Thin is In: Just Not for Software
October 20, 2019
Editor’s Note: This item is neither search nor cyber crime. DarkCyber found it interesting.
Scientific studies and research cannot be trusted depending on who conducts the study and who sponsors it, such as a big pharmaceutical company. Some organizations, however, do release unbiased studies that are simply the facts and research observations. The Guardian reports on a study that proves exercise does help older humans, “Older Adults Can Boost Longevity ‘With Just A Little Exercise.’”
According to the study, even a little activity such as washing the dishes, moving from one part oft house to another, and even walking to the water closet fends off death. Sedentary lifestyles have been proven through multiple studies to increase the chance for many diseases, including heart failure. A Norwegian study backs up the previous confirmed research, but this specific study concentrates on the elderly.
“It is important for elderly people, who might not be able to do much moderate-intensity activity, that just moving around and doing light-intensity [activity] [will have] strong effects and is beneficial,” said Ulf Ekelund, a professor and first author of the study at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. However, the study finds that there is more “bang for your buck” if you engage in intense activity compared with light activity. A short stint of intense activity is viewed as beneficial as much longer periods of lesser activity.”
The Norwegian study released by the BMJ followed 36,000 people for five to six years with an average age of sixty-three years. During the study there were a total of 2,149 deaths. Participants were divided into four groups based on their active time, risk of death, with other factors taken into consideration such as sex, body-mass, socioeconomic status, and BMI. Participants who had the most intense physical activity, about 380 minutes a day, were 62% lower death rate than other groups.
The death rate increased for less physical activity in the other test groups. It is better to be physical than sitting around all day. No one messed with this study, including governments and big pharmaceutical companies. We need more tests conducted in this manner.
Now about that 65 megabyte download for Google Lens?
Whitney Grace, October 20, 2019
Understanding Social Engineering
September 6, 2019
“Quiet desperation”? Nope, just surfing on psychological predispositions. Social engineering leads to a number of fascinating security lapses. For a useful analysis of how pushing buttons can trigger some interesting responses, navigate to “Do You Love Me? Psychological Characteristics of Romance Scam Victims.” The write up provides some useful insights. We noted this statement from the article:
a susceptibility to persuasion scale has been developed with the intention to predict likelihood of becoming scammed. This scale includes the following items: premeditation, consistency, sensation seeking, self-control, social influence, similarity, risk preferences, attitudes toward advertising, need for cognition, and uniqueness. The current work, therefore, suggests some merit in considering personal dispositions might predict likelihood of becoming scammed.
Cyberpsychology at work.
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2019
Memes and an App Apocalypse?
November 5, 2018
It used to be all about the apps and their versatility, but now apps are clunky especially when you want to make a meme. Memes are one of the Internet’s currencies, a good meme can hook a ton of views, hits, subscribers, and potentially go viral. Going viral ranks a meme’s longevity and can even go down in Internet infamy. Making memes are not as simple as one would think, take a look at The Atlantic’s article, “What’s The Best App For Making Memes?”
The answer: none. App meme makers available in the Apple App Store used to be a useful tool, but these apps have not been maintained and do not make the quality memes now in demand. The only time these apps are used are when they are being made fun of. The current meme creation app offerings are very poor, some meme creators rely on their computers instead of their mobile devices.
There is a high demand and someone can make money if a meme app was designed correctly:
“Recognizing this need, some apps have emerged in recent months to corner the market. But building the killer meme app is incredibly challenging. Many memers say that for one app to have everything they’d need, it would have to incorporate advanced photo- and video-editing tools and a highly precise eraser. And it would have to be flexible enough to adapt to new formats in real time.”
Memes are not one size fits all, however, and anything that works for one individual is fine. Memes are jokes and casual entertainment for quick Internet consumption. The goal is that memes generate laughter for an instant, then you one onto the next one. Whatever process that works for making them is fine.
Whitney Grace, November 5, 2018
Speed Shifting Cultural Gears
July 18, 2018
Social scientists have often speculated what percentage of a population must object to a behavior before that behavior is seen as abnormal (sexual harassment in the workplace, for example). Due to the complexity of the issue, it has been a difficult statistic to pin down; conclusions have ranged from 10% to 40% of the population. Classically, conventional wisdom has called for an even higher tipping point of 51%. According to a blog post from the U. of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, “Research Finds Tipping Point for Large-Scale Social Change,” we now have a more accurate answer. We learn:
“In this study, ‘Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social Convention,’ coauthored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill, Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a norm had been established, a group of confederates — a coalition of activists that varied in size — then pushed for a change to the norm.,,, When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single person accounted for the difference between success and failure. The researchers also tested the strength of their results by increasing the payments people got for adhering to the prevailing norm. Despite doubling and tripling the amount of money for sticking with the established behavior, Centola and his colleagues found that a minority group could still overturn the group norm.”
The real world being what it is, the researchers allow for the need to adjust that 25% target according to circumstances. The study’s lead author Damon Centola says his team’s research can inform political activism online, or can empower organizations to engineer their environments to “push people in pro-social directions” through purposely shifting their underlying beliefs. Interesting observations; see the article for more details.
Cynthia Murrell, July 18, 2018
Silicon Valley Hubris
November 1, 2017
Are today’s big tech companies leading our culture down foolish paths? Writer Scott Hartley at Quartz declares, “Silicon Valley Is Suffering from an Icarus Complex.” After briefly summarizing the story of Daedalus and Icarus, Hartley extrapolates that, today, the same examples of hubris would be cast as a pair of tech entrepreneurs, lauded for their bold wing-building initiative and attracting eager investors. He observes:
The Greeks distinguished between craftsmanship, known as technae, and knowledge, known as espisteme. But today we conflate doing with knowing: We believe that doers are wise, when perhaps they are only clever. Silicon Valley is so obsessed with crafting new wings—to harness the power of the Gods and tame the heavens—that it has overlooked the notion that cleverness is not necessarily wisdom. The ability to harness technology alone may be clever, but it isn’t wise unless it is contextualized within a greater human need. For example, someone might design the cleverest new system to optimize ad delivery—but few of us would call such an entrepreneur sagacious or wise. We might justly lionize them for their capitalistic prowess or for their ability to abstract value from the ever-tightening mechanics of how pixels are dangled before us like candy—but we wouldn’t call them a ‘genius.’ We require great technologists and clever doers, but we require those who question, probe, and seek to contextualize our advances in equal measure.
Yes. Just because we can “reinvent every human process with something mechanistic,” as he puts it, does not mean we should. We need more wise minds to consider what technology goals are worthy, and fewer who would pursue anything they can devise to make a buck, regardless of the consequences to society as a whole.
Cynthia Murrell, November 1, 2017
Crowd Wisdom Adjusted to Measure Information Popularity
June 2, 2017
The article on ScienceDaily titled In Crowd Wisdom, the ‘Surprisingly Popular’ Answer Can Trump Ignorance of the Masses conveys the latest twist on crowd wisdom, or efforts to answer questions by asking many people rather than specialists. Unsurprisingly, crowd wisdom often is not very wise at all, but rather favors the most popular information. The article uses the example of asking various populations whether Philadelphia is the capital of Pennsylvania. Those who answered yes also believed that others would agree, making it a popular answer. The article goes on to explain,
Meanwhile, a certain number of respondents knew that the correct answer is “no.” But these people also anticipated that many other people would incorrectly think the capital is Philadelphia, so they also expected a very high percentage of “yes” answers. Thus, almost everyone expected other people to answer “yes,” but the actual percentage of people who did was significantly lower. “No” was the surprisingly popular answer because it exceeded expectations of what the answer would be.
By measuring the perceived popularity of a given answer, researchers saw errors reduced by over 20% compared to straightforward majority votes, and by almost 25% compared to confidence-weighted votes. As in the case of the Philadelphia question above, those who predicted that they were in the minority deserve the most attention because they had enough information to expect that many people would incorrectly vote yes. If you take away nothing else from this, let it be that Harrisburg, not Philly, is the capital of Pennsylvania.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 2, 2017
Mobile App Usage on the Rise from 34% of Consumer Time in 2013 to 50% in 2016
February 24, 2017
Bad news, Google. The article titled Smartphone Apps Now Account for Half the Time Americans Spend Online on TechCrunch reveals that mobile applications are still on the rise. Throw in tablet apps and the total almost hits 60%. Google is already working to maintain relevancy with its In Apps feature for Androids, which searches inside apps themselves. The article explains,
This shift towards apps is exactly why Google has been working to integrate the “web of apps” into its search engine, and to make surfacing the information hidden in apps something its Google Search app is capable of handling. Our app usage has grown not only because of the ubiquity of smartphones, but also other factors – like faster speeds provided by 4G LTE networks, and smartphones with larger screens that make sitting at a desktop less of a necessity.
What apps are taking up the most of our time? Just the ones you would expect, such as Facebook, Messenger, YouTube, and Google Maps. But Pokemon Go is the little app that could, edging out Snapchat and Pinterest in the ranking of the top 15 mobile apps. According to a report from Senor Tower, Pokemon Go has gone beyond 180 million daily downloads. The growth of consumer time spent on apps is expected to keep growing, but comScore reassuringly states that desktops will also remain a key part of consumer’s lives for many years to come.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 24, 2017
Tips for Finding Information on Reddit.com
February 23, 2017
I noted “The Right Way to Search Posts on Reddit.” I find it interesting that the Reddit content is not comprehensively indexed by Google. One does stumble across this type of results list in the Google if one knows how to use Google’s less than obvious search syntax. Where’s bad stuff on Reddit? Google will reveal some links of interest to law enforcement professionals. For example:
Bing does a little better with certain Reddit content. To be fair, neither service is doing a bang up job indexing social media content but lists a fraction of the Google index pointers. For example:
So how does one search Reddit.com the “right way.” I noted this paragraph:
As of 2015, Reddit had accumulated over 190 million posts across 850,000 different subreddits (or communities), plus an additional 1.7 billion comments across all of those posts. That’s an incredible amount of content, and all of it can still be accessed on Reddit.
I would point out that the “all” is not accurate. There is a body of content deleted by moderators, including some of Reddit.com’s top dogs, which has been removed from the site.
Reddit offers some search syntax to help the researcher locate what is indexed by Reddit.com’s search system. The write up pointed to these strings:
- title:[text] searches only post titles.
- author:[username] searches only posts by the given username.
- selftext:[text] searches only the body of posts that were made as self-posts.
- subreddit:[name] searches only posts that were submitted to the given subreddit community.
- url:[text] searches only the URL of non-self-post posts.
- site:[text] searches only the domain name of non-self-post posts.
- nsfw:yes or nsfw:no to filter results based on whether they were marked as NSFW or not.
- self:yes or self:no to filter results based on whether they were self-posts or not.
The article contains a handful of other search commands; for example, Boolean and and or. How does one NOT out certain words. Use the minus sign. The word not is apparently minus sign appropriate for the discerning Reddit.com searcher.
Stephen E Arnold, February 23, 2017
Upgraded Social Media Monitoring
February 20, 2017
Analytics are catching up to content. In a recent ZDNet article, Digimind partners with Ditto to add image recognition to social media monitoring, we are reminded images reign supreme on social media. Between Pinterest, Snapchat and Instagram, messages are often conveyed through images as opposed to text. Capitalizing on this, and intelligence software company Digimind has announced a partnership with Ditto Labs to introduce image-recognition technology into their social media monitoring software called Digimind Social. We learned,
The Ditto integration lets brands identify the use of their logos across Twitter no matter the item or context. The detected images are then collected and processed on Digimind Social in the same way textual references, articles, or social media postings are analysed. Logos that are small, obscured, upside down, or in cluttered image montages are recognised. Object and scene recognition means that brands can position their products exactly where there customers are using them. Sentiment is measured by the amount of people in the image and counts how many of them are smiling. It even identifies objects such as bags, cars, car logos, or shoes.
It was only a matter of time before these types of features emerged in social media monitoring. For years now, images have been shown to increase engagement even on platforms that began focused more on text. Will we see more watermarked logos on images? More creative ways to visually identify brands? Both are likely and we will be watching to see what transpires.
Megan Feil, February 20, 2017
Give a Problem, Take a Problem
February 3, 2017
An article at the Telegraph, “Employees Are Faster and More Creative When Solving Other People’s Problems,” suggests innovative ways to coax creative solutions from workers. Writer Daniel H. Pink describes three experiments, performed by New York University’s Evan Polman and Cornell’s Kyle Emich. The researchers found that, when posed with hypothetical scenarios, participants devised more creative solutions when problems were framed as being someone else’s. But why? Pink writes:
Polman and Emich build upon existing psychological research showing that when we think of situations or individuals that are distant – in space, time, or social connection – we think of them in the abstract. But when those things are close – near us physically, about to happen, or standing beside us – we think about them concretely. Over the years, social scientists have found that abstract thinking leads to greater creativity. That means that if we care about innovation we need to be more abstract and therefore more distant. But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. We draw closer rather than step back. That’s a mistake, Polman and Emich suggest. ‘That decisions for others are more creative than decisions for the self… should prove of considerable interest to negotiators, managers, product designers, marketers and advertisers, among many others,’ they write.
The article goes on to supply five practical suggestions this research has for business. For one, organizations can recruit independent directors to bring in more objective points of view. Pink also suggests keeping firms loosely structured, and bringing together peers from different fields to exchange ideas. On the individual level, he advises finding a “problem-swapping partner” with whom you can trade perspectives. Finally, workers can create psychological distance between themselves and their projects by imagining they’re helping out someone else.
Pink acknowledges a couple of caveats to this approach. For one, many tasks actually do require concrete thinking and laser focus; it is important to recognize them. Also, the business world is not currently structured to take advantage of this quirk of the human psyche. The article points to the growth of crowd-sourcing techniques as evidence that factor may change. Perhaps… but group think brings its own issues, like the potential for discounting experience and specialized skill sets, for example. To whom shall we turn for a fresh perspective on that problem?
Cynthia Murrell, February 3, 2017
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