by a local thug; the robot then commit suicide,
smashing his head open, revealing it was piloted by a small dying animal. The monkey spirit resurrects the corpse, becoming a busker dancing in a costume for
donations; at the very end, the monkey-robot steps on a piece of poop and becomes annoyed.]
The evolution of technology causes human capital to become obsolete. We study this phenomenon in an overlapping generations setting, assuming that technology
evolves stochastically and that older workers find updating uneconomic. Experience and learning by doing may offer the old some income protection, but technology
advance always turns them into has-beens to some degree.
We focus on the determinants (demand elasticities, persistence of technology change, etc.) of the severity of the has-beens effect. It can be large, even
leading to negatively sloped within-occupation age-earnings profiles and an occupation dominated by a few young, high-income workers.
Architecture displays the sort of features the theory identifies as magnifying the has-beens effect, and both anecdotes and some data suggest that the has-beens
effect in architecture is extreme indeed.
Web page loading speed continues to vex users, even as broadband adoption increases. Several studies have addressed delays in the context of Web sites as well
as interactive corporate systems, and have recommended a wide range of ‘rules of thumb’. Some studies conclude that response times should be no greater than 2
seconds while other studies caution on delays of 12 seconds or more. One of the strongest conclusions was that complex tasks seemed to allow longer response times.
This study examined delay times of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 seconds using 196 undergraduate students in an experiment. Randomly assigned a constant delay time,
subjects were asked to complete 9 search tasks, exploring a familiar and an unfamiliar site. Plots of the dependent variables performance, attitudes, and
behavioral intentions, along those delays, suggested the use of non-linear regression, and the explained variance was in the neighborhood of 2%, 5%, and 7%, respectively. Focusing only on the familiar site, explained
variance in attitudes and behavioral intentions grew to about 16%. A sensitivity analysis implies that decreases in
performance and behavioral intentions begin to flatten when the delays extend to 4 seconds or longer, and attitudes flatten when the delays extend to 8 seconds or
longer. Future research should include other factors such as expectations, variability, and feedback, and other outcomes such as actual purchasing behavior, to
more fully understand the effects of delays in today’s Web environment.
A general review is presented of the worldwide evolution of ramjet propulsion since the
Wright brothers first turned man’s imagination to fly into a practical reality.
A perspective of the technological developments from subsonic to hypersonic flight speeds is provided to allow an appreciation for the advances made
internationally from the early 1900s to current times. Ramjet, scramjet, and mixed-cycle
engine types, and their operation and rationale for use are considered. The development history and principal contributing development programs are reviewed. Major
airbreathing technologies that had substantial impact on the maturation of ramjet propulsion and enabled engine designs to mature to their current state are
identified. The general state of flight-demonstrated technology is summarized and compared with the technology base of 1980. The current status of
ramjet/scramjet technology is identified.
Ramjet and scramjet propulsion technology has matured dramatically over the years in support of both military and space access applications, yet many
opportunities remain to challenge future generations of explorers.
[from Usenet, but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious
issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and
little-endianin connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitledOn Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.:
Unix, Unix vs.: VMS, BSDUnix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal, Cvs.: FORTRAN, etc. Inthe year 2003, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs.elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials includeEMACS vs.: vi, my personal computer vs.: everyone else’s personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that
distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices
and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the
sides are relatively minor. See also theology.
T.A. undertook this study to determine the costs and benefits of audible car alarms in the nation’s densest urban environment and to map out a strategy for
banning audible car alarms in the five boroughs of New York City. Summary of Findings:
CAR ALARMSCOSTNEW YORK$642$4002003 TO $802$5002003MILLIONPER
YEAR: The average New York City resident pays a car alarm “Noise Tax” of approximately $160$1002003 to
$193$1202003 per year.
Added up, car alarms cost New Yorkers between $642$4002003 and $802$5002003 million per year in public health costs, lost productivity, decreased property value, and diminished quality
of life.
Car alarms are a substantial and costly public health problem. The type of noise produced by car alarms boosts stress hormones and has been linked to
cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal illnesses, psychological problems and unhealthy fetal development in a number of studies over the last 30 years.
Car alarms hurt New York City’s kids. Children who are exposed to the type of noise produced by car alarms have been found to have more problems with
reading, motivation, and scholastic aptitude.
Car alarms destroy civility and quality of life. US Census data from 2001 show that traffic noise and car alarms are a primary reason why families leave
American cities.
AUDIBLECAR ALARMSDO NOTWORK: Manufacturers, installers, insurers, criminologists, police, and thieves
all say that car alarms are ineffective at stopping car theft. They simply do not work.
A 1997 analysis of insurance-claims data from 73 million vehicles concludes that cars with alarms “show no overall reduction in theft losses” compared to
cars without alarms. GM, Ford, and other auto-makers have begun to phase out factory installations of car alarms, calling the devices mere “noisemakers.”
People don’t respond to car alarms because the vast majority are false. Authorities estimate that 95% to 99% of all car alarms are false. The Progressive
Insurance Company found that fewer than 1% of respondents say they would call the police upon hearing a car alarm.
The professionalization of car theft has made alarms obsolete. In the past 20 years, car theft has evolved from a juvenile pastime into a $13.16$8.202003
billion a year business. 80% of cars are stolen by organized crime. Alarms do not deter the pros.
THEREARE MANY GOOD ALTERNATIVESTO CARALARMS: There are numerous
inexpensive and effective automobile security products on the market today. If audible alarms were made illegal, car owners would switch to more effective
devices.
Brake locks are inexpensive (about $80$502003) and difficult to defeat.
Personal car alarm pagers buzz a vehicle’s owner when a car is disturbed rather than annoying an entire neighborhood.
Lojack uses global positioning satellites to keep track of vehicles and often leads police to the thieves’ chop shops.
Passive immobilizers have reduced theft rates of some car models by as much as 77%.
THE CITY CANLEGALLYBAN CAR ALARMS: New York City law currently limits audible alarms to three minutes of
noise and bans the use of motion sensors, the technology responsible for most false alarms. These laws are ineffective and mostly unenforced.
T.A. legal analysis concludes that the City of New York has the authority to ban the sale, use, or installation of audible motor vehicle alarms.
City Council members introduced a bill in 2000 to ban the sale and installation of car alarms in New York City. The bill is currently buried in the City
Council Committee on Environmental Protection and has never received a public hearing.
Insiders say that a ban on car alarms is being prevented by City Council members who are afraid to take away the 5% discount on comprehensive coverage (less
than $32$202003 per year on
average) that some car owners receive for having alarms in their vehicles.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Ban audible car alarms in New York City.
Every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. A substitute is another product you might buy if the first product is too
expensive. Chicken is a substitute for beef. If you’re a chicken farmer and the price of beef goes up, the people will want more chicken, and you will sell more. A
complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer
operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants. In a small town, when the local five star restaurant has a two-for-one
Valentine’s day special, the local babysitters double their rates. (Actually, the nine-year-olds get roped into early service.) All else being equal, demand for a
product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.
Let me repeat that because you might have dozed off, and it’s important. Demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease. For
example, if flights to Miami become cheaper, demand for hotel rooms in Miami goes up—because more people are flying to Miami and need a room. When computers become
cheaper, more people buy them, and they all need operating systems, so demand for operating systems goes up, which means the price of operating systems can go
up.
…Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the
price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price”—the price that arises when you have a
bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So:
Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.
If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.
This thesis investigates the possibility to improve the quality of text composition. 2 typographic extensions were examined: marginkerning
and composing with font expansion.
Margin kerning is the adjustments of the characters at the margins of a typeset text. A simplified employment of margin kerning is hanging punctuation. Margin kerning is needed for optical alignment of the margins of
a typeset text, because mechanical justification of the margins makes them look rather ragged. Some characters can make a line appear shorter to the human eye than
others. Shifting such characters by an appropriate amount into the margins would greatly improve the appearance of a typeset text.
Composing with font expansion is the method to use a wider or narrower variant of a font to make interword spacing more even. A font in a loose
line can be substituted by a wider variant so the interword spaces are stretched by a smaller amount. Similarly, a font in a tight line can be replaced by a
narrower variant to reduce the amount that the interword spaces are shrunk by. There is certainly potential danger of font distortion when using such
manipulations, thus they must be used with extreme care. The potential to adjust a line width by font expansion can be taken into consideration while a paragraph
is being broken into lines, in order to choose better breakpoints.
These typographic extensions were implemented in pdfTeX, a derivation of TeX.
Many experiments have been done to examine the influence of the extensions on the quality of typesetting. The extensions turned out to noticeably improve the
appearance of a typeset text. A number of ‘real-world’ documents have been typeset using these typographic extensions, including this thesis.
Moreover, Benway (1998) showed that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find
specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was embedded in a banner. Benway consequently named this phenomenon “banner blindness.”
Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page
(closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1⁄3 of the
way down the page (Athenia Assoc., 1997).
…In our study, we were curious to simply explore how much users remember about a web page after viewing it—in particular, we were interested in investigating
user memory of banner advertisements:
How well can users’ recall a banner advertisement on a web page?
How well can users’ recognize a banner advertisement on a web page?
Does animation affect user recall or recognition of an advertising banner?
…Very few participants were able to complete both the recognition and recall tasks correctly. Only 3 (9%) of participants were able to correctly recall both
advertisements, recognize both companies, and correctly recall and recognize the state in which they were presented. On the other hand, participants who were
unable to recall anything for either company banner or correctly indicate the animation state of the banner (40%) had a surprisingly high recognition rate of 79%
for two correctly recognized ads. Results also show that of the 26% who recognized only one ad, the banner recognized was typically presented in the animated
state. In other words, 7 out of 9 times the single banner correctly recognized was in the animated state. This indicates that animation may have some effect on
recognition.
Results from this study indicate that recognition of the banner advertisements were fairly high (74% for both banners). In addition, about half of the
participants were able to recall at least seeing an advertisement on the page—and many of these actually recalled the name of the company. These results show that
most users did notice and remember the banners even though they were not part of the search tasks they were performing.
[Set of online resources published by IAPAC summarizing the Norvirdisappearing-polymorph AIDS crisis. As summarized byBučar et al 2015:]
Public relations footnote: As noted, Abbott’s initial encounter with Form II and its inability to produce Form I led to the disappearance of
the drug Norvir® from the market, leaving tens of thousands of AIDS patients without medication. This led to a
serious public relations problem for Abbott. To allay public concern, the company held a number of interviews and press conferences, at which senior Abbot
officials appeared in order to answer questions. The transcripts were originally published on the website42 of the International Association of Physicians in
AIDS Care, but no longer appear there. Some excerpts vividly portray the situation that can arise when a disappearing
polymorph is encountered:
“There was no gradual trend. Something occurred that caused the new form to occur……There was no early
warning.”
“We, quite honestly, have not been able to pinpoint the precise conditions which led to the appearance of the new crystal form. We now know that the new form
is, in fact, more stable than the earlier form, so nature would appear to favor it……Form II is new.”
“We did not know how to detect the new form. We did not know how to test for it. We did not know what caused it. We didn’t know how to prevent it. And
we kept asking the question, why now?……We didnot know the physical properties of the new form……We did not know how to clean it, and we did not know how to get rid of it.”
“……our initial activities were directed toward eliminating Form II from our environment. Then we finally accepted that we could not get rid of Form II. Then
our subsequent activities were directed to figuring out how to live in a Form II world.”
“This is why all of us at Abbott have been working extremely hard throughout the summer [of 1998], often around the clock, and sometimes never going home at
night. We have been here seven days a week and we will continue to do so. We have cancelled vacations and asked our families for their understanding and support.
This is not an issue that we take lightly.”
“There were several sub-teams of three to 600 people per team working full time in different areas. We also called on as many resources as we could.”
“We tried everything. We conducted countless experiments. We reconditioned our facilities. We rebuilt facilities and new lines. We looked at alternative
sites. We visited a number of [other] organizations around the world……to see if we could start clean in a new environment free of Form II.”
“In a matter of weeks—maybe five or six weeks, every place the product was became contaminated with Form II crystals.”
Question: “You are a large multinational company. Your scientists are obviously smart. How could this happen?”
Answer: “A company’s size and the collective IQs of their scientists have no relationship to this problem……This obviously has not happened to every drug. But it has happened to other drugs.”
Once Ejo asked: “What is meant by the expression: ‘Cause and effect are not clouded’?” Dogen said: “Cause and effect are immovable.” Ejo asked: “If this is
so, how can we escape?” Dogen replied: “Cause and effect emerge clearly at the same time.” Ejo asked: “If this is so, does cause prompt the next effect, or does
effect bring about the next cause?” Dogen said: “If everything were like that, it would be like Nan-ch’uan cutting the cat. Because the assembly was unable to say anything, Nan-ch’uan cut the
cat in two. Later, when Nan-ch’uan told this story to Chao-chou, the latter put his straw sandal on his head and went out,
an excellent performance. If I had been Nan-ch’uan, I would have said: ‘Even if you can speak, I will cut the cat, and
even if you cannot speak, I will still cut it. Who is arguing about the cat? Who can save the cat?’”
—Dogen, Shobogenzo Zuimonki, 1.61
…“One day a student asked me, ‘Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?’ I answered, ‘No, he does not.’ Since then I have been
doomed to undergo five hundred rebirths as a fox. I beg you now to give the turning word to release me from my life as a fox. Tell me, does a man of
enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?” Hyakujo answered, “He does not ignore [cloud] causation [cause and effect].” No sooner had the old man
heard these words than he was enlightened.2
“Causation” in this passage refers to “moral causation.” The Buddhist concept of karma acknowledges that good/bad deeds, thoughts, and so forth result in
good/bad effects. Thus the import of the question posed by the “fox” is whether or not the enlightened person is subject to karma. Hyakujo’s answer, in effect,
affirms that the enlightened person is subject to moral causation. Katsuki Sekida offers a common Zen interpretation of this passage in his comment: “Thus to
ignore causation only compounds one’s malady. To recognize causation constitutes the remedy for it.”4
Dōgen’s employment of this story in the “Daishugyo” chapter of the Shōbōgenzō implies that, on one level, he thinks Hyakujo’s answer indeed provides a “remedy” for the old man’s predicament.5
Yet Dogen was rarely content with merely citing traditional Zen interpretations of passages; typically, he sought to push his students to a further understanding
by a creative reinterpretation of a passage. Lest his disciple therefore think this not-ignoring/recognition of causation is de facto a release from it in an
ultimate sense, Dogen answers that the passage means “cause and effect are immovable.” In other words, moral causation, for Dogen, is an inexorable fact of human
existence.
Given this fact, Ejo then asks how we can ever “escape” moral causation. Dogen’s response is enigmatic: “Cause and effect arise at the same time.” Nowhere in
the Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki does he further clarify this passage. However, the key to understanding this statement can be gleaned from his discussion of
causation in the “Shoakumakusa” chapter of the Shōbōgenzō, wherein he observes that “cause is not before and effect is not after.”6 As Hee-Jin
Kim explains, Dogen saw cause and effect as absolutely discontinuous moments that, in any given action, arise simultaneously from “thusness.” Therefore,
no sooner does one choose and act according to a particular course of action than are the results thereof (heavens, hells, or otherwise) realized in it… Man
lives in the midst of causation from which he cannot escape even for a moment; nevertheless, he can live from moment to moment in such a way that these moments
are the fulfilled moments of moral and spiritual freedom and purity in thusness.7
…Dogen’s own proposed response helps us to see the point he is trying to make via the words of the old Master: “In expressing full function, there are no fixed
methods.” In other words, there is no fixed formula for expressing and eliciting without-thinking. Nan-ch’uan, in Dogen’s view, betrayed an attachment to only two
positions—to kill or not kill the cat. He was “fixated”, we might say, by these two possibilities. This is evidenced by the
fact that he does indeed carry out one of them precisely as he said he would.
Tacit knowledge, embodied in people rather than words, equations, or
diagrams, plays a vital role in science.
The historical record of the development and spread of nuclear weapons and the recollections of their designers suggest that tacit knowledge is also crucial to
nuclear weapons development. Therefore, if design ceases, and if there is no new generation of designers to whom that tacit knowledge can be passed, then in an
important (though qualified) sense nuclear weapons will have been uninvented.
Their renewed development would thus have some of the characteristics of reinvention rather than simply copying. In addition, knowledge may be lost not only as a result of complete disarmament, but also as a
consequence of likely measures such as a nuclear test ban. [cf Fogbank]
The human brain is a product of Darwinian evolution and as such it has evolved from a set of underlying structures that constrain its ultimate potential. A
combination of the physical size of the dendrites, axons and the associated blood vessels, and therefore their related signal space, limit the amount of
information the brain can effectively store and process. By analysing the inter-relationship of the key constraints we have shown that:
The maximum effective diameter of the human brain is around 10–20cm.
The interconnectivity of neurons is dictated by thermal, volumetric, signal processing and transmission constraints, and is not, a priori, a key system
parameter for intelligence.
Intelligent signal processing inflicts an order of magnitude time constraint on an optimised structure.
Thus we contend that the human brain is at, or near, the capability limits that a neuron-based system allows. This implies that our future evolutionary
potential is limited and that, as a species, Homo Sapiens may be near the pinnacle of achievable intelligence using current cellular carbon technology.
Sandia National Laboratories(SNL) convened an expert panel to develop design characteristics forpermanent markers and to judge the efficacy of the markers in
deterring inadvertent human intrusion in the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant(WIPP). The WIPP, located in southeastern New Mexico, is designed todemonstrate the safe disposal of transuranic (TRU) radioactive wastesgenerated by the United States
Department of Energy (DOE) defenseprograms. The DOE must evaluate
WIPP compliance with the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA)
regulation “Environmental Standards for the Management and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, High-Level and Transuranic Radioactive Wastes (40
CFR Part 191, Subpart E)”; this EPA regulation requires: “Disposal
sites shall be designated by the most permanent markers, records, and other passive institutional controls practicable to indicate the dangers of the wastes and
their location” (Federal Register 50; 38,086). The period of regulatory concern is 10,000 years.
The expert panel identified basic principles to guide current and future marker development efforts: (1) the site must be marked, (2) message(s) must be
truthful and informative, (3) multiple components within a marker system, (4) multiple means of communication (eg. language, pictographs, scientific diagrams), (5)
multiple levels of complexity within individual messages on individual marker system elements, (6) use of materials with little recycle value, and (7)
international effort to maintain knowledge of the locations and contents of nuclear waste repositories. The efficacy of the markers in deterring inadvertent human
intrusion was estimated to decrease with time, with the probability function varying with the mode of intrusion (who is intruding and for what purpose) and the
level of technological development of the society. The development of a permanent, passive marker system capable of surviving and remaining interpretable for
10,000 years will require further study prior to implementation.
[Keywords: management of radioactive and non-radioactive wastes from nuclear facilities, nuclear fuel cycle and fuel materials,
WIPP, human intrusion, alpha-bearing wastes, underground disposal, radiation hazards, communications, safety,
recommendations, design, waste disposal and storage, health and safety]
Since the early 1980’s, all major semiconductor manufacturers invoked the “no-cosmetics” policy. This had some severe psychological effects on the female
workforce which comprised approximately 90% of the wafer fab employees. In the interest of business (as well as wafer yield), this policy was upheld. This paper
discusses some of the psychological responses by the fab operators. Several experiments were performed which indicated that cosmetics presented a source of
particulate contamination but at the same time cosmetics can prevent skin flaking. However, the use of cosmetics by both men and women could be detrimental to the
cleanroom even when the personnel may not actually be wearing the cosmetics in the clean room. This paper is to raise the level of awareness to the problem of
cosmetics in the clean room and to offer some clean room protocol procedures that can minimize and possibly eliminate much of the human contaminants. Cosmetics in
the clean room is not restricted to the female workforce. Men are also guilty of using cosmetics while in the clean room. This paper examines this problem and
suggests cleanroom guidelines.
Background: The space program requires 100% electronic uptime on all major systems. In 1985 one of the shuttle missions was scrubbed
because mission guidelines did not allow lift off with only 4 of 5 computers operational. The cost of the aborted mission was in excess of $30$101985 million and the
cost of the removal and replacement of the defective component was approximately $1,505,530$500,0001985. Failure analysis of the shuttle component found corrosion of the semiconductor metallization as a result
of human contamination (spittle, in this particular instance).14 Similar accounts are described by FAA
computers and banking computers failing for similar defects in their CPU IC’s.
The space shuttle incidence has caused NASA and FAA to personally audit
prime semiconductor contractors. They found that 1–3% of all semiconductor devices had some form of human contamination. Since human-related contamination is more
of a reliability issue, military specs are now in place to require all microcircuits to be chemically analyzed for any on-die contaminants prior to sealing.
…The second task was to develop experiments that could be repeated as often as necessary to illustrate that cosmetics were a serious source of contamination.
The experiment was simply having operators with and without cosmetics performing simple wafer handling chores: wafer inspections at an inspection station next to
the Aeronca particle monitor. This test was repeated several times per week, using different operators with different skin types. Figures 2
and 3 summarize the results of this testing. Both men and women were tested across all 3 fabs. In Figure 2, women of all
skin types generated more particles when not wearing makeup. This would seem normal since nearly all cosmetics (or, more specifically, make-up) has a moisturizer
base which keeps the skin less dry in the harsh conditions of the clean room. The one exception is that women classified as having oily skin flaked about the same,
with or without cosmetics. This is because the skin will not slough off as much since the skin has its own built in moisturizing system, called keratin17. Similarly, women with dark skin tend to have less dryness because of
the excess skin pigmentation which also acts as a moisturizer.
…Even cosmetics that are used to protect the skin find their way to the microcircuit (or other products relating to clean rooms). In an unrelated experiment in
which Advanced Micro Devices was in the process of developing a new
site-wide wafer fab protocol spec, the training department began dry-runs of the series of classes involving the new, more rigid clean room procedures. One of the
classes involved selected wafer fab operators and the purpose was to demonstrate the proper method to put on the clean room attire. However, the gloves were
treated with a phosphorescent powder (the same type used by the police to “lift” fingerprints). Some of the older operators could feel the powder but they passed
it off as being part of a new style of glove. After all the participants were in their proper clean room attire (including the gloves), the trainer discussed
various protocol rules with the operators. About a half hour later the trainer informed everyone that the gloves had been lightly dusted. One by one, each person
stood in front of a full length mirror while the trainer scanned their body with a black light. With few exceptions, there were yellow fingerprints allover their
smocks as well on unprotected areas such as their faces and arms. This test was to illustrate that human contamination can find its way to the work area even with
all possible protective measures in force.
…Many of the contaminants in cosmetics are harmless to the wafer fab. But as this paper has illustrated, most cosmetics of all types contain chemicals and
compounds that can be devastating to semiconductor processing. The EDS illustrations ofFigures 4
through 9 show an abundance of easily ionized elements with low 1st ionization potential. The lower this potential, the easier it is
for that element to combine with other elements. Also, Table 1 shows the common elements in body fluids (or skin tissue) which also have low
first ionization potential. As in the case of the space shuttle where the defect was latent, that is, it occurred after the device had been tested and was in the field, many of the defects caused by
cosmetics can also be latent. It is these defects for which we have more concern. The immediate defects are usually caught
at the manufacturer’s facility or even at the subsystem level. Most of the highly ionized metallic elements can cause immediate damage such as metal shorts,
breakdowns in the oxides, threshold shifts, and various resistance changes.
…To illustrate the effects of cosmetics on the parametric values of the semiconductors, several wafers were contaminated with after shave, talc, eye liner,
lipstick, blush, mascara residue, moisturizer, and skin flakes/hair…These are just a few of the types of parameter changes that can occur when cosmetics (and
cosmetics on skin) come in contact with a semiconductor device in the clean room.
Let us seek for some blessing, which does not merely look fine, but is sound and good throughout alike, and most beautiful in the parts which are least seen…I
follow nature, which is a point upon which every one of the Stoic philosophers are agreed: true wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in moulding our
conduct according to her laws and model.
A happy life, therefore, is one which is in accordance with its own nature, and cannot be brought about unless in the first place the mind be sound and remain
so without interruption, and next, be bold and vigorous, enduring all things with most admirable courage, suited to the times in which it lives, careful of the
body and its appurtenances, yet not troublesomely careful. It must also set due value upon all the things which adorn our lives, without over-estimating any one of
them, and must be able to enjoy the bounty of Fortune without becoming her slave.
You understand without my mentioning it that an unbroken calm and freedom ensue, when we have driven away all those things which either excite us or alarm us:
for in the place of sensual pleasures and those slight perishable matters which are connected with the basest crimes, we thus gain an immense, unchangeable,
equable joy, together with peace, calmness and greatness of mind, and kindliness: for all savageness is a sign of weakness.
[from Bohn’s Classical Library Edition of L. Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogues Together with the Dialog ‘On Clemency’]
Separation of ethanol-water and methanol-water mixtures has been accomplished experimentally using a horizontal zero-gravity distillation column. A
countercurrent flow between liquid and vapor phases was established utilizing the principle of the heat pipe. The concentration profile along the column has been
investigated with various product rates. A high degree of separation was achieved in a relatively short column lined with capillary wicks. The flexible column
orientation can also be a tremendous advantage as compared to the necessarily vertical operation of the conventional distillation columns.
Scope: Substantial improvements have been made recently to increase the efficiency of continuous contact distillation. A wetted-wall column has
generally been considered to improve its efficiency. However, poor wetting characteristics are still a problem of such a system. Swathed glass tubes, ground glass
tubes, and stainless steel mesh tubes have been used as wetted-wall columns with improved wetting properties so that more effective distillation might be achieved
(in the range of low reflux rate)
In order to obtain a uniform wetting surface and an enhanced vapor-liquid contacting surface, materials with capillary action, such as wicks and screen meshes,
can be used for the distillation. All conventional distillation columns use gravitational force or centrifugal force (eg. the British ICI column) to return the condensed liquid to the evaporator. By employing materials with capillary action, however, the condensed
liquid can be transported back to the evaporator in the absence of or even against gravity. Thus the capillary action provides flexibility in column
orientation.
The scope of the present study is to investigate the feasibility of microdistillation (using short columns) in the absence of gravity (or in a horizontal
position). Both total reflux conditions and steady state with product removal conditions are studied for separation of binary mixtures. As a possible application
in outer space, zero-gravity distillation could be used to separate liquid mixtures for recycle of the materials used.
Conclusions and Substance: A new unit operation has been developed for a horizontal distillation column. Experiments were carried out for
binary liquid systems using a glass tube and fiberglass as wick material. The temperature of the evaporator was kept just below the boiling temperature of the
liquid mixture and an atmospheric pressure was maintained in the vapor phase. Mixture samples were analyzed to determine the concentration profiles along a total
reflux column and a steady state column with product removal.
It has been demonstrated that both the most and the least volatile components of a binary mixture of any composition can be separated as highly concentrated
products without using gravity forces. In contrast to the tall tower and the vertical operation of conventional distillation, this device permits a short column to
achieve the same degree of separation in a horizontal position.
A numerical simulation was developed to obtain the concentration profile along the column. A good agreement is shown between the theoretical and experimental
profiles. The performance was characterized by the number of transfer units and height of a transfer unit.
Unintentional deaths from suffocation and strangulation account for about 20% of all nontransport-related infant and child fatalities in the United States. In
the late 1950s, some preventive countermeasures were introduced to reduce the number of deaths resulting from refrigerator or freezer entrapment. A few years
later, countermeasures were introduced to prevent deaths resulting from suffocation by plastic bags, inhumation, and mechanical strangulation from wedging in
infant cribs. For three of these major causes of suffocation and strangulation deaths among infants and children (refrigerator or freezer entrapment, suffocation
by plastic bag, and inhumation at construction sites), there appears to have been a statistically-significant decline in incidence; however, there is no evidence
of a statistically-significant reduction in deaths from mechanical strangulation in cribs. The impact of current countermeasures is discussed, and some suggestions
for new or modified approaches are made.
Figure 3: Rate of suffocation deaths in refrigerators or freezers per million children and ratio of fatal entrapment events per million units
sold, California, 1960–1981
Figure 3 shows death rates per million children from suffocation in refrigerators and freezers in California from 1960 through 1981. The rates
were high in the early 1960s, then declined, then increased in 1966–1968. Since then, the death rate has declined statistically-significantly (p =
0.05).
The ratio of suffocation events per million refrigerators and freezers sold in California is also displayed in Figure 3. Since 37% of
entrapments in refrigerators or freezers involved more than 1 child (Table 3), it was appropriate to determine the ratio of events of entrapment
in refrigerators or freezers (regardless of the number of children involved) to the number of units sold. As seen in figure 3, the pattern is
about the same as for death rates; that is, there is a peak ratio in the mid-to-late 1960s followed by a steady decline (p = 0.025) through 1981. It
should be noted that the approximate lifespan of a refrigerator built in the 1950s was 15 years, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. This
may account for the lag before the decline in the incidence rate begins.
We have now discussed most of the issues that arise in line breaking, and it is interesting to compare the newfangled approaches to what printers have actually
been doing through the years. Medieval scribes, who prepared beautiful manuscripts by hand before the days of printing, were generally careful to break lines so
that the right-hand margins would be nearly straight, and this practice was continued by the early printers. Indeed, printers had to fill up each line of type with
spaces anyway, so that the individual letters wouldn’t fall out of position while making impressions, and it wasn’t too much more difficult for a compositor to
distribute the spaces between words instead of putting them at the ends of lines.
One of the most difficult challenges faced by printers over the years has been the typesetting of ‘polyglot Bibles’—editions of the Bible in which the original
languages are set side by side with various translations—since special care is needed to keep the versions of various languages synchronized with each other.
Furthermore the fact that several languages appear on each page means that the texts tend to be set with narrower columns than usual; this, together with the fact
that one dare not alter the sacred words, makes the line-breaking problem especially difficult. We can get a good idea of the early printers’ approaches to line
breaking by examining their polyglot Bibles carefully.
[Knuth & Plass discuss instances like the Complutensian Polyglot
Bible: a page might have up to 6 languages, all in different scripts with varying line lengths but intended to be cross-referenced for comparison to allow
scholarly study and check accuracy. The technical demand was solved using hyphenation & justification, and spaces might be filled with ’ooo’s to give solid blocks
of text. The justification was manual, often somewhat sloppy and loose, clearly done one line at a time, with resort to abbreviations and irregular spacing of
punctuation to assist. While the TeX Knuth-Plass algorithm may never be able to match Bartels’s 1926 The Art of
Spacing for perfection, Knuth feels it is better than most human typesetters can afford to do, even on the most prestigious and well-funded projects like
the polyglot Bibles.]
This paper discusses a new approach to the problem of dividing the text of a paragraph into lines of approximately equal length. Instead of simply making
decisions one line at a time, the method considers the paragraph as a whole, so that the final appearance of a given line might be influenced by the text on
succeeding lines.
A system based on three simple primitive concepts called ‘boxes’, ‘glue’, and ‘penalties’ provides the ability to deal satisfactorily with a wide variety of
typesetting problems in a unified framework, using a single algorithm that determines optimum breakpoints. The algorithm avoids backtracking by a judicious use of
the techniques of dynamic programming.
Extensive computational experience confirms that the approach is both efficient and effective in producing high-quality output. The paper concludes with a brief
history of line-breaking methods, and an appendix presents a simplified algorithm that requires comparatively few resources.
Which bit should travel first? The bit from the big end or the bit from the little end? Can a war between Big Endians and Little Endians be avoided?
This article was written in an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late for peace to prevail again. Many believe that the central question of this war
is, What is the proper byte order in messages? More specifically, the question is, Which bit should travel first-the bit from the little end of the word or the bit
from the big end of the word? Followers of the former approach are called Little Endians, or Lilliputians; followers of the latter are called Big Endians, or
Blefuscuians. I employ these Swiftian terms because this modern conflict is so reminiscent of the holy war described in Gulliver’s Travels.
…To sum it all up, there are two camps, each with its own language. These languages are as compatible with each other as any Semitic and Latin languages. All
Big Endians can talk only to each other. So can all the Little Endians, although there are some differences among the dialects used by different tribes. There is
no middle ground—only one end can go first. As in all the religious wars of the past, power—not logic—will be the decisive factor. This is not the first holy war,
and will probably not be the last. The “Reasonable, do it my way” approach does not work. Neither does the Esperanto approach of switching to yet another new
language. Lest our communications world split along theses lines, we should take note of a certain book (not mentioned in the references), which has an interesting
story about a similar phenomenon: the Tower of Babel. Lilliput and Blefuscu will never come to terms of their own free will. We need some Gulliver between the two
islands to force a unified communication regime on all of us.
Of course, I hope that my way will be chosen, but it is not really critical. Agreement upon an order is more important than the order agreed upon.
This Note is part of an ongoing investigation into the problem of potential and actual criminal adversaries of U.S. nuclear facilities and programs. Because of
the low level of criminal activity against nuclear targets in the United States, the RAND Corporation has employed an analogous methodology to study this subject.
RAND developed over several years a surrogate data base consisting of nonnuclear crimes that are analogous to
potential incidents against nuclear facilities and programs. The data base contains 121 sophisticated and high-value burglaries, robberies, and other conventional
crimes. Data on 45 of these crimes were taken directly from an earlier RAND study and an additional 76 crimes
were selected for this document. Most of the information comes from newspaper and journal articles, and is subject to their errors and limitations. The data base
was analyzed for information such as insider involvement, number of perpetrators, value of loot, type of crime, violence, coercion of employees, and use of
deception. The purpose of the document is not to declare what should be done by those responsible for the security of nuclear facilities and materials, but to
emphasize areas of particular vulnerability as observed in the analogous data base.
Among the inferences and observations are the following:
the higher the value of the loot the more likely that insiders participated
the higher the value of the loot the more perpetrators are likely to be involved
crimes involving insiders have an unusually high rate of apprehension
insiders can pose a great threat to nuclear security for a variety of reasons and in a number of ways
a high number of crimes occur while loot is in transit
crimes employing deception or coercion are very successful
his authority and/or access often determines whether an insider will use deception
crimes of coercion usually have as their victims employees with authority and access.
One of the most extraordinary books ever written about chess and chessplayers, this authoritative study goes well beyond a lucid explanation of how today’s chessmasters and tournament players are rated. Twenty years’ research and
practice produce a wealth of thought-provoking and hitherto unpublished material on the nature and development of high-level talent:
Just what constitutes an “exceptional performance” at the chessboard? Can you really profit from chess lessons? What is the lifetime pattern of Grandmaster
development? Where are the masters born? Does your child have master potential?
The step-by-step rating system exposition should enable any reader to become an expert on it. For some it may suggest fresh approaches to performance
measurement and handicapping in bowling, bridge, golf and elsewhere. 43 charts, diagrams and maps supplement the text.
How and why are chessmasters statistically remarkable? How much will your rating rise if you work with the devotion of a Steinitz? At what age should study
begin? What toll does age take, and when does it begin?
Development of the performance data, covering hundreds of years and thousands of players, has revealed a fresh and exciting version of chess history. One of the
many tables identifies 500 all-time chess greats, with personal data and top lifetime performance ratings.
Just what does government assistance do for chess? What is the Soviet secret? What can we learn from the Icelanders? Why did the small city of Plovdiv produce
three Grandmasters in only ten years? Who are the untitled dead? Did Euwe take the championship from Alekhine on a fluke? How would Fischer fare against Morphy
in a ten-wins match?
“It was inevitable that this fascinating story be written”, asserts FIDE President Max Euwe, who introduces the book
and recognizes the major part played by ratings in today’s burgeoning international activity. Although this is the definitive ratings work, with statistics
alone sufficient to place it in every reference library, it was written by a gentle scientist for pleasurable reading—for the enjoyment of the truths, the
questions, and the opportunities it reveals.
Social class and racial differences in human pair-bonding and heterosexual behavior patterns are considered in an evolutionary perspective. The expected
unpredictability of one’s future income stream should be an important parameter influencing these variables, according to theoretical considerations.
The literature is reviewed relevant to the prediction that those facing more predictable income streams should have a stronger marital pair bond and
premarital sexual activities more likely to lead to a strong pair bond, all other things being equal.
It is shown that those with high education or high occupational status do have more predictable income streams, and that their pair-bonding activities
exhibit the predicted consequences of that fact. A much smaller number of studies comparing different races’ sexual patterns are also consistent with the theory.
In the extremely few cases that permit it, it is found that a correlate of income predictability is more important in determining the dependent variables than
either race or class, as expected.
Alternative explanations of the data are briefly examined and found wanting, especially with respect to explaining the patterns of individuals whose parental
class differs from their own. Further research is suggested.
Optical systems which, when rotated, produce a rotation of an image about the optical axis have been known and used for a long time. Information on such systems
is sparse, however, and widely scattered. This paper discusses image rotation devices in general terms, and then attempts to collect together the more commonly
used devices and to present comparative information on them, in order to provide a convenient reference source for optical designers. In addition a number of
lesser known and novel arrangements are described.
Behavior of young children in a situation simulating entrapment in refrigerators was studied in order to develop standards for inside releasing devices, in
accordance with Public Law 930 of the 84th Congress [H. R. 11969: To require certain safety devices on household refrigerators shipped in interstate
commerce. Approved Aug. 2, 1956. Public Law No. 930.].
Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course
of this experiment as the result of observation of behavior.
Success in escaping was dependent on the device, a child’s age and size and his behavior. It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a
higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. Three major types of behavior were observed: (1)
inaction, with no effort or only slight effort to get out (24%); (2) purposeful effort to escape (39%); (3) violent action both directed toward escape and
undirected (37%).
Some of the children made no outcry (6% of the 2-year-olds and 50% of the 5-year-olds). Not all children pushed. When tested with devices where pushing was
appropriate, 61% used this technique. Some children had curious twisting and twining movements of the fingers or clenching of the hands. When presented with a
gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob.
Time of confinement in the enclosure was short for most children. Three-fourths released themselves or were released in less than 3 minutes; one-fourth in less
than 10 seconds. Of those who let themselves out, one-half did so in less than 10 seconds. One-third of the children emerged unruffled, about half were upset but
could be comforted easily, and a small group (11%) required some help to become calm.
Forces exerted in any horizontal direction by the children for whom such records were obtained ranged up to 29 pounds. The average was about 10 pounds for
3-year-olds and about 21 pounds for 5-year-olds. For reasons not known, the 2-year-old group exerted a slightly greater average force than did the 3-year-old
group.
More than one-fourth of the children exerted in excess of 18 pounds and almost two-thirds in excess of 12 pounds.
Data from these experiments proved valuable in developing standards for release devices (as required by Public Law 930), which are expected to be effective for
self-release by a large percentage of, but not all, entrapped children. An important result of the behavior study was the finding that, when entrapped, children
most often try to escape either by pushing on the door through which they entered the enclosure, or by manipulating a knob release as they would a doorknob.
Relatively few children pushed against the back, sides or ceiling of the enclosure.
A follow-up study of 96 test subjects, 8 months after the tests, by interviews with the mothers showed very little obvious residual effect. Reversion to
infantile behavior was not found. A number of children still talked about the tests, some with pleasure, a few with resentment. Mothers were not aware of more than
ephemeral emotional upset in any of the children.
Reasons for the low level of anxiety engendered by the tests may lie in the precautions taken and in factors inherent in the situation; the parents were not
involved in the incident, which enabled them to be calm and casual with the children.
Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public
sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered: “Sorry—but that would be fifty
tons”. Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. ..It is
estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi
Germany. One Washington official has called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire
country’s brain-power.”
What did we find? You’d like some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection?
…the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size. Notice it is heavy porcelain—not glass—and thus virtually indestructible. It is a
thousand watt—one-tenth the size of similar American tubes…“That’s Magnetophone tape”, he said. “It’s plastic, metallized on one side with iron oxide. In Germany
that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day’s Radio program can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a new program on at any
time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs fifty cents.”…He showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded,
technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it.
German cars could drive at any, speed in a total blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot; targets two
miles away. As a sniper scope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness…We got, in addition, among these prize secrets, the technique and the
machine for making the world’s most remarkable electric condenser…The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it and—something
which had always eluded scientists—in large sheets. We know now, thanks to FIAT teams, that ingredients of natural
mica were melted in crucibles of carbon capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then—this was the real secret—cooled in a special way…“This is done on
a press in one operation. It is called the ‘cold extrusion’ process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold
steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter
of one thousand%.” This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries.
…In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a little dizzy. But of all the industrial secrets,
perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such
a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics. drugs, dyes. One American dye
authority declares: “It includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many
are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years.”
…Milk pasteurization by ultra-violet light…how to enrich the milk with vitamin D…cheese was being made—“good quality Hollander and Tilsiter”—by a new method at
unheard-of speed…a continuous butter making machine…The finished product served as both animal and human food. Its caloric value is four times that of lean meat,
and it contains twice as much protein. The Germans also had developed new methods of preserving food by plastics and new, advanced refrigeration techniques…German
medical researchers had discovered a way to produce synthetic blood plasma.
…When the war ended, we now know, they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every known kind of remote control
and fuse: radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for
either subsonic or supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight…Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and
guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.
It came with a slide-on case that ingeniously fastens to the back plate of the typewriter with rubber straps. Unfortunately, over time these would often dry
out, crack, and break off. This example still has them intact, but given its age, it’s not a good idea to rely on them to carry it around!
The body is made largely of shiny ABS plastic, while the case has a heavy matte texture, and some key
structural pieces, such as the ends of the platen, are of painted metal. The bright orange caps of the ribbon reels perk up the actual mechanism, something which
in other typewriters is typically hidden from view…The large fold-out handle on the back of the machine (what becomes the top when carrying it in its case) overtly
invites picking up the Valentine and taking it along for a joy ride, much as the handle on the first Mac signified the same intent. The case itself was
custom-designed to match the aesthetic, unlike most typewriter cases of the day, which were nondescript black or gray plastic, or perhaps semi-soft vinyl. This is
another example of Sottsass’ thinking about the whole user experience (as we would call it today).
…The Valentine was conceived as competitor to the inexpensive units coming on to the market from Japan. Sottsass had some interesting ideas about how to
simplify and lower the cost of the machine, such as not having lower case letters (EVERYTHINGWOULDBE SHOUTINGIN
UPPERCASE!), removing the bell that went “ding” at the end of the line, and using an inexpensive
plastic for the case. Olivetti rejected all these as too radical, and used the higher-quality ABS plastic for the
case, which pushed the price up higher than Sottsass had wanted.
“[F]or use in any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of the monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet
Sundays in the country or to provide a highly colored object on a table in a studio apartment. An anti-machine machine, built around the commonest
mass-produced mechanism, the works inside any typewriter, it may also seem to be an unpretentious toy.”
The wonderful imagery documenting Alexander Graham Bell’s experiments with tetrahedral kites….the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell is also noted for
his work in aerodynamics, a rather more photogenic endeavour perhaps, as evidenced by the wonderful imagery documenting his experiments with tetrahedral kites. The
series of photographs depict Bell and his colleagues demonstrating and testing out a number of different kite designs, all based upon the tetrahedral structure, to
whose pyramid-shaped cells Bell was drawn as they could share joints and spars and so crucially lessen the weight-to-surface area ratio…Bell began his experiments
with tetrahedral box kites in 1898, eventually developing elaborate structures comprised of multiple compound tetrahedral kites covered in maroon silk, constructed
with the aim of carrying a human through the air. Named Cygnet I, II, and III (for they took off from water)
these enormous tetrahedral beings were flown both unmanned and manned during a five year period from 1907 until 1912.
One of the most distinctive features of Tufte’s style is his extensive use of sidenotes.3 Sidenotes are like footnotes, except they don’t force the
reader to jump their eye to the bottom of the page, but instead display off to the side in the margin. Perhaps you have noticed their use in this document already.
You are very astute.
Sidenotes are a great example of the web not being like print. On sufficiently large viewports, TufteCSS uses the margin for sidenotes, margin notes, and small
figures. On smaller viewports, elements that would go in the margin are hidden until the user toggles them into view. The goal is to present related but not
necessary information such as asides or citations as close as possible to the text that references them. At the same time, this secondary information
should stay out of the way of the eye, not interfering with the progression of ideas in the main text.
…If you want a sidenote without footnote-style numberings, then you want a margin note. Notice there isn’t a number preceding the note. On large screens, a
margin note is just a sidenote that omits the reference number. This lessens the distracting effect taking away from the flow of the main text, but can increase
the cognitive load of matching a margin note to its referent text.
Admonitions are small break-out boxes with notes, tips, warnings, etc. for the reader. They begin with a title line of a pattern of three exclamation
marks, an optional CSS class, and an optional title. All following lines that are indented at least three spaces are
included in the body, which may include multiple paragraphs. The default stylesheet provides classes for “note” (default), “tip”, “warning”, and “error”.
![[bar graph titled “Typical Response Latency” showing 3 major sections] [section 1: Automated Steps: 800 ms] [section 2: Someone Copies and Pastes From a Thing Into Another Thing: 2–15 minutes (more if the person on call is busy)] [section 3: Automated Steps: 200ms] Each SCAPDFATIAT point increases the chance that the process will involve the phrase ‘by the next business day.’](/images/cs/2022-munroe-xkcd-2565latency.png)
