2021-kaspar.pdf: “The rise of intelligent matter”, C. Kaspar, B. J. Ravoo, W. G. Wiel, S. V. Wegner, W. H. P. Pernice (2021-06-16):
Artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating the development of unconventional computing paradigms inspired by the abilities and energy efficiency of the brain. The human brain excels especially in computationally intensive cognitive tasks, such as pattern recognition and classification.
A long-term goal is de-centralized neuromorphic computing, relying on a network of distributed cores to mimic the massive parallelism of the brain, thus rigorously following a nature-inspired approach for information processing. Through the gradual transformation of interconnected computing blocks into continuous computing tissue, the development of advanced forms of matter exhibiting basic features of intelligence can be envisioned, able to learn and process information in a delocalized manner. Such intelligent matter would interact with the environment by receiving and responding to external stimuli, while internally adapting its structure to enable the distribution and storage (as memory) of information.
We review progress towards implementations of intelligent matter using molecular systems, soft materials or solid-state materials, with respect to applications in soft robotics, the development of adaptive artificial skins and distributed neuromorphic computing.
E-commerce and online advertisement are growing trends.
The overall impact of ad blockers is unclear.
Using survey data, the effect of ad blocker use on online purchases is quantified.
The analysis reveals a positive effect of ad blocker use on e-commerce.
In the light of the results stakeholders should consider if the present online ads formats are the most suitable.
The use of ad blocking software has risen sharply with online advertising and is recognized as challenging the survival of the ad supported web. However, the effects of ad blocking on consumer behavior have been studied scarcely.
This paper uses propensity score matching techniques on a longitudinal survey of 4411 Internet users in Spain to show that ad blocking has a causal positive effect on their number of online purchases. This could be attributed to the positive effects of ad blocking, such as a safer and enhanced navigation.
This striking result reinforces the controversial debate of whether current online ads are too bothersome for consumers.
[Keywords: Ad blockers, advertising avoidance, e-commerce, propensity score matching]
…This study employs a rich dataset coming from a longitudinal survey. The source of the data is a survey conducted by the Spanish Markets and Competition Authority on the same sample of interviewees in the 4th quarter of 2017 and in the second quarter of 2018 ([dataset]CNMCData, 2019). The sample was designed to be representative of the population living in private households in Spain. The information was provided by 4411 Internet users ≥16 years old. At the baseline time point (fourth quarter of 2017) these individuals were asked if they regularly used ad blocking tools when navigating the web. Additionally, the survey collected information on their socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, education level and employment status) and on how they used Internet (frequency of use of online services like: GPS navigation services, instant messaging, mobile gaming, social networks, e-mail and watching videos on the phone). 6 months later (second quarter of 2018), the same individuals were asked how many online purchases they had made during the previous 6 months (these included goods and services purchases, irrespective of the form of payment). Thus, the outcome variable (number of online purchases) occurred later than the collection of the ad blocking information and the rest of variables (our X covariates).
Analysis
N
Treated
Controls
Difference (ATT)
95% LCI
95% UCI
p-value
Unmatched
4411
5.084
2.735
2.348
—
—
—
PSM—NN
1648
5.084
3.325
1.759
0.994
2.523
<0.001
PSM—KM
4411
5.084
3.733
1.351
0.658
2.044
<0.001
Stratification on PS quintiles
4411
5.084
3.686
1.398
0.724
2.072
<0.001
Stratification on PS deciles
4411
5.084
3.774
1.310
0.626
1.994
<0.001
PSM—NN after CEM pruning (1)
1160
4.979
3.773
1.206
0.165
2.246
0.023
PSM—NN after CEM pruning (2)
1622
5.082
3.476
1.605
0.830
2.380
<0.001
Table 2: Estimated average treatment effects of ad blockers on online shopping (number of purchases in 6 months). [ATT: averagetreatment effect on the treated. PSM: propensity score matching. NN:nearest neighbor. KM: kernel matching. PS: propensity scores. CEM:coarsened exact matching. LCI: lowerconfidence interval.UCI: upperconfidence interval. (1) CEM pruning by using use of Internet appscovariates. (2) CEM pruning by using socio-demographic covariates.]
Fin whale calls are among the strongest animal vocalizations that are detectable over great distances in the oceans. We analyze fin whale songs recorded at ocean-bottom seismometers in the northeast Pacific Ocean and show that in addition to the waterborne signal, the song recordings also contain signals reflected and refracted from crustal interfaces beneath the stations. With these data, we constrain the thickness and seismic velocity of the oceanic sediment and basaltic basement and the P-wave velocity of the gabbroic lower crust beneath and around the ocean bottom seismic stations. The abundant and globally available fin whale calls may be used to complement seismic studies in situations where conventional air-gun surveys are not available.
2020-roscioli.pdf: “How hair deforms steel”, Gianluca Roscioli, Seyedeh Mohadeseh Taheri-Mousavi, Cemal Cem Tasan (2020-08-07):
A hair-splitting way to get dull: Razors eventually become dull after shaving even though the blade is about 50 times 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.
2020-beerling.pdf: “Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands”, David J. Beerling, Euripides P. Kantzas, Mark R. Lomas, Peter Wade, Rafael M. Eufrasio, Phil Renforth, Binoy Sarkar, M. Grace Andrews, Rachael H. James, Christopher R. Pearce, Jean-Francois Mercure, Hector Pollitt, Philip B. Holden, Neil R. Edwards, Madhu Khanna, Lenny Koh, Shaun Quegan, Nick F. Pidgeon, Ivan A. Janssens, James Hansen, Steven A. Banwart (2020-07-08; backlinks):
Enhancedsilicate rockweathering(ERW), deployable with croplands, has potential use for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) removal (CDR), which is now necessary to mitigate anthropogenic climate change1. ERW also has possible co-benefits for improved food and soil security, and reduced ocean acidification2,3,4. Here we use an integrated performance modelling approach to make an initial techno-economic assessment for 2050, quantifying how CDR potential and costs vary among nations in relation to business-as-usual energy policies and policies consistent with limiting future warming to 2° Celsius5. China, India, the USA andBrazil have great potential to help achieve average global CDR goals of 0.5 to 2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year with extraction costs of approximately US$80–$180 per tonne of CO2. These goals and costs are robust, regardless of future energy policies. Deployment within existing croplands offers opportunities to align agriculture and climate policy. However, success will depend upon overcoming political and social inertia to develop regulatory and incentive frameworks. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of ERW deployment, including the potential for excess industrial silicate materials (basalt mine overburden, concrete, and iron and steel slag) to obviate the need for new mining, as well as uncertainties in soil weathering rates and land-ocean transfer of weathered products.
Radio remains popular, delivering an audience reach of over 90 percent, but radio ratings may overestimate real advertising exposure. Little is known about audience and media factors affecting radio-advertising avoidance. Many advertisers have believed as much as one-third of the audience switch stations during radio-advertising breaks. In the current study, the authors combined Canadian portable people-meter data ratings to measure loss of audience during advertising. They discovered a new benchmark of 3% (across conditions) for mechanical (or actual physical) avoidance of radio advertising, such as switching stations or turning off the radio. This rate is about one-tenth of current estimates, but was higher for music versus talk stations, out-of-home versus in-home listening, and early versus late dayparts.
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.
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.
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]
Security conscious individuals may take considerable measures to disable sensors in order to protect their privacy. However, they often overlook the cyberphysical attack surface exposed by devices that were never designed to be sensors in the first place. Our research demonstrates that the mechanical components in magnetic hard disk drives behave as microphones with sufficient precision to extract and parse human speech. These unintentional microphones sense speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive. This proof of concept attack sheds light on the possibility of invasion of privacy even in absence of traditional sensors. We also present defense mechanisms, such as the use of ultrasonic aliasing, that can mitigate acoustic eavesdropping by synthesized microphones in hard disk drives.
In 2014, Georgia Tech launched an online campus for its Master of Science in Computer Science program. The degree, equal in stature and accreditation to its on-campus counterpart, offered a notably lower cost of attendance. Its design emphasized flexibility in both geography and time, allowing students from around the world to earn a highly-ranked MSCS without taking time off work or moving to campus.
Five years later, the program enrolls over 8000 students per semester and has graduated 1500 alumni. It is believed to be the largest program of its kind and has received recognition from national organizations on professional education. Existing research on the pro-gram has focused on challenges and opportunities to scale that are agnostic to the content itself.
In this reflection, we look at the creation and growth of the program as it relates to graduate-level CS instruction. In particular, we note a unique and powerful unity of content and platform: the online delivery of the program dovetails with the technical skillsets of the professors and students that it draws, putting both in the position to contribute and innovate.
Accelerometers are sensors for measuring acceleration forces. They can be found embedded in many types of mobile devices, including tablet PCs, smartphones, and smartwatches. Some common uses of built-in accelerometers are automatic image stabilization, device orientation detection, and shake detection. In contrast to sensors like microphones and cameras, accelerometers are widely regarded as not privacy-intrusive. This sentiment is reflected in protection policies of current mobile operating systems, where third-party apps can access accelerometer data without requiring security permission.
It has been shown in experiments, however, that seemingly innocuous sensors can be used as a side channel to infer highly sensitive information about people in their vicinity. Drawing from existing literature, we found that accelerometer data alone may be sufficient to obtain information about a device holder’s location, activities, health condition, body features, gender, age, personality traits, and emotional state. Acceleration signals can even be used to uniquely identify a person based on biometric movement patterns and to reconstruct sequences of text entered into a device, including passwords.
In the light of these possible inferences, we suggest that accelerometers should urgently be re-evaluated in terms of their privacy implications, along with corresponding adjustments to sensor protection mechanisms.
[Keywords: accelerometer, sensor, privacy, side channel, inference attack]
Up-to-date representation of the current status of global energy storage capacity.
Comprehensive and updated research of several energy storage technologies.
Comparison tables of all storage technologies by several characteristics.
Overview of grid-scale applications of different energy storage technologies.
Analysis of different hybrid energy storage combinations and applications.
Renewable Energy Sources have been growing rapidly over the last few years. The spreading of renewables has become stronger due to the increased air pollution, which is largely believed to be irreversible for the environment. On the other hand, the penetration of renewable energy technologies causes major problems to the stability of the grid. Along with the fluctuations of the renewable energy technologies production, storage is important for power and voltage smoothing. Energy storage is also important for energy management, frequency regulation, peak shaving, load leveling, seasonal storage and standby generation during a fault. Thus, storage technologies have gained an increased attention and have become more than a necessity nowadays.
This paper presents an up to date comprehensive overview of energy storage technologies. It incorporates characteristics and functionalities of each storage technology, as well as their advantages and disadvantages compared with other storage technologies. Comparison tables with several characteristics of each storage method are included, while different applications of energy storage technologies are described as well. Finally, several hybrid energy storage applications are analyzed and different combinations of energy storage technologies are reviewed.
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 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.
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.
He measures 21 keyboard latencies using a logic analyzer, finding a range of 15–60ms (!), representing a waste of a large fraction of the available ~100–200ms latency budget before a user notices and is irritated (“the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the 70s.”). The latency estimates are surprising, and do not correlate with advertised traits. They simply have to be measured empirically.]
We can see that, even with the limited set of keyboards tested, there can be as much as a 45ms difference in latency between keyboards. Moreover, a modern computer with one of the slower keyboards attached can’t possibly be as responsive as a quick machine from the 70s or 80s because the keyboard alone is slower than the entire response pipeline of some older computers. That establishes the fact that modern keyboards contribute to the latency bloat we’ve seen over the past forty years…Most keyboards add enough latency to make the user experience noticeably worse, and keyboards that advertise speed aren’t necessarily faster. The two gaming keyboards we measured weren’t faster than non-gaming keyboards, and the fastest keyboard measured was a minimalist keyboard from Apple that’s marketed more on design than speed.
The increasing use of ad blocking software poses a major threat for publishers in loss of online ad revenue, and for advertisers in the loss of audience. Major publishers have adopted various anti-ad blocking strategies such as denial of access to website content and asking users to subscribe to paid ad-free versions. However, publishers are unsure about the true impact of these strategies2, 3. We posit that the real problem lies in the measurement of effectiveness because the existing methods compare metrics after implementation of such strategies with that of metrics just before implementation, making them error prone due to sampling bias. The errors arise due to differences in group compositions across before and after periods, as well as differences in time-period selection for the before measurement. We propose a novel algorithmic method which modifies the difference-in-differences approach to address the sampling bias due to differences in time-period selection. Unlike difference-in-differences, we choose the time-period for comparison in an endogenous manner, as well as, exploit differences in ad blocking tendencies among visitors’ arriving on the publisher’s site to allow cluster specific choice of the control time-period. We evaluate the method on both synthetic data (which we make available) and proprietary real data from an online publisher and find good support.
In 2012, “A Quiet Opening: North Koreans in a Changing Media Environment” described the effects of the steady dissolution of North Korea’s information blockade. Precipitated by the collapse of the state economy during the famine of the 1990s, North Korea’s once strict external and internal controls on the flow of information atrophied as North Korean citizens traded with one another, and goods and people flowed across the border with China. Activities unthinkable in Kim Il Sung’s day became normalized, even if many remained technically illegal. A decade into the 21st century, North Korea was no longer perfectly sealed off from the outside world and its citizens were much more connected to each other. Continued research suggests that many of the trends toward greater information access and sharing detailed in “A Quiet Opening” persist today. Yet, over the last four years, since Kim Jong Un’s emergence as leader, the picture has become more complicated.
It is tempting to view the dynamics surrounding media access and information flow in North Korea as a simple tug-of-war: North Korean citizens gain greater access to a broader range of media and communication devices, and unsanctioned content. The North Korean government, realizing this, responds through crackdowns in an attempt to reconstitute its blockade on foreign information and limit the types of media and communication devices its citizens can access. However, the reality is not so neatly binary. As the North Korean economic situation rebounded after the famine and achieved relative stability, 2 authorities developed strategies to establish new, more modern forms of control within an environment that was fundamentally altered from its pre-famine state.
Among the most important trends to emerge in the North Korean information environment under Kim Jong Un is the shift toward greater media digitization and the expansion of networked communications. The state has ceded and now sanctioned a considerably greater level of interconnectedness between private North Korean citizens. This, at least in part, may be an acknowledgement the market economy in North Korea is here to stay, and thus the communications channels that enable the processes of a market economy must be co-opted and supported rather than rolled back.3 Although the government continues to make efforts to monitor communications and dictate what subjects are off-limits, it is allowing average citizens far greater access to communications technologies. Greater digitization and digital network access are already having profound effects on the basic dynamics and capabilities that define the information space in North Korea.
The expansion and catalyzation of person-to-person communication through mobile phones and other networked digital technologies is in many ways a promising development. However, as this report will document, from both a user and technical perspective, expanding network connectivity to a broad swath of the population is arming the North Korean government with a new array of censorship and surveillance tools that go beyond what is observed even in other authoritarian states or closed media environments. It is clear that the state’s information control strategy, while changing, is not ad hoc or ill-considered. Recent technological innovations and policy changes, on balance, may be giving the North Korean government more control than they are ceding.
…Data Sources: This study primarily draws from:
The 2015 Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Survey of North Korea Refugees, Defectors and Travelers (n = 350)
A qualitative study comprised of 34 interviews with specifically recruited recent defectors conducted in May and June of 2016 specifically for this report
Technical analyses of available North Korean software and hardware
[The details on NK use of digital censorship is interesting: steady progress in locking down Bluetooth and WiFi by software and then hardware modifications; use of Android security system/DRM to install audit logs + regular screenshots to capture foreign media consumption; a whitelist/signed-media system to block said foreign media from ever being viewed, with auto-deletion of offending files; watermarking (courtesy of an American university’s misguided outreach) of media created on desktops to trace them; network blocking and surveillance; and efforts towards automatic bulk surveillance of text messages for ‘South-Korean-style’ phrases/words. Stallman’s warnings about DRM are quite prophetic in the NK context—the system is secured against the user…For these reasons & poverty, radio (including foreign radios like Voice of America) is—surprisingly to me—the top source of information for North Koreans.]
This whitepaper presents the primary findings of new research by Professor Benjamin Shiller (Brandeis University), Professor Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota and the National Bureau of Economic Research), and Dr. Johnny Ryan (PageFair).
Research of 2,574 websites over 3 years reveals that adblock has a hidden cost: it not only reduces small and medium publishers’ revenue, it also reduces their traffic.
Studying the changing rate of desktop adblock usage and traffic rank from April 2013—June 2016 reveals that adblock usage is undermining many websites’ ability to invest in content. Affected websites then attract fewer visitors, and so their traffic declines. The full paper is available from NBER, the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research.
This is the adblock paradox: users may avoid ads in the short term, but ultimately undermine the value they can derive from the web. To reverse this phenomenon, publishers must listen to users’ legitimate grievances about online ads and respond by fixing the problems. Once they have remedied the users’ grievances, publishers can choose to serve their ads using technology that adblock companies cannot tamper with.
The purpose of this article is to collect and consolidate a list of these alternative methods of working with displays, light and optics. This will by no means be an exhaustive list of the possibilities available—depending on how you categorize, there could be dozens or hundreds of ways. There are historical mainstays, oddball one-offs, expensive failures and techniques that are only beginning to come into their own.
[Survey of visual display technologies going beyond the familiar CRTor LED display. See 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)
Volumetric Displays (Layered screens)
Electronic Paper
Flexible Displays
Laser Projectors
Head Mounted Displays (VR/AR/Mixed Reality)
[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).]
Easter bunnies aren’t what they used to be. The plush toys on store shelves these days are cheaper, often safer, and much, much softer than in bygone days. They represent a small example of a pervasive phenomenon: goods whose quality has improved gradually but substantially over time, without corresponding price increases and or public recognition.
If you shop around, you can find a stuffed Easter bunny for three dollars, as you could in the 1970s. My neighborhood Target is selling two models at that price, the cheapest in a lineup of plush Easter toys that includes offerings for $6.14$4.992015, $12.29$9.992015 and $24.58$19.992015 (for a giant rabbit). Back in 1970, when I myself was young enough for Easter baskets, Walgreens advertised “plush bunnies in ‘hot’ colors” for $14.00$2.971970, along with others for $10.33$2.191970 and $17.78$3.771970. The $14.00$2.971970 bunny from 1970 was probably bigger than today’s $14.10$2.991970 model, but keep in mind that these prices are not corrected for inflation. The 1970 bunny would cost $22.10$17.972015 in today’s dollars. Or, to use another benchmark, the federal minimum wage in 1970 was $6.84$1.451970—about half the price of one of those Walgreens bunnies—compared with today’s minimum of $8.92$7.252015, more than double the price of the Target ones. Earning enough to buy the 1970 bunny required 123 minutes of minimum-wage labor versus about 25 minutes today. Three-dollar bunnies are low-profit items designed to get people in the store and stimulate impulse buying. But the broad pattern applies to more expensive stuffed animals as well: Prices have stayed low. For that, you can thank intense international competition.
…Consumers have come to expect low prices. But inexpensive doesn’t necessarily mean “cheap.” The quality of stuffed toys has also improved. “It’s a better product than it was years ago, and it’s not that much more expensive”, said Steven Meyer, the third-generation owner of Mary Meyer Corp., a Vermont-based toy company. Meyer joined the company in 1986, helping his father weather the tough transition to manufacturing in Korea.
For example, Meyer explained, Korean and Taiwanese toymakers introduced safety procedures, later copied in China, to assure the toys didn’t contain hidden hazards. “Every one of our toys is put through a metal detector before it goes into a box, and that’s because a little shard of a sewing needle can break off and go into the toy”, Meyer said. “We never thought of that when we produced in the United States.”
More immediately apparent is how the toys feel. A stuffed animal that would have delighted a baby boomer now seems rigid and rough. Today’s toys are stuffed with soft, fibrous polyester rather than the foam rubber, sawdust or ground nut shells of the past. Plush outer fabrics no longer have stiff backings; the yarns are knitted to one another rather than attached to a rigid fabric like a carpet. “The whole stuffed toy feels softer and slouchier”, Meyer said. The real magic, however, is in that silky faux fur. I first noticed it about a dozen years ago while buying Christmas presents for my nephew, who has super-sensitive skin and hates clothing tags and scratchy fabrics. Stuffed animals, I discovered, were as different from my childhood toys as a wickable polyester workout T-shirt is from a sweat-sticky polyester disco suit. The secret to both wickable T-shirts and softer Easter bunnies lies in polyester microfibers. These high-tech textiles have replaced the acrylic and polyester plushes that once covered stuffed toys just as they’ve nudged aside cotton for exercise apparel.
…Textile fibers, including polyester filaments, are measured in decitex or deniers, almost equivalent units unique to the business. For reference: Silk measures about 1.1 to 1.3 decitex, while human hair is 30 to 50. A microfiber is anything less than 1 decitex. Although polyester microfibers date to Toray Industries’ development of Ultrasuede in 1970, they have become widespread only in recent years, thanks in part to massive plant investments in China that have swamped the polyester market and driven down prices. Back when I was buying toys for my nephew, polyester fibers of around 3 decitex “were considered fine”, said Frank Horn, president of the Fiber Economics Bureau, the statistical collection and publication arm of the American Fiber Manufacturers Association. But over the past decade or so, true microfibers have “become ubiquitous.” Now, Horn estimated, the average is about 0.5 decitex—a reduction of about 85%—and some popular microfibers are as fine as 0.3 decitex. The finer the fiber, the softer the final fabric—making today’s stuffed animals extraordinarily silky. Largely unheralded outside the textile business, this progress was “not one particular technology but many”, explained textile chemist Phil Brown of Clemson University’s materials science and engineering school. “Some involved changing fiber shape, some involved using chemical treatments to reduce fiber size, some involved new fiber extrusion technologies in which fibers have more than one polymer component.”
Recumbent bicycles have never truly been associated with international cycling. Conventional safety (upright) bicycles have long been at the center of the cycling world, for both sport and transportation. This is despite the fact that recumbent bicycles are faster more comfortable, and more efficient than the upright bicycles. The aim of this article is to explain the historical and social perspectives that led to the rejection of the recumbent bicycle by utilizing the theory of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Bijker’s 2 power theory, providing a contrast with the adoption of the safety bicycle.
…Almost half a century later, another technological innovation grabbed cyclists’ attention. Francis Faure, known to be far from the fastest rider, broke the one-hour record on a Velocar, a type of recumbent bike invented by Charles Mochet.
“At the finish line, the crowd’s reaction was similar to that of the crowd that witnessed the initial display of superiority of the safety bicycle: dominated by shock and anger”, Ahmed, Qureshi, and Khan write.
Some racers latched on to the speedier bike, but many did not. Instead, they viewed it as an impostor. The question of who was right fell to the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), formed in 1900 to set international rules for bike racing. This came to include defining the acceptable parameters of racing bikes. In 1914, for example, it banned fairings (coverings designed to make bikes more aerodynamic).
By the 1930s, the UCI had some reasons to be skittish about technological changes to the bicycle. The authors write that it was under pressure from bike manufacturers, which were ramping up production of safety bicycles to satisfy a growing Depression-era demand for cheap transportation.
“It is also likely that the UCI viewed potential identity or shape changes to the meaning of cycling dangerous to the cycling world as a whole”, they write. “We suspect that the UCI prioritized supporting the cycling world as a whole, as opposed to supporting promising new innovations in cycling technologies.”
The upshot was that even though Mochet had specifically designed the Velocar to fit existing UCI rules, the organization upheld a 1935 challenge to the use of the model with little explanation. It went on to publish a new definition of “bicycle” that set out standard dimensions, clarifying the Velocycle’s out-of-bounds position.
The authors identify this moment as a ‘rhetorical closure’, in which a dominant technology became viewed as the only option, with no need for better-designed competitors. UCI’s position as an arbiter of biking protocol ensured that neither racers nor other riders adopted recumbent bikes in large numbers. Ultimately, only 800 Velocars sold. Even today, recumbent bikes are a specialty product, with no cheap options that might encourage riders to try out a faster, more comfortable ride.
In the third annual ad blocking report, PageFair, with the help of Adobe, provides updated data on the scale and growth of ad blocking software usage and highlights the global and regional economic impact associated with it. Additionally, this report explores the early indications surrounding the impact of ad blocking within the mobile advertising space and how mobile will change the ad blocking landscape.
Table of Contents: · 1. Introduction · 2. Table of Contents · 3. Key insights · 4. Global ad blocking growth · 5. Usage of ad blocking software in the United States · 6. Usage of ad blocking software in Europe · 7. The cost of blocking ads · 8. Effect of ad blocking by industry · 9. Google Chrome still the main driver of ad block growth · 10. Mobile is yet to be a factor in ad blocking growth · 11. Mobile will facilitate future ad blocking growth · 12. Reasons to start using an ad blocker · 13. Afterword · 14. Background · 15. Methodology · 16. Tables · 17. Tables
Key Insights: More consumers block ads, continuing the strong growth rates seen during 2013 and 2014. The findings:
Globally, the number of people using ad blocking software grew by 41% year over year.
16% of the US online population blocked ads during Q2 2015.
Ad block usage in the United States grew 48% during the past year, increasing to 45 million monthly active users (MAUs) during Q2 2015.
Ad block usage in Europe grew by 35% during the past year, increasing to 77 million monthly active users during Q2 2015.
The estimated loss of global revenue due to blocked advertising during 2015 was $26.81$21.82015B.
With the ability to block ads becoming an option on the new iOS 9, mobile is starting to get into the ad blocking game. Currently Firefox and Chrome lead the mobile space with 93% share of mobile ad blocking.
Over the past 10+ years, online companies large and small have adopted widespread A/B testing as a robust data-based method for evaluating potential product improvements. In online experimentation, it is straightforward to measure the short-term effect, ie., the impact observed during the experiment. However, the short-term effect is not always predictive of the long-term effect, ie., the final impact once the product has fully launched and users have changed their behavior in response. Thus, the challenge is how to determine the long-term user impact while still being able to make decisions in a timely manner.
We tackle that challenge in this paper by first developing experiment methodology for quantifying long-term user learning. We then apply this methodology to ads shown on Google search, more specifically, to determine and quantify the drivers of ads blindness and sightedness, the phenomenon of users changing their inherent propensity to click on or interact with ads.
We use these results to create a model that uses metrics measurable in the short-term to predict the long-term. We learn that user satisfaction is paramount: ads blindness and sightedness are driven by the quality of previously viewed or clicked ads, as measured by both ad relevance and landing page quality. Focusing on user satisfaction both ensures happier users but also makes business sense, as our results illustrate. We describe two major applications of our findings: a conceptual change to our search ads auction that further increased the importance of ads quality, and a 50% reduction of the ad load on Google’s mobile search interface.
The results presented in this paper are generalizable in two major ways. First, the methodology may be used to quantify user learning effects and to evaluate online experiments in contexts other than ads. Second, the ads blindness/sightedness results indicate that a focus on user satisfaction could help to reduce the ad load on the internet at large with long-term neutral, or even positive, business impact.
We propose a RF fingerprint approach for device identification in wireless networks.
Based on the extraction and analysis of the preamble RF fingerprint of a device.
Techniques for feature reduction such as PCA and PLS are used.
Experimentation with commercial WiFi devices is done and results are provided.
This document proposes a radiofrequency (RF) fingerprinting strategy for the proper identification of wireless devices in mobile and wireless networks.
The proposed identification methods are based on the extraction of the preamble RF fingerprint of a device and its comparison with a set of already known device RF fingerprints. The identification method combines techniques for feature reduction such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares regression (PLS), both based on subspace transformation, along with a similarity-based analysis. In this work, a complete procedure for RF fingerprint data extraction and analysis is provided. In addition, some experimentation with commercial Wi-Fi devices is carried out for the methods validation.
…Acknowledgement: This work has been carried out despite the economic difficulties of the authors’ country. The authors want to overall remark the clear contribution of the Spanish Government in destroying the R&D horizon of Spain and the future of an entire generation.
Some online display advertisements are annoying. Although publishers know the payment they receive to run annoying ads, little is known about the cost that such ads incur (eg., causing website abandonment). Across three empirical studies, the authors address two primary questions: (1) What is the economic cost of annoying ads to publishers? and (2) What is the cognitive impact of annoying ads to users? First, the authors conduct a preliminary study to identify sets of more and less annoying ads. Second, in a field experiment, they calculate the compensating differential, that is, the amount of money a publisher would need to pay users to generate the same number of impressions in the presence of annoying ads as it would generate in their absence. Third, the authors conduct a mouse-tracking study to investigate how annoying ads affect reading processes. They conclude that in plausible scenarios, the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns.
We review the state of the art on computational displays.
The survey is organized according to the dimensions of the plenoptic function.
For each dimension, we discuss related perceptual considerations.
Hardware architectures and software approaches for content generation are discussed.
Display technology has undergone great progress over the last few years. From higher contrast to better temporal resolution or more accurate color reproduction, modern displays are capable of showing images which are much closer to reality. In addition to this trend, we have recently seen the resurrection of stereo technology, which in turn fostered further interest on automultiscopic displays. These advances share the common objective of improving the viewing experience by means of a better reconstruction of the plenoptic function along any of its dimensions. In addition, one usual strategy is to leverage known aspects of the human visual system (HVS) to provide apparent enhancements, beyond the physical limits of the display. In this survey, we analyze these advances, categorize them along the dimensions of the plenoptic function, and present the relevant aspects of human perception on which they rely.
[Keywords: HDR display, wide color gamut, high definition, stereoscopic, autostereoscopic, automultiscopic]
As displays in public space are augmented with sensors, such as the Kinect, they enable passersby to interact with the content on the screen. As of today, feedback on the user action in such environments is usually limited to the visual channel. However, we believe that more immediate and intense forms, in particular haptic feedback, do not only increase the user experience, but may also have a strong impact on user attention and memorization of the content encountered during the interaction. Haptic feedback can today be achieved through vibration on the mobile phone, which is strongly dependent on the location of the device. We envision that fabrics, such as underwear, can in the future be equipped with electrical muscle stimulation, thus providing a more natural and direct way of haptic feedback. In this demo we aim to showcase the potential of applying electrical muscle stimulation as direct haptic feedback during interaction in public spaces in the context of a Kinect-based game for public displays.
[Keywords: interactivity, tactile feedback, EMS, public spaces]
[video] The ways in which we leave graffiti have not changed much in thousands of years. Humans have felt the need to anonymously leave messages to one another for centuries.
In this paper, we introduce StallTalk (www.stalltalk.info [defunct]), an anonymous location-based micro blogging website that uses QR codes posted in bathroom stalls. StallTalk allows users to leave digital graffiti on bathroom walls without actually causing permanent damage. Users scan the QR codes, which are unique to each stall, and write short messages to each other.
We deployed StallTalk in over 500 locations and have had almost 9,000 unique visitors to our website.
After a few months of planning, several weeks of work, and possibly a few kilometres of aimless pacing through the living room, I’m happy to present “Palm: I’m ready to wallow now”. This massive article (22,000 words) covers countless aspects of Palm, its devices, its operating system, and the company’s importance to the mobile industry. I start with a detailed look at the history of handwriting recognition, after which I move on to the four hardware products I believe are crucial in understanding Palm as a company. Of course, I also dive into Palm OS, covering the kernel, its filesystem (or lack thereof), ‘multitasking’ capabilities, user experience, and much more. Important Palm OS licensees like Sony and Handspring make an appearance, and I cover the failed attempt at modernising the Palm OS: Palm OS 6 Cobalt. Finally, the conclusion ties it all together.
Introduction
History of handwriting recognition
First steps
Stylator
The holy GRAIL
Going to market
Driving the point home
Palm’s hardware
GRiDPad
Zoomer
Palm Pilot
Palm V
Defining Palm
The Palm operating system
The kernel
There is no file
Single-tasking (but not quite)
Graffiti
The user experience
Zen of Palm [more Apple than Apple then]
Palm OS’ legacy Miscellaneous
Licensing Palm OS
Where to go from here (if here is 2004): Palm OS 6 ‘Cobalt’
“Dear Valentine, this is to tell you that you are my friend as well as my Valentine, and that I intend to write you lots of letters”, says the user guide of the familiar red typewriter. This purposefully heartwarming greeting sets the tone for Ettore Sottsass’ typewriter. The blood-red Valentine was a fun, light-hearted and smooth-operating symbol of the 1960s Pop era, and its use of bright, playful casing for a piece of traditional office equipment was arguably a precursor to Apple’s 1998 Bondi Blue iMac. “When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism”, said Sottsass. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting.”
The Valentine—created for the Italian brand Olivetti—was designed in collaboration with the British designer Perry King and entered production in 1969. It was not a commercial success. The Valentine was technically mediocre, expensive and failed to sell to a mass audience, yet still became a design classic. Valentines can be found in the permanent collections of London’s Design Museum and MoMA, the typewriter being accepted into the latter just two years after its launch. The product’s critical success was unhindered by its functional limitations because its design focused as much on its emotional connection to users as it did on practical ease of use.
Sottsass set out his stall early on. One of the initial advertising campaigns for the design featured posters by the graphic designer and founder of New York magazine, Milton Glaser. Glaser used a detail of Piero di Cosimo’s renaissance painting, Satyr Mourning over Nymph. In the poster, the Valentine typewriter is placed next to a red setter, an elegant, rambunctious dog; man’s best friend. The suggestion was that Sottsass’ portable accessory could be just as loyal and convivial. How the product performed was arguably irrelevant. It was about how it made you feel.
The Valentine was available in white, green and blue, but its most famous form was red: lipstick-bright ABS plastic casing, with black plastic keys and white lettering. “Every colour has a history”, said Sottsass, “Red is the color of the Communist flag, the colour that makes a surgeon move faster and the color of passion.”
The distinctive colour was calculated to bring vibrancy and fun into the office world of the 1960s. Sottsass said that the Valentine “was invented for use any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country or to provide a highly coloured object on a table in a studio apartment.” The ideas that later manifested themselves in Sottsass’ 1970s Memphis movement—the Milan design group known for its brightly coloured postmodern furniture—were already evident in the Valentine typewriter. Sottsass gave a standardised piece of office equipment personality.
Although, the designer would later dismiss the Valentine—comparing it to “a girl wearing a very short skirt and too much make-up”—its design was an elegant summation of his belief that successful, long-lasting product design was not solely connected to performance, but rather owed as much to the emotional force of a design.
Forecasting technological progress is of great interest to engineers, policy makers, and private investors. Several models have been proposed for predicting technological improvement, but how well do these models perform? An early hypothesis made by Theodore Wright in 1936 is that cost decreases as a power law of cumulative production. An alternative hypothesis is Moore’s law, which can be generalized to say that technologies improve exponentially with time. Other alternatives were proposed by Goddard, Sinclair et al and Nordhaus. These hypotheses have not previously been rigorously tested. Using a new database on the cost and production of 62 different technologies, which is the most expansive of its kind, we test the ability of six different postulated laws to predict future costs. Our approach involves hindcasting and developing a statistical model to rank the performance of the postulated laws. Wright’s law produces the best forecasts, but Moore’s law is not far behind. We discover a previously unobserved regularity that production tends to increase exponentially. A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in production would make Moore’s law and Wright’s law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.
The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late 19th century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.
As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick details, people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
“Some believed that users should creatively interrogate these objects and learn how they worked as part of a broader electrical education”, Plotnick explains. “Others…suggested that pushing buttons could help users to avoid complicated and laborious technological experiences. These approaches reflected different groups’ attempts at managing fears of electricity.”
… Between 1880 and 1920, hundreds of patent applications were made for “electric buttons” or “push-buttons.”
At the end of the 19th century, many laypeople had a “working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the 2”, according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be “simplistic and worry-free.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.
Ultimately, the idea that electricity was a kind of magic would triumph over a more hands-on, demystifying approach.
Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.” That resonates now, more than a century later, when technology is even more complicated and even more intimately entwined with our lives. The “black box” reigns supreme.]
We examine the cost for an attacker to pay users to execute arbitrary code—potentially malware. We asked users at home to download and run an executable we wrote without being told what it did and without any way of knowing it was harmless. Each week, we increased the payment amount. Our goal was to examine whether users would ignore common security advice—not to run untrusted executables—if there was a direct incentive, and how much this incentive would need to be. We observed that for payments as low as $0.01$0.012012, 22% of the people who viewed the task ultimately ran our executable. Once increased to $1.31$1.002012, this proportion increased to 43%. We show that as the price increased, more and more users who understood the risks ultimately ran the code. We conclude that users are generally unopposed to running programs of unknown provenance, so long as their incentives exceed their inconvenience.
The decades surrounding the Second World War saw an intense wave of interest in pictographic communication, with social scientists and graphic designers promoting the potential of universal pictographic “language” to bring about international understanding and co-operation. This article explores the historical relationship between pictographic design and internationalist politics in this era through the work of Rudolf Modley, a pioneering designer of information graphics whose career spanned from the socialist experiments of 1920s Vienna to humanist advocacy projects in late-1960s America. Tracing the complex relationship between visual communication, commerce and politics in mid-twentieth-century design, this article further reflects on the decline of the pictographic project after the 1970s, when pictographs at once gained a broad global currency and lost their political thrust just as the dream of an international visual language was ironically realized in the triumph of a global traffic in mass-consumable images.
[Keywords: pictographic design, internationalism, information design, Rudolf Modley, Otto Neurath, Margaret Mead]
New technologies have led to increased television advertising avoidance. In particular, mechanical avoidance in the form of zipping and zapping has gained momentum in recent years. Channel switching or “commercial zapping” studies employ diverse methodologies, including self reports, electronic monitoring, laboratory, and in-home observation which has led to a diversity of reported results. This article proposes advancing and standardizing the methodology to comprise a two-phase hidden observation and survey method. A number of research phases have led to the development of this method to collect both mechanical and behavioral avoidance data. The study includes a detailed outline of the hidden observation approach. The survey phase opens up the potential for the collection of viewer data that may further illuminate television advertising avoidance behavior.
Architecture that is hard to describe by being immaterial, irrelevant, and unintended may engage us in a narrative rather than a visual sense. 3 examples of anonymous architecture are presented where stories regarding interfaces between existence and nonexistence emerge. They are all places where people can vanish and taken together tell stories of death, hell, and heaven. In these unexpected places, the deeper issues of life may be obliquely and ironically experienced.
[Geoff Manaugh: While the entirety of the paper is worth reading, I want to highlight a specific moment, wherein Crompton introduces us to the colossal western bellmouth drain of the Ladybower reservoir in Derbyshire, England.
His description of this “inverted infrastructural monument”, as InfraNet Lab described it in their own post about Crompton’s paper—adding that spillways like this “maintain 2 states: (1) in use they disappear and are minimally obscured by flowing water, (2) not in use they are sculptural oddities hovering ambiguously above the water line”—is spine-tingling.
“What is down that hole is a deep mystery”, Crompton begins, and the ensuing passage deserves quoting in full:
Not even Google Earth can help you since its depths are in shadow when photographed from above. To see for yourself means going down the steps as far as you dare and then leaning out to take a look. Before attempting a descent, you might think it prudent to walk around the hole looking for the easiest way down. The search will reveal that the workmanship is superb and that there is no weakness to exploit, nowhere to tie a rope and not so much as a pebble to throw down the hole unless you brought it with you in the boat. The steps of this circular waterfall are all 18 inches high. This is an awkward height to descend, and most people, one imagines, would soon turn their back on the hole and face the stone like a climber. How far would you be willing to go before the steps became too small to continue? With proper boots, it is possible to stand on a sharp edge as narrow as a quarter of an inch wide; in such a position, you will risk your life twisting your cheek away from the stone to look downward because that movement will shift your center of gravity from a position above your feet, causing you to pivot away from the wall with only friction at your fingertips to hold you in place. Sooner or later, either your nerves or your grip will fail while diminishing steps accumulate below preventing a vertical view. In short, as if you were performing a ritual, this structure will first make you walk in circles, then make you turn your back on the thing you fear, then give you a severe fright, and then deny you the answer to a question any bird could solve in a moment. When you do fall, you will hit the sides before hitting the bottom. Death with time to think about it arriving awaits anyone who peers too far into that hole.
“What we have here”, he adds, “is a geometrical oddity: an edge over which it is impossible to look. Because you can see the endless walls of the abyss both below you and facing you, nothing is hidden except what is down the hole. Standing on the rim, you are very close to a mystery: a space receiving the light of the sun into which we cannot see.”]
De Leval reviewed all the arterial switch procedures done in the United Kingdom over a two-year period with a psychologist watching the operation. Once again, the journey from the operating room to the ICU was demonstrated to be a high risk factor. Staff came to accept that there was an element of danger associated with what they were doing, so they were receptive to change.
Quality Solutions: In Formula One motor racing, the pit stop team completes the complex task of changing tires and fueling the car in about seven seconds. The doctors saw this as analogous to the team effort of surgeons, anesthetist, and ICU staff to transfer the patient, equipment, and information safely and quickly from operating room to ICU.
GOSH doctors visited and observed the pit crew handoff in Italy, noting the value of process mapping, process description, and trying to work out what people’s tasks should be. Following their trip, the GOSH team videotaped the handover in the surgery unit and sent it to be reviewed by the Formula One team. From the analysis came a new handover protocol with more sophisticated procedures and better choreographed teamwork.
The GOSH researchers also noted the importance of the role of the lollipop man, the one who waves the car in and coordinates the pit stop. Under the new handover process, the anesthetist was given overall responsibility for coordinating the team until it was transferred to the intensivist at the termination of the handover. These same two individuals were charged with the responsibility of periodically stepping back to look at the big picture and to make safety checks of the handover.
Results: The real gain for patients was safety. Results showed that the new handover procedure had broken a link between technical and informational errors. Before the new handover protocol, approximately 30% of patient errors occurred in both equipment and information. Afterward, only 10% occurred in both areas.
The provision of electricity has been a great benefit to society, particularly in health terms, but it also carries health costs. Comparison of different forms of commercial power generation by use of the fuel cycle methods developed in European studies shows the health burdens to be greatest for power stations that most pollute outdoor air (those based on lignite, coal, and oil). The health burdens are appreciably smaller for generation from natural gas, and lower still for nuclear power. This same ranking also applies in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions and thus, potentially, to long-term health, social, and economic effects arising from climate change. Nuclear power remains controversial, however, because of public concern about storage of nuclear waste, the potential for catastrophic accident or terrorist attack, and the diversion of fissionable material for weapons production. Health risks are smaller for nuclear fusion, but commercial exploitation will not be achieved in time to help the crucial near-term reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The negative effects on health of electricity generation from renewable sources have not been assessed as fully as those from conventional sources, but for solar, wind, and wave power, such effects seem to be small; those of biofuels depend on the type of fuel and the mode of combustion. Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage is increasingly being considered for reduction of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants, but the health effects associated with this technology are largely unquantified and probably mixed: efficiency losses mean greater consumption of the primary fuel and accompanying increases in some waste products. This paper reviews the state of knowledge regarding the health effects of different methods of generating electricity.
Effective resizing of images should not only use geometric constraints, but consider the image content as well. We present a simple image operator called seam carving that supports content-aware image resizing for both reduction and expansion. A seam is an optimal 8-connected path of pixels on a single image from top to bottom, or left to right, where optimality is defined by an image energy function. By repeatedly carving out or inserting seams in one direction we can change the aspect ratio of an image. By applying these operators in both directions we can retarget the image to a new size. The selection and order of seams protect the content of the image, as defined by the energy function. Seam carving can also be used for image content enhancement and object removal. We support various visual saliency measures for defining the energy of an image, and can also include user input to guide the process. By storing the order of seams in an image we create multi-size images, that are able to continuously change in real time to fit a given size.
We conducted an experiment with different forms and types of ads. An artificial Web site was created for the experiment that contained images, prices, and descriptions of familiar products and product categories. The products were those that would be carried by a general store and included food, health care, and household products. Nine search tasks were assigned to participants that would force them to traverse a variety of portions of the site…The experimental websites were accessed over the Internet in a controlled laboratory setting by 536 undergraduate students.
…This study provides clear support for an assertion that users will adopt more negative intentions when a site displays advertisements than when the site does not. It is also clear that advertisements interfere with retention of site content and that features of advertisements also have important effects on retaining both site and ad content. Inline ads permit both site and ad content to be remembered more clearly than popups and popunders, a finding that is most interesting because it suggests the action of closing the advertisement window distracts users from the site, and further, it is visible for a shorter time. When ads are markedly different from the content of the site, they theoretically stimulate more effort as users work toward an important goal, and users remember more about both the Web site and the advertisement. It is interesting to note that while these effects might on the surface appear small, they are quite consistent and highly statistically-significant. Extrapolating to millions of site visitors, even small differences can amount to an urgent problem for management. Finally, it is also clear that popups and popunders are considered to be more intrusive than inline ads. Users seem to prefer not to have to divert their attention from their searching task or take additional steps to close the popup or pop-under windows.
In 1915, when Lawrence Bragg was a 25-year-old Second Lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery, seconded to ‘Maps GHQ’, he learned that he and his father had shared the Nobel Prize in physics. Lawrence’s equation was crucial for winning the prize and he had been wounded by his father’s early dissemination of their work with casual attribution to ‘my son’. Lawrence was responsible for developing methods for pinpointing the position of enemy artillery pieces by recording the boom of their firing with an array of microphones. It was a simple idea but difficult to implement. Step by step, Bragg and the group he assembled solved the problems and developed a system that worked. Sound-ranging was valuable in the British victory at Cambrai in 1917 and vital for that at Amiens in 1918: the ‘black day of the German Army’. He received the MC and the OBE. His Army service manifested both his scientific leadership and administrative skills, which culminated in the demonstrations of the validity of the dream he enunciated in his Nobel lecture: that X-rays could be used to resolve the structure of the most complicated molecules.
…We had new applications like the Web, email, instant messaging, and bulletin boards, all of which were about humans communicating with one another through software. Now, suddenly, when you create software, it isn’t sufficient to think about making it possible to communicate; you have to think about making communication socially successful. In the age of usability, technical design decisions had to be taken to make software easier for a mass audience to use; in the age of social software, design decisions must be taken to make social groups survive and thrive and meet the goals of the group even when they contradict the goals of the individual. A discussion group designed by a usability expert might be optimized to make it easy to post spam about Viagra. But in social software design it’s pretty obvious that the goal is to make certain things harder, not easier, and if you can make it downright impossible to post spam, you’ve done your job. Features need to be designed to make the group successful, not the individual.
Today, hardly anybody really studies how to design software for human-to-human interaction. The field of social software design is in its infancy. In fact, we’re not even at the point yet where the software developers developing social software realize that they need to think about the sociology and the anthropology of the group that will be using their software, so many of them just throw things together and allow themselves to be surprised by the social interactions that develop around their software. Clay Shirky has been a pioneer in this field, and his talk “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” will be remembered as a watershed in the widespread realization that in this new era, sociology and anthropology are just as crucial to software design as usability was in the last. —Joel Spolsky
People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you’re dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It’s what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it’s not just “We need to have some rules.” It’s also “We need to have some rules for making some rules.” And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogeneous groups. “The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases.” As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.
You cannot completely separate technical and social issues
Members [power users] are different than users.
The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.
…if you don’t accept them upfront, they’ll happen to you anyway. And then you’ll end up writing one of those documents that says “Oh, we launched this and we tried it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we’re documenting it so future ages won’t make this mistake.”
…If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or “member since.”
Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations.
Web page loading speed continues to vex users, even as broadband adoption increases. Several studies have addressed delays in the context of Web sites as well as interactive corporate systems, and have recommended a wide range of ‘rules of thumb’. Some studies conclude that response times should be no greater than 2 seconds while other studies caution on delays of 12 seconds or more. One of the strongest conclusions was that complex tasks seemed to allow longer response times. This study examined delay times of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 seconds using 196 undergraduate students in an experiment. Randomly assigned a constant delay time, subjects were asked to complete 9 search tasks, exploring a familiar and an unfamiliar site. Plots of the dependent variables performance, attitudes, and behavioral intentions, along those delays, suggested the use of non-linear regression, and the explained variance was in the neighborhood of 2%, 5%, and 7%, respectively. Focusing only on the familiar site, explained variance in attitudes and behavioral intentions grew to about 16%. A sensitivity analysis implies that decreases in performance and behavioral intentions begin to flatten when the delays extend to 4 seconds or longer, and attitudes flatten when the delays extend to 8 seconds or longer. Future research should include other factors such as expectations, variability, and feedback, and other outcomes such as actual purchasing behavior, to more fully understand the effects of delays in today’s Web environment.
A general review is presented of the worldwide evolution of ramjet propulsion since the Wright brothers first turned man’s imagination to fly into a practical reality.
A perspective of the technological developments from subsonic to hypersonic flight speeds is provided to allow an appreciation for the advances made internationally from the early 1900s to current times. Ramjet, scramjet, and mixed-cycle engine types, and their operation and rationale for use are considered. The development history and principal contributing development programs are reviewed. Major airbreathing technologies that had substantial impact on the maturation of ramjet propulsion and enabled engine designs to mature to their current state are identified. The general state of flight-demonstrated technology is summarized and compared with the technology base of 1980. The current status of ramjet/scramjet technology is identified.
Ramjet and scramjet propulsion technology has matured dramatically over the years in support of both military and space access applications, yet many opportunities remain to challenge future generations of explorers.
T.A. undertook this study to determine the costs and benefits of audible car alarms in the nation’s densest urban environment and to map out a strategy for banning audible car alarms in the five boroughs of New York City. Summary of Findings:
CAR ALARMSCOSTNEW YORK $623$4002003 TO $779$5002003MILLIONPER YEAR: The average New York City resident pays a car alarm “Noise Tax” of approximately $156$1002003 to $187$1202003 per year. Added up, car alarms cost New Yorkers between $623$4002003 and $779$5002003 million per year in public health costs, lost productivity, decreased property value, and diminished quality of life.
Car alarms are a substantial and costly public health problem. The type of noise produced by car alarms boosts stress hormones and has been linked to cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal illnesses, psychological problems and unhealthy fetal development in a number of studies over the last 30 years.
Car alarms hurt New York City’s kids. Children who are exposed to the type of noise produced by car alarms have been found to have more problems with reading, motivation, and scholastic aptitude.
Car alarms destroy civility and quality of life. US Census data from 2001 show that traffic noise and car alarms are a primary reason why families leave American cities.
AUDIBLECAR ALARMSDO NOTWORK: Manufacturers, installers, insurers, criminologists, police, and thieves all say that car alarms are ineffective at stopping car theft. They simply do not work.
A 1997 analysis of insurance-claims data from 73 million vehicles concludes that cars with alarms “show no overall reduction in theft losses” compared to cars without alarms. GM, Ford, and other auto-makers have begun to phase out factory installations of car alarms, calling the devices mere “noisemakers.”
People don’t respond to car alarms because the vast majority are false. Authorities estimate that 95% to 99% of all car alarms are false. The Progressive Insurance Company found that fewer than 1% of respondents say they would call the police upon hearing a car alarm.
The professionalization of car theft has made alarms obsolete. In the past 20 years, car theft has evolved from a juvenile pastime into a $12.77$8.22003 billion a year business. 80% of cars are stolen by organized crime. Alarms do not deter the pros.
THEREARE MANY GOOD ALTERNATIVESTO CARALARMS: There are numerous inexpensive and effective automobile security products on the market today. If audible alarms were made illegal, car owners would switch to more effective devices.
Brake locks are inexpensive (about $78$502003) and difficult to defeat.
Personal car alarm pagers buzz a vehicle’s owner when a car is disturbed rather than annoying an entire neighborhood.
Lojack uses global positioning satellites to keep track of vehicles and often leads police to the thieves’ chop shops.
Passive immobilizers have reduced theft rates of some car models by as much as 77%.
THE CITY CANLEGALLYBAN CAR ALARMS: New York City law currently limits audible alarms to three minutes of noise and bans the use of motion sensors, the technology responsible for most false alarms. These laws are ineffective and mostly unenforced.
T.A. legal analysis concludes that the City of New York has the authority to ban the sale, use, or installation of audible motor vehicle alarms.
City Council members introduced a bill in 2000 to ban the sale and installation of car alarms in New York City. The bill is currently buried in the City Council Committee on Environmental Protection and has never received a public hearing.
Insiders say that a ban on car alarms is being prevented by City Council members who are afraid to take away the 5% discount on comprehensive coverage (less than $31$202003 per year on average) that some car owners receive for having alarms in their vehicles.
RECOMMENDATIONS: Ban audible car alarms in New York City.
Moreover, Benway (1998) showed that extremely colorful and obvious banners tend to be ignored by users. When participants in this study were asked to find specific information on a web page, the information was not found if it was embedded in a banner. Benway consequently named this phenomenon “banner blindness.” Benway also found that banners located at the top of the page (away from other links), tended to be ignored more often than banners located lower down the page (closer to other important links). This finding is supported by another study which showed a 77% increased click-through rate for advertisements placed 1⁄3 of the way down the page (Athenia Assoc., 1997).
…In our study, we were curious to simply explore how much users remember about a web page after viewing it—in particular, we were interested in investigating user memory of banner advertisements:
How well can users’ recall a banner advertisement on a web page?
How well can users’ recognize a banner advertisement on a web page?
Does animation affect user recall or recognition of an advertising banner?
…Very few participants were able to complete both the recognition and recall tasks correctly. Only 3 (9%) of participants were able to correctly recall both advertisements, recognize both companies, and correctly recall and recognize the state in which they were presented. On the other hand, participants who were unable to recall anything for either company banner or correctly indicate the animation state of the banner (40%) had a surprisingly high recognition rate of 79% for two correctly recognized ads. Results also show that of the 26% who recognized only one ad, the banner recognized was typically presented in the animated state. In other words, 7 out of 9 times the single banner correctly recognized was in the animated state. This indicates that animation may have some effect on recognition.
Results from this study indicate that recognition of the banner advertisements were fairly high (74% for both banners). In addition, about half of the participants were able to recall at least seeing an advertisement on the page—and many of these actually recalled the name of the company. These results show that most users did notice and remember the banners even though they were not part of the search tasks they were performing.
Sandia National Laboratories(SNL) convened an expert panel to develop design characteristics forpermanent markers and to judge the efficacy of the markers in deterring inadvertent human intrusion in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant(WIPP). The WIPP, located in southeastern New Mexico, is designed todemonstrate the safe disposal of transuranic (TRU) radioactive wastesgenerated by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) defenseprograms. The DOE must evaluate WIPP compliance with the EnvironmentalProtection Agency (EPA) regulation “Environmental Standards for the Management and Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel, High-Level and Transuranic Radioactive Wastes (40 CFR Part 191, Subpart E)”; this EPA regulation requires: “Disposal sites shall be designated by the most permanent markers, records, and other passive institutional controls practicable to indicate the dangers of the wastes and their location” (Federal Register 50; 38086). The period of regulatory concern is 10,000 years.
The expert panel identified basic principles to guide current and future marker development efforts: (1) the site must be marked, (2) message(s) must be truthful and informative, (3) multiple components within a marker system, (4) multiple means of communication (eg., language, pictographs, scientific diagrams), (5) multiple levels of complexity within individual messages on individual marker system elements, (6) use of materials with little recycle value, and (7) international effort to maintain knowledge of the locations and contents of nuclear waste repositories. The efficacy of the markers in deterring inadvertent human intrusion was estimated to decrease with time, with the probability function varying with the mode of intrusion (who is intruding and for what purpose) and the level of technological development of the society. The development of a permanent, passive marker system capable of surviving and remaining interpretable for 10,000 years will require further study prior to implementation.
[Keywords: management of radioactive and non-radioactive wastes from nuclear facilities, nuclear fuel cycle and fuel materials, WIPP, human intrusion, alpha-bearing wastes, underground disposal, radiation hazards, communications, safety, recommendations, design, waste disposal and storage, health and safety]
Since the early 1980’s, all major semiconductor manufacturers invoked the “no-cosmetics” policy. This had some severe psychological effects on the female workforce which comprised approximately 90% of the wafer fab employees. In the interest of business (as well as wafer yield), this policy was upheld. This paper discusses some of the psychological responses by the fab operators. Several experiments were performed which indicated that cosmetics presented a source of particulate contamination but at the same time cosmetics can prevent skin flaking. However, the use of cosmetics by both men and women could be detrimental to the cleanroom even when the personnel may not actually be wearing the cosmetics in the clean room. This paper is to raise the level of awareness to the problem of cosmetics in the clean room and to offer some clean room protocol procedures that can minimize and possibly eliminate much of the human contaminants. Cosmetics in the clean room is not restricted to the female workforce. Men are also guilty of using cosmetics while in the clean room. This paper examines this problem and suggests cleanroom guidelines.
Background: The space program requires 100% electronic uptime on all major systems. In 1985 one of the shuttle missions was scrubbed because mission guidelines did not allow lift off with only 4 of 5 computers operational. The cost of the aborted mission was in excess of $29$101985 million and the cost of the removal and replacement of the defective component was approximately $1,461,679$500,0001985. Failure analysis of the shuttle component found corrosion of the semiconductor metallization as a result of human contamination (spittle, in this particular instance).14 Similar accounts are described by FAA computers and banking computers failing for similar defects in their CPU IC’s.
The space shuttle incidence has caused NASA and FAA to personally audit prime semiconductor contractors. They found that 1–3% of all semiconductor devices had some form of human contamination. Since human-related contamination is more of a reliability issue, military specs are now in place to require all microcircuits to be chemically analyzed for any on-die contaminants prior to sealing.
…The second task was to develop experiments that could be repeated as often as necessary to illustrate that cosmetics were a serious source of contamination. The experiment was simply having operators with and without cosmetics performing simple wafer handling chores: wafer inspections at an inspection station next to the Aeronca particle monitor. This test was repeated several times per week, using different operators with different skin types. Figures 2 and 3 summarize the results of this testing. Both men and women were tested across all 3 fabs. In Figure 2, women of all skin types generated more particles when not wearing makeup. This would seem normal since nearly all cosmetics (or, more specifically, make-up) has a moisturizer base which keeps the skin less dry in the harsh conditions of the clean room. The one exception is that women classified as having oily skin flaked about the same, with or without cosmetics. This is because the skin will not slough off as much since the skin has its own built in moisturizing system, called keratin17. Similarly, women with dark skin tend to have less dryness because of the excess skin pigmentation which also acts as a moisturizer.
…Even cosmetics that are used to protect the skin find their way to the microcircuit (or other products relating to clean rooms). In an unrelated experiment in which Advanced Micro Devices was in the process of developing a new site-wide wafer fab protocol spec, the training department began dry-runs of the series of classes involving the new, more rigid clean room procedures. One of the classes involved selected wafer fab operators and the purpose was to demonstrate the proper method to put on the clean room attire. However, the gloves were treated with a phosphorescent powder (the same type used by the police to “lift” fingerprints). Some of the older operators could feel the powder but they passed it off as being part of a new style of glove. After all the participants were in their proper clean room attire (including the gloves), the trainer discussed various protocol rules with the operators. About a half hour later the trainer informed everyone that the gloves had been lightly dusted. One by one, each person stood in front of a full length mirror while the trainer scanned their body with a black light. With few exceptions, there were yellow fingerprints allover their smocks as well on unprotected areas such as their faces and arms. This test was to illustrate that human contamination can find its way to the work area even with all possible protective measures in force.
…Many of the contaminants in cosmetics are harmless to the wafer fab. But as this paper has illustrated, most cosmetics of all types contain chemicals and compounds that can be devastating to semiconductor processing. The EDS illustrations of Figures 4 through 9 show an abundance of easily ionized elements with low 1st ionization potential. The lower this potential, the easier it is for that element to combine with other elements. Also, Table 1 shows the common elements in body fluids (or skin tissue) which also have low first ionization potential. As in the case of the space shuttle where the defect was latent, that is, it occurred after the device had been tested and was in the field, many of the defects caused by cosmetics can also be latent. It is these defects for which we have more concern. The immediate defects are usually caught at the manufacturer’s facility or even at the subsystem level. Most of the highly ionized metallic elements can cause immediate damage such as metal shorts, breakdowns in the oxides, threshold shifts, and various resistance changes.
…To illustrate the effects of cosmetics on the parametric values of the semiconductors, several wafers were contaminated with after shave, talc, eye liner, lipstick, blush, mascara residue, moisturizer, and skin flakes/hair…These are just a few of the types of parameter changes that can occur when cosmetics (and cosmetics on skin) come in contact with a semiconductor device in the clean room.
Separation of ethanol-water and methanol-water mixtures has been accomplished experimentally using a horizontal zero-gravity distillation column. A countercurrent flow between liquid and vapor phases was established utilizing the principle of the heat pipe. The concentration profile along the column has been investigated with various product rates. A high degree of separation was achieved in a relatively short column lined with capillary wicks. The flexible column orientation can also be a tremendous advantage as compared to the necessarily vertical operation of the conventional distillation columns.
Scope: Substantial improvements have been made recently to increase the efficiency of continuous contact distillation. A wetted-wall column has generally been considered to improve its efficiency. However, poor wetting characteristics are still a problem of such a system. Swathed glass tubes, ground glass tubes, and stainless steel mesh tubes have been used as wetted-wall columns with improved wetting properties so that more effective distillation might be achieved (in the range of low reflux rate)
In order to obtain a uniform wetting surface and an enhanced vapor-liquid contacting surface, materials with capillary action, such as wicks and screen meshes, can be used for the distillation. All conventional distillation columns use gravitational force or centrifugal force (eg., the British ICI column) to return the condensed liquid to the evaporator. By employing materials with capillary action, however, the condensed liquid can be transported back to the evaporator in the absence of or even against gravity. Thus the capillary action provides flexibility in column orientation.
The scope of the present study is to investigate the feasibility of microdistillation (using short columns) in the absence of gravity (or in a horizontal position). Both total reflux conditions and steady state with product removal conditions are studied for separation of binary mixtures. As a possible application in outer space, zero-gravity distillation could be used to separate liquid mixtures for recycle of the materials used.
Conclusions and Substance: A new unit operation has been developed for a horizontal distillation column. Experiments were carried out for binary liquid systems using a glass tube and fiberglass as wick material. The temperature of the evaporator was kept just below the boiling temperature of the liquid mixture and an atmospheric pressure was maintained in the vapor phase. Mixture samples were analyzed to determine the concentration profiles along a total reflux column and a steady state column with product removal.
It has been demonstrated that both the most and the least volatile components of a binary mixture of any composition can be separated as highly concentrated products without using gravity forces. In contrast to the tall tower and the vertical operation of conventional distillation, this device permits a short column to achieve the same degree of separation in a horizontal position.
A numerical simulation was developed to obtain the concentration profile along the column. A good agreement is shown between the theoretical and experimental profiles. The performance was characterized by the number of transfer units and height of a transfer unit.
Unintentional deaths from suffocation and strangulation account for about 20% of all nontransport-related infant and child fatalities in the United States. In the late 1950s, some preventive countermeasures were introduced to reduce the number of deaths resulting from refrigerator or freezer entrapment. A few years later, countermeasures were introduced to prevent deaths resulting from suffocation by plastic bags, inhumation, and mechanical strangulation from wedging in infant cribs. For three of these major causes of suffocation and strangulation deaths among infants and children (refrigerator or freezer entrapment, suffocation by plastic bag, and inhumation at construction sites), there appears to have been a statistically-significant decline in incidence; however, there is no evidence of a statistically-significant reduction in deaths from mechanical strangulation in cribs. The impact of current countermeasures is discussed, and some suggestions for new or modified approaches are made.
Figure 3: Rate of suffocation deaths in refrigerators or freezers per million children and ratio of fatal entrapment events per million units sold, California, 1960–1981
Figure 3 shows death rates per million children from suffocation in refrigerators and freezers in California from 1960 through 1981. The rates were high in the early 1960s, then declined, then increased in 1966–1968. Since then, the death rate has declined statistically-significantly (p = 0.05).
The ratio of suffocation events per million refrigerators and freezers sold in California is also displayed in figure 3. Since 37% of entrapments in refrigerators or freezers involved more than 1 child (table 3), it was appropriate to determine the ratio of events of entrapment in refrigerators or freezers (regardless of the number of children involved) to the number of units sold. As seen in figure 3, the pattern is about the same as for death rates; that is, there is a peak ratio in the mid-to-late 1960s followed by a steady decline (p = 0.025) through 1981. It should be noted that the approximate lifespan of a refrigerator built in the 1950s was 15 years, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. This may account for the lag before the decline in the incidence rate begins.
Optical systems which, when rotated, produce a rotation of an image about the optical axis have been known and used for a long time. Information on such systems is sparse, however, and widely scattered. This paper discusses image rotation devices in general terms, and then attempts to collect together the more commonly used devices and to present comparative information on them, in order to provide a convenient reference source for optical designers. In addition a number of lesser known and novel arrangements are described.
Behavior of young children in a situation simulating entrapment in refrigerators was studied in order to develop standards for inside releasing devices, in accordance with Public Law 930 of the 84th Congress [H. R. 11969: To require certain safety devices on household refrigerators shipped in interstate commerce. Approved Aug. 2, 1956. Public Law No. 930.].
Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result of observation of behavior.
Success in escaping was dependent on the device, a child’s age and size and his behavior. It was also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education attained by mother and father combined. Three major types of behavior were observed: (1) inaction, with no effort or only slight effort to get out (24%); (2) purposeful effort to escape (39%); (3) violent action both directed toward escape and undirected (37%).
Some of the children made no outcry (6% of the 2-year-olds and 50% of the 5-year-olds). Not all children pushed. When tested with devices where pushing was appropriate, 61% used this technique. Some children had curious twisting and twining movements of the fingers or clenching of the hands. When presented with a gadget that could be grasped, some (18%) pulled, a few (9%) pushed, but 40% tried to turn it like a doorknob.
Time of confinement in the enclosure was short for most children. Three-fourths released themselves or were released in less than 3 minutes; one-fourth in less than 10 seconds. Of those who let themselves out, one-half did so in less than 10 seconds. One-third of the children emerged unruffled, about half were upset but could be comforted easily, and a small group (11%) required some help to become calm.
Forces exerted in any horizontal direction by the children for whom such records were obtained ranged up to 29 pounds. The average was about 10 pounds for 3-year-olds and about 21 pounds for 5-year-olds. For reasons not known, the 2-year-old group exerted a slightly greater average force than did the 3-year-old group.
More than one-fourth of the children exerted in excess of 18 pounds and almost two-thirds in excess of 12 pounds.
Data from these experiments proved valuable in developing standards for release devices (as required by Public Law 930), which are expected to be effective for self-release by a large percentage of, but not all, entrapped children. An important result of the behavior study was the finding that, when entrapped, children most often try to escape either by pushing on the door through which they entered the enclosure, or by manipulating a knob release as they would a doorknob. Relatively few children pushed against the back, sides or ceiling of the enclosure.
A follow-up study of 96 test subjects, 8 months after the tests, by interviews with the mothers showed very little obvious residual effect. Reversion to infantile behavior was not found. A number of children still talked about the tests, some with pleasure, a few with resentment. Mothers were not aware of more than ephemeral emotional upset in any of the children.
Reasons for the low level of anxiety engendered by the tests may lie in the precautions taken and in factors inherent in the situation; the parents were not involved in the incident, which enabled them to be calm and casual with the children.
1946-walker.pdf: “Secrets by the thousands”{#linkBibliography-magazine)-1946 .docMetadata doi=“economics/copyright”}, Charles Lester Walker (Harper's Magazine) (1946-10-01; backlinks):
Someone wrote to Wright Field recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets, that many were now on public sale, and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered: “Sorry—but that would be fifty tons”. Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. ..It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they, very likely, practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany. One Washington official has called it “the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country’s brain-power.”
What did we find? You’d like some outstanding examples from the war secrets collection?
…the tiniest vacuum tube I had ever seen. It was about half thumb-size. Notice it is heavy porcelain—not glass—and thus virtually indestructible. It is a thousand watt—one-tenth the size of similar American tubes…“That’s Magnetophone tape”, he said. “It’s plastic, metallized on one side with iron oxide. In Germany that supplanted phonograph recordings. A day’s Radio program can be magnetized on one reel. You can demagnetize it, wipe it off and put a new program on at any time. No needle; so absolutely no noise or record wear. An hour-long reel costs fifty cents.”…He showed me then what had been two of the most closely-guarded, technical secrets of the war: the infra-red device which the Germans invented for seeing at night, and the remarkable diminutive generator which operated it. German cars could drive at any, speed in a total blackout, seeing objects clear as day two hundred meters ahead. Tanks with this device could spot; targets two miles away. As a sniper scope it enabled German riflemen to pick off a man in total blackness…We got, in addition, among these prize secrets, the technique and the machine for making the world’s most remarkable electric condenser…The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Silicate Research had discovered how to make it and—something which had always eluded scientists—in large sheets. We know now, thanks to FIAT teams, that ingredients of natural mica were melted in crucibles of carbon capable of taking 2,350 degrees of heat, and then—this was the real secret—cooled in a special way…“This is done on a press in one operation. It is called the ‘cold extrusion’ process. We do it with some soft, splattery metals. But by this process the Germans do it with cold steel! Thousands of parts now made as castings or drop forgings or from malleable iron can now be made this way. The production speed increase is a little matter of one thousand%.” This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries.
…In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations, that American textile men are a little dizzy. But of all the industrial secrets, perhaps, the biggest windfall came from the laboratories and plants of the great German cartel, I. G. Farbenindustrie. Never before, it is claimed, was there such a store-house of secret information. It covers liquid and solid fuels, metallurgy, synthetic rubber, textiles, chemicals, plastics. drugs, dyes. One American dye authority declares: “It includes the production know-how and the secret formulas for over fifty thousand dyes. Many of them are faster and better than ours. Many are colors we were never able to make. The American dye industry will be advanced at least ten years.”
…Milk pasteurization by ultra-violet light…how to enrich the milk with vitamin D…cheese was being made—“good quality Hollander and Tilsiter”—by a new method at unheard-of speed…a continuous butter making machine…The finished product served as both animal and human food. Its caloric value is four times that of lean meat, and it contains twice as much protein. The Germans also had developed new methods of preserving food by plastics and new, advanced refrigeration techniques…German medical researchers had discovered a way to produce synthetic blood plasma.
…When the war ended, we now know, they had 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of production or development, using every known kind of remote control and fuse: radio, radar, wire, continuous wave, acoustics, infra-red, light beams, and magnetics, to name some; and for power, all methods of jet propulsion for either subsonic or supersonic speeds. Jet propulsion had even been applied to helicopter flight…Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years.
It came with a slide-on case that ingeniously fastens to the back plate of the typewriter with rubber straps. Unfortunately, over time these would often dry out, crack, and break off. This example still has them intact, but given its age, it’s not a good idea to rely on them to carry it around!
The body is made largely of shiny ABS plastic, while the case has a heavy matte texture, and some key structural pieces, such as the ends of the platen, are of painted metal. The bright orange caps of the ribbon reels perk up the actual mechanism, something which in other typewriters is typically hidden from view…The large fold-out handle on the back of the machine (what becomes the top when carrying it in its case) overtly invites picking up the Valentine and taking it along for a joy ride, much as the handle on the first Mac signified the same intent. The case itself was custom-designed to match the aesthetic, unlike most typewriter cases of the day, which were nondescript black or gray plastic, or perhaps semi-soft vinyl. This is another example of Sottsass’ thinking about the whole user experience (as we would call it today).
…The Valentine was conceived as competitor to the inexpensive units coming on to the market from Japan. Sottsass had some interesting ideas about how to simplify and lower the cost of the machine, such as not having lower case letters (EVERYTHINGWOULDBE SHOUTINGIN UPPERCASE!), removing the bell that went “ding” at the end of the line, and using an inexpensive plastic for the case. Olivetti rejected all these as too radical, and used the higher-quality ABS plastic for the case, which pushed the price up higher than Sottsass had wanted.
“[F]or use in any place except in an office, so as not to remind anyone of the monotonous working hours, but rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays in the country or to provide a highly colored object on a table in a studio apartment. An anti-machine machine, built around the commonest mass-produced mechanism, the works inside any typewriter, it may also seem to be an unpretentious toy.”
