How much data are the most popular apps on Android and iOS leaking to third parties (i.e. people who have nothing to do with the app you’re using). A LOT!
Tag: Research
Inner City “Dueling” Over “Micro Aggressions”
From the comments section of a summary of a paper called “Microaggression and Moral Cultures“:
Re: In the inner city men are dueling over the smallest of, er, micro aggressions.
TMMD ?
In Vino Veritas … At Least Untill You Have To Pee
Who would have thought the lies we tell are more convincing when we need to pee.
I’m watching out for sentences like this in the news: ?
[…] complained they were subjected to ‘forced urination’ before they were interrogated by the TSA.
The actual paper.
Abstract: The Inhibitory-Spillover-Effect (ISE) on a deception task was investigated. The ISE occurs when performance in one self-control task facilitates performance in another (simultaneously conducted) self-control task. Deceiving requires increased access to inhibitory control. We hypothesized that inducing liars to control urination urgency (physical inhibition) would facilitate control during deceptive interviews (cognitive inhibition). Participants drank small (low-control) or large (high-control) amounts of water. Next, they lied or told the truth to an interviewer. Third-party observers assessed the presence of behavioral cues and made true/lie judgments. In the high-control, but not the low-control condition, liars displayed significantly fewer behavioral cues to deception, more behavioral cues signaling truth, and provided longer and more complex accounts than truth-tellers. Accuracy detecting liars in the high-control condition was significantly impaired; observers revealed bias toward perceiving liars as truth-tellers. The ISE can operate in complex behaviors. Acts of deception can be facilitated by covert manipulations of self-control.
Moral parents, moral babies
Ars again covers interesting research on the psychology toddlers. This time: toddlers with parents with lower tolerance to injustice show stronger differences in EEG-readings when watching prosocial vs. antisocial behavior.
It also has a discussion on how difficult it is to do a “psychological” assessment of toddlers’ behavior and derive concrete explanations or conclusions from them.
The Trick of Hope
I often tell myself and my students: medicine is the most human of all the sciences that is stuck with the least human of all the experiments: and that is the randomized trial.
Randomization doesn’t exist because doctors are malign or medicine is nasty it exists precisely for the utterly opposite reason: because we hope too much.
We’re so hopeful, that we want things to work so badly-especially against cancer-we want things to work so badly that we’ll trick ourselves to believing that they’re working.
And there’s nothing as toxic or as lethal as that trick: the trick of hope.
— Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee in PBS’ Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies
New RC Cars
What’s so new about RC cars? Oh … they’re the real, “off-the-shelve” ones, those where people ride in … and they can be hijacked by anybody with the same cellular provider … over the Internet, no direct access required … o.O … WIRED has a piece.
I Helped Find And Fix A Bug In RabbitMQ
Bottle Plugin Lifecycle
If you use Python‘s Bottle micro-framework there’ll be a time where you’ll want to add custom plugins. To get a better feeling on what code gets executed when, I created a minimal Bottle app with a test plugin that logs what code gets executed. I uesed it to test both global and route-specific plugins.
When Python loads the module you’ll see that the plugins’
__init__()
and
setup()
methods will be called immediately when they are installed on the app or applied to the route. This happens in the order they appear in the code. Then the app is started.
The first time a route is called Bottle executes the plugins’
apply()
methods. This happens in “reversed order” of installation (which makes sense for a nested callback chain). This means first the route-specific plugins get applied then the global ones. Their result is cached, i.e. only the inner/wrapped function is executed from here on out.
Then for every request the
apply()
method’s inner function is executed. This happens in the “original” order again.
Below you can see the code and example logs for two requests. You can also clone the Gist and do your own experiments.
https://twitter.com/riyadpr/status/617681143538786304
Drone Meteorology
Drone Meteorology, noun
the study of death “raining down” on congregations of people
This is especially useful when planning open-air weddings. 😶
Übergewicht senkt Demenzrisiko
Ein weiter Beweis dafür, dass der Verein zur Pflege des Wohlstandsbauches einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Volksgesundheit leistet. Wissenschaftler haben die Gesundheitsdaten von fast 2 Mio. Briten über 20 Jahre ausgewertet und kommen zum Ergebnis, dass Übergewicht das Demenzrisiko senkt.