Daily Archives: February 6, 2019

Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

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In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, 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. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity community, it also represents an impressive, sci-fi feat of sheer hacker ingenuity.

Source: Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

Stock market shows greater reaction to forecasts by analysts with favorable surnames

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Financial analysts whose surnames are perceived as favourable elicit stronger market reactions to their earnings forecasts, new research from Cass Business School has found.

The researchers found that following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, market reactions weakened for forecasts from analysts with Middle Eastern surnames. They also found that following the French and German governments’ opposition to the US-led Iraq War, the US market reactions weakened for analysts with French or German surnames. This effect was stronger in firms with lower institutional ownership and for analysts with non-American first names.

The researchers measured surname favourability using the US historical immigration records to identify countries of origin associated with a particular surname and the Gallup survey data on Americans’ favourability toward foreign countries.

Dr. Jay Jung, assistant professor of accounting at Cass Business School, said surname favourability was not associated with quality such as accuracy, bias, and timeliness but rather it suggested the investors made biased judgements based on their perception of analysts’ .

“Our finding is consistent with the prediction based on motivated reasoning that people have a natural desire to draw conclusions that they are motivated to reach. If investors have favourable views toward an analyst due to his or her surname, they are motivated to assess the analyst’s forecasts as being more credible or of higher quality because it reduces the unpleasant inconsistency between their attitudes and judgments,” said Dr. Jung.

Dr. Jung said surname favourability did have a complementary effect on analysts’ career outcomes, helping analysts prosper in their profession.

“We found that, conditional on good forecasting performance, having a favourable surname made it more likely for an analyst to get elected as an All-Star analyst and survive in the profession when his or her brokerage house went out of business or went through a M&A (mergers and acquisition) process,” he adds.

Dr. Jung said surname favourability also had impact on price drifts in the .

“The speed at which stock prices reacted to an analyst’s forecasts was faster when the analyst had a favourable surname. We found significantly smaller delayed price responses.”

Dr. Jung said the research demonstrated that investors’ perception of an analyst’ surname not only influences their information processing in capital markets but also affects market efficiency and leads to different labour market consequences for finance professionals.

“It is quite interesting to see how the favorability of a surname, unrelated to the or quality of an analyst’s forecast, influences investor reaction and price anomalies in the capital market.”

Explore further: Marriage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife’s last name?

More information: The research paper ‘An Analyst by Any Other Surname: Surname Favorability and Market Reaction to Analyst Forecasts’ is conditionally accepted for publication in the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-stock-greater-reaction-analysts-favorable.html#jCp

Source: Stock market shows greater reaction to forecasts by analysts with favorable surnames

Visualizing the Crime Rate Perception Gap

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The Crime Rate Perception Gap

The Crime Rate Perception Gap

There’s a persistent belief across America that crime is on the rise.

Since the late 1980s, Gallup has been polling people on their perception of crime in the United States, and consistently, the majority of respondents indicate that they see crime as becoming more prevalent. As well, a recent poll showed that more than two-thirds of Americans feel that today’s youth are less safe from crime and harm than the previous generation.

Even the highest ranking members of the government have been suggesting that the country is in the throes of a crime wave.

We have a crime problem. […] this is a dangerous permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk.

— Jeff Sessions, Former Attorney General

Is crime actually more prevalent in society? Today’s graphic, amalgamating crime rate data from the FBI, shows a very different reality.

Data vs Perception

In the early ’90s, crime in the U.S. was an undeniable concern – particularly in struggling urban centers. The country’s murder rate was nearly double what it is today, and statistics for all types of crime were through the roof.

Since that era, crime rates in the United States have undergone a remarkably steady decline, but public perception has been slow to catch up. In a 2016 survey, 57% of registered voters said crime in the U.S. had gotten worse since 2008, despite crime rates declining by double-digit percentages during that time period.

There are many theories as to why crime rates took such a dramatic U-turn, and while that matter is still a subject for debate, there’s clear data on who is and isn’t being arrested.

Are Millennials Killing Crime?

Media outlets have accused millennials of the killing off everything from department stores to commuting by car, but there’s another behavior this generation is eschewing as well – criminality.

Compared to previous generations, people under the age of 39 are simply being arrested in smaller numbers. In fact, much of the decline in overall crime can be attributed to people in this younger age bracket. In contrast, the arrest rate for older Americans actually rose slightly.

Arrests by Age Group

There’s no telling whether the overall trend will continue.

In fact, the most recent data shows that the murder rate has ticked up ever-so-slightly in recent years, while violent and property crimes continue to be on the decline.

A Global Perspective

Perceptions of increasing criminality are echoed in many other developed economies as well. From Italy to South Korea, the prevailing sentiment is that youth are living in a society that is less safe than in previous generations.

global crime perceptions

As the poll above demonstrates, perception gaps exist in somewhat unexpected places.

In Sweden, where violent crime is actually increasing, 53% of people believe that crime will be worse for today’s youth. Contrast that with Australia, where crime rates have declined in a similar pattern as in the United States – yet, more than two-thirds of Aussie respondents believe that crime will be worse for today’s youth.

One significant counterpoint to this trend is China, where respondents felt that crime was less severe today than in the past.

Source: Visualizing the Crime Rate Perception Gap

The “Do Not Track” Setting Doesn’t Stop You from Being Tracked – by Google, Facebook and Twitter, among many more

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Most browsers have a “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting that sends “a special signal to websites, analytics companies, ad networks, plug in providers, and other web services you encounter while browsing, to stop tracking your activity.” Sounds good, right? Sadly, it’s not effective. That’s because this Do Not Track setting is only a voluntary signal sent to websites, which websites don’t have to respect 😧.

Screenshot showing the Do Not Track setting in the Chrome browser

Nevertheless, a hefty portion of users across many browsers use the Do Not Track setting. While DNT is disabled by default in most major web browsers, in a survey we conducted of 503 U.S. adults in Nov 2018, 23.1% (±3.7) of respondents have consciously enabled the DNT setting on their desktop browsers. (Note: Apple is in the process of removing the DNT setting from Safari.)

Graph showing survey responses about the current status of the Do Not Track setting in respondent's primary desktop browser

We also looked at DNT usage on DuckDuckGo (across desktop and mobile browsers), finding that 24.4% of DuckDuckGo requests during a one day period came from browsers with the Do Not Track setting enabled. This is within the margin of error from the survey, thus lending more credibility to its results.

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It can be alarming to realize that Do Not Track is about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says “Please, don’t look into my house” while all of your blinds remain open. In fact, most major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, do not respect the Do Not Track setting when you visit and use their sites – a fact of which 77.3% (±3.6) of U.S. adults overall weren’t aware.

There is simply a huge discrepancy between the name of the setting and what it actually does. It’s inherently misleading. When educated about the true function and limitation of the DNT setting, 75.5% (±3.8) of U.S. adults say it’s “important” or “very important” that these companies “respect the Do Not Track signal when it is enabled.” So, in shocking news, when people say they don’t want to be tracked, they really don’t want to be tracked.

Pie chart showing 75.5 percent of respondents believe it's important that major tech companies respect the Do Not Track signal.

As a matter of fact, 71.9% (±3.9) of U.S. adults “somewhat favor” or “strongly favor” a federal regulation requiring companies to respect the Do Not Track signal.

Pie chart showing 71.9 percent of respondents would favor federal regulation requiring companies and their websites to respect the Do Not Track signal when enabled.

We agree and hope that governments will focus this year on efforts to enforce adherence to the Do Not Track setting when users enable it. As we’ve seen here and in our private browsing research, many people seek the most readily available (though often, unfortunately, ineffective) methods to protect their privacy.

Source: The “Do Not Track” Setting Doesn’t Stop You from Being Tracked

Zooniverse – crowd sourced classification of real scientific questions

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The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — hundreds of thousands of people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

At the Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher

You don’t need any specialised background, training, or expertise to participate in any Zooniverse projects. We make it easy for anyone to contribute to real academic research, on their own computer, at their own convenience.

You’ll be able to study authentic objects of interest gathered by researchers, like images of faraway galaxies, historical records and diaries, or videos of animals in their natural habitats. By answering simple questions about them, you’ll help contribute to our understanding of our world, our history, our Universe, and more.

With our wide-ranging and ever-expanding suite of projects, covering many disciplines and topics across the sciences and humanities, there’s a place for anyone and everyone to explore, learn and have fun in the Zooniverse. To volunteer with us, just go to the Projects page, choose one you like the look of, and get started.

Source: About — Zooniverse

The Milky Way is warped, not a flat disc

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The Milky Way galaxy’s disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly warped and twisted far away from the Milky Way’s center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

From a great distance, the galaxy would look like a thin disk of stars that orbit once every few hundred million years around its central region, where hundreds of billions of stars, together with a huge mass of dark matter, provide the gravitational ‘glue’ to hold it all together.

But the pull of gravity becomes weaker far away from the Milky Way’s inner regions. In the galaxy’s far outer disk, the making up most of the Milky Way’s gas disk are no longer confined to a thin plane, but they give the disk an S-like warped appearance.

“It is notoriously difficult to determine distances from the sun to parts of the Milky Way’s outer gas disk without having a clear idea of what that disk actually looks like,” says Dr. Chen Xiaodian, a researcher at NAOC and lead author of the article published in Nature Astronomy on Feb. 4.

“However, we recently published a new catalogue of well-behaved known as classical Cepheids, for which distances as accurate as 3 to 5 percent can be determined.” That database allowed the team to develop the first accurate three-dimensional picture of the Milky Way out to its far outer regions.

The Milky Way in a twist
Top: 3D distribution of the classical Cepheids in the Milky Way’s warped disk. Bottom: Precession of the warp’s line of nodes with Galactocentric radius. Credit: CHEN Xiaodian

Classical Cepheids are that are some four to 20 times as massive as the sun and up to 100,000 times as bright. Such high imply that they live fast and die young, burning through their nuclear fuel very quickly, sometimes in only a few million years. They show day- to month-long pulsations, which are observed as changes in their brightness. Combined with a Cepheid’s observed brightness, its pulsation period can be used to obtain a highly reliable distance.

“Somewhat to our surprise, we found that in 3-D, our collection of 1339 Cepheid and the Milky Way’s gas disk follow each other closely. This offers new insights into the formation of our home galaxy,” says Prof. Richard de Grijs from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and senior co-author of the paper. “Perhaps more importantly, in the Milky Way’s outer regions, we found that the S-like stellar disk is warped in a progressively twisted spiral pattern.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-milky-warped.html#jCp

Source: The Milky Way is warped

Muscle-inspired materials that get stronger after stretching

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Scientists a Hokkaido University have found a way to create materials that actually get stronger the more you use them. By mimicking the mechanism that allows living muscles to grow and strengthen after exercise, the team led by Jian Ping Gong developed a polymer that breaks down under mechanical stress, then regrows itself into a stronger configuration by feeding off a nutrient bath.

One of the drawbacks of non-living materials is that they have a very finite service life compared to living, organic materials. Materials like steel, plastic, ceramics, and textiles wear out with use at a surprisingly fast rate compared to comparable living things. Metals undergo fatigue, plastics crumble, ceramics crack, and textiles have a sadly short life compared to the skin they cover.

The reason for this is that living tissue can not only regrow itself, it can become stronger the more it’s used. That’s why a human heart can pump at a rate of about 72 beats per minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for over a century. It’s also why exercise can make skeletal muscles stronger. A workout in the gym that makes a human healthier would just be so much wear and tear to a machine.

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the Hokkaido team used what is called double-network hydrogels. Like other hydrogels, these are polymers that are 85 percent water by weight, but in this case, the material consist of both a rigid, brittle polymer and a soft, stretchable one. In this way, the finished product is both soft and tough.

Graph comparing the muscle-like hydrogel with other materials

However, the clever bit is that under laboratory conditions the hydrogel was immersed in a bath of monomers, which are the individual molecular links that make up a polymer. These serve the same function in the muscle-mimicking material as amino acids do in living tissue.

According to the team, when the hydrogel is stretched, some of the brittle polymer chains break, creating a chemical species called “mechanoradicals” at the end of the broken polymer chains. These are very reactive and quickly join up with the floating monomers to form a new, stronger polymer chain.

Under testing, the hydrogel acted much like muscles under strength training. It became 1.5 times stronger, 23 times stiffer, and increased in weight by 86 percent. It was even possible to control the properties of the material by using heat-sensitive monomers and applying high temperatures to make it more water resistant.

Gong says this approach could lead to materials suitable for a variety of applications, such as in flexible exosuits for patients with skeletal injuries that become stronger with use.

Source: Muscle-inspired materials that get stronger after stretching

The question in my mind is, why didn’t they make the material this strength in the first place? Or is it really self-repairing?