Thursday, December 21, 2023

When Algorithms Attack - Thought Hygiene and Social Behavior in the Digital Age


Here's some things about how algorithms and social behavior interact, starting with a good background on how we as individuals treat bad information:

No simple answer for why people believe in conspiracy theories
Jun 2023, phys.org
"Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks—a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture," said Bowes. "Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment."
  • 170 studies, 158,000 participants from the United States, UK and Poland, measuring motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.
  • overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others
  • people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships
  • participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories (Sept. 11), rather than an abstract theory in general (governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power)
  • people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works
  • The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking
  • may be related to recent theory about social identity motives and conspiracy theories 
via Emory University: The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates, Psychological Bulletin (2023). DOI: 10.1037/bul0000392

Image credit: AI Art - Is Your Data Under the Weather - 2023


Perception of Russia-Ukraine conflict linked to endorsement of false news about adversary
Mar 2023, phys.org
Analysis of the survey responses showed that participants who perceived a higher level of conflict between Ukraine and Russia were less likely to believe in and want to share the false stories about the European Union, but were more likely to endorse the false stories about Russia. Stories about Tanzania (a neutral control) were least likely to be endorsed.

These findings suggest that people's tendency to endorse false news does not depend simply on their group identity; it also depends on perceptions of the level of conflict between their group and another group. This implies that conflict de-escalation could help prevent the spread of misinformation.
via Leiden University in the Netherlands and Public Library of Science: Information battleground: Conflict perceptions motivate the belief in and sharing of misinformation about the adversary, PLoS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282308


Social media 'trust' or 'distrust' buttons could reduce spread of misinformation
Jun 2023, phys.org

(You mean like a "dislike" button?)
The addition of "trust" and "distrust" buttons on social media, alongside standard "like" buttons, could help to reduce the spread of misinformation, finds a new experimental study led by University College London (UCL) researchers.
via UUCL Psychology & Language Sciences, Max Planck UCL Center for Computational Psychiatry and Aging Research, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Laura K Globig et al, Changing the incentive structure of social media platforms to halt the spread of misinformation, eLife (2023). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.85767

Also: Valentina Vellani et al, The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation, Cognition (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105421


Controversy in Facebook posts linked to speed of spread among users
Jun 2023, phys.org

  • 57 million posts published across about 2 million Facebook pages and groups from 2018 to 2022. 
  • Posts that went viral were more likely to be associated with negative or controversial reactions among users, regardless of topic.
  • Posts that did not go viral were associated with more positive reactions.
via Sapienza Università di Roma: Etta G, Sangiorgio E, Di Marco N, Avalle M, Scala A, Cinelli M, et al. Characterizing engagement dynamics across topics on Facebook, PLoS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286150

Image credit: AI Art - Isometric Maze by Jesper Ejsing, Rhads, Makoto Shinkai Lois van Baarle, and Ilya Kuvshinov - 2022

Researchers build an AI system to identify social norm violations
Jul 2023, phys.org
Built the system using GPT-3, zero-shot text classification, and automatic rule discovery. The system used a binary of ten social emotions: competence, politeness, trust, discipline, caring, agreeableness, success, conformity, decency, and loyalty.

DARPA commissioned The Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program to create cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a Department of Defense operator's situational awareness and interactional effectiveness. Cross-cultural miscommunication not only derails negotiations, but also can be a contributing factor leading to war, according to DARPA's explanation of the rationale for the program.
via Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: Yair Neuman et al, AI for identifying social norm violation, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-35350-x


Sharing on Facebook reveals two very different news environments
Aug 2023, phys.org

Low-Cred
Here it is: "There's a little more nuance to what it takes to be a well-informed person. You can't just be reading multiple news stories. You have to be reading sources that are well known to be credible."
(I think we're having a problem with the "well-known" part; well-known by who? It gets even harder  when more and more of our online infodiets come from robots.)
  • 2 million online news stories that were shared at least 100 times by Facebook users from February 2017 to April 2019
  • both high- and low-credibility publishers tended to put out bursts of coverage at the same time -- but they often were about different topics
  • low-credibility publishers more often converged on stories about politics and the government
  • high-credibility publishers' topics ranged more widely
via Ohio State: Ceren Budak et al, Bursts of contemporaneous publication among high- and low-credibility online information providers, New Media & Society (2023). DOI: 10.1177/14614448231183617


Social media algorithms exploit how humans learn from their peers
Aug 2023, phys.org

They can't change to create a sense of community because that's not their purpose and doesn't yield profit.
Humans are biased to learn from others in a way that typically promotes cooperation and collective problem-solving, which is why they tend to learn more from individuals they perceive as a part of their ingroup and those they perceive to be prestigious. In addition, when learning biases were first evolving, morally and emotionally charged information was important to prioritize, as this information would be more likely to be relevant to enforcing group norms and ensuring collective survival.

In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content's accuracy or representativeness of a group's opinions.
This last part is great part because it sounds like how you have to talk about an alien race taking over the planet or a new parasite to wipe out the population -- 
"It's not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation. It's just that its goals are different."
via Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern: Algorithm-mediated social learning in online social networks, Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.06.008


No evidence linking Facebook adoption and negative well-being
Aug 2023, phys.org

According to the article below this, it doesn't matter because it's already broken, but also because nobody is going to believe this.
"largest independent scientific study ever conducted" (nearly a million people across 72 countries over 2008 to 2019)
Reasons -- "Much of the past research into social media use and well-being has been hampered by an exclusive focus on well-being data in the Global North and a reliance on inaccurate self-reports of social media engagement."
There was another study that says the positive effects are mediated by affluence, so that the wealthier the country the more negative the effects and vice versa? I don't see it here, but I think it just came out in the last few months. Also, and this isn't so much a swipe at the authors, but the state of affairs in general, that their first reference, where they introduce their "2.94 billion monthly active users" number, is sourced from quarterly earnings data from the company itself. We know private companies blackbox lots of their data, and that we can't use with confidence the numbers they give us (the public, or university researchers), and yet one of the base numbers of their whole calculation comes from the company, lowering the confidence of all that follows. 

via University of Oxford's Internet Institute: Matti Vuorre et al, Estimating the association between Facebook adoption and well-being in 72 countries, Royal Society Open Science (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.221451


Facebook's design makes it unable to control misinformation, research suggests
Sep 2023, phys.org
Facebook's efforts were undermined by the core design features of the platform itself. "Our results show that removing content or changing algorithms can be ineffective if it doesn't change what the platform is designed to do."
via George Washington and Johns Hopkins Universities: David Broniatowski, The Efficacy of Facebook's Vaccine Misinformation Policies and Architecture During The COVID-19 Pandemic, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh2132



And finally, feed this to your model-bot:

High rate of mental health problems and political extremism found in those who bought firearms during COVID pandemic
Sep 2023, phys.org

Not about the article itself, but this is the statement that defines you as a conspiracy theorist in scientific studies:

"The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation." (I agree, I do not agree)

via University of Michigan: Brian M. Hicks et al, Who bought a gun during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States?: Associations with QAnon beliefs, right-wing political attitudes, intimate partner violence, antisocial behavior, suicidality, and mental health and substance use problems, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290770

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To Believe


Study finds placebo effect also applies to exercise training
Apr 2023, phys.org

Personal trainer, is that you?
"If you believe that the training program you are following has been optimized for you, that in itself will have an effect, regardless of the content of the program. It is exactly the same as the placebo effect we know from medicine. ... The placebo effect has been studied for over 70 years, but looking at it in the context of exercise research is new."

Interesting to think about this in terms of recommendation algorithms -- a term which encompasses pretty much all the consumer-facing artificial intelligence that's been available to the masses up until the explosion of generative-AI like GPT or Stable Diffusion. Recommendation algorithms, like so much consumer technologies, don't actually work as well as they're marketed to work. But they do convincingly present to us the illusion of personal customization -- this thing knows who you are, what you do and what you like, and it can give you things that even your most intimate of social partners don't know you want.

Recommendation algorithms inherently benefit from this phenomenon, and so we should be even more critical when assessing their utility, and especially when comparing that utility to the harms it inflicts, like personal data harvesting and surveillance.   

via University of Agder in Norway: Kolbjørn Lindberg et al, The effects of being told you are in the intervention group on training results: a pilot study, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-29141-7


Study finds people who use alternative medicine favor risk and novelty, and distrust science
Sep 2023, phys.org
"Susceptible to persuasion, and skeptical of science" (the ultimate recipe for disaster)

Researchers found that 1,492 Canadians ages 16 and over who access alternative health-care therapies where the proven benefits do not justify the risks involved tend to be wealthier, like novelty and taking risks, and are also more likely to distrust conventional medicine.
via University of British Columbia School of Nursing and the University of Alberta Health Law Institute: Bernie Garrett et al, Demographic and psychometric predictors associated with engagement in risk-associated alternative healthcare behaviours, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291016


Belief in manifesting financial success leads to risky investments and bankruptcy, says study
Sep 2023, phys.org

Not only did they creating a "manifestation scale", but it focuses on "aspirational" thinking, which has been my word of the year for 2023 by the way.

First let's get this in writing, archived here: "The business world is filled with self-described experts, gurus, and influencers who promise success through manifestation, but many of these beliefs and practices lack solid evidence," Dr. Dixon said.
Next, some results: "Although manifesters felt more confident and optimistic about achieving success, we didn't find objective proof to support the effectiveness of manifestation."

And finally I ask, why did we need a study to prove that "thinking really hard" about money can make you rich? Anyway, now you know. 

via University of Queensland Business School: Lucas J. Dixon et al, "The Secret" to Success? The Psychology of Belief in Manifestation, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2023). DOI: 10.1177/01461672231181162

Image credit: AI Art - Aliens Entering a Pissoir by Marcel Duchamp - 2022


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Are You Listening



Android phones sold to customers in China found to be loaded with apps that send user data to third parties
Feb 2023, phys.org

No way though:
Riddled with software that continuously sends user data to third parties without the permission or even knowledge of the phone's users.

The research team found that the phones were rife with applications sending user data to a variety of third parties, all without permission. During testing, they set phones to opt out of sending any sort of data to providers or any other third parties, and did not connect to cloud applications. Still, applications sent data to the makers of the phone, network operators and also to the makers of apps. Data included physical information such as the user's phone number, its MAC address and ongoing geolocation data. It also included more personal data, such as contact lists and text metadata.

Text metadata (to, from, time, length, location), sent straight to the phone-makers and app-makers.
via University of Edinburgh and Trinity College: Haoyu Liu et al, Android OS Privacy Under the Loupe—A Tale from the East, arXiv (2023). [a "loupe" is like a magnifying glass, typically seen used with jewelery] DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2302.01890



Smartphone study reveals that bodily rhythm affects behavior
Apr 2023, phys.org

He literally says it out loud: 
"If people think they just live their lives, deciding their behavior for themselves, and that there is no overarching structure, they've got it wrong," says researcher Arko Ghosh.
  • the body has rhythms ranging between seven and 52 days
  • these cycles influence how we behave
  • everyone has these rhythms (young, old, men, women)
  • impact on psychological and neurological research -- "Are the cycles we see here caused by the illness, or are they 'normal' cycles that become more apparent as a result of the illness?"
  • 400 subjects aged 16 to 80 had an app installed that allowed the researchers to track usage data
  • "We only looked at the times when people were actively using their phones and were swiping or typing"
  • We distinguished 2,500 different types of smartphone use.
  • Some mannerisms had a pattern that repeated every 25 days such as a long pause between touches.
  • Others had a pattern that repeated every 19 days such as a short pause between touches. 
"We might then be able to predict particular behavior on the basis of a person's cycle. This might in turn lead to a completely new definition of what is normal behavior and what is behavior that is related to a neurological or psychological condition."
via Leiden University: Enea Ceolini et al, Common multi-day rhythms in smartphone behavior, npj Digital Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41746-023-00799-7


Wearable devices may be able to capture well-being through effortless data collection using AI
May 2023, phys.org

"Passive data collection" sounds so benign. 
The findings support wearable devices as a way to monitor and assess psychological states remotely without requiring the completion of mental health questionnaires.
This would sound like the most dystopian thing ever if it weren't coming from a hospital:
"Wearables provide a means to continually collect information about an individual's physical state. Our results provide insight into the feasibility of assessing psychological characteristics from this passively collected data."

"A better understanding of who is at psychological risk and an improved means of tracking the impact of psychological interventions is needed. The growth of digital technology presents an opportunity to improve access to mental health services for all people."
The data: 
They the Warrior Watch Study, a digital observational study of 329 health care workers enrolled at seven hospitals in New York City, measuring heart rate variability and resting heart rate throughout the follow-up period using a smart watch. The metrics collected were found to be predictive in identifying resilience or well-being states. 

via the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital: A machine learning approach to determine resilience utilizing wearable device data: analysis of an observational cohort, JAMIA Open (2023). DOI: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooad029

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jamiaopen/ooad029



Majority of consumers care what kind of data they share with retailers and service providers, new study finds
May 2023, phys.org

Just preferences -- 
96% of individuals were willing to pay to avoid sharing their personal data in at least one of the data sharing environments. Banking transactions was the data type people considered the most important to protect, with over 

95% for banking data
79% for medical records
72% for GPS
43% for online browsing history
40% for social media data
via University of Bristol: Anya Skatova et al, Unpacking privacy: Valuation of personal data protection, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284581


AI Art - Body Cam - 2023

Swiss researchers use typing, mouse clicks to detect office stress
Apr 2023, phys.org

The way people type and use their computer mouse can be better stress indicators than their heart rate.

"People who are stressed move the mouse pointer more often and less precisely and cover longer distances on the screen," Nagelin said.

People who feel stressed in the office make more mistakes when typing and tend to write in fits and starts, with many brief pauses.

Relaxed people by contrast take fewer but longer pauses when typing.
via Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich


Wearable monitor detects stress hormone levels across a full 24-hour day
Jun 2023, phys.org

We can already do it for entire groups by measuring isoprene in the air, and now it can be done on the individual level -- 
Until now scientists haven't been able to define what normal rhythmicity looks like in healthy daily life. ... The device is worn around the waist and painlessly and automatically samples from beneath the skin every 20 minutes, without the need to collect blood. Importantly, the method allows sampling during sleep, work, and other daily life activities for up to 72 hours in a single session. Mathematicians then used these data to develop a new class of dynamic markers to better understand how a healthy hormonal profile should look like depending on an individual's sex, age, body mass index, as well as other characteristics.
via University of Birmingham: Thomas Upton, High resolution daily profiles of tissue adrenal steroids by portable automated collection, Science Translational Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.adg8464.


Attackers can break voice authentication with up to 99% success within six tries
Jun 2023, phys.org

Please stop -- 
Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have discovered a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries.

No Wells Fargo, company that literally created fake bank accounts using existing customer data, nobody wants you to record their voice. Nobody wants this, only you want this.

via University of Waterloo: Breaking Security-Critical Voice Authentication, 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). DOI: 10.1109/SP46215.2023.00139


Hackers can steal cryptographic keys by video-recording power LEDs 60 feet away
Jun 2023, Ars Technica

Side channels -- a class of attack that measures physical effects that leak from a device as it performs a cryptographic operation, like using cameras in iPhones or commercial surveillance systems to video record power LEDs that show when the card reader or smartphone is turned on.
By carefully monitoring characteristics such as power consumption, sound, electromagnetic emissions, or the amount of time it takes for an operation to occur, attackers can assemble enough information to recover secret keys that underpin the security and confidentiality of a cryptographic algorithm.

Computer security experts offer advice to freeze out risk of thermal attacks
Aug 2023, phys.org

Sometimes you just need to be reminded that this is a thing --
Thermal attacks use heat-sensitive cameras to read the traces of fingerprints left on surfaces like smartphone screens, computer keyboards and PIN pads.

Hackers can use the relative intensity of heat traces across recently-touched surfaces to reconstruct users' passwords. [follow the above link to see the heat map video]

The team identified 15 different approaches described in previous papers on computer security which could reduce the risk of thermal attacks:
  • wearing gloves or rubber thimbles
  • touching something cold before typing
  • pressing hands against surfaces or breathing on them
  • a heating element behind surfaces could erase traces of finger heat
  • surfaces could be made from materials which dissipate heat more rapidly
  • a physical shield which covers keys until heat has dissipated
  • eye-tracking inputs or biometric security could reduce risk of thermal attack
  • manufacturers of thermal cameras could integrate software to prevent thermal cameras from taking pictures of surfaces like PIN pads on bank machines.
via University of Glasgow: In the Quest to Protect Users from Side-Channel Attacks—A User-Centred Design Space to Mitigate Thermal Attacks on Public Payment Terminals.


Research hack reveals call security risk in smartphones
Aug 2023, phys.org

The researchers' malware, called EarSpy, used machine learning algorithms to filter a surprising amount of caller information from ear speaker vibration data recorded by an Android smartphone's own motion sensors

via Texas A&M University College of Engineering: Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad et al, EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2212.12151


AI Art - Cables and Wires - 2023


Extracting blood-induced color changes on the face for non-contact heart rate estimation
Aug 2023, phys.org

Blood volume pulse (BVP) that causes slight temporal changes in facial skin color can be captured in videos, but complex lighting conditions make any change in color difficult to measure. These scientists have devised a way to use dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), a technique that analyzes spatio-temporal structures in multi-dimensional time-series signals.

via Tokyo University: Kosuke Kurihara et al, Spatio-Temporal Structure Extraction of Blood Volume Pulse Using Dynamic Mode Decomposition for Heart Rate Estimation, IEEE Access (2023). DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3284465


Reddit forces personalized ads, starts X-like user payment program
Sep 2023, Ars Technica

Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss. 

Now you know where the value lies -- these are the most problematic because these are the most effective:
  • alcohol
  • dating
  • gambling
  • pregnancy
  • parenting


AI and 10 seconds of voice can screen for diabetes, new study reveals
Oct 2023, phys.org
Scientists used six to 10 seconds of people's voice, along with basic health data, including age, sex, height, and weight, to create an AI model that can distinguish whether that individual has type 2 diabetes. The model has 89% accuracy for women and 86% for men. 267 people (diagnosed as either non- or type 2 diabetic) to record a phrase into their smartphone six times daily for two weeks. From more than 18,000 recordings, scientists analyzed 14 acoustic features for differences between non-diabetic and type 2 diabetic individuals.
via private company Klick Labs: Jaycee M. Kaufman et al, Acoustic Analysis and Prediction of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Using Smartphone-Recorded Voice Segments, Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.mcpdig.2023.08.005


Your smart speaker data is used in ways you might not expect
Oct 2023, phys.org

It's so important to note that "we all knew this was a thing" like 10 years ago when they first came out, and yet, not until today do we have a legit university study, publicly funded, rigorously tested study, to prove what "we already knew", and even government agencies are only now paying attention. It takes years for this to happen:
The research team built an auditing framework to measure the collection, usage and sharing of Amazon Echo interaction data by creating several personas with interests in specific categories, and one control persona, and whereby each persona interacted with a different Echo device.

Then the researchers measured data collection by intercepting network traffic and inferred data usage by observing ads targeted to each persona on the web and on Echo devices.

The team reported that as many as 41 advertisers sync or share their cookies with Amazon, and then those advertisers further sync their cookies with 247 other third parties, including advertising services.
"Unfortunately, surveillance is the business model of the internet" 
-Umar Iqbal, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
via Washington University in St. Louis: Umar Iqbal et al, Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem, Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference (2023). DOI: 10.1145/3618257.3624803


AI Art - Cables and Wires 2 - 2023

A robot that can detect subtle noises in its surroundings and use them to localize nearby humans
Oct 2023, phys.org

Hidden information:
"Our group has recently been interested in exploring a high-level theme of research regarding what types of 'hidden' information are freely available that we can train models on. ... We wanted to see if the subtle and incidental sounds that humans inadvertently produce as they move can be that 'free' signal." 

The Robot Kidnapper Dataset: 14 hours of high-quality four-channel audio recordings paired with 360 RGB camera footage, collected during experimental trials where people were asked to move around a robot at various levels of 'sneakiness' (e.g., walking quietly, walking normally, etc.).

The researchers trained their model to ignore external and irrelevant noises, such as those originating from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, as well as sounds produced by the robot itself. 

"Robots commonly use cameras or lidar to navigate around people, but should those sensors fail or become unavailable (low-lit environments, occlusions, etc.), our method allows robots to fall back solely onto audio, which is usually already available in most hardware setups. Moreover, when interacting with robots, people should not be expected to intentionally create extra sounds, which is what previous works rely on." 
via Georgia Institute of Technology: Mengyu Yang et al, The Un-Kidnappable Robot: Acoustic Localization of Sneaking People, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.03743

Post Script: I am (only slightly) disturbed by the choice here in calling this the "un-kidnappable robot" which implies that, in the course of their study, they were trying to "kidnap" it. Isn't there another word for kidnap that doesn't have "kid" in it? (The Un-Abductable Robot?)


Five big carmakers beat lawsuits alleging infotainment systems invade privacy
Nov 2023, Ars Technica
The class-action "complaint alleges that the vehicle's system downloads all text messages and call logs from Plaintiffs' cellphones as soon as they are connected," the Ford ruling said. "The complaint also alleges that the infotainment system permanently stores the private communications without Plaintiffs' knowledge or consent." The complaint's allegations refer to Ford cars made in 2014 and after.

Plaintiffs alleged that there is no way to delete the text messages and call logs from the car system. "If text messages or call logs are deleted from a cellphone, the vehicle nevertheless retains the communications on the vehicle's on-board memory, even after the cellphone is disconnected. Vehicle owners cannot access or delete their personal information once it has been stored," the ruling's summary of the complaint said.

Why on Earth would you ever be able to access your own personal information that has been saved on this product which you purchased and thus ostensibly own? 

Because you don't own it. You don't own the product and you don't own your personal data. The Davos 2016 premonition -- it already happened -- You own nothing, and you like it. 


Study warns restrictions to application programming interfaces by social media platforms threaten research
Nov 2023, phys.org

Data is so valuable.
"Numerous social media platforms made substantial changes to their APIs -- drastically reducing access or increasing charges for access, which the researchers say will in many cases make research harder."

What research?
"The changes are adversely affecting academics who want to study the impact of social media on mental health, on misinformation, political views and so on."

In order for social media platforms to make money, in fact the only way they can possibly make any money at all, is by selling the intimate personal data about its own users. (Something that might be referred to as predatory in other contexts.)

It's like a cross between a digital Skinner Box and a roach motel where every person that touches it has their unspeakably minute, mostly invisible, and definitely private behavioral attributes catalogued, collated, and consigned to the greater data market where it will be used to fuel the consumer economy, where we stopped selling actual products to people a long time ago.

Now we just sell them ideas; actually, first we steal those ideas directly from the people themselves, via things like social media platforms, and then sell them right back, in a quasi-material form, where the actual physical part is mostly shitty made-in-China garbage, but the important part, which is the picture of you using said shitty product, quasi-physical since it's just a picture, has been acquired and used to manipulate another person into buying said product, and the circle of consumption complete. 

via University of Bath's School of Management: Platform-controlled social media APIs threaten open science, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01750-2

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Thursday, November 30, 2023

Music Science and the Mathematical Language of the Universe


But First:

Stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be detected from more than a meter away
Mar 2023, phys.org

Tomato and tobacco plants that are stressed -- from dehydration or having their stems severed -- emit sounds that are comparable in volume to normal human conversation, and sound like bubble wrap, but in a fequency we can't hear, at 30–50 clicks per hour at random intervals.

via Tel Aviv University: Lilach Hadany, Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative, Cell (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2023.03.009.



New research shows how cultural transmission shapes the evolution of music
Mar 2023, phys.org

The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; their study design was awesome:

The researchers used singing experiments to study music evolution in an unprecedented detail: testing the evolution of more than 3,400 melodies sung by around 1,800 participants from India and North America. To simulate music evolution, they used a method similar to the classic game of "broken telephone," where messages are passed from one participant to the next.

In this case, melodies had to be passed from one to the next by singing. Over time, participants make mistakes in their efforts to repeat the melodies they hear, which gradually shapes the evolution of music towards melodies that are appealing and easy to learn by everyone.

They call it the transmission bias, and they found US participants tended to produce melodies that were biased towards certain cultural conventions of Western music, whereas Indian participants showed a bias towards common Indian scales.

via Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics: Manuel Anglada-Tort et al, Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.02.070


Here comes the sun: New study shows how UK weather conditions influence music success in the markets
May 2023, phys.org

The research, which analyzed over 23,000 songs that reached the UK weekly top charts in the last 70 years, found that songs that were energetic, danceable, and evoked positive emotions such as joy and happiness were positively associated with warm and sunny weather and negatively associated with rainy and cold months. Similarly, energetic and positive music varied according to expected seasonal patterns in the UK, increasing in summer and decreasing in winter.

BUT - hyper popular songs exhibited the strongest associations with weather fluctuations, less popular songs showed no relationship at all. 

AND - only music features reflecting high intensity and positive emotions were associated with weather conditions, whereas music features reflecting low intensity and negative emotions were not related to weather at all. This suggests that negative emotional states may be more influenced by individual situational factors rather than general environmental conditions.

via University of Oxford: Manuel Anglada-Tort et al, Here comes the sun: music features of popular songs reflect prevailing weather conditions, Royal Society Open Science (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.221443


Research shows why our taste in music can't be siloed into catch-all genres
Jun 2023, phys.org

That one trick: "The pop music people liked best was from the decade during which they were around 20 years old." (Learned this from a wedding DJ, many years ago.)

Also: Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (exists).

Other results: "By systematically recording liking at genre and sub-genre levels, the researchers obtained a more differentiated picture of musical taste. ... Across all genres, subtypes that represented the mainstream variant were generally preferred over more challenging alternatives."

via Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics: ou don't know a person('s taste) when you only know which genre they like: Taste differences within five popular music genres based on sub-genres and sub-styles, Frontiers in Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1062146



Brain2Music taps thoughts to reproduce music
Jul 2023, phys.org
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-brain2music-thoughts-music.html

Music samples covering 10 genres including rock, classical, metal, hip-hop, pop and jazz were played for five subjects while researchers observed their brain activity under functional MRI (fMRI). This data trained a model to match the music and the brain waves. But then, another machine, this one trained on music-text data to generate music from text prompts, is combined with the brains-on-music model. The two models mix and match so that "the generated music resembles the musical stimuli that human subjects experienced, with respect to semantic properties like genre, instrumentation and mood".

In other words, with your own machine like this, you would be able to make music just by thinking about it. 

Also noted: despite advances in text-to-music models, "their internal processes are still poorly understood." 

via Google and Osaka University: Timo I. Denk et al, Brain2Music: Reconstructing Music from Human Brain Activity, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.11078


Brain recordings capture musicality of speech, with help from Pink Floyd
Aug 2023, phys.org

The phrase "All in all it was just a brick in the wall" comes through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable. This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings of 29 patients. [you can actually hear the re-construction at the link above]. From some of the people who brought the first reconstruction of the words a person was hearing from recordings of brain activity alone (2012).

Also about left brain vs right brain, language vs music, pinpoint vs field action --

Bellier emphasized that the study, which used artificial intelligence to decode brain activity and then encode a reproduction, did not merely create a black box to synthesize speech. He and his colleagues were also able to pinpoint new areas of the brain involved in detecting rhythm, such as a thrumming guitar, and discovered that some portions of the auditory cortex -- in the superior temporal gyrus, located just behind and above the ear -- respond at the onset of a voice or a synthesizer, while other areas respond to sustained vocals.

"Language is more left brain. Music is more distributed, with a bias toward right," Knight said.

"It wasn't clear it would be the same with musical stimuli," Bellier said. "So here we confirm that that's not just a speech-specific thing, but that's it's more fundamental to the auditory system and the way it processes both speech and music."

via University of California Berkeley, Albany Medical Center: Music can be reconstructed from human auditory cortex activity using nonlinear decoding models, PLoS Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002176




What's love got to do with it? An exception to the recognition of musical themes
Sep 2023, phys.org

(I am so confused by this study)

Researchers played 14-second snippets of vocals in 31 languages from a bank of songs that originated from a host of cultures to more than 5,000 people from 49 countries. The research team included subjects not only from the industrialized world, but more than 100 individuals who live in three small, relatively isolated groups of no more than 100.

They then asked the listeners to rank the likelihood of each sample as being one of four music types: dance, lullabies, "healing" music, or love music. People from all cultures could easily identify all except love songs -- only 12 of 28 groups could recognize love songs.

(Is it the point of the study to prove that a love song is determined by its lyrics rather than by its musical style? Confused.)

"One reason for this could be that love songs may be a particularly fuzzy category that includes songs that express happiness and attraction, but also sadness and jealousy," said lead author Lidya Yurdum, who works as research assistant at the Yale Child Study Center and is also a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam. "Listeners who heard love songs from neighboring countries and in languages related to their own actually did a little better, likely because of the familiar linguistic and cultural clues."

But other than love songs, the authors discovered, the listeners' "ratings were largely accurate, consistent with one another, and not explained by their linguistic or geographical proximity to the singer—showing that musical diversity is underlain by universal psychological phenomena."

via Yale: Lidya Yurdum et al, Universal interpretations of vocal music, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2218593120


Research demonstrates the power of rhythm as a design element in evolution and robotics
Oct 2023, phys.org

Varying the rhythm of movement -- the music of how the pieces move together over time -- is a new way of designing robot movement. For example, the breaststroke is characterized by three time-intervals: a slow period of reaching forward, a fast period of pushing backward and a static period of coasting. For optimum performance, the lengths of time for those intervals typically go long, fast, long. But in certain situations—outracing or outmaneuvering a predator, for example—the ratios of those periods change drastically.

The work builds on research Bejan published nearly 20 years ago, where he demonstrated that size and speed go hand-in-hand across the entire animal kingdom whether on land, in the air or under water. The physics underlying that work dealt with weight falling forward from a given animal's height over and over again. In this paper, Bejan shows that his previous work was incomplete, and that all animals, robots and other moving things can further optimize their mechanics by adding an element of rhythm.

It is yet another example of how good design—whether made by humans or through natural evolution—is truly a form of art."

via Duke University: A. Bejan et al, Locomotion rhythm makes power and speed, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-41023-6

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Tuesday, November 28, 2023

On Language, Prediction and Power


Big Bonus on the Words Front, Dan Jurafsky professor of computer science and linguistics:

Vehicle stop study illuminates importance of officer's first words
May 2023, phys.org

A law enforcement officer's first 45 words during a vehicle stop with a Black driver can often indicate how the stop will end. "There's a clear linguistic signature to escalated vehicle stops. Simply put, the officer starts off with a command rather than a reason in escalated stops."

They analyzed audio recordings and transcripts from police-worn body cameras from 577 vehicle stops that occurred over the course of a month in a medium-sized, racially diverse city in the U.S. 

The study found that the stops ending in escalation were almost three times more likely to begin with the officer issuing a command to the driver and 2 1/2 times less likely to provide a reason for the stop.

"We found that stops that end escalated, often start escalated," Rho said.

But wait (great work here by the way, ambitious study) -- 

During the second study, researchers played the audio from the traffic stops in the first study to a nationally representative sample of 188 Black male U.S. citizens ranging in age, region, education, and political ideology. 

Black male participants predicted that 84% of stops that involved an officer giving orders with no reasons would escalate, and worried about force being used in more than 80% of the stops that involved orders and no reasons as compared to only 47% of stops that involved reasons with no orders.

"The most common way for the average citizen to encounter law enforcement is through vehicle stops," Rho said. 

via Virginia Tech: Rho, Eugenia H. et al, Escalated police stops of Black men are linguistically and psychologically distinct in their earliest moments, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216162120


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Words, for the Corpus That Has It All


The following update to the 'list of crazy words you read when scanning science press headlines', 6 months from April 2023 to October 2023. This one is a big list, an avalanche of verbal programming; start your semantic engines.

Appropriately illustrated by artificial intelligence engine-generated images of Dental Art, starting with the above image, prompted by the words "Hyperrealistic pink tissue bloody gums slippery glistening" but I just call it Dental Art.


Researchers develop the first-ever ingestible electroceutical device to control appetite by hormone modulation
Apr 2023, phys.org

"Electroceuticals" - for the neuromodulation of the gut-brain axis 

via NYU: Khalil Ramadi et al, Bioinspired, ingestible electroceutical capsules for hunger-regulating hormone modulation, Science Robotics (2023). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.ade9676.


Meteosat-12: Europe's new weather satellite takes first photos
Apr 2023, BBC News

"Nowcasting" - (like forecasting but better) the ability to say with greater confidence that violent winds, lightning, hail or heavy downpours are about to strike a particular area; Europe's new weather satellite Meteosat-12 flies 36,000km above the Earth and takes pictures every 10 minutes

And the word nowcasting, in the wild: "The insights gained from linking lightning intensity to eruptive activity can provide better monitoring and nowcasting of aviation-related hazards during a large volcanic eruption, including ash cloud development and movement," Van Eaton said." -New study shows Tonga's Hunga eruption produced the most intense lightning ever recorded. Jun 2023. phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-tonga-hunga-eruption-intense-lightning.html ; and via American Geophysical Union: Alexa R. Van Eaton et al, Lightning Rings and Gravity Waves: Insights Into the Giant Eruption Plume From Tonga's Hunga Volcano on 15 January 2022, Geophysical Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1029/2022GL102341. https://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022GL102341


'Bioprospecting' technique uncovers viruses that can kill deadly superbugs
May 2023, phys.org

"Bioprospecting" for viruses known as phages that can kill deadly superbugs; like "bioprospector" will be a word on someone's resume soon

via Monash University: Rhys A. Dunstan et al, Epitopes in the capsular polysaccharide and the porin OmpK36 receptors are required for bacteriophage infection of Klebsiella pneumoniae, Cell Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2023.112551


DarkBERT learns language of the Dark Web
May 2023, phys.org

Fucking "DarkBERT" - A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet

FYI - "Surface Web content" (as opposed to "Dark Web content") I think what this is saying, without saying it, is that the internet is English, but the Dark Web is not, so they can't use the internet as their training model like we do with all the others.

via Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology: Youngjin Jin et al, DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.08596



Combining twistronics with spintronics could be the next giant leap in quantum electronics
Jun 2023, phys.org

I try to keep up, but -- "Twistronics", "spintronics", and "tunable moiré magnetism"

via Tohoku University: Guanghui Cheng et al, Electrically tunable moiré magnetism in twisted double bilayers of chromium triiodide, Nature Electronics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-023-00978-0


Researchers grow bio-inspired polymer brains for artificial neural networks
Jul 2023, phys.org

Neuromorphic "wetware" - based on memristive devices via electropolymerization aka growing wires

via Osaka University and Hokkaido University: Naruki Hagiwara et al, Fabrication and Training of 3D Conductive Polymer Networks for Neuromorphic Wetware, Advanced Functional Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202300903


New study reveals why defense against brain corrosion declines in people with Alzheimer's disease
Jul 2023, phys.org

"Brain corrosion" - Why yes, oxidative stress corrodes the brain, and that's called oxidative damage. Some might even call it "rust", brain rust. 

via Case Western Reserve University: Sara Cazzaro et al, Slingshot homolog-1–mediated Nrf2 sequestration tips the balance from neuroprotection to neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2217128120



Photonic time crystals could open the door to a new branch of optics
Jul 2023, phys.org

"Photonic Time Crystals" - they are the temporal version of photonic crystals, and in the optical domain could have profound implications for the science of light, enabling truly disruptive applications in the future

Just for background, and because this will all become the new computers of the next technological revolution -- "photonic crystals have a refractive index that oscillates periodically in space causing iridescence of precious minerals and insect wings for example."

via Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and Purdue University:  Eran Lustig et al, Time-refraction optics with single cycle modulation, Nanophotonics (2023). DOI: 10.1515/nanoph-2023-0126


Researchers put a new twist on graphite
Jul 2023, phys.org

"Interdimensional" - mixed dimensional materials, like embedding 2D graphene into 3D graphite

via University of Washington, Osaka University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan: Matthew Yankowitz, Mixed-dimensional moiré systems of twisted graphitic thin films, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06290-3.


Spontaneous quasi-crystal self-assembly observed using tiny vibrating magnetic spheres
Jul 2023, phys.org

"Spontaneous Crystals" aka "Spontaneous Quasi-Crystal Self-Assembly" - discovered sort of by accident

via Université Paris-Saclay: Andrea Plati et al, Quasi-crystalline order in vibrated granular matter, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.01643


Zentropy and the art of creating new ferroelectric materials
Aug 2023, phys.org

"Zentropy" - The "Z" in zentropy stands for the German word Zustandssumm, meaning "sum over states" of entropy, and alternatively considered a play on the term "zen" from Buddhism, and the idea is to consider how entropy can occur over multiple scales within a system to help predict potential outcomes of the system when influenced by its surroundings. It's also a parameter-free pathway to predicting how advanced materials behave. And in other words, it can integrate top-down statistical and bottom-up quantum mechanics to predict experimental measures of the system without "fitting parameters" to closely match real-world variables.

via Penn State: Zi-Kui Liu et al, Parameter-free prediction of phase transition in PbTiO3 through combination of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, Scripta Materialia (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.scriptamat.2023.115480



Researchers use 'topological gardening' to achieve unexpected spin transport
Aug 2023, phys.org

Fastest forming word cluster in the sciences, that's all --

"Topological Gardening" - Although topological insulators conduct electricity only along their edges, and strictly in one direction, new science challenges that view by uncovering a new type of edge transport by manipulating edge states through bulk-edge interactions, similar to the pruning work done in gardening routines.

via Monash University: Yuefeng Yin et al, Extracting unconventional spin texture in two dimensional topological crystalline insulator bismuthene via tuning bulk-edge interactions, Materials Today Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.mtphys.2023.101168

Also: Qile Li et al, Localized Wannier function based tight-binding models for two-dimensional allotropes of bismuth, New Journal of Physics (2021). DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ac04c9


This fish doesn't just see with its eyes, it also sees with its skin
Aug 2023, phys.org

"Skin Vision" -- Hogfish can change color, and carry a gene for a light-sensitive protein called opsin that is activated in their skin, and that this gene is different from the opsin genes found in their eyes. Their skin is made of cells called chromatophores which contain pigment, with opsin proteins residing in a previously unknown cell type right underneath the chromatophore, which means that light striking the skin must pass through the pigment-filled chromatophores first before it reaches the light-sensitive layer, suggesting that their skin acts like internal Polaroid film, capturing changes in the light, so that they can "literally take a photo of their own skin from the inside".

via Duke University: Lorian Schweikert, Dynamic light filtering over dermal opsin as a sensory feedback system in fish color change, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40166-4.


Scientists develop finger sweat test to detect antipsychotic drugs in patients
Aug 2023, phys.org

"Finger Sweat Test" - Scientists have now discovered a way to test the levels of common antipsychotic drugs (clozapine, quetiapine, or olanzapine) in the sweat from patients' fingerprints (and because blood tests are invasive and uncomfortable).

via University of Surrey: Noninvasive drug adherence monitoring of antipsychotic patients via finger sweat testing, Frontiers in Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fchem.2023.1245089


Researchers prep fentanyl, heroin vaccines for human trials
Aug 2023, phys.org

"Heroin Vaccine" - Just the words heroin vaccine.

via University of Montana: Bethany Crouse et al, A TLR7/8 agonist increases efficacy of anti-fentanyl vaccines in rodent and porcine models, npj Vaccines (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41541-023-00697-9


Crack vaccine research on rats could help babies of mothers who use cocaine—and reduce addiction
Oct 2023, phys.org

"Crack Vaccine" - Also. I have a feeling it doesn't end here. 

via Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil: Rachel J. Stephenson et al, Anti-cocaine Vaccine Development: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going?, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.3c00366



Team simulates collective movement of worm blobs for future swarm robotic systems
Sep 2023, phys.org

"Swarm Ball", "Worm Ball", or "Swarm Robot Worm Ball" - systems of many individual components that must work collectively, using soft-bodied agents

(click on the article above for some high octane nightmare fuel)

via Tohoku University and Hiroshima University: Taishi Mikami et al, Elongating, entwining, and dragging: mechanism for adaptive locomotion of tubificine worm blobs in a confined environment, Frontiers in Neurorobotics (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fnbot.2023.1207374


Vulnerability to different COVID-19 mutations depends on previous infections and vaccination, study suggests
Oct 2023, phys.org

"Antigenic Cartography" - compares the similarity of different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to measure how well human antibodies formed in response to infection with one virus respond to infection with a variant of that virus (and because they found that a person's immune response to SARS-CoV-2 depends on the variant they were previously exposed to)

via University of Cambridge's Center for Pathogen Evolution in the Department of Zoology: Samuel H. Wilks et al, Mapping SARS-CoV-2 antigenic relationships and serological responses, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adj0070.



Next-generation printing: Precise and direct, using optical vortices
Oct 2023, phys.org

An "Optical Vortex Laser" - "Using a special laser beam known as an optical vortex, we have achieved stable printing of high-viscosity liquids that allows for the fabrication of microdroplet laser arrays and the micropatterning of conductive nanoinks, as well as bioinks for cell scaffolds, leading to the establishment of next-generation printed photonic or electronic devices."

via Osaka Metropolitan University:  Ken-ichi Yuyama et al, Fabrication of an Array of Hemispherical Microlasers Using Optical Vortex Laser-Induced Forward Transfer, ACS Photonics (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.3c01005


Photonic crystals bend light as though it were under the influence of gravity
Oct 2023, phys.org

"Pseudogravity" - replicating the effects of gravity

Also, they don't say moiré but they describe it: Kitamura and her colleagues modified photonic crystals by introducing lattice distortion; gradual deformation of the regular spacing of elements, which disrupted the grid-like pattern of protonic crystals. This manipulated the photonic band structure of the crystals, resulting in a curved beam trajectory in-medium—just like a light-ray passing by a massive celestial body such as a black hole.

via Tohoku University: Kanji Nanjyo et al, Deflection of electromagnetic waves by pseudogravity in distorted photonic crystals, Physical Review A (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.108.033522


Sabotage tool takes on AI image scrapers
Oct 2023, phys.org

"Data poisoning" - the tool named Nightshade manipulates image pixels that will alter the output during training but are not visible to the naked eye prior to processing. The tool is meant to "poison" graphics appropriated by AI companies to train image-generating models. "A moderate number of Nightshade attacks can destabilize general features in a text-to-image generative model, effectively disabling its ability to generate meaningful images," Zhao said. 

via University of Chicago: Shawn Shan et al, Prompt-Specific Poisoning Attacks on Text-to-Image Generative Models, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.13828

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Thursday, September 7, 2023

On Hella


Hella, by David Gerold, 2020
Good book, good writer. [link]

Classic scifi novel about living on an alien planet. Here's some notes -- 

On waiting two generations before naming a place after a person: None of the places on Hella are named after people. The First Hundred established that rule. They didn't want half the places on the planet named after them. They said they wanted names to represent the spirit of the place. They were quite adamant about it. They didn't want to have future generations saddled with shallow memorials, for people they didn't know or barely remembered. They made a rule for themselves that they wouldn't name any place after any living person, and they would wait 50 years after the person's death so that at least two generations of people could decide if that person's contributions ended up being much more important than anyone might have realized at the time. (p137)

On Intelligence Engines: There's this thing about people. If an intelligence engine says it, people think it's true. ... But if an intelligence engine has its own agenda, then it isn't telling you what you need to know. It's telling you only what it wants you to know and that's where trusting it starts to get dangerous. (p197)

After the main character gets a change to his brain chip, during a post-recovery session, he asks the robot if he passed the test (which is like a reverse Turing, and we're already there actually w captchas etc. but still, well done). (p344)

After the main character has his chip taken out, which gives him access to the network, if you will, and now he's describing his experience with a regular brain -- "I do miss being able to know stuff just by thinking." And so we get real Isaac Asimov's "the computer is in my head" vibes, a classic. Good work again. (p422)

About the Author - David Gerrold has been writing professionally for half a century. He created the tribbles for Star Trek and the Sleestaks for Land Of The Lost. His most famous novel is The Man Who Folded Himself. His semi-autobiographical tale of his son's adoption, The Martian Child won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, and was the basis for the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.
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