Those pet talking buttons do not work like the YouTube pet owners think they work.
There is no question that dogs are intelligent. But Susan Hazel, an associate professor at the School of Animal and Veterinary Science at the University of Adelaide, and Eduardo J Fernandez assert, that pets cannot understand the human language. Instead, all the research indicates they are reacting from operant conditioning and cite the famous case of Clever Hans.
Pets learn that pressing a button can lead to a reward, but in cases where dogs seem to be able to string multiple buttons together to say something advanced, or where they can press the ‘right’ button when asked, it is very likely they are just responding to their owner’s body language. They almost certainly wouldn’t be able to replicate the behavior if a new pet sitter was asking the command.
Learning complex actions by operant conditioning isn’t new. The Verge writes about how good operant conditioning gets with the Clever Hans phenomenon. Hans was a 20th century horse who could apparently provide answers to simple math questions by tapping his hoof. With careful investigation, it turned out Hans wasn’t doing any arithmetic but was instead reading subtle cues from whoever was questioning him to know when to stop tapping.
Remember when PC Gamer magazine had a demo CD attached to the cover?
JacobJazz has released a set of 22 little indie horror games on itch.io. It even comes with a digital spoof of late 90’s PCGamer magazine you can browse (or print out) for hints on the games and prints out front/back covers and all kinds of tidbits you can print out and DIY craft your own malevolent looking disk/magazine at home.
None of the games are particularly earth shattering; but I love the effort put into creating some physical media and reviving the past.
Elisabeth Bik has become an unexpected lightning rod. In 2013 she heard about science paper plagiarism and, on a whim, took a sentence she wrote in a paper and put it into Google Scholar to see if anybody had used the text. She found the sentence picked randomly had indeed been stolen by somebody else. The paper plagiarized not only her text but that of many others.
Fast forward to one evening in January 2014. She sat at her computer, sifting through scientific papers as she often did. Imagine her shock when she saw a section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments. The authors seemed to be deliberately trying to cover their tracks by flipping the image back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.
What came next was the discovery of a shocking amount of very obviously duplicated and fabricated images. In a simple scan, she found 800 of 20,000 papers to contain duplicated figures and they estimated about half of the duplications were deliberate. What’s worse, a shocking 2% of all papers she looked at had deliberately copied and manipulated images/figures – indicating clear intent to hide the deception.
In two years, Cerabyte built a prototype ceramic storage system solely from commercially available, off the shelf parts. They believe they can build palm-sized cartridges that can store 10,000TB of data.
Each cartridge is a layer of glass, similar to Gorilla Glass by Corning, with a thin, dark ceramic layer as the actual data storage medium. These cartridges are kept in a robotic library. When data needs to be read or written, the cartridge is moved from the library rack to the read-write device.
Data is written by two million laser beamlets that punch QR code-like nano-scale patterns into the surface of the media. Data can be written at GBps speeds, with TB/square-centimeter densities – much greater than the density of HDDs which only hit 0.02TB/square-centimeter in current drives.
It will be interesting to see how resilient the data storage is for the long term. One disadvantage is likely that they are only write-once media. But if the media is just a piece of glass with a ceramic coating; it may be relatively cheap.
The advantages, however, could be breath-taking. Besides the incredible amount of storage density, these could be game changing for long-term storage since there are no moving parts and the media doesn’t rely on magnetic particles that can drift (HD’s) or polymer substrates that degrade over time (CD/DVD). So long as the ceramic coating doesn’t fade or easily scratch; ceramic storage could last longer than current methods. Immunity from EMP and other electronic attacks is another amazing advantage. One could easily see this used as a failsafe that can re-load literally hard-coded binary data such as firmware, an OS, or a secure bootstrap loader. If it is stable for a long period of time, it might be used for ultra-long term archives of massive amounts of data.
Summary: The cost goods and services in Portlandare more expensive when compared to other large cities, but nothing like California and cheaper than Seattle.
According to an indictment, the four [men from Florida] flew to Portland on Nov. 8, 2023, rented an Airbnb in Vancouver and used ride-share car services to get around.
Over the next two days, they watched their target’s downtown Portland apartment and schemed how to carry out the kidnapping, the indictment alleges.
On Nov. 10, some in the group abducted the man, forced him from one car into another and drove him away from his residence while others entered the man’s apartment to try to access his cryptocurrency.
They drove the man to a field in Banks, tied him to a post with duct tape and repeatedly assaulted him before abandoning him, according to the indictment and police records.
Later that day, they ultimately used the man’s password, or so-called “seed phrase,” to transfer digital currency from his cryptocurrency wallet to another location, the indictment says. Prosecutors have not disclosed how much currency was taken.
Extortion and personal data breaches accounted for the most frequent cryptocurrency frauds reported in 2023, according to the FBI
A reminder that security is only as strong as it’s weakest link. And often, that link is you. It only took some rope and a long bout of ‘persuasion’ for this guy to lose his crypto wallet.
This also holds up for things like biometrics where you can be forced to apply a finger or put your face in front of the device. Even worse, some biometrics still work if you’re conscious or not. They could club you and put your finger on the device to unlock it. They may not even need the rest of you if you turn into too much of a hassle. You could just find yourself tied to a post missing a finger, hand, or even your head (face id).
I’m not a climate change denier. I am a denier of these cornball solutions proposed to supposedly fix climate change. Why can’t I question bad ideas without being branded a denier/heretic?
I love science. It’s what got me into the field of Computer Science as my livelihood for the last 25 years. Empirical, data-backed thinking is what’s led us from the ignorance and superstitions of the past to understanding we have today. But science has a problem. Namely – that politicians, news agencies, and activists are running around claiming they are speaking for science.
To understand something, you must know what it is you’re seeking. Epistemologically, the object of science is to create physical descriptions of the natural world. Science seeks to describe how the world works via repeatable, quantifiable descriptions of natural processes. Science, however, has NOTHING to say about political policy or ascribing human value to what it finds. Political policy and human value are the proper objects of government and religion. Science can describe how an atom is split – it is politicians, engineers, and theologians that tell us if we should build a bomb or a power plant.
Therefore, it’s time to separate the peanut butter from the chocolate. If someone legitimately questions a political policy or posited socialpolicy for an issue – they are NOT a science denier. They are a policy or activist questioner. I believe most people would agree politicians, and especially activists, should be questioned – regularly. This is a good thing, a necessary thing. Something democracy is founded on. Any activist or politician that resorts to silencing others or cannot defend their proposals by describing the solid scientific evidence and social policy reasoning behind them is a danger to democracy.
Example: We can 100% agree that gravity is real and buildings will fall down and kill people if built badly. A healthy scientific statement can absolutely withstand someone arguing if certain kind of concrete can withstand certain pressures and forces. You go out and try it. Reality decides who’s right. A healthy public policy of building codes based on those facts can withstand any scrutiny without resorting to someone being called a ‘gravity denier’ or ‘regulations denier’. It’s clear that building code has had serious flaws in the past – but that is a flaw of the policy. Science and gravity are just fine thank you.
Public policy and social policy do NOT speak scientifically nor for science. Policy should be BASED on science, but equating the two is wrong. Science and political/social policy fundamentally differ in what they are trying to do.
What we have now are policy makers and activists pretending they are scientists or pretending to speak for science when they are not. They are arguing for a particular political policy – not the science. Most activists, if you look, have very limited to no real knowledge of real science. Most are not scientists at all. Some have very dubious public and private credentials to even speak on these topics. Because they do not understand the science, they all too often resort to ad-hominem name calling more akin to radicals, cults, and zealots.
Sadly, the average person doesn’t usually understand the nuance that science and policy are different. I see all kinds of signs that say ‘Science is real’ and ‘We believe science’ here in Portland, while at the same time voting down fluoridating water – 5 times. It doesn’t help when politicians/activists saying they are the same. It’s beginning to undermine the notion of truth itself. This is why people are increasingly starting to say they don’t trust ‘science’ anymore. What they should say is they don’t (and shouldn’t) trust politicians and activists claiming to be scientists.
Maybe that’s why we are seeing an increase in political fanaticism that one would normally see in a cult. It attracts the same radicals – for the same reasons. (Aside: One might make a very interesting study that with the decline of religious following, people have turned to political/social policy as their new religious belief system. Which is why people’s political beliefs are often held with the same convictions as faith)
Hossenfelder has been ruffling some big feathers. She claims her adherence to the standards of truth surrounding her calling foul on the failures of string theory (claims she was proven right about) cost her tenure. She also admits when she’s wrong. Honestly – I think she’s one of the few people really doing science by demanding high standards of proof.
More telling is the comment sections on her Youtube videos that are full of other scientists (and PHD’s) who are encountering the same things and sharing the same stories. Namely, that publishing results that align with current thinking is more important than truth (evidenced by major cases of data fraud being discovered in a shocking numbers of papers). She notes funding channels are controlled by just a few large figureheads in each field that determine what can be researched and often hold personal vendettas against anyone that questions their leadership or scientific direction. Science has become highly entrenched in ‘orthodox’ lines of thought and has their own inquisitions towards those that question the results. She describe how the funding mechanisms keeps perpetuating failed ideas even when decades of work shows no results – or even shows clear negative results.
As stated before public policy and social policy is NOT science. Policy should be BASED on science, but equating the two is wrong because they fundamentally differ in what they are trying to do. The other problem is that it appears we’re not actually DOING science by demanding high standards of repeatable proof.
Truth is being attacked on 2 fronts. Ironically by the very people claiming to be speaking for truth. It’s creating a crisis of faith in science as well as contributing to our increasingly divisive political climate that acts more like cults than democracy.
Looking Glass is now making the Looking Glass Go – a much thinner and mobile version of their glasses free holographic Looking Glass Portrait display. This isn’t new tech, but it is interesting to see people working in the space again.
With their software, you can make your own images and display animated content as well. Viewing angle is about 60 degrees and is created from up to 100 different still images.
It’s not limited to static images. You can even use the Looking Glass API to run this Unity version of Doom on the display and can look around pillars and objects.
Did you know the US Mint has a really interesting online shop? One of their more interesting products is uncut sheets of currency. You can get uncut sheets of most denominations: $1, $5, $10, $50, $100, and even the wonderful $2 bill. The sheets come in lots of different formats too. You can usually buy sheets of 50, 32, 25, 20, 10, 8, and even 4 note configurations.
Some gotchas:
You may need to come back to the site multiple times over a period of months if you have something specific. $2 bills were out of stock for almost a year at one point during Covid but have recently returned. In addition, since this is legal currency, the cost of the sheet is actually more than the full face value of all the bills on the sheet. For example, a 32 sheet of $2 costs $102 (more than the $64 face value). A 50 note sheet of $1 is $86. A 16 note sheet of $100 bills costs an eye watering $1860.
Adding to recent discussions about the ‘script kiddie’ Flipper Zero hardware hacking device, a new video appears to show someone burning up a smart electric meter by issuing power cycling commands really fast.
