haruki zaemon

Taken together, these are the most common misconceptions about American slavery I encountered during my time interpreting history to the public

The booby-trapped screens also exploited operating system vulnerabilities that bypassed key security protections built into the phones. The malicious parts cost less than $10 and could easily be mass-produced. Most chilling of all, to most people, the booby-trapped parts could be indistinguishable from legitimate ones, a trait that could leave many service technicians unaware of the maliciousness. There would be no sign of tampering unless someone with a background in hardware disassembled the repaired phone and inspected it.

Without any AI or speech recognition mechanism instead relying entirely on a set of 16 pre-recorded responses, Lenny is able to trick many people and keep conversations going for many minutes, and in one case up to an hour! Spammers on average spend 10:13 minutes talking to Lenny, and these conversations have an average of 58 turns! On average, a caller hears 27 turns of Lenny, which corresponds to 1.7x repetition of the whole script. Surprisingly, in only 11 calls (5%), the caller realizes and states that he is talking to a recording or an automated system.

The waggle dance is one of the most popular examples of animal communication. Forager bees direct their nestmates to profitable resources via a complex motor display. Essentially, the dance encodes the polar coordinates to the resource in the field. Unemployed foragers follow the dancer’s movements and then search for the advertised spots in the field. Throughout the last decades, biologists have employed different techniques to measure key characteristics of the waggle dance and decode the information that it conveys. Early techniques involved the use of protractors and stopwatches to measure the dance orientation and duration directly from the observation hive. Recent approaches employ digital video recordings from which dance characteristics are extracted using digital protractors on screen. However, manual approaches are very time-consuming. Most studies, therefore, regard only small numbers of animals in short periods of time. We have developed a system capable of automatically detecting, decoding and mapping communication dances in real-time.

A recent paper showed that male STEM faculty assessed the quality of real research that demonstrated bias against women in STEM as being low; instead the male faculty favored fake research, designed for the purposes of the study in question, which purported to demonstrate that no such bias exists.

On the 40th anniversary of their launch, we check in with the Voyager space probes. We revisit the story of the romantic time capsules that were placed onboard, and a question we asked five years ago: where exactly is Voyager 1?

Who decides what emojis are available to users, and who makes the actual designs? Independent radio and film producer Mark Bramhill (Welcome to Macintosh) took it upon himself to find out and, in the process, ended up developing and pitching his own idea for a new emoji.

In the 1970s, a small group of astronomers used the first prototype of the Concorde to pursue a total eclipse across the Sahara at twice the speed of sound.

In this context, Damore’s memo is particularly sloppy and fundamentally unscientific. The memo doesn’t clearly define what makes for a successful coder. It doesn’t explore what scientists do and don’t know about how biological sex shapes behavior. It doesn’t call on experts to debate. It doesn’t evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence. And it never once discusses what we know about gender discrimination or its long, sordid history in tech. […] The memo isn’t reaching for a higher truth — it is instead the expression of a reactionary instinct to preserve the status quo. Deflection: now, with graphs!

According to Google Trends, search traffic about the upcoming solar eclipse mirrors the path of totality. And according to XKCD, pre-eclipse search traffic for “eclipse” is outpacing pre-election search traffic for “election”.

Why has clean eating proved so difficult to kill off? Hadley Freeman, in this paper, identified clean eating as part of a post-truth culture, whose adherents are impervious, or even hostile, to facts and experts. But to understand how clean eating took hold with such tenacity, it’s necessary first to consider just what a terrifying thing food has become for millions of people in the modern world. The interesting question is not whether clean eating is nonsense, but why so many intelligent people decided to put their faith in it.

A group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.

If you, as a man, claim to know more about a woman’s own body than she does, you are mansplaining. When you start to question her own experiences and reality and feelings and opinions just because you don’t like them, you are mansplaining. When you feel that you are better qualified to make choices that influence her autonomy over her own body, you are mansplaining. When you ridicule or dismiss her viewpoints and her description of reality, despite having zero evidence to support the idea that she’s wrong or mistaken, you are mansplaining. And in doing so, you are perpetuating the misogyny and sexism that defines nearly every part of a woman’s existence.

In addition to creative pressures, tablescapers must also have an encyclopedic knowledge of the lost art of how to set a table. The dishes, glasses and flatware must correspond with the proposed menu, and those items must be laid out perfectly, down to the direction of the knife blade. Mistakes cost competitors points, detracted by anonymous judges whose choices can sometimes feel arbitrary.

As faint as the tiniest moons of Pluto, Planet Nine would be barely two pixels wide on the Hubble Space Telescope’s camera. Searchers could easily miss it among random speckles of sensor noise and the twinkling of distant and variable stars. And because the planet is so far from Earth, near the far end of a highly elliptical path that takes at least 15,000 years to complete, astronomers have to wait a day or more between successive photographs of the right patch of sky to see the planet shift its apparent position relative to the much more distant stars.

America has long wrestled with this concept in the context of our strongest punishment, the death penalty. A majority of “we the people” (61 percent, to be exact) are in favor of having it, but inside the Supreme Court, opinions have evolved over time in surprising ways.

Our algorithm can create spatially- constrained perturbations that mimic vandalism or art to reduce the likelihood of detection by a casual observer. We show that adversarial examples generated by RP2 achieve high success rates under various conditions for real road sign recognition by using an evaluation methodology that captures physical world conditions. We physically realized and evaluated two attacks, one that causes a Stop sign to be misclassified as a Speed Limit sign in 100% of the testing conditions, and one that causes a Right Turn sign to be misclassified as either a Stop or Added Lane sign in 100% of the testing conditions.

Leaders need to choose what kind of company cultures they want to build and who they want to feel safe, valued, and supported in within them.

Radiohead has hidden a syncopated rhythm in the song that even the band members have trouble keeping straight when they’re trying to play it

During World War I, peace broke out.

It was Christmas 1914 on the Western Front. Despite strict orders not to chillax with the enemy, British and German soldiers left their trenches, crossed No Man’s Land, and gathered to bury their dead, exchange gifts, and play games.

Meanwhile: it’s 2017, the West has been at peace for decades, and wow, we suck at trust. Surveys show that, over the past forty years, fewer and fewer people say they trust each other. So here’s our puzzle:

Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies? And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?

I think game theory can help explain our epidemic of distrust – and how we can fix it! So, to understand all this…