Man Hospitalized for 10+ Day Erection

Florida man reports handgun stolen during orgy at his home

Computers start to take over leadership functions once performed by human leaders, e.g., assigning tasks to human workers.

should we eat our research subjects? – it seems that Animal Studies scholars are divided on that issue; some do, some don’t

study found a strong correlation between adultery and workplace misconduct by corporate executives and financial advisers

91.4% of worries did not come true for those with generalized anxiety disorder

Jeff Bezos has done something that even the nonprofits receiving his millions remark is highly unusual: He has given them life-changing money with virtually no restrictions, formal vetting, or oversight

Self-Checkout Thievery“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron.”

Do We Create Shoplifters?

Scientists develop ‘artificial tongue’ to detect fake whiskies. The technology can also be used to identify poisons as well as to monitor rivers.

A research team is working on training mice to understand irregularities within speech, a task the animals can do with remarkable accuracy

When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way. How Digital Advertising Markets Really Work

Hackers working for the Russian government have been using printers, video decoders, and other so-called Internet-of-things devices as a beachhead to penetrate targeted computer networks

Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

When our cherished ideas are contradicted by the facts, we must avoid the human tendency to double down on those ideas

Dynamic Information Design with Diminishing Sensitivity Over News

Having mastered Space Invaders, chess, and Go, AI tackles video soccer

Most American books published before 1964 never extended their copyright, meaning they’re in the public domain today. Where to download these free Public domain eBooks

A team of scientists have unveiled a vodka which has been produced using grains and water from the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which they claim is completely safe to drin

Michel Foucault’s LSD Trip in the Valley of Death

Fart-proof underwear

{ What makes WeWork worth more, the company seems to be saying, is that it’s a tech company + Everything about the company is over-the-top: its growth, losses, potential conflicts of interest and financial gymnastics + The company’s IPO prospectus is an exercise in ducking reality }

Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk? […]

Your phone number may have now become an even stronger identifier than your full name. I recently found this out firsthand when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a phone number.

He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.

From there, it could have easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

image { Bell telephone magazine, March/April 1971 }

When faced with a personal problem people typically give better advice to others than to themselves. This has been termed ‘Solomon’s Paradox’, named after the biblical King Solomon who was wise for others, but not so when it came to making decisions that would have an impact on his own standing.

Suppose that instead of imagining a problem from the perspective of another you were actually able to have a conversation with yourself about it, but from the embodied perspective of another.

A previous study showed how it is possible to enact internal dialogue in virtual reality (VR) through participants alternately occupying two different virtual bodies – one representing themselves and the other Sigmund Freud. They could maintain a self-conversation by explaining their problem to the virtual Freud and then from the embodied perspective of Freud see and hear the explanation by their virtual doppelganger, and then give some advice. Alternating between the two bodies they could maintain a self-dialogue, as if between two different people.

Here we show that the process of alternating between their own and the Freud body is important for successful psychological outcomes. An experiment was carried out with 58 people, 29 in the body swapping Self-Conversation condition and 29 in a condition where they only spoke to a Scripted Freud character. The results showed that the Self-Conversation method results in a greater perception of change and help compared to the Scripted. We compare this method with the distancing paradigm where participants imagine resolving a problem from a first or third person perspective.

We consider the method as a possible strategy for self-counselling.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas { Andy Warhol, Are You “Different?” (Positive), 1985 }

An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says.

The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore.

Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans - to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognised.

The academics say this is “outdated”.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

enamel on linen { Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2007 }

Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China

Scientists create contact lenses that zoom when you blink twice

Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind

Apple has said that it will temporarily suspend its practice of using human contractors to grade snippets of Siri voice recordings for accuracy. Contractors “regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex” as part of their job.

women’s voices are becoming deeper in some countries

Employee happiness and business success are linked, study

Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing

More than 1 in 4 delivery drivers are eating orders and Delivery drivers involved in Amazon theft ring

A two-track algorithm to detect deepfake images — can spot image manipulation at the level of single-pixels

How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality

Computers can’t tell if you’re happy when you smile. Emotion recognition is a $20 billion industry, but a new study says the most popular method is deeply flawed.

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

Joseph D’Alesandro, 20, made nearly $2,000 a month from phone farming back in 2017. Other phone farmers said they’ve made hundreds of dollars a month from passively running apps on their phones.

The project, which launched in July 2016, now hosts 82 tools that can be used to decrypt 109 different types of ransomware.

How Over 25 People Got Scammed Into Working At A Nonexistent Game Company

evidence suggests it is possible for the vast majority of Americans to eat healthily and affordably

Bernie Madoff asks Trump to reduce his prison sentence

the method for taking a shit as an Apollo astronaut was horrifyingly simple

BrandoMOtv [Thanks Tim]

“The maximum speed required to break through the earth’s gravitational pull is seven miles a second,” says David Wojnarowicz. “Since economic conditions prevent us from gaining access to rockets or spaceships, we would have to learn to run awful fast to achieve escape from where we all are heading.”

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

About 25% of American couples that eventually move in together do so after four months of dating, and 50% after a year. By two years, over 70% had moved in.

New study uses camera footage to track the frequency of bystander intervention in heated incidents

this study finds that brighter nights, those with a full moon and no clouds, have significantly more crime than nights without any moonlight

Never Commit a Crime When Your Phone Is Connected to a Wi-Fi Network

A Few Thoughts about Deep Fakes

Sand and gravel are being extracted faster than they can be replaced. Roughly 32 billion to 50 billion tonnes are used globally each year, mainly for making concrete, glass and electronics.

History’s Greatest Horse Racing Cheat and His Incredible Painting Trick

Why everything you know about nutrition is wrong

In 2019, blockchain has been piercing the food industry at an accelerated pace. According to recent research, 20% of the top-10 global grocers will use blockchain by 2025

An 1851 manual on making ice cream [via Austerity Kitchen]

I spent a day eating food cooked by robots in America’s tech capital [more Austerity Kitchen]

More than 400,000 people have joined a Facebook event page calling for storming Area 51

Facebook’s stock went up after news of a record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine

Google takes another run at social networking with Shoelace

To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

In a Constantly Changing San Francisco, Change is Constant — by A.I. Algorithm [Thanks Tim]

I’LL WASH YOUR PET

We analyzed over one million posts from over 4,000 individuals on several social media platforms, using computational models based on reward reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media qualitatively and quantitatively conforms to the principles of reward learning.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

image { Dissecting Reinforcement Learning }

In mid-1947, a United States Army Air Forces balloon crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Following wide initial interest in the crashed “flying disc”, the US military stated that it was merely a conventional weather balloon. Interest subsequently waned until the late 1970s, when ufologists began promoting a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military, which then engaged in a cover-up.

In the 1990s, the US military published two reports disclosing the true nature of the crashed object: a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { W. Eugene Smith, Untitled [man holding bottle, S-shaped foam form emerging from it], Springfield, Massachusetts, 1952 }

The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat

People keep spotting Teslas with snoozing drivers on the freeway

people judged that altering some moral facts was impossible—not even God could turn morally wrong acts into morally right acts. Strikingly, people thought that God could make physically impossible and logically impossible events occur.

In a technical tour de force, Japanese researchers created eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Now, scientists have to determine how to use those cells safely — and ethically.

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

Cockroaches may soon be unstoppable—thanks to fast-evolving insecticide resistance

In recent weeks, hackers believed to be working for the Iranian government have targeted U.S. government agencies, as well as sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, sending waves of spear-phishing emails

China Snares Tourists’ Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App — Border authorities routinely install the app on the phones of people entering the Xinjiang region by land from Central Asia, gathering personal data and scanning for material considered objectionable. [NY Times | Vice]

China may soon be home to half of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems.

China’s Social Credit System Is More Kafka Than Orwell

Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press

James Joyce and the Writing of Odor 

Cincinnati Built a Subway System 100 Years Ago–But Never Used It

In 1999 Sweden banned the purchase—but not the sale—of sex. The idea of criminalising prostitutes’ clients is spreading

Deepfake revenge porn distribution now a crime in Virginia

Why pilots are seeing UFOs

The United States Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron “Thunderbirds” will fly over Hollywood in celebration of the upcoming film Captain Marvel during the afternoon of March 4, 2019. + U.S. Air Force’s Thunderbirds stunt team flying over Hollywood Blvd [Thanks Tim]

A few months ago, I started hearing about something called Superhuman. It’s an invitation-only service that costs $30 a month and promises “the fastest email experience ever made.” Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, reportedly swore by it, as did tech bigwigs like Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe. The app was rumored to have a waiting list of more than 100,000 people.

“We have the who’s who of Silicon Valley at this point,” Superhuman’s founder, Rahul Vohra, told me in an interview. The waiting list is actually 180,000 people long, he said, and some people are getting desperate. He showed me a photo of a gluten-free cake sent to Superhuman’s office by a person who was hoping to score an invitation.

“We have insane levels of virality that haven’t been seen since Dropbox or Slack,” Mr. Vohra added.

Last month, Superhuman raised a $33 million investment round, led by Mr. Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz. That valued the company at roughly $260 million — a steep valuation for an app with fewer than 15,000 customers, but one apparently justified by the company’s trajectory and its support among fans, which borders on evangelical. […]

I spent several weeks testing it out. And it turns out that the hype is mostly justified, at least if you’re the kind of person who can spend $30 a month to get your inbox in order. […]

Some of the app’s features — such as ones that let users undo sending, track when their emails are opened and automatically pull up a contact’s LinkedIn profile — are available in other third-party email plug-ins. But there are bells and whistles that I hadn’t seen before. Like “instant intro,” which moves the sender of an introductory email to bcc, saving you from having to manually re-enter that person’s address. Or the scheduling feature, which sees that you’re typing “next Tuesday” and automatically pulls up your calendar for that day.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }