haruki zaemonDuring the Cold War, the most formidable Western fighter was the F-15 Eagle. From his part in the first USAF ‘Bear-H’ intercept, to tangling with elite Aggressor pilots and the dangers of dogfighting low over the sea, Paul ‘Skid’ Woodford describes the perils and joys of flying the best fighter in the world.
Innovative cultures are misunderstood. The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors. A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. Collaboration must be balanced with a individual accountability. And flatness requires strong leadership. Innovative cultures are paradoxical. Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail.
At its core our work shows that CNNs use the many weak statistical regularities present in natural images for classification and don’t make the jump towards object-level integration of image parts like humans. The same is likely true for other tasks and sensory modalities.
A simple analytic argument that NNs are in fact essentially polynomial regression models, with the effective degree of the polynomial growing at each hidden layer.
A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall.
AgriProtein is a British company that operates two fly farms in South Africa. Each farm contains 8.4 billion flies, which consume 276 tonnes of food waste and lay 340 million eggs each day. Those eggs (maggots) are dehydrated, flattened and used as animal feed. The company is worth $200m, and they’re planning to open 100 more factories around the world by 2024.
Created by Avery Trufelman, Articles of Interest covers a broad range of concepts including the rise of casual wear, the environmental impact of the textile industry, and why womenswear doesn’t have pockets. Together, the episodes link thematically, each one to the next, like a daisy chain. Think of it as a podcast concept album … on clothes.
Overall, our results show that our approach can estimate the total number of people behind the walls with a high accuracy while minimizing the need for prior calibrations.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh faced the Senate Judiciary Committee in Day One of a two-day marathon Q&A session for his nomination as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. We sat through it all so you don’t have to. We’ve cut out all the garbage and are bringing you just the questions and answers on legal matters related to national security, presidential power and presidential investigation.
We report the first active acoustic side-channel attack. Speakers are used to emit human inaudible acoustic signals and the echo is recorded via microphones, turning the acoustic system of a smart phone into a sonar system. The echo signal can be used to profile user interaction with the device. For example, a victim’s finger movements can be inferred to steal Android unlock patterns. In our empirical study, the number of candidate unlock patterns that an attacker must try to authenticate herself to a Samsung S4 phone can be reduced by up to 70% using this novel acoustic side-channel. The attack is entirely unnoticeable to victims. Our approach can be easily applied to other application scenarios and device types. Overall, our work highlights a new family of security threats.
Do people of opposing political parties believe in different facts? The mantra at the moment is that they do, because of media echo chambers, motivated reasoning, and ideological blindspots. But a more careful look reveals a different answer, with perhaps even more startling consequences.
Cliven Bundy and his sons led two armed standoffs against the federal government and beat them twice in court. The Bundys and their supporters see themselves as Patriots fighting government overreach. Others see them as domestic terrorists rallying extremists and conspiracy theorists to their side. What is the truth?
If you engage in consensual sadomasochistic sex could you actually be found guilty of assault?
The case of R v Brown is one of the most hotly debated criminal decisions in legal history.
“We have a perverse situation where harm with consent (e.g. S&M) is can be deemed unlawful, but without consent (as in the case of alleged rape) is OK.”
The pair discovered just how much visual information is hiding in plain sight. In their first paper, Freeman and Torralba showed that the changing light on the wall of a room, filmed with nothing fancier than an iPhone, can be processed to reveal the scene outside the window. Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.
We perform programmer de-anonymization using both obfuscated binaries, and real-world code found “in the wild” in single-author GitHub repositories and the recently leaked Nulled.IO hacker forum. We show that programmers who would like to remain anonymous need to take extreme countermeasures to protect their privacy.
In response to a dumb viral video with almost 20 million views that suggests detonating a powerful nuclear device at the bottom of the ocean would unleash global chaos, Kurzgesagt provides a counterpoint using, you know, science.
Each of the cities is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. Each bar’s direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings.
Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there.
I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.