The Dunning-Kruger effect: why do incompetent people think they are so great? or Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

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People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Source: PsycNET – DOI Landing page

Easy Solutions: So, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway.

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309
Easy Solutions #1

So, you’re in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn’t have sex with you anyway.

What you will need: 1 x knife, 1 x ring, access to a sunbed, the ability to grow a beard.

Step One: Place the ring on your wedding finger and avoid contact with your friend for a month.

Step Two: Stop shaving and use the sunbed to gain a tan.

Step Three: After a month when your beard is full and your tan is noticeable, remove the ring from your finger.

Step Four: Remove all your clothes and break into your friend’s house.

Step Five: Use the knife to cut your body in various places. Avoid the face. If possible, focus on your back. The more blood the better.

Step Six: Enter your friend’s bedroom and lie face down on the floor. Wait for her return.

Step Seven: When she enters the room pretend to be unconscious. Allow her to turn you over and try to wake you for a few seconds before you open your eyes. The injuries to your body will serve as a distraction to your nakedness. She will be more concerned about your wellbeing instead of fearing the naked man in her room.

Step Eight: When she asks you what’s happened you should ignore her questions. Instead you must act confused and ask the date. If it’s September 15th she will say ‘September 15th’ to which you must reply ‘No, what year is it?’

Step Nine: Upon hearing the year say the words ‘It worked.’ Pretend to lose consciousness again for a few seconds, implying that whatever it is that has worked took a great effort.

Step Ten: If your friend is a curious person she will probably ask ‘What worked?’, even if she doesn’t ask this question it is important that you now say the words ‘(Insert Friend’s Name), I’m from the future’ in your most deadpan voice.

Step Eleven: Pause for ten seconds to allow the incrediblness of the situation to sink in. There will be no reason for her to doubt your claim, because your beard will make you appear many years older and your cuts would add weight to the idea that you’ve come from a post-apocalyptic future where a war is currently taking place.

Step Twelve: Raise your left hand to your face. All women are very observant, so your friend will immediately notice the tanline on your wedding finger. If she is educated to a decent standard she will realise that you are married and your ring has simply disappeared, because clothing and other items cannot travel through time. Your nudity will support this.

Step Thirteen: Now comes the hard part – The monologue. In your own words you must give a speech in which you mention all of these key points:

a) You are married to each other in the future
b) Her current boyfriend is dead
c) The world is coming to an end. It’s up to you to pick a reason, but I would recommend a war against machines. This whole situation will be backed up by the Terminator franchise
d) In the future your relationship is not going well
e) You’ve come back in time because you can’t help but feel that she would have been happier with her current boyfriend if he hadn’t been killed
f) Her current boyfriend is going to be hit by a bus on a day six months from her present. She should stop him going to work that day
g) If she does exactly what you say this current version of yourself will be erased and you will never get married. If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future

Step Fourteen: Unless your friend is made of stone she will now be overcome by emotion, especially at your selflessness. Get to your feet and go to kiss her goodbye. It is important that you do this with the confidence of a man who has done this to her many times.

Step Fifteen: There is now no possible way that you aren’t about to have sex with her. You’re naked, kissing her, in her bedroom, agreeing to erase a version of yourself from history to make her happy. And as far as she knows you’ve had sex many times in a future that will no longer happen, so she thinks to herself that maybe she should have one memory of it.

Step Sixteen: After having the sex, ask to borrow some clothes then leave.

Step Seventeen: Shave off your beard and coat your wedding finger in fake tan. Carry on as if nothing has happened. There will be three possible outcomes:

1) During the sex some feelings that she didn’t know existed are awakened and she will leave her boyfriend for you.
2) Life will carry on as normal.
3) You will be filled with guilt because of this moral grey area where you aren’t entirely sure if what you’ve done counts as some kind of low level rape. You will take your own life by hanging, overdose or wrist cutting.

BatteriesFeelIncluded

I put on my robe and wizard hat

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#104383 +(15587)- [X]

bloodninja: Baby, I been havin a tough night so treat me nice aight?
BritneySpears14: Aight.
bloodninja: Slip out of those pants baby, yeah.
BritneySpears14: I slip out of my pants, just for you, bloodninja.
bloodninja: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
BritneySpears14: Oh, I like to play dress up.
bloodninja: Me too baby.
BritneySpears14: I kiss you softly on your chest.
bloodninja: I cast Lvl. 3 Eroticism. You turn into a real beautiful woman.
BritneySpears14: Hey…
bloodninja: I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 chicken of the Infinite.
BritneySpears14: Funny I still don’t see it.
bloodninja: I spend my mana reserves to cast Mighty F*ck of the Beyondness.
BritneySpears14: You are the worst cyber partner ever. This is ridiculous.
bloodninja: Don’t f*ck with me bitch, I’m the mightiest sorcerer of the lands.
bloodninja: I steal yo soul and cast Lightning Lvl. 1,000,000 Your body explodes into a fine bloody mist, because you are only a Lvl. 2 Druid.
BritneySpears14: Don’t ever message me again you piece of ****.
bloodninja: Robots are trying to drill my brain but my lightning shield inflicts DOA attack, leaving the robots as flaming piles of metal.
bloodninja: King Arthur congratulates me for destroying Dr. Robotnik’s evil army of Robot Socialist Republics. The cold war ends. Reagan steals my accomplishments and makes like it was cause of him.
bloodninja: You still there baby? I think it’s getting hard now.
bloodninja: Baby?
————–
BritneySpears14: Ok, are you ready?
eminemBNJA: Aight, yeah I’m ready.
BritneySpears14: I like your music Em… Tee hee.
eminemBNJA: huh huh, yeah, I make it for the ladies.
BritneySpears14: Mmm, we like it a lot. Let me show you.
BritneySpears14: I take off your pants, slowly, and massage your muscular physique.
eminemBNJA: Oh I like that Baby. I put on my robe and wizard hat.
BritneySpears14: What the f*ck, I told you not to message me again.
eminemBNJA: Oh ****
BritneySpears14: I swear if you do it one more time I’m gonna report your ISP and say you were sending me kiddie porn you f*ck up.
eminemBNJA: Oh ****
eminemBNJA: damn I gotta write down your names or something

Source: QDB: Quote #104383

Used cars allow the old owners app access

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enderson tested four major auto manufacturers, and found they all have apps that allow previous owners to access them from a mobile device.

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Friday, Henderson explained how people can still retain control of connected cars even after they resell them.

Manufacturers create apps to control smart cars — you can use your phone to unlock the car, honk the horn and find out the exact location of your vehicle. Henderson removed his personal information from services in the car before selling it back to the dealership, but he was still able to control the car through a mobile app for years.

That’s because only the dealership that originally sold the car can see who has access and manually remove someone from the app. A full factory reset of the vehicle doesn’t revoke mobile access, Henderson said. In order to revoke app access, you should go to a factory-authorized car dealership.

On smartphones, a factory reset wipes all the local data off the device so you can sell it to someone else. So-called internet of things devices store information in servers far away from the actual hardware. This means executing a factory reset on your car only resets the car — the data still exists in the cloud for other people to access.

Source: Why buying used cars could put your safety at risk

AI Software Juggles Probabilities to Learn from Less Data

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Gamalon uses a technique that it calls Bayesian program synthesis to build algorithms capable of learning from fewer examples. Bayesian probability, named after the 18th century mathematician Thomas Bayes, provides a mathematical framework for refining predictions about the world based on experience. Gamalon’s system uses probabilistic programming—or code that deals in probabilities rather than specific variables—to build a predictive model that explains a particular data set. From just a few examples, a probabilistic program can determine, for instance, that it’s highly probable that cats have ears, whiskers, and tails. As further examples are provided, the code behind the model is rewritten, and the probabilities tweaked. This provides an efficient way to learn the salient knowledge from the data.

Source: AI Software Juggles Probabilities to Learn from Less Data

Microsoft Graph Engine goes open source on github

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Graph Engine – Open Source

Microsoft Graph Engine is a distributed in-memory data processing engine, underpinned by a strongly-typed in-memory key-value store and a general distributed computation engine.

This repository contains the source code of Graph Engine and its graph query language — Language Integrated Knowledge Query (LIKQ). LIKQ is a versatile graph query language on top of Graph Engine. It combines the capability of fast graph exploration and the flexibility of lambda expression: server-side computations can be expressed in lambda expressions, embedded in LIKQ, and executed on the server side during graph traversal. LIKQ is powering Academic Graph Search API, which is part of Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Source: GitHub – Microsoft/GraphEngine: Microsoft Graph Engine

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Text in an R package

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As described by Hadley Wickham, tidy data has a specific structure:

each variable is a column
each observation is a row
each type of observational unit is a table

This means we end up with a data set that is in a long, skinny format instead of a wide format. Tidy data sets are easier to work with, and this is no less true when one starts to work with text. Most of the tooling and infrastructure needed for text mining with tidy data frames already exists in packages like dplyr, broom, tidyr, and ggplot2. Our goal in writing the tidytext package is to provide functions and supporting data sets to allow conversion of text to and from tidy formats, and to switch seamlessly between tidy tools and existing text mining packages.

Source: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Text

text2vec

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text2vec is an R package which provides an efficient framework with a concise API for text analysis and natural language processing (NLP).

Goals which we aimed to achieve as a result of development of text2vec:

Concise – expose as few functions as possible
Consistent – expose unified interfaces, no need to explore new interface for each task
Flexible – allow to easily solve complex tasks
Fast – maximize efficiency per single thread, transparently scale to multiple threads on multicore machines
Memory efficient – use streams and iterators, not keep data in RAM if possible

Source: text2vec

The Royal Navy’s ENTIRE fleet of attack submarines is out of action — and Theresa May doesn’t know because ‘chiefs fear reaction’

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THE Royal Navy’s entire fleet of attack submarines is currently out of action. Repairs and maintenance to all seven have left none to defend our waters — or monitor Russia’s relentless probes. But …

Source: The Royal Navy’s ENTIRE fleet of attack submarines is out of action — and Theresa May doesn’t know because ‘chiefs fear reaction’

Fortunately the Vanguard nuclear deterrent fleet is still sailing. This is what happens when you keep taking “peace dividend” when there is no peace.

This is what happens with an unelected PM: Planned Espionage Act could jail journos and whistleblowers as spies

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The government has received recommendations for a “future-proofed” new Espionage Act that would put leaking and whistleblowing in the same category as spying for foreign powers.

The plans would threaten leakers and journalists with the same extended jail sentences as agents working for of foreign powers. Sentences would apply even if – like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning – the leaker was not British, or in Britain, or was intent on acting in the public interest.

Source: Planned Espionage Act could jail journos and whistleblowers as spies • The Register

Free press and whistleblowing are necessary checks and balances on democracy. Killing them opens the way to a dictatorial corrupt nepotistic free for all, where the top layer of society distances themselves from the lower layer and crime becomes a necessity on the part of the lowest layers to survive.

5 Things We’ve Learned About How Companies Track You Online And Off

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The ability for companies to follow you from one platform to another — from your phone to your laptop to a physical store — is called cross-device tracking, and for businesses that want to market and sell stuff to you, it is basically the holy grail.

With robust tracking, a company can follow you basically from the moment you wake up and check social media feeds on your phone, through your commute, to work, back through the evening, and once more to your bed at night.
[…]
To get there, the FTC recently held a workshop on Cross-Device tracking, and has now published a report [PDF] highlighting some key facts about this increasingly popular practice.

Source: 5 Things We’ve Learned About How Companies Track You Online And Off – Consumerist

These same organizations also employ the use of social media analytics in order to reach the best target audience. Many of the tracked pieces of information helps them in this regard. More accurate advertising is very beneficial to them for obvious reasons.

1. You don’t need always to be logged in to be tracked.
2. Cross-device tracking can actually improve account security.
3. Companies are not at all transparent about tracking practices.
4. Consumers have very little control.
5. The industry is working on some voluntary self-regulation… sort of.

Windows DRM can find your IP without you knowing if you’re watching properly signed wmv and asf files, can uncloak your tor anonymity

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If you were to modify the above WRMHEADER or any of the three identified GUID objects you would find that on opening in Windows Media Player you are prompted with a warning from Windows Media Player.

However, this warning DOES NOT appear if the DRM license has been signed correctly and the Digital Signature Object, Content Encryption Object and Extended Content Encryption Object contain the appropriate cryptographic signing performed by an authorised Microsoft License Server profile. There are several free DRM providers who could sign your media for you however as the barrier to entry to the DRM market is the aforementioned price tag, it makes you wonder how these files are being signed in the wild! As these “signed WMV” files do not present any alert to a user before opening them they can be used quite effectively to decloak users of the popular privacy tool TorBrowser with very little warning. For such an attack to work your target candidate must be running TorBrowser on Windows. When opening/downloading files, TorBrowser does warn you that 3rd party files can expose your IP address and should be accessed in tails. This is not an attack against Tor or the TorBrowser directly but a useful way that could be leveraged to identify people attempting to access illegal media content (such as Daesh propaganda).

Source: Windows DRM Social Engineering Attacks & TorBrowser – My Hacker House

Metasploit hwbridge connects to your car

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We recently announced a new addition to Metasploit to help you do exactly that: the Hardware Bridge API. The Hardware Bridge API extends Metasploit’s capabilities into the physical world of hardware devices. Much in the same way that the Metasploit framework helped unify tools and exploits for networks and software, the Hardware Bridge looks to do the same for all types of hardware. From within Metasploit you can now branch out into a Metasploit compatible hardware device to remotely control and use it for your penetration testing needs.
[…]
If your device supports CAN, Metasploit will automatically provide several interactive vehicle-related commands. This will also mark your Hardware Bridge (HWBridge) session as an Automotive session that can be viewed in your session list or via modules that are designed to work only on automotive systems. This allows exploit developers to focus on writing automotive tools without having to worry about the attached hardware. It also provides internal Metasploit APIs to make common automotive calls easier, such as getting the vehicle speed or requesting a security access token from the Engine Control Unit (ECU).

Source: Exiting the Matrix: Introducing Metasploit’s Ha… | Rapid7 Community and Blog

Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them

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Initially used to improve the experience for visually impaired members of the Facebook community, the company’s Lumos computer vision platform is now powering image content search for all users. This means you can now search for images on Facebook with key words that describe the contents of a photo, rather than being limited by tags and captions.

To accomplish the task, Facebook trained an ever-fashionable deep neural network on tens of millions of photos. Facebook’s fortunate in this respect because its platform is already host to billions of captioned images. The model essentially matches search descriptors to features pulled from photos with some degree of probability.
[…]
Facebook isn’t the only one racing to apply recent computer vision advances to existing products. Pinterest’s visual search feature has been continuously improved to let users search images by the objects within them. This makes photos interactive and more importantly it makes them commercializable.

Google on the other hand open sourced its own image captioning model last fall that can both identify objects and classify actions with accuracy over 90 percent. The open source activity around TensorFlow has helped the framework gain prominence and become very popular with machine learning developers.

Facebook is focused on making machine learning easy for teams across the company to integrate into their projects. This means improving the use of the company’s general purpose FBLearner Flow.

“We’re currently running 1.2 million AI experiments per month on FBLearner Flow, which is six times greater than what we were running a year ago,” said Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning.

Lumos was built on top of FBLearner Flow. It has already been used for over 200 visual models. Aside from image content search, engineers have used the tool for fighting spam.

Source: Facebook’s AI unlocks the ability to search photos by what’s in them | TechCrunch

Google, unlike Microsoft, must turn over foreign emails: U.S. judge

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A U.S. judge has ordered Google to comply with search warrants seeking customer emails stored outside the United States, diverging from a federal appeals court that reached the opposite conclusion in a similar case involving Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O).

U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter in Philadelphia ruled on Friday that transferring emails from a foreign server so FBI agents could review them locally as part of a domestic fraud probe did not qualify as a seizure.

The judge said this was because there was “no meaningful interference” with the account holder’s “possessory interest” in the data sought.

“Though the retrieval of the electronic data by Google from its multiple data centers abroad has the potential for an invasion of privacy, the actual infringement of privacy occurs at the time of disclosure in the United States,” Rueter wrote.

Source: Google, unlike Microsoft, must turn over foreign emails: U.S. judge

I guess Rueter finds that invasion of privacy is no meaningful interference.

GM Salmonella destroys cancer

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A genetically modified bacterium destroys tumors by provoking an immune response, according to a study published Wednesday.

Using mice and cultures of human cancer cells, a South Korean-led scientific team demonstrated that Salmonella typhimurium engineered to make a foreign protein caused immune cells called macrophages and neutrophils to mobilize against the cancer.
[…]
Tumors shrank below detectable levels in 11 out of 20 mice injected with the modified Salmonella, said the study, published in Science Translational Medicine.

Go to j.mp/salcancer for the study. The first author was Jin Hai Zheng of Chonnam National University Hwasun Hospital, in Jeonnam, South Korea.

The engineered Salmonella provoke a sustained immune response, in addition to preventing the spread of a human colon cancer implanted in a mouse. The bacterium also were found to be nontoxic, multiplying almost exclusively inside tumors.
[…]
UC San Diego researcher Jeff Hasty has developed engineered Salmonella that deliver cancer-killing toxins inside the tumor. This bacterium periodically self-destructs when it reaches a certain population density, releasing the toxins. Some of the engineered Salmonella survive, rebuilding the population until it reaches the self-destruct density. So the tumor receives periodic doses of targeted chemotherapy.

Source: GM Salmonella destroys cancer

Vizio coughs up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of families

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California electronics maker Vizio will cough up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of people.

America’s trade watchdog, the FTC, said today the payment will settle a complaint filed by the state of New Jersey accusing Vizio of violating privacy regulations: the biz had collected the viewing habits of 11 million television sets throughout the country without warning or permission.

According to the state attorney general’s federal complaint [PDF], from February 2014 to March 2016, Vizio noted down exactly what its customers were watching and then resold all those records as summaries to third parties – which were mostly advertising companies.

The usage data was not only collected while customers were watching over-the-air or cable TV broadcasts, but also when they were watching DVDs or streaming video from websites and over-the-top services like Netflix.

Vizio harvested surveillance on people and their families so precise, it knew exactly what you were watching, second by second, and even took copies of the watched video, according to prosecutors. Additionally, we’re told, Vizio resold summaries of personal information about its customers it had gathered, including age, marital status, and household income, to advertisers without consent.

Source: Vizio coughs up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of families • The Register

No mention of the records having to be destroyed though?

600 Goldman traders replaced by 200 computer engineers

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Average compensation for staff in sales, trading, and research at the 12 largest global investment banks, of which Goldman is one, is $500,000 in salary and bonus, according to Coalition. Seventy-five percent of Wall Street compensation goes to these highly paid “front end” employees, says Amrit Shahani, head of research at Coalition.

For the highly paid who remain, there is a growing income spread that mirrors the broader economy, says Babson College professor Tom Davenport. “The pay of the average managing director at Goldman will probably get even bigger, as there are fewer lower-level people to share the profits with,” he says.
[…]
Goldman Sachs has already begun to automate currency trading, and has found consistently that four traders can be replaced by one computer engineer, Chavez said at the Harvard conference. Some 9,000 people, about one-third of Goldman’s staff, are computer engineers.
[…]
Goldman’s new consumer lending platform, Marcus, aimed at consolidation of credit card balances, is entirely run by software, with no human intervention, Chavez said. It was nurtured like a small startup within the firm and launched in just 12 months, he said. It’s a model Goldman is continuing, housing groups in “bubbles,” some on the now-empty trading spaces in Goldman’s New York headquarters: “Those 600 traders, there is a lot of space where they used to sit,” he said.

Source: As Goldman Embraces Automation, Even the Masters of the Universe Are Threatened

Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you’re on Trump’s hit list

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Previously, tourists, travelers and visa holders were warned they may have to hand over their online account names and handles so their public profiles can be studied by border agents and immigration officials.

Now Kelly wants to take that further, by demanding passwords from some visa applicants so g-men can log into Twitter, Facebook, online banking accounts, and so on, and rummage around for any eyebrow-raising non-public posts, messages and transactions. If you refuse, you can’t come in.

“We want to say ‘what kind of sites do you visit and give us your passwords,’ so we can see what they do,” Kelly explained, in response to a question from Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA).

“We want to get on their social media with passwords – what do you do, what do you say. If they don’t want to cooperate then they don’t come in. If they truly want to come to America they’ll cooperate, if not then ‘next in line’.”
[…]
Kelly said this invasive vetting of people’s online personas and accounts could take weeks or months, and that applicants would just have to wait until it was done. Representative Higgins said he agreed, and was anxious for Homeland Security and others to start trawling through people’s social media pages. Higgins said handing over such credentials should be mandatory.

Source: Want to come to the US? Be prepared to hand over your passwords if you’re on Trump’s hit list • The Register

The 4th reich keeps getting scarier.

71% NL population likes cash

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Even though cash payments have decreased to 49% of our daily payments, people in the eurozone still think cash is important and shouldn’t be banned.

DNBulletin: Contant betalen moet mogelijk blijven

Source: DNBulletin: Contant betalen moet mogelijk blijven

There has been a movement to try to shame cash payments, into creating a shady overtone to them. In fact it’s none of anyones’ business what you are spending your money on and being able to monitor your expenditure is shameless. For the banks you become the product, for the government you fall more under their control.