2022-wu.pdf: “Light-driven microdrones”, Xiaofei Wu, Raphael Ehehalt, Gary Razinskas, Thorsten Feichtner, Jin Qin, Bert Hecht (2022-04-21; similar):
When photons interact with matter, forces and torques occur due to the transfer of linear and angular momentum, respectively. The resulting accelerations are small for macroscopic objects but become substantial for microscopic objects with small masses and moments of inertia, rendering photon recoil very attractive to propel micro-objects and nano-objects [eg. optical tweezer]. However, until now, using light to control object motion in 2 or 3 dimensions in all 3 or 6° of freedom has remained an unsolved challenge.
Here we demonstrate light-driven microdrones (size roughly 2 μm and mass roughly 2 pg) in an aqueous environment that can be maneuvered in 2 dimensions in all 3 independent degrees of freedom (two translational and one rotational) using 2 overlapping unfocused light fields of 830 and 980 nm wavelength.
To actuate the microdrones independent of their orientation, we use up to 4 individually addressable chiral plasmonic nanoantennas acting as nanomotors that resonantly scatter the circular polarization components of the driving light into well-defined directions. The microdrones are maneuvered by only adjusting the optical power for each motor (the power of each circular polarization component of each wavelength). The actuation concept is therefore similar to that of macroscopic multirotordrones.
As a result, we demonstrate manual steering of the microdrones along complex paths. Since all degrees of freedom can be addressed independently and directly, feedback control loops may be used to counteract Brownian motion.
We posit that the microdrones can find applications in transport and release of cargo, nanomanipulation, and local probing and sensing of nano and mesoscale objects.
Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Despite widespread concerns that YouTube’s algorithms send people down “rabbit holes” with recommendations to extremist videos, little systematic evidence exists to support this conjecture.
Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample (n = 1,181), we show that exposure to alternative and extremist channel videos on YouTube is heavily concentrated among a small group of people with high prior levels of gender and racial resentment. These viewers typically subscribe to these channels (causing YouTube to recommend their videos more often) and often follow external links to them.
Contrary to the “rabbit holes” narrative, non-subscribers are rarely recommended videos from alternative and extremist channels and seldom follow such recommendations when offered.
This paper explores Null Island, a fictional place located at 0° latitude and 0° longitude in the WGS84 geographic coordinate system.
Null Island is erroneously associated with large amounts of geographic data in a wide variety of location-based services, place databases, social media and web-based maps. While it was originally considered a joke within the geospatial community, this article will demonstrate implications of its existence, both technological and social in nature, promoting Null Island as a fundamental issue of geographic information that requires more widespread awareness.
The article summarizes error sources that lead to data being associated with Null Island.
We identify four evolutionary phases which help explain how this fictional place evolved and established itself as an entity reaching beyond the geospatial profession to the point of being discovered by the visual arts and the general population. After providing an accurate account of data that can be found at (0, 0), geospatial, technological and social implications of Null Island are discussed.
Guidelines to avoid misplacing data to Null Island are provided. Since data will likely continue to appear at this location, our contribution is aimed at both GIScientists and the general population to promote awareness of this error source.
How humans choose their mates is a central feature of adult life and an area of considerable disagreement among relationship researchers. However, few studies have examined mate choice (instead of mate preferences) around the world, and fewer still have considered data from online dating services.
Using data from more than 1.8 million online daters from 24 countries, we examined the role of sex and resource-acquisition ability (as indicated by level of education and income) in mate choice using multilevel modeling. We then attempted to understand country-level variance by examining factors such as gender equality and the operational sex ratio.
In every nation, a person’s resource-acquisition ability was positively associated with the amount of attention they received from other site members. There was a marked sex difference in this effect; resource-acquisition ability improved the attention received by men almost 2.5× that of women. This sex difference was in every country, admittedly with some variance between nations. Several country-level traits moderated the effects of resource-acquisition ability, and in the case of unemployment this moderating role differed by sex.
Overall, country-level effects were more consistent with evolutionary explanations than sociocultural ones. The results suggest a robust effect of resource-acquisition ability on real-life mate choice that transcends international boundaries and is reliably stronger for men than women. Cross-cultural variance in the role of resource-acquisition ability appears sensitive to local competition and gender equality at the country level.
…Data for this project were provided by the Spark Networks Services GmbH (formerly Affinitas), which operates in more than 20 countries under different names (eg. EliteSingles, eDarling). Members of the sites are single adults looking for a long-term, committed relationship. They are predominantly heterosexual (96%). The company provided as much data for each country as possible through Excel files, with the largest samples (USA, Germany, France) containing membership records for more than 1 million people. In total, the sample exceeded 9.5m. The transferred data lacked personal details (eg. name, email) or specific job labels (asked in free text) that could be used to identify members.
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-analysis found 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 (eg. happiness, life satisfaction) with ill-being outcomes (eg. 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 2020,14 the reported associations of SMU with depressive symptoms ranged from r = −0.10 to r = +0.33.
Apple and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials, according to 3 people with knowledge of the matter.
Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged “emergency data requests”. Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, such emergency requests don’t require a court order. Snap received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn’t known if it provided data in response. It’s also not clear how many times the companies provided data in response to forged legal requests.
[Trusted third parties are security holes; under the third-party doctrine, Americans have no legal protection for their data, so there are essentially no barriers to the subpoena any of hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers can write.]
…Law enforcement around the world routinely asks social media platforms for information about users as part of criminal investigations. In the U.S., such requests usually include a signed order from a judge. The emergency requests are intended to be used in cases of imminent danger and don’t require a judge to sign off on it.
Hackers affiliated with a cybercrime group known as “Recursion Team” are believed to be behind some of the forged legal requests, which were sent to companies throughout 2021, according to the 3 people who are involved in the investigation…The information obtained by the hackers using the forged legal requests has been used to enable harassment campaigns, according to one of the people familiar with the inquiry. The 3 people said it may be primarily used to facilitate financial fraud schemes. By knowing the victim’s information, the hackers could use it to assist in attempting to bypass account security. The fraudulent legal requests are part of a months-long campaign that targeted many technology companies and began as early as January 2021, according to 2 of the people. The forged legal requests are believed to be sent via hacked email domains belonging to law enforcement agencies in multiple countries, according to the 3 people and an additional person investigating the matter. The forged requests were made to appear legitimate. In some instances, the documents included the forged signatures of real or fictional law enforcement officers, according to 2 of the people. By compromising law enforcement email systems, the hackers may have found legitimate legal requests and used them as a template to create forgeries, according to one of the people.
… Apple and Meta both publish data on their compliance with emergency data requests. From July to December 2020, Apple received 1,162 emergency requests from 29 countries. According to its report, Apple provided data in response to 93% of those requests. Meta said it received 21,700 emergency requests from January to June 2021 globally and provided some data in response to 77% of the requests.
…Compromising the email domains of law enforcement around the world is in some cases relatively simple, as the login information for these accounts is available for sale on online criminal marketplaces.
“Dark web underground shops contain compromised email accounts of law enforcement agencies, which could be sold with the attached cookies and metadata for anywhere from $10 to $50”, said Gene Yoo, chief executive officer of the cybersecurity firm Resecurity, Inc.
[Bloomberg confirmation] There is a terrifying and highly effective “method” that criminal hackers are now using to harvest sensitive customer data from Internet service providers, phone companies and social media firms. It involves compromising email accounts and websites tied to police departments and government agencies, and then sending unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.
…It is now clear that some hackers have figured out there is no quick and easy way for a company that receives one of these EDRs to know whether it is legitimate. Using their illicit access to police email systems, the hackers will send a fake EDR along with an attestation that innocent people will likely suffer greatly or die unless the requested data is provided immediately…“And then we have this emergency process, almost like you see on [the television series] Law & Order, where they say they need certain information immediately”, Rasch continued. “Providers have a streamlined process where they publish the fax or contact information for police to get emergency access to data. But there’s no real mechanism defined by most Internet service providers or tech companies to test the validity of a search warrant or subpoena. And so as long as it looks right, they’ll comply.”…To make matters more complicated, there are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world—including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone—and all it takes for hackers to succeed is illicit access to a single police email account.
…The founder of the Recursion Team was a then 14-year-old from the United Kingdom who used the handle “Everlynn”. On April 5, 2021, Everlynn posted a new sales thread to the cybercrime forum cracked[.]to titled, “Warrant/subpoena service (get law enforcement data from any service).” The price: $100 to $250 per request.
“Services [include] Apple, Snapchat, Google (more expensive), not doing Discord, basically any site mostly”, read Everlynn’s ad, which was posted by the user account “InfinityRecursion.” A month prior on Cracked, Everlynn posted a sales thread, “1× Government Email Account || BECOME A FED!”, which advertised the ability to send email from a federal agency within the government of Argentina.
“I would like to sell a government email that can be used for subpoena for many companies such as Apple, Uber, Instagram, etc.”, Everlynn’s sales thread explained, setting the price at $150. “You can breach users and get private images from people on Snapchat like nudes, go hack your girlfriend or something ha ha. You won’t get the login for the account, but you’ll basically obtain everything in the account if you play your cards right. I am not legally responsible if you mishandle this. This is very illegal and you will get raided if you don’t use a VPN. You can also breach into the government systems for this, and find LOTS of more private data and sell it for way, way more.”
… KrebsOnSecurity recently interviewed the past and current owner of the Doxbin—an established hacker who goes by the handle “KT.” According to KT, it is becoming more common for hackers to use EDRs for stalking, hacking, harassing and publicly humiliating others. KT shared several recent examples of fraudulent EDRs obtained by hackers who bragged about their success with the method. “Terroristic threats with a valid reason to believe somebody’s life is in danger is usually the go-to”, KT said, referring to the most common attestation that accompanies a fake EDR.
One of the phony EDRs shared by KT targeted an 18-year-old from Indiana, and was sent to the social media platform Discord earlier this year. The document requested the Internet address history of Discord accounts tied to a specific phone number used by the target. Discord complied with the request. “Discord replies to EDRs in 30 minutes to one hour with the provided information”, KT claimed. Asked about the validity of the unauthorized EDR shared by KT, Discord said the request came from a legitimate law enforcement account that was later determined to have been compromised.
…KT said fake EDRs don’t have to come from police departments based in the United States, and that some people in the community of those sending fake EDRs are hacking into police department emails by first compromising the agency’s website. From there, they can drop a backdoor “shell” on the server to secure permanent access, and then create new email accounts within the hacked organization. In other cases, KT said, hackers will try to guess the passwords of police department email systems. In these attacks, the hackers will identify email addresses associated with law enforcement personnel, and then attempt to authenticate using passwords those individuals have used at other websites that have been breached previously. “A lot of governments overseas are using WordPress, and I know a kid on Telegram who has multiple shells on gov sites”, KT said. “It’s near impossible to get U.S. dot-govs nowadays, although I’ve seen a few people with it. Most govs use [Microsoft] Outlook, so it’s more difficult because there’s usually some sort of multi-factor authentication. But not all have it.”
Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I’m interested to talk for a second about the interaction between nuclear weapons and cybersecurity. I just started reading this book called Hacking the Bomb—which from the title sounds a little bit sensationalist, but actually I can recommend it, because it’s quite a serious and sober, more academic look at the issues of play here.
RW: I think that’s right, yeah. What do you think people who are somewhat informed about this area don’t know or don’t recognize about the interaction between nuclear weapons and cybersecurity?
JR: Thanks for raising that. Andrew Futter is doing some really important work in this space. For me, a cyber hack of our nuclear weapons is one of the most likely pathways to nuclear use. I worry a lot about it. NTI has done some [2018] work on this space. In 2018, we convened a study group with senior former military officials, civilian government officials, and experts in the field to look at this issue of implications of cyber vulnerabilities of nuclear weapons.
In part, we were motivated to do that because we had been watching this space closely, and were very concerned about a report that was published by the Defense Department itself. The Defense Department has an advisory board called the Defense Science Board that undertook a study in the 2013 timeframe, and published a report that basically says—and I’m paraphrasing the top-level recommendation—that all of our military operational systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks.
If you think about it, this is logical. All of our military forces have thousands of digital components—not all of those digital components come out of secure foundries, so we may be baking into our military systems faulty, compromised components. Then we also know that even if you have systems that aren’t directly connected to the internet air gap, there are a lot of ways they can be compromised by an adversary. We saw how that might work with the cyberattack on Iranian centrifuges—which were not connected to the internet and nevertheless had a massive failure because of the introduction of a cyberattack.
The upshot of the report is that we have to assume that our nuclear forces may already be compromised, and that there is no technical solution. That’s the other chilling part of that story: this is not something you can just patch and be done, and you’re fine. It forces us to rethink: if this is true and we can’t have confidence in the system that it’s going to work as designed—that it’s not compromised—then what kind of policy changes do we need to be thinking about to counter what we can’t manage and that there’s no technical fix to? So this is a very real problem.
By the way, Andrew Futter, whose book you just referred to, was one of the participants in the 2018 NTI study on cyber-vulnerabilities of nuclear systems, which also included a former Head of US Strategic Command, and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is consensus that this is a very substantial problem.
The relationship between social media use and life satisfaction changes across adolescent development.
Our analyses of 2 UK datasets comprising 84,011 participants (10–80 years old) find that the cross-sectional relationship between self-reported estimates of social media use and life satisfaction ratings is most negative in younger adolescents. Furthermore, sex differences in this relationship are only present during this time.
Longitudinal analyses of 17,409 participants (10–21 years old) suggest distinct developmental windows of sensitivity to social media in adolescence, when higher estimated social media use predicts a decrease in life satisfaction ratings one year later (and vice-versa: lower estimated social media use predicts an increase in life satisfaction ratings). These windows occur at different ages for males (14–15 and 19 years old) and females (11–13 and 19 years old).
Decreases in life satisfaction ratings also predicted subsequent increases in estimated social media use, however, these were not associated with age or sex.
It would be useful for machines to use computers as humans do so that they can aid us in everyday tasks. This is a setting in which there is also the potential to leverage large-scale expert demonstrations and human judgements of interactive behaviour, which are two ingredients that have driven much recent success in AI.
Here we investigate the setting of computer control using keyboard and mouse, with goals specified via natural language.
Instead of focusing on hand-designed curricula and specialized action spaces, we focus on developing a scalable method centered on reinforcement learning combined with behavioural priors informed by actual human-computer interactions.
We achieve state-of-the-art and human-level mean performance across all tasks within the MiniWob++ benchmark, a challenging suite of computer control problems, and find strong evidence of cross-task transfer.
These results demonstrate the usefulness of a unified human-agent interface when training machines to use computers. Altogether our results suggest a formula for achieving competency beyond MiniWob++ and towards controlling computers, in general, as a human would.
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.
[Previously: studio diip’s“Fish on Wheels”; rodent operated vehicle; rat VR using foam spheres rolling in place] 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.
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 an 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)]
When venturing into unfamiliar areas of technology, inventors face ex ante technological uncertainty, that is many possible alternative technological paths going forward and limited guidance from existing technological knowledge for predicting the likelihood that a given path will successfully result in an invention.
I theorize, however, that this ex ante technological uncertainty becomes less apparent when evaluating inventions in hindsight. When one knows that a given technological path turned out to be successful ex post, it may be difficult to appreciate the ex ante plausibility of reasons to prefer alternative paths. As a result, inventions may seem more obvious to those evaluating inventions with the benefit of hindsight. My theory yields a counterintuitive implication; when inventors venture into less familiar areas of technology, there is a greater risk of evaluators overestimating obviousness due to hindsight bias.
Empirical evidence comes from novel data on accepted and rejected patent applications, including hand-collected data from the text of applicant objections to obviousness rejections and examiners’ subsequent reversals of rejections in response to applicant objections.
…I contend, moreover, that there are still other regularities in the field of computing that could also be formulated in a fashion similar to that of Moore’s and Metcalfe’s relationships. I would like to propose 4 such laws.
I named this law after George Udny Yule (1912), who was the statistician who proposed the seminal equation for explaining the relationship between 2 attributes. I formulate this law as follows:
If 2 attributes or products are complements, the value/demand of one of the complements will be inversely related to the price of the other complement.
In other words, if the price of one complement is reduced, the demand for the other will increase. There are a few historical examples of this law. One of the famous ones is the marketing of razor blades. The legendary King Camp Gillette gained market domination by applying this rule. He reduced the price of the razors, and the demand for razor blades increased. The history of IT contains numerous examples of this phenomenon, too.
The case of Atari 2600 is one notable example. Atari video games consisted of the console system hardware and the read-only memory cartridges that contained a game’s software. When the product was released, Atari Inc. marketed 3 products, namely the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) hardware and the 2 games that it had created, the arcade shooter game Jet Fighter and Tank, a heavy-artillery combat title involving, not surprisingly, tanks.
Crucially, Atari engineers decided that they would use a microchip for the VCS instead of a custom chip. They also made sure that any programmer hoping to create a new game for the VCS would be able to access and use all the inner workings of the system’s hardware. And that was exactly what happened. In other words, the designers reduced the barriers and the cost necessary for other players to develop VCS game cartridges. More than 200 such games have since been developed for the VCS—helping to spawn the sprawling US $170 billion global video game industry today.
A similar law of complementarity exists with computer printers. The more affordable the price of a printer is kept, the higher the demand for that printer’s ink cartridges. Managing complementary components well was also crucial to Apple’s winning the MP3 player wars of the early 2000s, with its now-iconic iPod.
From a strategic point of view, technology firms ultimately need to know which complementary element of their product to sell at a low price—and which complement to sell at a higher price. And, as the economist Bharat Anand points out in his celebrated 2016 book The Content Trap, proprietary complements tend to be more profitable than non-proprietary ones.
[I have been unable to find where George Udny Yule wrote about complementary goods or where the Yule-Simon distribution has been applied to demonstrate ‘commoditize your complement’ dynamics as described by Adenekan Dedeke above.]
We present in-hand manipulation skills on a dexterous, compliant, anthropomorphic hand. Even though these skills were derived in a simplistic manner, they exhibit surprising robustness to variations in shape, size, weight, and placement of the manipulated object. They are also very insensitive to variation of execution speeds, ranging from highly dynamic to quasi-static. The robustness of the skills leads to compositional properties that enable extended and robust manipulation programs.
To explain the surprising robustness of the in-hand manipulation skills, we performed a detailed, empirical analysis of the skills’ performance. From this analysis, we identify three principles for skill design: (1) Exploiting the hardware’s innate ability to drive hard-to-model contact dynamics. (2) Taking actions to constrain these interactions, funneling the system into a narrow set of possibilities. (3) Composing such action sequences into complex manipulation programs. We believe that these principles constitute an important foundation for robust robotic in-hand manipulation, and possibly for manipulation in general.
Social connection is critical for our mental and physical health yet assessing and measuring connection has been challenging. Here, we demonstrate that a feature intrinsic to conversation itself—the speed with which people respond to each other—is a simple, robust, and sufficient metric of social connection. Strangers and friends feel more connected when their conversation partners respond quickly. Because extremely short response times (<250 ms) preclude conscious control, they provide an honest signal that even eavesdroppers use to judge how well 2 people “click.”
Clicking is one of the most robust metaphors for social connection. But how do we know when 2 people “click”? We asked pairs of friends and strangers to talk with each other and rate their felt connection. For both friends and strangers, speed in response was a robust predictor of feeling connected. Conversations with faster response times felt more connected than conversations with slower response times, and within conversations, connected moments had faster response times than less-connected moments. This effect was determined primarily by partner responsivity: People felt more connected to the degree that their partner responded quickly to them rather than by how quickly they responded to their partner. The temporal scale of these effects (<250 ms) precludes conscious control, thus providing an honest signal of connection. Using a round-robin design in each of 6 closed networks, we show that faster responders evoked greater feelings of connection across partners. Finally, we demonstrate that this signal is used by third-party listeners as a heuristic of how well people are connected: Conversations with faster response times were perceived as more connected than the same conversations with slower response times. Together, these findings suggest that response times comprise a robust and sufficient signal of whether 2 minds “click.”
[Keywords: conversation, social connection, response time, turn taking]
We study the impact of crisis on information seeking in authoritarian regimes. Using digital trace data from China during the COVID-19 crisis, we show that crisis motivates citizens to seek out crisis-related information, which subsequently exposes them to unrelated and potentially regime-damaging information. This gateway to both current and historically sensitive content is not found for individuals in countries without extensive online censorship. While information seeking increases during crisis under all forms of governance, the added gateway to previously unknown and sensitive content is disproportionate in authoritarian contexts.
Crisis motivates people to track news closely, and this increased engagement can expose individuals to politically sensitive information unrelated to the initial crisis. We use the case of the COVID-19 outbreak in China to examine how crisis affects information seeking in countries that normally exert substantial control over access to media.
The crisis spurred censorship circumvention and access to international news and political content on websites blocked in China. Once individuals circumvented censorship, they not only received more information about the crisis itself but also accessed unrelated information that the regime has long censored.
Using comparisons to democratic and other authoritarian countries also affected by early outbreaks, the findings suggest that people blocked from accessing information most of the time might disproportionately and collectively access that long-hidden information during a crisis. Evaluations resulting from this access, negative or positive for a government, might draw on both current events and censored history.
[Keywords: censorship, political science, political communication]
Dynamic IP addresses constitute personal data for the operator of a website, because he has the abstract legal means that could reasonably be used to have the person in question determined from the stored IP addresses with the help of third parties, namely the competent authority and the Internet access provider (following BGH VI ZR 135/13).
The use of font services such as Google Fonts cannot be based on Art. 6 (1) p.1 lit. f GDPR, since the use of the fonts is also possible without a connection from visitors to Google servers.
There is no obligation on the part of the visitor to “encrypt” his IP address (presumably means disguise it, for example by using a VPN).
The disclosure of the user’s IP address in the above-mentioned manner and the associated encroachment on the general right of personality is so substantial with regard to the loss of control over a personal data to Google, a company that is known to collect data about its users, and the individual discomfort felt by the user as a result, that a claim for damages is justified.
…The defendant is sentenced to refrain from a fine of up to €250,000.00 to be set for each case of infringement, alternatively to imprisonment or imprisonment for up to 6 months, when the plaintiff accesses a website operated by the defendant and his IP address address by providing a font from the provider Google (Google Fonts) to disclose the provider of this font…The defendant is sentenced to pay the plaintiff €100.00 plus interest from this amounting to 5 percentage points above the base interest rate since January 28, 2021.
Terms like echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarization are widely used in public and political debate but not in ways that are always aligned with, or based on, scientific work. And even among academic researchers, there is not always a clear consensus on exact definitions of these concepts.
In this literature review we examine, specifically, social science work presenting evidence concerning the existence, causes, and effect of online echo chambers and consider what related research can tell us about scientific discussions online and how they might shape public understanding of science and the role of science in society.
Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and the relationship between news and media use and various forms of polarization has to be understood in the context of increasingly digital, mobile, and platform-dominated media environments where most people spend a limited amount of time with news and many internet users do not regularly actively seek out online news, leading to large inequalities in news use.
When defined as a bounded, enclosed media space that has the potential to both magnify the messages delivered within it and insulate them from rebuttal, studies in the UK estimate that between 6 and 8% of the public inhabit politically partisan online news echo chambers.
More generally, studies both in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarized US, have found that most people have relatively diverse media diets, that those who rely on only one source typically converge on widely used sources with politically diverse audiences (such as commercial or public service broadcasters) and that only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.
Studies in the UK and several other countries show that the forms of algorithmic selection offered by search engines, social media, and other digital platforms generally lead to slightly more diverse news use—the opposite of what the “filter bubble” hypothesis posits—but that self-selection, primarily among a small minority of highly partisan individuals, can lead people to opt in to echo chambers, even as the vast majority do not.
Research on polarization offers a complex picture both in terms of overall developments and the main drivers and there is in many cases limited empirical work done outside the United States. Overall, ideological polarization has, in the long run, declined in many countries but affective polarization has in some, but not all, cases increased. News audience polarization is much lower in most European countries, including the United Kingdom. Much depends on the specifics of individual countries and what point in time one measures change from and there are no universal patterns.
There is limited research outside the United States systematically examining the possible role of news and media use in contributing to various kinds of polarization and the work done does not always find the same patterns as those identified in the US. In the specific context of the United States where there is more research, it seems that exposure to like-minded political content can potentially polarize people or strengthen the attitudes of people with existing partisan attitudes and that cross-cutting exposure can potentially do the same for political partisans.
Public discussions around science online may exhibit some of the same dynamics as those observed around politics and in news and media use broadly, but fundamentally there is at this stage limited empirical research on the possible existence, size, and drivers of echo chambers in public discussions around science. More broadly, existing research on science communication, mainly from the United States, documents the important role of self-selection, elite cues, and small, highly active communities with strong views in shaping these debates and highlights the role especially political elites play in shaping both news coverage and public opinion on these issues.
In summary, the work reviewed here suggests echo chambers are much less widespread than is commonly assumed, finds no support for the filter bubble hypothesis and offers a very mixed picture on polarization and the role of news and media use in contributing to polarization.
…Across a range of different countries, including the highly polarize United States, several cross-platform studies—both those reliant on survey data and those reliant on passive tracking data—have found that few people occupy politically partisan online news echo chambers.
One recent study (Fletcher et al 2021b), that includes the UK, used survey data from 2020 to assess the number of people in politically partisan online news echo chambers in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Spain, the UK, and the US by looking at how many people only use news sources with left-leaning or right-leaning slants (measured in terms of the overall ideological slant of each outlet’s audience). In the UK, the proportion of people estimated to be in a left-leaning echo chamber is around 2% and the proportion in a right-leaning echo chamber is around 5% (Fletcher et al 2021b). This is slightly lower than in most of the other countries covered in the study. In most other cases, a minority of around 5% of people only use news sources with ideological slants in one direction. The US is the main outlier among the 7 and the only one where more than 10% of the respondents are estimated to rely only on partisan news sources. In every country covered by this study, many more internet users consume no online news at all on a regular basis than inhabit politically partisan echo chambers. The UK results from this study are broadly similar to a previous analysis, also based on survey data, that, using a more indirect measure of diversity of news use, found that around 10% in the UK said they almost never see political content on social media that they disagree with (Dubois & Blank 2018). In the UK, Fletcher et al (2020c) find a relative dearth of partisan online news echo chambers in the UK, using web tracking data collected during the 2019 General Election and show that the proportion of people in like-minded echo chambers in the UK during the election was 2% among Labour voters and 4% among Conservative voters—very similar to the results of survey-based work in the UK cited above.
These findings are consistent with several other studies of other European countries. In Sweden, for instance, Dahlgren et al (2019, p. 170) found that while some people did engage in selective exposure to partisan news sources, rates were low overall, “suggesting a pattern of cross-cutting exposure more than isolated echo chambers.” The authors note that “citizens who are frequent users of online news from one side of the ideological spectrum also tend to be more frequent users of news from the other side” (p. 170). Similarly, in Spain, Masip et al 2020 did not find strong evidence for widespread news echo chambers and observed that most people accessed “non-like-minded media” at least sometimes. In the Netherlands, Bos et al 2016 found some evidence of partisan selective exposure to news but noted that the formation of echo chambers was largely undercut by people’s common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting. This is also an important factor in the UK, where the BBC News website is by far the most widely used online news source (Fletcher et al 2021b).
Even in the United States, researchers have long found that echo chambers are smaller and less prevalent than commonly assumed. Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011, p. 1831) observe that “internet news consumers with homogeneous news diets are rare”, and Garrett (2013, p. 248) similarly argues that the notion that large numbers of people are cocooned in pure ideological news echo chambers, cut off from other points of view, is exaggerated and wrong. Studies based on passive tracking that automatically log people’s behaviour on one or more platforms have similar findings to analyses of survey data from nationally representative samples, though there are fewer such studies from outside the United States.
Similarly, in Israel, Dvir-Gvirsman et al 2016, using web tracking data collected around the time of the 2013 election, estimate that 3% of people were in an entirely one-sided partisan media echo chamber and that, in most cases, people in Israel had either relatively diverse media diets or did not consume online news at all.
In addition to people’s common use of relatively impartial public service broadcasting undercutting the existence of partisan echo chambers, we should keep in mind that—at least online—their potential size is limited by the fact that many people do not consume much online news in the first place. In the UK, around 25% of internet users say they access no online news at all each week (Newman et al 2021).
Related research—often not specifically aiming to measure the size of echo chambers—often arrives at broadly similar conclusions by analysing patterns of media use. Again, even in the polarised United States, the results are largely similar. Using network analysis and combining TV and internet tracking data, Webster & Ksiazek 2012 find high degrees of audience overlap across news sources and concentration of audiences on large mainstream outlets. Guess (2016, pp. 17–18) observes, based on analysis of tracking data, that there is a “remarkable degree of balance in respondents’ overall media diets regardless of partisan affiliation. Whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, the large bulk of these individuals’ media diets cluster around the center of the ideological spectrum.” Similarly, Nelson & Webster 2017 find that audiences are concentrated on a few popular political news sites and that, in general, political news sites, irrespective of popularity, have ideologically diverse audiences. Yang et al 2020, working with desktop and mobile data from Comscore’s panels, also observe that ideologically diverse US audiences converge on mainstream news outlets online, find little evidence of ideological selective exposure and, contrary to what some have suggested, find increasing co-exposure to news sources over time. Reinforcing the results from survey data, the authors also note that many more internet users consume no online news at all than rely solely on partisan sources. Single-platform studies are, as noted, of limited value in identifying echo chambers, but there are several important studies that identify like-minded communities formed on individual social media platforms—whether through algorithmic selection, self-selection, or some combination thereof (Bakshy et al 2015; Barberá et al 2015; Kaiser & Rauchfleisch 2020; Vaccari et al 2016). Even these, however, often conclude, like Barberá (2015, p. 28), that “most social media users receive information from a diversity of viewpoints.” And in the absence of evidence on what other media the individuals involved use in addition to the social media platform in question, these studies simply cannot establish whether people inhabit a bounded, enclosed media space where specific messages are magnified and insulated from rebuttal.
In summary, studies in the UK and several other countries, including the highly polarised US, have found very similar results whether relying on survey data or passive tracking data. Most people have diverse media diets, those who rely on only one source typically converge on large sources with politically diverse audiences such as commercial or public service broadcasters, and only small minorities, often only a few percent, exclusively get news from partisan sources.
…
In terms of distribution, algorithmic selection by digital platforms such as search engines and social media that make personalized display decisions for countless users using automated systems might, some fear, generate filter bubbles by reducing the diversity of information people come across, serving them more attitude-consistent news and resulting in less cross-cutting exposure.
But empirical studies, whether based on survey data or passive tracking data, have generally found the opposite. They demonstrate that reliance on secondary gatekeepers such as search engines and social media—whatever other problems might be associated with them—is in most cases associated with more diverse news use. This is a consistent finding across a growing number of survey-based studies (DuBois & Blank 2018; Fletcher & Nielsen 2018a; Fletcher & Nielsen 2018b; Beam et al 2018) and studies based on various forms of passive tracking data (Flaxman et al 2016; Cardenal et al 2019; Fletcher et al 2021a; Sharkow et al 2020; Wojcieszak et al 2021). These findings also hold across different countries (including the United Kingdom and the United States), across different digital platforms (search engines, different social media platforms, and news aggregators), and across different methods and modes of analysis. These avenues particularly increase exposure for people who are less likely to otherwise visit news sites directly (Fletcher & Nielsen 2018a; Wojcieszak et al 2021). We are not aware of any comparable studies that have found support for the filter bubble hypothesis that algorithmic ranking leads to echo chambers (see Bruns 2019 for a more detailed overview).
To understand why algorithmic selection is consistently found to lead to more diverse news diets, not narrower diets (let alone echo chambers), it is important to remember that the median number of different sources of news that people in the UK use on a weekly basis offline is 2, and just one online (Newman et al 2021). Search engines and social media do not vastly expand this number and it is not the case that people who use these platforms have very diverse and balanced news diets. Rather, they lead people to slightly more, and slightly more diverse, sources of news than what they seek out of their own volition.
[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). Most of 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 ~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 of SFAs were obtained via continuous paraffin oxidation processes in Eastern 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).
Digital firms tend to be both narrow in their vertical scope and large in their scale. We explain this phenomenon through a theory about how attributes of firms’ resource bundles impact their scale and specialization. We posit that highly scalable resource bundles entail large opportunity costs of integration (vs. outsourcing), which simultaneously drive “hyperspecialization” and “hyperscaling” in digital firms. Using descriptive theory and a formal model, we develop several propositions that align with observed features of digital businesses. We offer a parsimonious modeling framework for resource-based theorizing about highly scalable digital firms, shed light on the phenomenon of digital scaling, and provide insights into the far-reaching ways that technology-enabled resources are reshaping firms in the digital economy.
Why are leading firms in the digital economy simultaneously larger and more specialized than those in the industrial age? Our research explains this phenomenon as being driven by the scalability of digital resources—that is, their capacity to create more value at larger scales when used intensively in a focal activity. We clarify what digital scalability means, and highlight trade-offs created by the opportunity costs of not employing scalable digital resources intensively. Digital firms should outsource complementary activities to avoid diverting resources away from their scalable core, and to enhance their ability to grow exponentially. Although resource fungibility and outsourcing costs mitigate these imperatives, digital firms may nonetheless find it profitable to remain specialized despite the challenges of managing outsourcing and sharing value with complementors.
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.
[If users load an average of 1.5 pages per session, and almost all the subsequent 0.5 page loads are by following internal wiki links (and only 6% by alternative navigation methods like search), and sessions terminate at low-quality pages mostly, how much reading or lack of reading is due to the presence or absence of wiki links?
I notice that there are still a lot of missing wiki links on articles (even proper noun ones which are dead obvious: eg. John Eyre×Osman II). From a reader’s perspective, the absence of a link is evidence that they shouldn’t bother searching and they should halt there if that was what they wanted. Quality is in considerable part just accuracy and comprehensiveness of wikilinking. (See also impact of banner ads/latency; “Wikipedia Matters”, Hinnosaar et al 2019; “Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial”, Thompson et al 2017.)
If an average page has, say, 50 wikilinks and the expectation of another page is ~0.5 or 50% of a page, then each individual wikilink would on average be worth 1% of a pageview and one’d expect a marginal gain of <1% for each additional wikilink added to that page. That sounds ludicrously valuable if the real value is even a tenth of that, because adding wikilinks has traditionally not been a major focus of WP tooling or bot operator cause area (compared to disambiguation or vandal fighting). Can the user tracking estimate the value more directly? One could also look at analyzing the effects of the various semi-auto and auto-linking bots as natural experiments on the logged traffic.]
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 an 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.
Many blame partisan news media for polarization in America.
This paper examines the effects of liberal, conservative, and centrist news on affective and attitude polarization. To this end, we rely on two studies that combine two-wave panel surveys (n1 = 303, n2 = 904) with 12 months’’ worth of web browsing data submitted by the same participants comprising roughly 38m visits. We identify news exposure using an extensive list of news domains and develop a machine learning classifier to identify exposure to political news within these domains.
The results offer a robust pattern of null findings. Exposure to partisan and centrist news websites—no matter if it is congenial or crosscutting—does not enhance polarization. These null effects also emerge among strong and weak partisans as well as Democrats and Republicans alike.
We argue that these null results accurately portray the reality of limited effects of news in the “real world.” Politics and partisan news account for a small fraction of citizens’ online activities, less than 2% in our trace data, and are nearly unnoticeable in the overall information and communication ecology of most individuals.
Senders can reduce the bias by explicitly noting their response speed expectations.
Workplaces increasingly use response speed as a proxy for hard work, signaling to employees that the only way to succeed is to be “always on.” Drawing on boundary theory and egocentrism, we examine a problematic bias around expectations of response speed for work emails, namely that receivers overestimate senders’ response speed expectations to non-urgent emails sent outside normative work hours (eg. on the weekend).
We label this phenomenon the email urgency bias and document it across 8 pre-registered experimental studies (n = 4,004).
This bias led to discrepancies in perceived stress of receiving emails, and was associated with lower subjective well-being via greater experienced stress. A small adjustment on the sender’s side alleviated the email urgency bias (a brief note senders can add in their emails to clarify their response expectations).
This paper demonstrates the importance of perspective differences in email exchanges and the need to explicitly communicate non-urgent expectations.
[Keywords: work connectivity, boundary theory, subjective well-being, work-life balance, egocentrism]
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) in numerical 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.
Despite its celebrated place in the American imagination, the backyardpool as both object and technology has largely gone unexamined by historians.
In this paper, we begin to remedy that gap, tracing its explosive rise back to 1940s Southern California. From there, we examine the various technological, economic, and architectural forces that guided its journey from plaything of the rich to banal accoutrement of backyards across the Southern Californian suburbs.
But as quickly as they appeared, pools morphed into something new, and wholly unexpected: spaces for skateboarding. As many pools were drained due to drought, water levels receded to reveal smooth walls and curves that were perfect for skating on, launching skateboarding into a new era. Additional technological advancements in truck and wheel design allowed skaters to take advantage of these gunite surfaces, whose popularity would in turn influence the construction of skateparks around the country and cause participation in the sport to explode.
Drawing from both historical and architectural sources, we argue that the technological advancement of these 2 sports was brought about not just by inventors but by individuals adapting existing technology to new sportive purposes.
…The Invention of Gunite: Perhaps the individual most important to the spread of Southern California swimming pools was, surprisingly, an east coast taxidermist now buried in the Congo. Carl Akeley, considered the father of modern taxidermy, is also responsible for the creation of gunite, a construction technique that made pools much less expensive to build. Gunite is a system of applying concrete, delivered as a spray though a pressurized hose onto rebar. Submitted to the US Department of the Interior’s Patent Office in September 1909 and officially patented in May 1911, gunite was the result of the evolution of a tool Akeley had created for his taxidermy work, ‘an enlarged atomizer… that used compressed air to spray on colored plaster of paris.’12Frederick Skiff, the director of the Field Columbian Museum, where Akeley worked at the time, encouraged him to improve the plaster-gun so it could be used to recoat the fading façade of the building [built for the Columbian Exposition]. After a few months of tinkering, Akeley managed just that, never imagining the many sporting uses his new technology would eventually be applied to.
…This connection, however, was not made until 1938, with the patent filed by Frank F. Beeby, who was an employee of Taylor’s Cement Gun Company. Up until this point, pools had been built mostly out of stone or marble, as concrete was not strong enough to support the walls. As Beeby explains the problem, ‘the construction of such a pool was usually a very expensive operation in that the side and end walls were heavy retaining walls to support the pressure of the adjacent earth and these retaining walls were of considerable depth.’13 Gunite solved these problems by having the strength to support the weight at only a few inches thick, making pools much less costly to build. Additionally, gunite allowed pools to be constructed in any shape, limited only by imagination. Whereas previously pools were all corners, flat surfaces, and right angles, now they could bend and curve to your heart’s desire (Figure 2)
Paddock Engineering Co. was the major player in California pool construction in the early days. Founder Pascall Paddock began his career as a masonry contractor building custom pools for movie stars in the 1920s and ‘30s.14 Then, each pool was a massive undertaking, as they were normally dug by hand and so were incredibly expensive—$60,128.3$5,000.01920–$120,256.5$10,000.01920 in 1920s dollars. At the time, maybe 20 new pools were being dug each year.15 Being one of the only firms in a nascent industry, Paddock Engineering was well positioned to capture much of the business when middle and upper-middle class people began to build their own pools. Paddock was always experimenting, seeking out ways to improve his pools and decrease costs. He pioneered the use of single-shell pools and plaster to prevent leakages at seams. So, it makes sense that his company would experiment with gunite, discovering its usefulness for pool construction. As early as 1940, then-president Phillip Ilsley (who had bought Paddock’s company from him) praised the impact of gunite, saying that ’Our improved methods of construction have really brought swimming pools within reach of everybody.’16 Ilsley was an artist and architect who had previously designed river-pools, using plants to disguise the flat walls and sharp corners.17 He was also a believer in the virtues of concrete, commissioning a house built entirely out of it.18 Given these interests, he was clearly drawn to gunite and its vast untapped potential in pool construction. The first such pool was built in either 1938 or 1939.19
The Pool Boom: Gunite caused the price of pools to plummet. By 1950, a sizeable 34 × 16ft pool could be had for just $19,291.7$2,000.01950 in 1950s dollars.20 This means that, when accounting for inflation, prices had been slashed by about 80% in real dollars from 3 decades earlier. But other factors contributed to the pool construction boom as well. Over time, technological advances for filters and chemical balancing made pools both less costly and less time-intensive to maintain.21 Additionally, the 1950s brought about the reclassification of pools as ‘home improvements’, meaning they were eligible for bank financing for the first time. This helped open the floodgates, letting more people purchase pools than just those that could pay up front in full. By 1958, ‘more than 2-thirds of all residential pools built in the United States were financed through banks or mortgage and loan companies.’22 One 1961 Times article, citing the National Swimming Pool Institute, claimed that Californians could buy pools for 3 quarters the price paid by the rest of the country, as the competitive market depressed prices. Builders could keep their own costs down, too, as the mild winters meant pool walls didn’t need to be as thick as they did in the North and East parts of the country. The article explained that as a result, over a third of the nation’s 290,000 pools were in-state.
In 1960, the Los Angeles region accounted for 20% of all newly installed pools in the entire country.24 3 years later, the number of pools had exploded to almost 150,000 in California alone, with 3⁄5ths of all new pools being installed in the southern part of the state.25 At 19,000 pools annually and growing, Southern California was building more, faster than anywhere else. One pool contractor summed up the sunny outlook of this now billion-dollar industry for both buyers and sellers:
While the prices of everything else have gone up, pool prices have not. People today are in a better position financially to own pools, which are now competitive to a second car. Banks consider pool paper to be excellent because most people who own their own homes are financially stable. A swimming pool is a plain good investment.26
Thus, the adoption of gunite—along with evolving bank lending rules—resulted in an incredibly rapid expansion of pool construction. In the 2 decades from 1940 to 1960, pools transformed from luxury good to common household item in Southern California. New installations would peak in 1964, with numbers only slightly off that through the rest of the decade.27
…While street skating still reigns supreme, the legacies of the pool-era live on in the sport’s constructed landscapes of the 21st century. Many contemporary skateboard parks still feature bowls and pool inspired designs (though they are not made of gunite), as did the terrain for the first Olympic skateboard competitions at the Tokyo Olympic games. 1970s pool skating remains a touchstone of vintage skateboarding and California culture. It is a touchstone that now effectively transcends time and space as photographer and urban theorist Dwayne Dixon chronicles in an article on skateboarding and visual culture in Japan:
‘This globalized mimesis of skateboard history was especially visible in the perfect copy of a 1970s suburban SoCal swimming pool—bone dry, of course—complete with blue tile border… We laughed at how ironic it was, as North American skaters, that we’d had to travel to Japan to actually ride skateboarding’s most fetishized site of authenticity, the drained backyard swimming pool, but only as a simulacrum of itself.’83
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 an 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.
A combination of Classics, Egyptology, and experimental archaeology were utilized to recreate the (in)famous perfume used by Queen Cleopatra VII.
Especially important was the use of classical sources and paleobotany to determine the identity of the Egyptian sacred oils such as camphor and balanos. Excavations at the site of Tell Timai revealed a perfumery that contributed to our ability to recreate the process of perfume manufacture.
…One constellation of variables produced a scent that was extremely pleasant, with a spicy base note of freshly ground myrrh and cinnamon and accompanied by sweetness. It has remained potent for nearly 2 years, a quality associated with Egyptian perfumes already in Theophrastus’s time [On Odours]…Mendesian reproduced (counterclockwise from bottom left): mortar and pestle, myrrh, pine resin, desert date oil, cassia and cinnamon quills, completed perfume.
This ancient “Mendesian” perfume has since been recreated in the lab, exhibited at the Smithsonian, and worn again for the first time in millennia.
Music streaming platforms can affect artists’ success through playlist ranking decisions.
Dominant platforms may exercise their power in a biased fashion.
We test for bias in Spotify’s New Music playlist rankings using outcome-based tests.
We find that Spotify’s New Music rankings favor indie-label music and music by women.
Despite challenges faced by women and indie artists, Spotify’s New Music curation appears to favor them.
Platforms are growing increasingly powerful, raising questions about whether their power might be exercised with bias.
While bias is inherently difficult to measure, we identify a context within the music industry that is amenable to bias testing. Our approach requires ex ante platform assessments of commercial promise—such as the rank order in which products are presented—along with information on eventual product success. A platform is biased against a product type if the type attains greater success, conditional on ex ante assessment. Theoretical considerations and voiced industry concerns suggest the possibility of platform biases in favor of major record labels, and industry participants also point to bias against women.
Using data on Spotify curators’ rank of songs on New Music Friday playlists in 2017, we find that Spotify’s New Music Friday rankings favor independent-label music, along with some evidence of bias in favor of music by women.
Despite challenges that independent-label artists and women face in the music industry, Spotify’s New Music curation appears to favor them.
[Keywords: online platforms, platform power, platform bias, music streaming, playlists]
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 decentralized 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.
Sketch of a decentralized mineralization-based carbon capture: suppliers stake on reported deposits of mineral dust in publicly-auditable locations.
Blockchains or tokens for carbon dioxide removal have sometimes been proposed, but provide little advantage.
I review the principles of cryptoeconomics for designing mechanisms, and the proposal of “mineralization”—rock dust naturally reacting with atmospheric CO2 to lock it into minerals—for carbon capture to fight global warming.
Cryptoeconomics often relies on auditability & challenges to create desired behavior, and mineralization provides an objective, checkable, form of carbon credits. Thus, one can set up a simple economic game where miners claim tokens for doing mineralization to sell as carbon offsets, and challengers audit their supposed mineralization deposits hunting for fraud; the equilibrium is honest reporting of mineralization quantities, yielding a true decentralized, reliable, fraud-resistant “CO2 Coin”.
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.
At Google I/O 2021, Google today formally announced its 4th-generation tensor processing units (TPUs), which the company claims can complete AI and machine learning training workloads in close-to-record wall clock time.
…TPUv4 chips offers more than double the matrix multiplication TFLOPs of a third-generation TPU (TPUv3), where a single TFLOP is equivalent to 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. (Matrices are often used to represent the data that feeds into AI models.) It also offers a “significant” boost in memory bandwidth while benefiting from unspecified advances in interconnect technology. Google says that overall, at an identical scale of 64 chips and not accounting for improvement attributable to software, the TPUv4 demonstrates an average improvement of 2.3× over TPUv3 performance.
…TPUv4 clusters—or “pods”—total 4,096 chips interconnected with 13× the bandwidth of most other networking technologies, according to Google. This enables a TPUv4 pod to deliver more than an exaflop of compute, which is equivalent to about 10 million average laptop processors at peak performance
“This is a historic milestone for us—previously to get an exaflop, you needed to build a custom supercomputer”, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during a keynote address. “But we already have many of these deployed today and will soon have dozens of TPUv4 pods in our datacenters, many of which will be operating at or near 90% carbon-free energy.”
…On an image classification task that involved training an algorithm (ResNet-50 v1.5) to at least 75.90% accuracy with the ImageNet data set, 256 4th-gen TPUs finished in 1.82 minutes…The 4th-gen TPUs also scored well when tasked with training a BERT model on a large Wikipedia corpus. Training took 1.82 minutes with 256 4th-gen TPUs, only slightly slower than the 0.39 minutes it took with 4,096 third-gen TPUs. Meanwhile, achieving a 0.81-minute training time with Nvidia hardware required 2,048 A100 cards and 512 AMD Epyc 7742 CPU cores.
Google says that TPUv4 pods will be available to cloud customers starting later this year.
Fonts are durable, highly-reusable, compact, & high-quality software products which do not ‘bitrot’. Nevertheless, hundreds or thousands of new ones come out every year despite enormous duplication; why? I speculate that designer boredom seems to be the answer: they crave novelty.
Fonts are a rare highlight in software design—stable, with well-defined uses, highly-compatible software stacks, and long-lived. Unsurprisingly, a back-catalogue of tens or hundreds of thousands of digital fonts out there, many nigh-indistinguishable from the next in both form and function.
Why, then do they all cost so much, and who is paying for them all, and even going around commissioning more fonts?
The casualness of the highly marked-up prices & the language around commissioned fonts strongly points to designers spending client money, largely for the sake of novelty & boredom, functioning as a cross-subsidy from large corporations to the art of typography. The surplus of fonts then benefits everyone else—as long as they can sort through all the choices!
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: average treatment effect on the treated. PSM: propensity score matching. NN: nearest neighbor. KM: kernel matching. PS: propensity scores. CEM: coarsened exact matching. LCI: lower confidence interval. UCI: upper confidence interval. (1) CEM pruning by using use of Internet apps covariates. (2) CEM pruning by using socio-demographic covariates.]
Robot swarms have, to date, been constructed from artificial materials. Motile biological constructs have been created from muscle cells grown on precisely shaped scaffolds. However, the exploitation of emergent self-organization and functional plasticity into a self-directed living machine has remained a major challenge.
We report here a method for generation of in vitro biological robots from frog (Xenopus laevis) cells. These xenobots exhibit coordinated locomotion via cilia present on their surface. These cilia arise through normal tissue patterning and do not require complicated construction methods or genomic editing, making production amenable to high-throughput projects. The biological robots arise by cellular self-organization and do not require scaffolds or microprinting; the amphibian cells are highly amenable to surgical, genetic, chemical, and optical stimulation during the self-assembly process.
We show that the xenobots can navigate aqueous environments in diverse ways, heal after damage, and show emergent group behaviors. We constructed a computational model to predict useful collective behaviors that can be elicited from a xenobot swarm. In addition, we provide proof of principle for a writable molecular memory using a photoconvertible protein that can record exposure to a specific wavelength of light.
Together, these results introduce a platform that can be used to study many aspects of self-assembly, swarm behavior, and synthetic bioengineering, as well as provide versatile, soft-body living machines for numerous practical applications in biomedicine and the environment.
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 an 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 ~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) developed Intermedia, 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.
Face-to-face (F2F) embodied interaction is the initial ingredient of interaction ritual (IR), the buildup of shared emotion, mutual focus of attention, and rhythmic entrainment that produces interpersonal solidarity.
What happens when a natural experiment (the COVID-19 epidemic) prevents most F2F encounters or limits the modes of micro-interactional communication by masking? The paper examines evidence of the effects of masking and social distancing on public behavior, family life, remote schooling and remote work, prohibition of large audiences and assemblies, and attempts to substitute non-embodied electronic media [eg. “Zoom fatigue”].
Most effects are consistent with IR theory predictions.
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, but that 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 an 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.
In typography/design, ‘sidenotes’ place footnotes/endnotes in the margins for easier reading. I discuss design choices, HTML implementations and their pros/cons.
Sidenotes/margin notes are a typographic convention which improves on footnotes & endnotes by instead putting the notes in the page margin to let the reader instantly read them without needing to refer back and forth to the end of the document (endnotes) or successive pages (footnotes spilling over).
They are particularly useful for web pages, where ‘footnotes’ are de facto endnotes, and clicking back and forth to endnotes is a pain for readers. (Footnote variants, like “floating footnotes” which pop up on mouse hover, reduce the reader’s effort but don’t eliminate it.)
However, they are not commonly used, perhaps because web browsers until relatively recently made it hard to implement sidenotes easily & reliably. Tufte-CSS has popularized the idea and since then, there has been a proliferation of slightly variant approaches. I review some of the available implementations.
For general users, I recommend Tufte-CSS: it is fast & simple (using only compile-time generation of sidenotes, rendered by static HTML/CSS), popular, and easy to integrate into most website workflows. For heavy footnote users or users who want a drop-in, runtime Javascript-based solutions like sidenotes.js may be more useful.
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.
[Retrospective profile of Adobe Flash, with interviews from creator Jonathan Gay about its founding in 1992: it began as a vector drawing program for now-forgotten tablet / PDA devices, a project that was killed, and they pivoted to porting it to desktop. This too flopped, as customers suggested that cel-shading and rotoscoping animation would be more useful; with the Web emerging, they decided to retarget Java applets. Their prototype ran at 2FPS, and Adobe was unimpressed. Microsoft & Disney, however, saw promise in it, and made it a highlight of their new websites like MSN and The Daily Blast, despite Flash being on the brink of death. Macromedia heard of it through them, and acquired Flash, as a bridge from their fading multimedia CD-ROM to the hot new Internet. The highly expanded Flash was the most interactive and versatile web development tool in an era when JavaScript barely existed, and easy to use. Soon, games were being written in it (to the creators’ surprise, considering how weak a programming language it was, with barely-working conditionals or variables), and an online ecosystem springing up around sites like Newgrounds with literally millions of players. Flash soon became used for video, and animating. Adobe, a decade after declining Flash, bought it for billions. But at its zenith in the mid-2000s, Flash was about to fall, as Adobe was distracted by corporate uses rather than video/games/general web, open web standards/browsers gradually accreted its capabilities natively; finally, a major blow was Steve Jobs declaring Flash dead—slow & power-hungry, proprietary (ie. ‘not Apple-owned’), insecure, and ill-designed for the mobile-first future. Flash entered a death spiral, and quickly was abandoned by even Adobe. Its legacy is now primarily opening up creative Internet uses worldwide and getting countless people involved in media.]
GPT-3, announced in May 2020 by OpenAI, was a breakthrough in neural net modeling of natural language and natural-language-related tasks; the June 2020 API opened up GPT-3 use to outsiders, including myself. I extensively documented my experiences testing GPT-3 and learning how to use it primarily for creative fiction such as poetry; but I also tested some “nonfiction” uses (often in response to hyperbolic claims about what GPT-3 could never do). This page documents tasks like anagrams, queries based on premises described as ‘databases’, probing the problems with GPT-3’s commonsense and other tasks (often related to poor prompting, showing the importance of prompt programming, or the pernicious influence of BPEs)
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
I continue my AI poetry generation experiments with OpenAI’s 2020 GPT-3, which is 116× larger, and much more powerful, than the 2019 GPT-2. GPT-3, however, is not merely a quantitative tweak yielding “GPT-2 but better”—it is qualitatively different, exhibiting eerie runtime learning capabilities allowing even the raw model, with zero finetuning, to “meta-learn” many textual tasks purely by example or instruction. One does not train or program GPT-3 in a normal way, but one engages in dialogue and writes prompts to teach GPT-3 what one wants.
Experimenting through the OpenAI Beta API in June 2020, I find that GPT-3 does not just match my finetuned GPT-2-1.5b-poetry for poem-writing quality, but exceeds it, while being versatile in handling poetry, Tom Swifty puns, science fiction, dialogue like Turing’s Turing-test dialogue, literary style parodies… As the pièce de résistance, I recreate Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad’s “Trurl’s Electronic Bard” poetry using GPT-3. (Along the way, I document instances of how the BPE text encoding unnecessarily damages GPT-3’s performance on a variety of tasks, how to best elicit the highest-quality responses, common errors people make in using GPT-3, and test out GPT-3’s improvements in NN weak points like logic or commonsense knowledge.)
GPT-3’s samples are not just close to human level: they are creative, witty, deep, meta, and often beautiful. They demonstrate an ability to handle abstractions, like style parodies, I have not seen in GPT-2 at all. Chatting with GPT-3 feels uncannily like chatting with a human. I was impressed by the results reported in the GPT-3 paper, and after spending a week trying it out, I remain impressed.
This page records GPT-3 samples I generated in my explorations, and thoughts on how to use GPT-3 and its remaining weaknesses. I hope you enjoy them even a tenth as much as I enjoyed testing GPT-3 and watching the completions scroll across my screen.
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 $46.4$30.02004 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…
Flamewars over platforms & upgrades are so bitter not because people are jerks but because the choice will influence entire ecosystems, benefiting one platform through network effects & avoiding ‘bitrot’ while subtly sabotaging the rest through ‘bitcreep’.
The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform.
The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
This desperate need for there to be a victor, and the large technical benefits/costs to those who choose the winning/losing side, explain the (only apparently) disproportionate energy, venom, and intractability of holy wars.
Perhaps if we explicitly understand holy wars as coordination problems, we can avoid the worst excesses and tap into knowledge about the topic to better manage things like language migrations.
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 performance on 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-shot learning 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%, 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 1⁄3rd 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 an 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 an 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.
…So the agency turned to retroreflectors, tiny glass beads that reflect laser light (in this case, a laser beam) back at its source…In addition to being incredibly maneuverable, dragonflies are exceptionally good gliders compared to other insects, which helps them conserve energy on long flights. The scientist brought in some specimens, and when Adkins pressed him on the issue, “the old fellow plucked the insect from its perch and tossed it into the air”, Adkins wrote. “It made about two circuits and landed nicely on the desk.”
The demonstration convinced Adkins, but the team still needed to figure out how to replicate a dragonfly’s wings, which flap 1,800 times per minute. To pull this off, scientists used a tiny fluidic oscillator, a device with no moving parts that’s completely driven by gas produced by lithium nitrate crystals. When initial tests showed that the prototype couldn’t carry the required 0.2 gm payload, designers added additional thrust by venting exhaust backward, much like jet propulsion. After a quick dragonfly-inspired paint job, the drone was ready for (covert) action, weighing just under a gram. Its glittering ‘eyes’ were the glass retroreflector beads destined to snoop on unsuspecting targets.
…While the CIA now had its robo-bug, it still needed a way to control it. Radio control was out of the question because any extra weight would doom the small insectothopter. So CIA scientists turned to the same lasers used for the retroreflectors. This was a portable laser unit, known as ROME, that produced an invisible infrared beam. The idea was that the laser would heat a bimetallic strip that would then open or close the dragonfly’s exhaust. While effectively throttling the ‘engine’, another laser—acting like a kind of rudder—would then steer the drone to its desired destination. With its gas-pumping engine and laser-based navigation system, the insectothopter could fly for only 60 seconds. But this was more than enough to get the dragonfly—and its payload—to a target some 200 meters away.
…The biggest problem with the insectothopter’s design was that an operator had to keep a laser manually trained on the drone during flight. Easily done in a static wind tunnel, less so in blustery and unpredictable conditions…In theory, the insectothopter could still be flown in less than 7MPH winds, but “the ultimate demonstration of controlled powered flight has not yet been achieved”, Adkins ultimately reported. “Though the flight tests were impressive, control in any kind of crosswind was too difficult.”
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.”
Rats can learn the complex task of navigating a car to a desired goal area.
Enriched environments enhance competency in a rodent driving task.
Driving rats maintained an interest in the car through extinction.
Tasks incorporating complex skill mastery are important for translational research.
Although rarely used, long-term behavioral training protocols provide opportunities to shape complex skills in rodent laboratory investigations that incorporate cognitive, motor, visuospatial and temporal functions to achieve desired goals.
In the current study, following preliminary research establishing that rats could be taught to drive a rodent operated vehicle (ROV) in a forward direction, as well as steer in more complex navigational patterns, male rats housed in an enriched environment were exposed to the rodent driving regime.
Compared to standard-housed rats, enriched-housed rats demonstrated more robust learning in driving performance and their interest in the ROV persisted through extinction trials. Dehydroepiandrosterone/corticosterone (DHEA/CORT) metabolite ratios in fecal samples increased in accordance with training in all animals, suggesting that driving training, regardless of housing group, enhanced markers of emotional resilience.
These results confirm the importance of enriched environments in preparing animals to engage in complex behavioral tasks. Further, behavioral models that include trained motor skills enable researchers to assess subtle alterations in motivation and behavioral response patterns that are relevant for translational research related to neurodegenerative disease and psychiatric illness.
[Keywords: enriched environment, motor skill, emotional resilience, animal learning]
Figure 1: Environment, Rodent-Operated Vehicle (ROV) and Training Protocol. (A) The key elements of the ROV are shown, (B) prior to and during driving training, rats were either housed in an enriched environment as shown, or standard rodent laboratory cages, (C) Following habituation to the ROV shell, rats were shaped to engage in behaviors to drive the ROV.
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.
A typographic proposal: replace cumbersome inline citation formats like ‘Foo et al. (2010)’ with subscripted dates/sources like ‘Foo…2020’. Intuitive, easily implemented, consistent, compact, and can be used for evidentials in general.
I propose reviving an old General Semantics notation: borrow from scientific notation and use subscripts like ‘Gwern2020’ for denoting sources (like citation, timing, or medium). Using subscript indices is flexible, compact, universally technically supported, and intuitive. This convention can go beyond formal academic citation and be extended further to ‘evidentials’ in general, indicating the source & date of statements. While (currently) unusual, subscripting might be a useful trick for clearer writing, compared to omitting such information or using standard cumbersome circumlocutions.
“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 an 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]
We propose a novel system SwarmCloak for landing of a fleet of four flying robots on the human arms using light-sensitive landing pads with vibrotactile feedback. We developed two types of wearable tactile displays with vibromotors which are activated by the light emitted from the LED array at the bottom of quadcopters. In an user study, participants were asked to adjust the position of the arms to land up to two drones, having only visual feedback, only tactile feedback or visual-tactile feedback. The experiment revealed that when the number of drones increases, tactile feedback plays a more important role in accurate landing and operator’s convenience. An important finding is that the best landing performance is achieved with the combination of tactile and visual feedback. The proposed technology could have a strong impact on the human-swarm interaction, providing a new level of intuitiveness and engagement into the swarm deployment just right from the skin surface.
As part of my PhD, I developed Higgs, an experimental JIT compiler…I developed it on GitHub, completely in the open, and wrote about my progress on this blog. Pretty soon, the project had 300 stars on GitHub, a handful of open source contributors, and I was receiving some nice feedback.
…One day, someone I had been exchanging with on the chat room for two weeks reached out to me to signal a strange bug. They couldn’t get the tests to pass and were getting a segmentation fault. I was puzzled. They asked me if Higgs had MacOS support. I explained that I’d never tested it on MacOS myself, but I couldn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. I told this person that the problem was surely on their end. Higgs had been open source for over a year. It was a pretty niche project, but I knew for a fact that at least 40–60 people must have tried it, and at least 50% of these people must have been running MacOS. I assumed that surely, if Higgs didn’t run on MacOS at all, someone would have opened a GitHub issue by now. Again, I was wrong.
…It’s a horrifying thought, but it could be that for every one person who opens an issue on GitHub, 100 or more people have already tried your project, run into that same bug, and simply moved on.
[One developer observes that “Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from the Linux community”, of which only 3⁄400 were Linux-specific—affected users on other platforms simply didn’t report them. Firefox likewise. Data science example. Scott Hanselman listed 19 categories of issues in his previous week (iTunes/iPhoto simply being categories of their own listed: ‘everything’.) Soren Bjornstad nearly failed an online exam due to a cascade of 15+ problems & attempted fixes, which fixes he estimates as requiring knowledge of at least 12 different pieces of tech esoterica that an user shouldn’t have to know. tzs notes Japanese users are so inured to bad software they’ll let something install for 30 hours. Dan Luu chronicles a week of bugs he observed, large & small (so many he couldn’t report them all). I’ve observed quite a few bugs just from cats walking on my keyboard. (A IRL version of fuzz testing, itself notorious for finding endless bugs in any software it’s used on.) My experience reporting website bugs in particular has been that many of them were unknown. Gwern.net examples of this include: 400,000+ Chinese visitors to This Waifu Does Not Exist not mentioning that the mobile version was horribly broken; Apple users not mentioning that 80% of Gwern.net videos didn’t play for them or that Apple won’t support OGG music; the Anime Faces page loading 500MB+ of files on each page load… Another fun example: popups on all Wikipedias worldwide for ~5 months (September 2020–January 2021), could be disabled but not re-enabled (affecting ~24 billion page views per month or ~120 billion page views total); no one mentioned it until we happened to investigate the feature while cloning it for Gwern.net.
How can devs miss so many bugs, and so many be unreported by users? Many reasons. Users don’t know it’s supposed to not hurt, and have low expectations; they also develop horrifying workflows (obligatory XKCD), (ab)using features in ways designers never thought of. Developers (particularly ones with mechanical sympathy) undergo decades of operant conditioning teaching them subconsciously how to use software in the safest possible way (eg. not typing or mousing when software lags), illusions of transparency in how clear it is to use something, and suffer from a curse-of-expertise in knowing how their software should work, while they need to unsee it in order to break it. (Testing is a completely different mindset; for an amusing fictional demonstration, read “Stargate Physics 101”.) Alan Kay: “…in many ways one of the most difficult things in programming is to find end user sensibilities. I think the general programmer personality is somebody who has, above all other things, learned how to cope with an enormous number of disagreeable circumstances.”]
…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 a service 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, or lower 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 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
A growing number of studies have examined the psychological corollaries of using social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter (often called social media). The interdisciplinary research area and conflicting evidence from primary studies complicate the assessment of current scholarly knowledge in this field of high public attention.
We review meta-analytic evidence on 3 hotly debated topics regarding the effects of SNSs: well-being, academic achievement, and narcissism.
Meta-analyses from different laboratories draw a rather equivocal picture. They show small associations in the r = 0.10 range between the intensity of SNS use and loneliness, self-esteem, life satisfaction, or self-reported depression, and somewhat stronger links to a thin body ideal and higher social capital. There is no indication for potential devastating effects of social media on school achievement; social media use and school grades are unrelated for adolescents. The meta-analyses revealed small to moderate associations between narcissism and SNS use.
In sum, meta-analytic evidence is not in support of dramatic claims relating social media use to mischief.
[Keywords: social media, meta-analysis, narcissism, achievement, well-being]
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.
We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter.
Our deep-RL algorithm finds a high-performance solution to a challenging problem, even in presence of high noise levels and generalizes across real and simulation environments with different obstacle configurations.
We verify our approach with simulation and in-field testing on a Bitcraze CrazyFlie using only the cheap and ubiquitous Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit.
The results show that by end-to-end application-specific system design, our contribution consumes almost three times less additional power, as compared to competing learning-based navigation approach onboard a nano quadcopter. Thanks to our observation space, which we carefully design within the resource constraints, our solution achieves a 94% success rate in cluttered and randomized test environments, as compared to the previously achieved 80%. We also compare our strategy to a simple finite state machine (FSM), geared towards efficient exploration, and demonstrate that our policy is more robust and resilient at obstacle avoidance as well as up to 70% more efficient in source seeking.
To this end, we contribute a cheap and lightweight end-to-end tiny robot learning (tinyRL) solution, running onboard a nano quadcopter, that proves to be robust and efficient in a challenging task using limited sensory input.
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.js parses a HTML document and looks for <a> links which have the link-annotated 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, see LinkMetadata.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.
A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.
Dating back to medieval manuscripts, text has often been highlighted using a particular distinct bright red. The contrast of black and red on a white background is highly visible and striking, and this has been reused many times, in a way which I have not noticed for other colors. I call these uses rubrication and collate examples I have noticed from many time periods. This design pattern does not seem to have a widely-accepted name or be commonly discussed, so I propose extending the term “rubrication” to all instances of this pattern, not merely religious texts.
Why this rubrication design pattern? Why red, specifically, and not, say, orange or purple? Is it just a historical accident? Cross-cultural research suggests that for humans, red may be intrinsically more noticeable & has a higher contrast with black, explaining its perennial appeal as a design pattern.
Regardless, it is a beautiful design pattern which has been used in many interesting ways over the millennia, and perhaps may inspire the reader.
Note: to hide apparatus like the links, you can use reader-mode ().
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.
5 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 an 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.
I describe how I made the website ThisWaifuDoesNotExist.net (TWDNE) for displaying random anime faces generated by StyleGAN neural networks, and how it went viral.
Generating high-quality anime faces has long been a task neural networks struggled with. The invention of StyleGAN in 2018 has effectively solved this task and I have trained a StyleGAN model which can generate high-quality anime faces at 512px resolution. To show off the recent progress, I made a website, “This Waifu Does Not Exist” for displaying random StyleGAN 2 faces. TWDNE displays a different neural-net-generated face & plot summary every 15s. The site was popular and went viral online, especially in China. The model can also be used interactively for exploration & editing in the Artbreeder online service.
TWDNE faces have been used as screensavers, user avatars, character art for game packs or onlinegames, painted watercolors, uploaded to Pixiv, given away in streams, and used in a research paper (Noguchi & Harada 2019). TWDNE results also helped inspired Sizigi Studio’s online interactive waifu GAN, Waifu Labs, which generates even better anime faces than my StyleGAN results.
A tutorial explaining how to train and generate high-quality anime faces with StyleGAN 1/2 neural networks, and tips/scripts for effective StyleGAN use.
Generative neural networks, such as GANs, have struggled for years to generate decent-quality anime faces, despite their great success with photographic imagery such as real human faces. The task has now been effectively solved, for anime faces as well as many other domains, by the development of a new generative adversarial network, StyleGAN, whose source code was released in February 2019.
The anime face graveyard gives samples of my failures with earlier GANs for anime face generation, and I provide samples & model from a relatively large-scale BigGAN training run suggesting that BigGAN may be the next step forward to generating full-scale anime images.
A minute of reading could save an hour of debugging!
Experiments in using BigGAN to generate anime faces and whole anime images; semi-successful.
Following my StyleGAN anime face experiments, I explore BigGAN, another recent GAN with SOTA results on one of the most complex image domains tackled by GANs so far (ImageNet). BigGAN’s capabilities come at a steep compute cost, however.
Using the unofficial BigGAN-PyTorch reimplementation, I experimented in 2019 with 128px ImageNet transfer learning (successful) with ~6 GPU-days, and from-scratch 256px anime portraits of 1000 characters on an 8×2080ti machine for a month (mixed results). My BigGAN results are good but compromised by the compute expense & practical problems with the released BigGAN code base. While BigGAN is not yet superior to StyleGAN for many purposes, BigGAN-like approaches may be necessary to scale to whole anime images.
For followup experiments, Shawn Presser, I and others (collectively, “Tensorfork”) have used Tensorflow Research Cloud TPU credits & the compare_gan BigGAN reimplementation. Running this at scale on the full Danbooru2019 dataset in May 2020, we have reached the best anime GAN results to date (later exceeded by This Anime Does Not Exist).
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]
Markets/evolution as backstops/ground truths for reinforcement learning/optimization: on some connections between Coase’s theory of the firm/linear optimization/DRL/evolution/multicellular life/pain/Internet communities as multi-level optimization problems.
One defense of free markets notes the inability of non-market mechanisms to solve planning & optimization problems. This has difficulty with Coase’s paradox of the firm, and I note that the difficulty is increased by the fact that with improvements in computers, algorithms, and data, ever larger planning problems are solved. Expanding on some Cosma Shalizi comments, I suggest interpreting phenomenon as multi-level nested optimization paradigm: many systems can be usefully described as having two (or more) levels where a slow sample-inefficient but ground-truth ‘outer’ loss such as death, bankruptcy, or reproductive fitness, trains & constrains a fast sample-efficient but possibly misguided ‘inner’ loss which is used by learned mechanisms such as neural networks or linear programming group selection perspective. So, one reason for free-market or evolutionary or Bayesian methods in general is that while poorer at planning/optimization in the short run, they have the advantage of simplicity and operating on ground-truth values, and serve as a constraint on the more sophisticated non-market mechanisms. I illustrate by discussing corporations, multicellular life, reinforcement learning & meta-learning in AI, and pain in humans. This view suggests that are inherent balances between market/non-market mechanisms which reflect the relative advantages between a slow unbiased method and faster but potentially arbitrarily biased methods.
Clear directions for a robotic platform: The chemistry literature contains more than a century’s worth of instructions for making molecules, all written by and for humans.
Steiner et al 2018 developed an autonomous compiler and robotic laboratory platform to synthesize organic compounds on the basis of standardized methods descriptions (see the Perspective by Milo). The platform comprises conventional equipment such as round-bottom flasks, separatory funnels, and a rotary evaporator to maximize its compatibility with extant literature. The authors showcase the system with short syntheses of 3 common pharmaceuticals that proceeded comparably to manual synthesis.
The synthesis of complex organic compounds is largely a manual process that is often incompletely documented.
To address these shortcomings, we developed an abstraction that maps commonly reported methodological instructions into discrete steps amenable to automation.
These unit operations were implemented in a modular robotic platform by using a chemical programming language that formalizes and controls the assembly of the molecules.
Yields and purities of products and intermediates were comparable to or better than those achieved manually. The syntheses are captured as digital code that can be published, versioned, and transferred flexibly between platforms with no modification, thereby greatly enhancing reproducibility and reliable access to complex molecules.
Introduction: Outside of a few well-defined areas such as polypeptide and oligonucleotide chemistry, the automation of chemical synthesis has been limited to large-scale bespoke industrial processes, with laboratory-scale and discovery-scale synthesis remaining predominantly a manual process. These areas are generally defined by the ability to synthesize complex molecules by the successive iteration of similar sets of reactions, allowing the synthesis of products by the automation of a relatively small palette of standardized reactions. Recent advances in areas such as flow chemistry, oligosaccharide synthesis, and iterative cross-coupling are expanding the number of compounds synthesized by automated methods. However, there is no universal and interoperable standard that allows the automation of chemical synthesis more generally.
Rationale: We developed a standard approach that mirrors how the bench chemist works and how the bulk of the open literature is reported, with the round-bottomed flask as the primary reactor. We assembled a relatively small array of equipment to accomplish a wide variety of different syntheses, and our abstraction of chemical synthesis encompasses the 4 key stages of synthetic protocols: reaction, workup, isolation, and purification. Further, taking note of the incomplete way chemical procedures are reported, we hypothesized that a standardized format for reporting a chemical synthesis procedure, coupled with an abstraction and formalism linking the synthesis to physical operations of an automated robotic platform, would yield a universal approach to a chemical programming language. We call this architecture and abstraction the Chemputer.
Results: For the Chemputer system to accomplish the automated synthesis of target molecules, we developed a program, the Chempiler, to produce specific, low-level instructions for modular hardware of our laboratory-scale synthesis robot. The Chempiler takes information about the physical connectivity and composition of the automated platform, in the form of a graph using the open-source GraphML format, and combines it with a hardware-independent scripting language [chemical assembly (ChASM) language], which provides instructions for the machine operations of the automated platform. The Chempiler software allows the ChASM code for a protocol to be run without editing on any unique hardware platform that has the correct modules for the synthesis. Formalization of a written synthetic scheme by using a chemical descriptive language (XDL) eliminates the ambiguous interpretation of the synthesis procedures. This XDL scheme is then translated into the ChASM file for a particular protocol. An automated robotic platform was developed, consisting of a fluidic backbone connected to a series of modules capable of performing the operations necessary to complete a synthetic sequence. The backbone allows the efficient transfer of the required chemicals into and out of any module of the platform, as well as the flushing and washing of the entire system during multistep procedures in which the modules are reused multiple times. The modules developed for the system consist of a reaction flask, a jacketed filtration setup capable of being heated or cooled, an automated liquid-liquid separation module, and a solvent evaporation module. With these 4 modules, it was possible to automate the synthesis of the pharmaceutical compounds diphenhydramine hydrochloride, rufinamide, and sildenafil without human interaction, in yields comparable to those achieved in traditional manual syntheses.
Conclusion: The Chemputer allows for an abstraction of chemical synthesis, when coupled with a high-level chemical programming language, to be compiled by our Chempiler into a low-level code that can run on a modular standard robotic platform for organic synthesis. The software and modular hardware standards permit synthetic protocols to be captured as digital code. This code can be published, versioned, and transferred flexibly between physical platforms with no modification. We validated this concept by the automated synthesis of 3 pharmaceutical compounds. This represents a step toward the automation of bench-scale chemistry more generally and establishes a standard aiming at increasing reproducibility, safety, and collaboration.
Extended book review of Bradshaw 2013 (Cat Sense) on the connections between cat psychology, evolution/genetics, history of domestication or lack thereof, & possible dysgenics, highlighting modern maladaptivity of cat psychology, with fulltext bibliography of key references.
I review John Bradshaw’s book on domestic cat psychology, Cat Sense, after difficulties dealing with my own cat. Bradshaw reviews the history of domestic cats from their apparent Middle Eastern origins as a small solitary desert predator to their domestication in Ancient Egypt where breeding millions of cats for sacrifice may have played a critical role (as opposed to any unique role as a vermin exterminator) through to the modern day and psychological studies of the learning abilities and personalities of cats, with particular emphasis on cat social skills in “cat colonies” & plasticity in kittenhood. As Bradshaw diagnoses it, these are responsible for what ability they have to modern pet life, even though they are not bred for this like dogs; every tame cat still has the feral cat in them, and are in many ways unsuited for contemporary living, with disturbing hints that human lack of selective breeding plus recent large-scale spay/neuter population control efforts may be producing a subtle dysgenic effect on domestication, and this double neglect & backfire may be responsible for disturbingly high rates of cat maladaptation & chronic stress diseases.
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.
The commitment device increased both effort and performance in the course.
Neither the alert nor distraction-blocking tools led to different outcomes from control.
In order to address poor outcomes for online students, I leverage insights from behavioral economics to design 3 software tools including (1) a commitment device, (2) an alert tool, and (3) a distraction-blocking tool. I test the impact of these tools in a massive open online course (MOOC).
Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the alert and distraction-blocking treatments are statistically indistinguishable from the control.
[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.”
An annotated fulltext bibliography of publications on the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of high-IQ youth.
SMPY (Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth) is a long-running longitudinal survey of extremely mathematically-talented or intelligent youth, which has been following high-IQ cohorts since the 1970s. It has provided the largest and most concrete findings about the correlates and predictive power of screening extremely intelligent children, and revolutionized gifted & talented educational practices.
Because it has been running for over 40 years, SMPY-related publications are difficult to find; many early papers were published only in long-out-of-print books and are not available in any other way. Others are digitized and more accessible, but one must already know they exist. Between these barriers, SMPY information is less widely available & used than it should be given its importance.
To fix this, I have been gradually going through all SMPY citations and making fulltext copies available online with occasional commentary.
Review of Roland & Shiman 2002 history of a decade of ARPA/DARPA involvement in AI and supercomputing, and the ARPA philosophy of technological acceleration; it yielded mixed results, perhaps due to ultimately insurmountable bottlenecks—the time was not yet ripe for many goals.
Review of DARPA history book, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983–1993, Roland & Shiman 2002, which reviews a large-scale DARPA effort to jumpstart real-world uses of AI in the 1980s by a multi-pronged research effort into more efficient computer chip R&D, supercomputing, robotics/self-driving cars, & expert system software. Roland & Shiman 2002 particularly focus on the various ‘philosophies’ of technological forecasting & development, which guided DARPA’s strategy in different periods, ultimately endorsing a weak technological determinism where the bottlenecks are too large for a small (in comparison to the global economy & global R&D) organization best a DARPA can hope for is a largely agnostic & reactive strategy in which granters ‘surf’ technological changes, rapidly exploiting new technology while investing their limited funds into targeted research patching up any gaps or lags that accidentally open up and block broader applications. (For broader discussion of progress, see “Lessons from the Media Lab” & Bakewell.)
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]
A suggested x-risk/Great Filter is the possibility of advanced entertainment technology leading to wireheading/mass sterility/population collapse and extinction. As media consumption patterns are highly heritable, any such effect would trigger rapid human adaptation, implying extinction is almost impossible unless immediate collapse or exponentially accelerating addictiveness.
To demonstrate the point that there are pervasive genetic influences on all aspects of media consumption or leisure time activities/preferences/attitudes, I compile >580 heritability estimates from the behavioral genetics literature (drawing particularly on Loehlin & Nichols 1976’s A Study of 850 Sets of Twins), roughly divided in ~13 categories.
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropping costs and new material and… etc. All of these gradually drop the cost, drop the price, improve the quality at the same price, remove irritations or limits not explicitly noticed, or so on.
It all adds up.
So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).
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.
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. No matter how valuable the original may be and how much one could charge for it, it can be more valuable to make it free if it increases profits elsewhere. A classic example is the commodification of PC hardware by the Microsoft OS monopoly, to the detriment of IBM & benefit of MS.
This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields, such as the high rate of releasing open-source contributions by many Internet companies or the intrusion of advertising companies into smartphone manufacturing & web browser development & statistical software & fiber-optic networks & municipal WiFi & radio spectrum auctions & DNS (Google): they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them.
Users organize themselves into communities on web platforms. These communities can interact with one another, often leading to conflicts and toxic interactions. However, little is known about the mechanisms of interactions between communities and how they impact users.
Here we study inter-community interactions across 36,000 communities on Reddit, examining cases where users of one community are mobilized by negative sentiment to comment in another community. We show that such conflicts tend to be initiated by a handful of communities—less than 1% of communities start 74% of conflicts. While conflicts tend to be initiated by highly active community members, they are carried out by statistically-significantly less active members. We find that conflicts are marked by formation of echo chambers, where users primarily talk to other users from their own community. In the long-term, conflicts have adverse effects and reduce the overall activity of users in the targeted communities.
Our analysis of user interactions also suggests strategies for mitigating the negative impact of conflicts—such as increasing direct engagement between attackers and defenders. Further, we accurately predict whether a conflict will occur by creating a novel LSTM model that combines graph embeddings, user, community, and text features. This model can be used to create early-warning systems for community moderators to prevent conflicts. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of community interactions and conflict, and paves the way towards healthier online communities.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to perform web-based tasks, such as booking flights or replying to emails, where a single mistake can ruin the entire sequence of actions. A common remedy is to “warm-start” the agent by pre-training it to mimic expert demonstrations, but this is prone to overfitting. Instead, we propose to constrain exploration using demonstrations. From each demonstration, we induce high-level “workflows” which constrain the allowable actions at each time step to be similar to those in the demonstration (eg. “Step 1: click on a textbox; Step 2: enter some text”). Our exploration policy then learns to identify successful workflows and samples actions that satisfy these workflows. Workflows prune out bad exploration directions and accelerate the agent’s ability to discover rewards. We use our approach to train a novel neural policy designed to handle the semi-structured nature of websites, and evaluate on a suite of web tasks, including the recent World of Bits benchmark. We achieve new state-of-the-art results, and show that workflow-guided exploration improves sample efficiency over behavioral cloning by more than 100×.
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.
A new model for mechanical computing is demonstrated that requires only two basic parts: links and rotary joints. These basic parts are combined into two main higher level structures: locks and balances, which suffice to create all necessary combinatorial and sequential logic required for a Turing-complete computational system. While working systems have yet to be implemented using this new approach, the mechanical simplicity of the systems described may lend themselves better to, eg. microfabrication, than previous mechanical computing designs. Additionally, simulations indicate that if molecular-scale implementations could be realized, they would be far more energy-efficient than conventional electronic computers.
There has been a controversy about the origin of Bronze Ageirons that could be either meteoritic or smelted irons.
A geochemical approach using Fe:Co:Ni analyses, permits to differentiate terrestrial from extraterrestrial irons.
Meteoritic irons, Bronze Age iron artifacts, ancient terrestrial irons and lateritic ores enable to validate this approach.
Modern irons and iron ores are shown to exhibit a different relationship in a Fe:Co:Ni array.
Iron from the Bronze Age are meteoritic, invalidating speculations about precocious smelting during the Bronze Age.
Bronze Age iron artifacts could be derived from either meteoritic (extraterrestrial) or smelted (terrestrial) iron. This unresolved question is the subject of a controversy: are some, all or none made of smelted iron?
In the present paper we propose a geochemical approach, which permits us to differentiate terrestrial from extraterrestrial irons. Instead of evaluating the Ni abundance alone (or the Ni to Fe ratio) we consider the relationship between Fe, Co and Ni abundances and their ratios. The study of meteoritic irons, Bronze Age iron artifacts and ancient terrestrial irons permit us to validate this chemical approach. The major interest is that non-invasive p-XRF analyses provide reliable Fe:Co:Ni abundances, without the need to remove a sample; they can be performed in situ, in the museums where the artifacts are preserved.
The few iron objects from the Bronze Age sensu stricto that could be analyzed are definitely made of meteoritic iron, suggesting that speculations about precocious smelting during the Bronze Age should be revised. In a Fe:Co:Ni array the trend exhibited by meteoritic irons departs unambiguously from modern irons and iron ores.
The trend of Ni/Fe vs Ni/Co in different analysis points corroded to variable extents of a single object provides a robust criterion for identifying the presence of meteoritic iron. It opens the possibility of tracking when and where the first smelting operations happened, the threshold of a new era. It emphasizes the importance of analytical methods for properly studying the evolution of the use of metals and metal working technologies in our past cultures.
[Keywords: iron, Bronze Age, Iron Age, meteorite, iron ore]
I’ve had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. These are tests of the latency between a keypress and the display of a character in a terminal (see appendix for more details)…If we look at overall results, the fastest machines are ancient. Newer machines are all over the place. Fancy gaming rigs with unusually high refresh-rate displays are almost competitive with machines from the late 70s and early 80s, but “normal” modern computers can’t compete with thirty to forty year old machines.
…Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the iPad Pro can get into the same range as quick machines from thirty to forty years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren’t even close.
If we had to pick one root cause of latency bloat, we might say that it’s because of “complexity”. Of course, we all know that complexity is bad. If you’ve been to a non-academic non-enterprise tech conference in the past decade, there’s a good chance that there was at least one talk on how complexity is the root of all evil and we should aspire to reduce complexity.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder to remove complexity than to give a talk saying that we should remove complexity. A lot of the complexity buys us something, either directly or indirectly. When we looked at the input of a fancy modern keyboard vs. the Apple 2 keyboard, we saw that using a relatively powerful and expensive general purpose processor to handle keyboard inputs can be slower than dedicated logic for the keyboard, which would both be simpler and cheaper. However, using the processor gives people the ability to easily customize the keyboard, and also pushes the problem of “programming” the keyboard from hardware into software, which reduces the cost of making the keyboard. The more expensive chip increases the manufacturing cost, but considering how much of the cost of these small-batch artisanal keyboards is the design cost, it seems like a net win to trade manufacturing cost for ease of programming.
Personal experience and surveys on running out of socks; discussion of socks as small example of human procrastination and irrationality, caused by lack of explicit deliberative thought where no natural triggers or habits exist.
After running out of socks one day, I reflected on how ordinary tasks get neglected. Anecdotally and in 3 online surveys, people report often not having enough socks, a problem which correlates with rarity of sock purchases and demographic variables, consistent with a neglect/procrastination interpretation: because there is no specific time or triggering factor to replenish a shrinking sock stockpile, it is easy to run out.
This reminds me of akrasia on minor tasks, ‘yak shaving’, and the nature of disaster in complex systems: lack of hard rules lets errors accumulate, without any ‘global’ understanding of the drift into disaster (or at least inefficiency). Humans on a smaller scale also ‘drift’ when they engage in System I reactive thinking & action for too long, resulting in cognitive biases. An example of drift is the generalized human failure to explore/experiment adequately, resulting in overly greedy exploitative behavior of the current local optimum. Grocery shopping provides a case study: despite large gains, most people do not explore, perhaps because there is no established routine or practice involving experimentation. Fixes for these things can be seen as ensuring that System II deliberative cognition is periodically invoked to review things at a global level, such as developing a habit of maximum exploration at first purchase of a food product, or annually reviewing possessions to note problems like a lack of socks.
While socks may be small things, they may reflect big things.
Figure 2: Article-level repeated participation over time, all sections.
The Guardian—the fifth most widely read online newspaper in the world as of 2014—changed conversations on its commenting platform by altering its design from non-threaded to single-level threaded in 2012.
We studied this naturally occurring experiment to investigate the impact of conversation threading on user retention as mediated by several potential changes in conversation structure and style.
Our analysis shows that the design change made new users statistically-significantly more likely to comment a second time, and that this increased stickiness is due in part to a higher fraction of comments receiving responses after the design change. In mediation analysis, other anticipated mechanisms such as reciprocal exchanges and comment civility did not help to explain users’ decision to return to the commenting system; indeed, civility did not increase after the design change and reciprocity declined.
These analyses show that even simple design choices can have a substantial impact on news forums’ stickiness. Further, they suggest that this influence is more powerfully shaped by affordances—the new system made responding easier—than by changes in users’ attention to social norms of reciprocity or civility. This has an array of implications for designers.
…Gidding hints that the house itself is doing the haunting [in 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 firsttwoIndiana 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 an 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.
Instead of purchasing individual content, streaming adopters rent access to libraries from which they can consume content at no additional cost.
In this paper, we study how the adoption of music streaming affects listening behavior. Using a unique panel data set of individual consumers’ listening histories across many digital music platforms:
adoption of streaming leads to very large increases in the quantity and diversity of consumption in the first months after adoption. Although the effects attenuate over time, even after half a year, adopters play substantially more, and more diverse, music. Relative to music ownership, where experimentation is expensive, adoption of streaming increases new music discovery. While repeat listening to new music decreases, users’ best discoveries have higher play rates.
We discuss the implications for consumers and producers of music.
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
There are no good websites for learning how to lipread, despite widespread hearing impairment and the aging of the US population. Looking at some numbers, it seems like a potentially profitable niche?
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 strategies.
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% 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.
Experience curves are widely used to predict the cost benefits of increasing the deployment of a technology. But how good are such forecasts? Can one predict their accuracy a priori?
In this paper we answer these questions by developing a method to make distributional forecasts for experience curves. We test our method using a dataset with proxies for cost and experience for 51 products and technologies and show that it works reasonably well. The framework that we develop helps clarify why the experience curve method often gives similar results to simply assuming that costs decrease exponentially.
To illustrate our method we make a distributional forecast for prices of solar photovoltaic modules.
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 an 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 an 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.
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
One source of complexity & JavaScript use on Gwern.net is the use of Google AdSense advertising to insert banner ads. In considering design & usability improvements, removing the banner ads comes up every time as a possibility, as readers do not like ads, but such removal comes at a revenue loss and it’s unclear whether the benefit outweighs the cost, suggesting I run an A/B experiment. However, ads might be expected to have broader effects on traffic than individual page reading times/bounce rates, affecting total site traffic instead through long-term effects on or spillover mechanisms between readers (eg. social media behavior), rendering the usual A/B testing method of per-page-load/session randomization incorrect; instead it would be better to analyze total traffic as a time-series experiment.
Design: A decision analysis of revenue vs readers yields an maximum acceptable total traffic loss of ~3%. Power analysis of historical Gwern.net traffic data demonstrates that the high autocorrelation yields low statistical power with standard tests & regressions but acceptable power with ARIMA models. I design a long-term Bayesian ARIMA(4,0,1) time-series model in which an A/B-test running January–October 2017 in randomized paired 2-day blocks of ads/no-ads uses client-local JS to determine whether to load & display ads, with total traffic data collected in Google Analytics & ad exposure data in Google AdSense. The A/B test ran from 2017-01-01 to 2017-10-15, affecting 288 days with collectively 380,140 pageviews in 251,164 sessions.
Correcting for a flaw in the randomization, the final results yield a surprisingly large estimate of an expected traffic loss of −9.7% (driven by the subset of users without adblock), with an implied −14% traffic loss if all traffic were exposed to ads (95% credible interval: −13–16%), exceeding my decision threshold for disabling ads & strongly ruling out the possibility of acceptably small losses which might justify further experimentation.
Thus, banner ads on Gwern.net appear to be harmful and AdSense has been removed. If these results generalize to other blogs and personal websites, an important implication is that many websites may be harmed by their use of banner ad advertising without realizing it.
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.
A new wave of portable biosensors allows frequent measurement of health-related physiology. We investigated the use of these devices to monitor human physiological changes during various activities and their role in managing health and diagnosing and analyzing disease.
By recording over 250,000 daily measurements for up to 43 individuals, we found personalized circadian differences in physiological parameters, replicating previous physiological findings. Interestingly, we found striking changes in particular environments, such as airline flights (decreased peripheral capillary oxygen saturation [SpO2] and increased radiation exposure). These events are associated with physiological macro-phenotypes such as fatigue, providing a strong association between reduced pressure/oxygen and fatigue on high-altitude flights.
Importantly, we combined biosensor information with frequent medical measurements and made two important observations: First, wearable devices were useful in identification of early signs of Lyme disease and inflammatory responses; we used this information to develop a personalized, activity-based normalization framework to identify abnormal physiological signals from longitudinal data for facile disease detection. Second, wearables distinguish physiological differences between insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant individuals. Overall, these results indicate that portable biosensors provide useful information for monitoring personal activities and physiology and are likely to play an important role in managing health and enabling affordable health care access to groups traditionally limited by socioeconomic class or remote geography.
After putting up with slow glitchy WiFi Internet for years, I investigate improvements. Upgrading the router, switching to a high-gain antenna, and installing a buried Ethernet cable all offer increasing speeds.
My laptop in my apartment receives Internet via a WiFi repeater to another house, yielding slow speeds and frequent glitches. I replaced the obsolete WiFi router and increased connection speeds somewhat but still inadequate. For a better solution, I used a directional antenna to connect directly to the new WiFi router, which, contrary to my expectations, yielded a ~6× increase in speed. Extensive benchmarking of all possible arrangements of laptops/dongles/repeaters/antennas/routers/positions shows that the antenna+router is inexpensive and near optimal speed, and that the only possible improvement would be a hardwired Ethernet line, which I installed a few weeks later after learning it was not as difficult as I thought it would be.
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 CRT or LED display. See also Masia 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).]
Isaac Newton’s cosmology apparently involved regular apocalypses caused by comets overstoking the furnace of the Sun and the repopulation of the Solar System by new intelligent species. He supports this speculation with an interestingly-incorrect anthropic argument.
Isaac Newton published few of his works, and only those he considered perfect after long delays. This leaves his system the world, as described in the Principia and elsewhere, incomplete, and many questions simply unaddressed, like the fate of the Sun or role of comets. But in 2 conversations with an admirer and his nephew, the elderly Newton sketched out the rest of his cosmogony.
According to Newton, the solar system is not stable and must be adjusted by angels; the Sun does not burn perpetually, but comets regularly fuel the Sun; and the final result is that humanity will be extinguished by a particularly large comet causing the sun to flare up, and requiring intelligent alien beings to arise on other planets or their moons. He further gives an anthropic argument: one reason we know that intelligent races regularly go extinct is that humanity itself arose only recently, as demonstrated by the recent innovations in every field, inconsistent with any belief that human beings have existed for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
This is all interestingly wrong, particularly the anthropic argument. That Newton found it so absurd to imagine humanity existing for millions of years but only recently undergoing exponential improvements in technology demonstrates how counterintuitive and extraordinary the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions were.
[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.
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016-2017 state-of-the-art
With genetic predictors of a phenotypic trait, it is possible to select embryos during an in vitro fertilization process to increase or decrease that trait. Extending the work of Shulman & Bostrom 2014/Hsu 2014, I consider the case of human intelligence using SNP-based genetic prediction, finding:
a meta-analysis of GCTA results indicates that SNPs can explain >33% of variance in current intelligence scores, and >44% with better-quality phenotype testing
this sets an upper bound on the effectiveness of SNP-based selection: a gain of 9 IQ points when selecting the top embryo out of 10
the best 2016 polygenic score could achieve a gain of ~3 IQ points when selecting out of 10
the marginal cost of embryo selection (assuming IVF is already being done) is modest, at $1,822.7[^\$1,500.0^~2016~]{.supsub} + $243.0[^\$200.0^~2016~]{.supsub} per embryo, with the sequencing cost projected to drop rapidly
a model of the IVF process, incorporating number of extracted eggs, losses to abnormalities & vitrification & failed implantation & miscarriages from 2 real IVF patient populations, estimates feasible gains of 0.39 & 0.68 IQ points
embryo selection is currently unprofitable (mean: -$435.0[^\$358.0^~2016~]{.supsub}) in the USA under the lowest estimate of the value of an IQ point, but profitable under the highest (mean: $7,570.3[^\$6,230.0^~2016~]{.supsub}). The main constraints on selection profitability is the polygenic score; under the highest value, the NPV EVPI of a perfect SNP predictor is $29.2[^\$24.0^~2016~]{.supsub}b and the EVSI per education/SNP sample is $86.3[^\$71.0^~2016~]{.supsub}k
under the worst-case estimate, selection can be made profitable with a better polygenic score, which would require n > 237,300 using education phenotype data (and much less using fluid intelligence measures)
selection can be made more effective by selecting on multiple phenotype traits: considering an example using 7 traits (IQ/height/BMI/diabetes/ADHD/bipolar/schizophrenia), there is a factor gain over IQ alone; the outperformance of multiple selection remains after adjusting for genetic correlations & polygenic scores and using a broader set of 16 traits.
![[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)
