Monday, March 20, 2023

Surveillance of Da Highest Orda


The path of the righteous: Using mouse movements to understand fraud decisions in real time
Dec 2022, phys.org

The team explored whether online fraudsters can be distinguished from honest users on the basis of their mouse movements, so-called "trace data," i.e., real-time data like mouse movements or click-streams. "We have already been working on trace data and consumer behavior for ten years,"

Results show that, on average, those participants who gave fraudulent responses were much slower and had more deviations with their mouse movements than the honest users.

via University of Cologne Institute for Information Systems: Markus Weinmann et al, The Path of the Righteous: Using Trace Data to Understand Fraud Decisions in Real Time (Open Access), MIS Quarterly (2022). DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2022/17038

Totally unrelated image credit: Simulation of a large planetesimal striking a Venus-like planet by Simone Marchi & Raluca Rufu at Southwest Research Institute in 2021


Deep learning algorithm can hear alcohol in voice
Jan 2023, phys.org

You know we're really just here for the Alcohol Language Corpus, where linguistic researchers in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk and talk into a tape recorder. 

And please let us not forget that this is in fact a sub-language called Drunken John. (But here is one of those moments when you're sure that either the internet, or the search algorithms, must be broken -- try searching for this and you'll find not a single instance, like it doesn't even exist.)

Audio-based Deep Learning Algorithm to Identify Alcohol Inebriation (ADLAIA) can determine an individual's intoxication status based on a 12-second recording of their speech.

via La Trobe University: Abraham Albert Bonela et al, Audio-based Deep Learning Algorithm to Identify Alcohol Inebriation (ADLAIA), Alcohol (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.alcohol.2022.12.002

Since prompts are all the rage these days, here:
  • 002 Please speak to the experimenter: Talk about one of your vacations.
  • 003 Please read as soon as possible: Messwechsel, Wachsmaske, Wachsmaske, Messwechsel (change of measurement, wax mask, wax mask, change of measurement)
  • 014 Please answer the following question: What was the nicest present you received so far
  • 016 Bitte so schnell wie möglich lesen: Die Köchin mit dem Tupfenkopftuch kocht Karpfen in dem Kupferkochtopf. (The cook with the polka dot headscarf cooks carp in the copper saucepan)
-translated by artificial intelligence engines from German to English

Post Script:
Neural prosthesis uses brain activity to decode speech
Jan 2023, phys.org

Machine learning model that can predict the word about to be uttered by a subject, based on their neural activity recorded with a small set of minimally invasive electrodes.

"About" to -- this is called "imaginary speech"

via National Research University Higher School of Economics and Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry: Artur Petrosyan et al, Speech decoding from a small set of spatially segregated minimally invasive intracranial EEG electrodes with a compact and interpretable neural network, Journal of Neural Engineering (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1741-2552/aca1e1

FYI: While ECoG provides higher density coverage over a limited cortical region (typically unilateral), sEEG provides sparser coverage spanning more, bilateral brain regions including deeper structures (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7056827). Unlike ECoG, electrodes for sEEG can be implanted without a full craniotomy via a drill hole in the skull. (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-01-neural-prosthesis-brain-decode-speech.html)

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Behold The Hidden Hand


This was the basis for Spike Lee's 1989 Do the Right Thing by the way:
AI-based research reveals that extreme temperatures fuel online hate speech
Sep 2022, phys.org

Temperatures above or below a feel-good window of 12–21 degrees Celsius (54–70 °F) are linked to a marked rise in aggressive online behavior across the U.S.

Detecting hate tweets in more than four billion tweets from U.S. users with our AI-algorithm and combining them with weather data.

via Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: Temperature impacts on hate speech online: evidence from 4 billion geolocated tweets from the USA, The Lancet Planetary Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00173-5

Also: A Stechemesser et al, Strong increase of racist tweets outside of climate comfort zone in Europe, Environmental Research Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3 , dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac28b3



Urban elites seize most of the benefits of big cities, finds study
Jan 2023, phys.org

Ouch. This is pretty messed up.

Back up to 2010: A unified theory of urban living (Bettencourt and West) -- the legends of sociothermodynamics -- decide to measure cities like living things and find a universal scaling law similar to metabolic rates and body size. Basically everything you want to know about a city you can tell just by its size. Gas stations, patents, hospitals, suicides, cars, even average pedestrian walking speed. Everything. But wait, there's efficiency built into this scaling law -- for every doubling of a city's population, the number of new gas stations required is only 85%, not 100%, and the number of patents goes up 115%, not 100%. And that goes for everything, better medical care for less money, better garbage pick up, better job opportunities, better car dealerships, all for less money because the more people there are, the cheaper everything gets. 

Cities are a stellar reactor of wealth, creativity and even social services. The more people there are, the bigger and better everything gets, and for less time and less money. This has been measured by scientists only in the past decade.

But now, when we look a bit more carefully at the data, we find that averages aren't always a good indicator of the average person's experience. Instead, the rich get all the good stuff, and the poor get even less than they would if they lived in the soul-less suburbs. 

The study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than among the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places.

In other words, when it comes to cities, or anything for that matter, the rich get richer (insert astronaut meme).

via Linköping University: Martin Arvidsson, Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities, Nature Human Behaviour (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1


Post Script:
Active matter theory explains fire-ant group behavior
Jan 2023, phys.org

Ants are considered active particles that use chemical energy to move. They can be easily concentrated to create a dense collective that we can use to address active matter questions.

Active matter is based on particles that can self-propel and move due to local consumption of energy, unlike atomic or colloidal systems, whose constituents move as a result of temperature.

There are two large behaviors that emerge in active matter: the first is the transition into a state in which the set of particles moves in the same direction (collective mode), a behavior usually related to bird flocks and fish schools. The other is when the motility of the particles decreases with their pair-separation distance, which can lead to the formation of aggregates, and in some cases, to the separation of a phase formed by stationary ants and a phase formed by moving ants.

They can tell us about material properties: mechanical properties changed drastically depending on the state of the ant collective. In attraction-dominated phases, the behavior was similar to that of an elastic solid. In contrast, in active phases, the community reorganizes itself at the particle level to somewhat flow as a liquid

via University of Barcelona and Georgia Institute of Technology: Caleb Anderson et al, Ant waves—Spontaneous activity waves in fire-ant columns, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add0635

Also: Caleb Anderson et al, Social interactions lead to motility-induced phase separation in fire ants, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34181-0

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Habitual Sharing of Misinformation is Not Inevitable


Feels like somebody's playing hardball:
Study reveals the key reason why fake news spreads on social media
Jan 2023, phys.org

It's the algorithm, stupid. And specifically, algorithms that prioritize engagement:

Upends popular misconceptions that misinformation spreads because users lack the critical thinking skills necessary for discerning truth from falsehood or because their strong political beliefs skew their judgment.

15% of the most habitual news sharers in the research were responsible for spreading about 30% to 40% of the fake news.

"Due to the reward-based learning systems on social media, users form habits of sharing information that gets recognition from others," the researchers wrote. "Once habits form, information sharing is automatically activated by cues on the platform without users considering critical response outcomes, such as spreading misinformation."

The study's conclusions:
  • Habitual sharing of misinformation is not inevitable.
  • Users could be incentivized to build sharing habits that make them more sensitive to sharing truthful content.
  • Effectively reducing misinformation would require restructuring the online environments that promote and support its sharing.

And the best conclusion:
"These findings suggest that social media platforms can take a more active step than moderating what information is posted and instead pursue structural changes in their reward structure to limit the spread of misinformation."

Public Service Announcement:
Business will never do something unless it increases profits, because unlike humans who need air and water and food to live, business needs only profits. Business will never do something that directly inhibits its own profit-generating activities. In this case, social media makes money from "engaging users". To expect them to stop would be to expect a starving mother not to steal food for her children. Government, and regulation, is the immune system of society. In our attempts to maintain the human race as a species, unregulated business is a parasite, not a partner. 

via University of Southern California: Gizem Ceylan et al, Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216614120


True stories can win out on social media, study finds
Feb 2023, phys.org

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on." Or at least that's how the saying goes. That's what we thought back in 2018 when we heard the same thing from MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines

It turns out that only held true for Twitter; on Reddit they found the opposite.
The difference? Twitter has no moderators.
And who can blame them; for that kind of money?!

Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone (June 2022)

via The Ohio State University: Robert M Bond et al, Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit, PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad018



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Monday, March 13, 2023

Of Course Biocomputers Are Real, They're Us


I always thought mass social behavioral modification would be via olfactory receptor manipulation, but this looks like another option:

Controlling nematode worm behavior using two different light-sensitive proteins called opsins*
Nov 2022, phys.org

So they are "introducing" new sensory cells into the C. elegans. They find light-sensitive cells (opsins) in other animals, and put them in the worms.

One opsin is sensitive to white light and comes from a mosquito, another is sensitive to ultraviolet light and comes from a lamprey. These "tuned" light-receptor cells are then introduced to parts of the worm's motor neurons.

When you shine light on the worm, it stimulates the motor neurons, making them move. They made the white-light opsins to make the worm go, and the UV light makes it stop.

They can then move the worm, or rather make the worm move itself, by shining light on it. Fuck off.

*Opsins, like olfactory receptros, are GPCR's -- G protein-coupled receptors

via Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology at Osaka Metropolitan University: Mitsumasa Koyanagi et al, High-performance optical control of GPCR signaling by bistable animal opsins MosOpn3 and LamPP in a molecular property–dependent manner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2204341119


Scientists create living smartwatch powered by slime mold
Dec 2022, phys.org

Using the electrically conductive single-cell organism known as "slime mold," the researchers created a watch that only works when the organism is healthy, requiring the user to provide it with food and care.

The organism (Physarum polycephalum or slime mold) is placed in an enclosure on the watch, and the user must regularly feed it a mixture of water and oats to induce its growth. When the slime mold reaches the other side of the enclosure, it forms an electrical circuit that activates the heart rate monitor function. The organism can also enter a dormant state when not fed, allowing for revival days, months, or even years later.

The researchers found a high level of attachment to the watch, with some users saying it felt like a pet -- even naming it, or putting their partner in charge of the feeding when they got sick.

via University of Chicago: Jasmine Lu et al, Integrating Living Organisms in Devices to Implement Care-based Interactions, The 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2022). DOI: 10.1145/3526113.3545629

Image credit: It's not C elegans but it is a nematode (P pacificus) showing us its teeth. Because it has teeth. Everyday Nightmare Pictures - Nematode Teeth - P pacificus nematode showing its teeth - Jürgen Berger MPI for Biology - 2022

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Selling Words on Ebay



Scientists discover mechanism plants use to control 'mouths'
Dec 2022, phys.org

Just plant mouths.

via University of California San Diego: Yohei Takahashi et al, Stomatal CO2/bicarbonate Sensor Consists of Two Interacting Protein Kinases, Raf-like HT1 and non-kinase-activity requiring MPK12/MPK4, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abq6161.

Accelerating tactile communication with skin-attached telehaptics
Dec 2022, phys.org

Yes telehaptic.

But wait -- "can measure and reproduce materials such as cotton, polyester, and spandex, as well as the shape of convexly protruding letter surfaces and the dynamic feeling of plastic rods rolling on the fingertips." It can make you feel the feel of cotton. That's called high-resolution haptics. 

via National Research Council of Science & Technology Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute: Hanbit Jin et al, Highly pixelated, untethered tactile interfaces for an ultra-flexible on-skin telehaptic system, npj Flexible Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41528-022-00216-1


Wireless, ultrathin 'skin VR' to provide a vivid, personalized touch experience in the virtual world
Dec 2022, phys.org

Virtual touching, aka Skin VR

via City University of Hong Kong: Kuanming Yao et al, Encoding of tactile information in hand via skin-integrated wireless haptic interface, Nature Machine Intelligence (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00543-y


Meta-optics: The disruptive technology you didn't see coming
Dec 2022, phys.org

Meta-optics

The field, which blossomed after the early 2000s thanks to the conceptualization of a material with negative refractive index that could form a perfect lens, has grown rapidly in the last five years and now sees around 3000 publications a year.

This accelerating volume of research is impossible for scientists and technologists to navigate, which prompted Nature Photonics to commission a review from leaders in meta-optics research.

They found the field was on the verge of industrial disruption.

The first commercial components using these properties are already on the market, with companies such as Metalenz, NILT technologies and Meta Materials Inc delivering flat metalenses, polarization imaging, microscopy and biosensing.

via ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems: Dragomir Neshev, Enabling smart vision with metasurfaces, Nature Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01126-4


The first lab-created 'quantum abacus'
Feb 2023, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-lab-created-quantum-abacus.html

Not just the Quantum Abacus, but also the Holographic Lasers and Light Traps - Using sophisticated holographic experimental techniques, they were then able to create light traps with intensity profiles corresponding to the first 15 prime numbers and the first 10 lucky numbers.

via International School of Advanced Studies, University of Trieste, and the University of Saint Andrews: Donatella Cassettari et al, Holographic realization of the prime number quantum potential, PNAS Nexus (2022). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac279 


Researchers devise a new path toward 'quantum light'
Feb 2023, phys.org

Quantum Light - new state of light, which has controllable quantum properties over a broad range of frequencies, up as high as X-ray frequencies

via University of Camridge: Nicholas Rivera, Light emission from strongly driven many-body systems, Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01910-7


An illuminated water droplet creates an 'optical atom'
Jan 2023, phys.org

Optical Atom - when a beam of light is shone into a water droplet, rays of light bounce off the inner wall of the water droplet over and over again, going around and around inside the droplet; when its circumference is a multiple of the light's wavelength, a resonance phenomenon occurs, making the droplet shine brighter; when the droplet shrinks due to evaporation, it appears to flash every time its size is right to create the resonance phenomenon, and in a way similar to what occurs when an electron is emitted from an atom when illuminated by light of varying wavelengths; it's then a 100,00x model of an atom

via University of Gothenburg: Javier Tello Marmolejo et al, Fano Combs in the Directional Mie Scattering of a Water Droplet, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.043804

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Own Nothing Be Happy


AKA Ownership vs Lonership

Europeans gain access to Apple parts, manuals in Self Service Repair program
Dec 2022, Ars Technica

New right to repair program for Apple:
  • these countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom
  • these products: phone from the iPhone 12 or 13 lineups or a MacBook with an M1- or M2-based chip
  • individual customers to purchase the same repair manuals, parts, and tools that Apple uses to perform repairs
  • customers can rent repair kits for 54.90 euros with free shipping
  • https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-launches-self-service-repair-in-europe/

An architecture that gives users full control of their smartphones
Dec 2022, phys.org

New smartphone architecture called TEEtime allows different 'domains' running simultaneously to coexist on a smartphone.

It came about when governments creating contact tracing apps had to integrate with legacy systems in order to work, but didn't want to integrate the data used in the app.

They also quote the word "our" in our smartphones. 

"We show that it is indeed possible to run software that is mutually distrusting on one phone, with hardware primitives that already exist," Groschupp said. "We hope this leads to a change in the public perception of the smartphone ecosystem. Usability, security, and user control are not mutually exclusive. An important design choice for us was to refrain from leveraging hypervisors, as we wanted to avoid complex high-privileged software on the phones, since this would require again trusting large commercial entities with its development and updates."

via ETH Zurich: Friederike Groschupp et al, It's TEEtime: Bringing User Sovereignty to Smartphones, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2211.05206

Image credit: AI Art - Happiness by Norman Rockwell - 2022

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Scientists Startled, Puzzled and Shocked Over New Discoveries



Astrophysicists make observations consistent with the predictions of an alternative theory of gravity
Oct 2022, phys.org

"Puzzling discovery"

New method developed for counting stars:
MOND - MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, also called
MoND - Modified Newtonian Dynamics, (see what they did there)

"According to Newton's laws of gravity, it's a matter of chance* in which of the tails a lost star ends up," explains Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg of the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics. "So both tails should contain about the same number of stars. However, in our work we were able to prove for the first time that this is not true: In the clusters we studied, the front tail always contains significantly more stars nearby to the cluster than the rear tail."
*I thought they said God doesn't roll dice?!

via University of Bonn: Pavel Kroupa et al, Asymmetrical tidal tails of open star clusters: stars crossing their cluster's práh challenge Newtonian gravitation, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac2563



Unique features of octopus create 'an entirely new way of designing a nervous system'
Nov 2022, phys.org

Totally unexpected about the octopus nervous system: a structure by which the intramuscular nerve cords (INCs), which help the animal sense its arm movement, connect arms on the opposite sides of the animal. The startling discovery provides new insights into how invertebrate species have independently evolved complex nervous systems.

via University of Chicago Medical Center: Adam Kuuspalu et al, Multiple nerve cords connect the arms of octopuses, providing alternative paths for inter-arm signaling, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.007


Researcher finds a sweet new way to print microchip patterns on curvy surfaces
Nov 2022, phys.org

It was only as a last resort that he had even tried burying microscopic magnetic dots in hardened chunks of sugar—hard candy, basically—and sending these sweet packages to colleagues in a biomedical lab. The sugar dissolves easily in water, freeing the magnetic dots for their studies without leaving any harmful plastics or chemicals behind.

By chance, Zabow had left one of these sugar pieces, embedded with arrays of micromagnetic dots, in a beaker, and it did what sugar does with time and heat—it melted, coating the bottom of the beaker in a gooey mess.

"No problem," he thought. He would just dissolve away the sugar, as normal. Except this time when he rinsed out the beaker, the microdots were gone. But they weren't really missing; instead of releasing into the water, they had been transferred onto the bottom of the glass where they were casting a rainbow reflection.

Could regular table sugar be used to bring the power of microchips to new and unconventional surfaces?

(Yes)

via National Institute of Standards and Technology: G. Zabow, Reflow transfer for conformal three-dimensional microprinting, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.add7023


New measurements of galaxy rotation lean toward modified gravity as an explanation for dark matter
Dec 2022, phys.org

Modified Newtonian dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model: 

Rather than the force of attraction as a pure inverse square relation, gravity has a small remnant pull regardless of distance. This remnant is only about 10 trillionths of a G, but it's enough to explain galactic rotation curves.

So the author of this paper looked at high-resolution velocity curves of 152 galaxies as observed in the Spitzer Photometry and Accurate Rotation Curves (SPARC) database. He found a shift in agreement with AQUAL. The data seems to support modified gravity over standard dark matter cosmology.

via Sejong University Department of Physics and Astronomy, Korea: Kyu-Hyun Chae, Distinguishing Dark Matter, Modified Gravity, and Modified Inertia with the Inner and Outer Parts of Galactic Rotation Curves, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2207.11069


Post Script:
A subtitled world: Uncovering the secrets of tickertape synesthesia
Feb 2023, phys.org

Tickertape synesthesia - transcribing the speech of others into text, automatically and involuntarily, these sounds will appear as imaginary subtitles floating before your eyes

A previous study estimated that up to 1.4% of the population could experience involuntary subtitles when hearing a human voice, but this figure remains uncertain. It's challenging to detect TTS subjects, who are generally unaware that they are distinguishable from the average person.

"Several participants in the study were shocked to learn that not everyone has built-in subtitles,"

Even more surprising: some subjects report that when they watch a foreign movie, a second level of subtitles—a product of their synesthesia—appears above the subtitles embedded in the video. Others have subtitled dreams and nightmares, which provide their oneiric activity with a cinematic dimension. Finally, since one-third of the participants knew of other cases of TTS in their family, the emergence of this form of synesthesia might have a genetic basis.

AKA "Orthographic representations"

via Paris Brain Institute: abien Hauw et al, Subtitled speech: Phenomenology of tickertape synesthesia, Cortex (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.11.005

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