Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 23, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago

Surveillance balloons at the edge of space; A privacy exposé on the location information that's collected by mobile phone apps; A psychology study suggests that liberals may be too open to true & false ideas, whereas conservatives may be too skeptical; Insights on the future of business from Temple University's Fox School of Business; and a Steem post introducting readers to the Pythonic graphical programming tool

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Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space - Created by World View Enterprises, the "stratollite" (stratospheric balloon) was first conceived as a space tourism vehicle. The atmospheric vehicle is guided by two balloons. At high altitudes, the large one, filled with helium, grows to a size that could enclose a football field. That balloon is responsible for lifting the device upwards. The second balloon, filled with pressurized air, serves as a sort-of ballast and controls navigation. Air can be added or discharged in order to guide the balloon to an altitude where winds are blowing in the desired direction. In a given day, the altitude might vary by as much as 25,000 feet. The device was used in 2014, when Google executive, Alan Eustace, broke the record for the highest skydive, jumping from a height of 135,890 feet. However, with an uncertain market for this use, the company sought out other uses, and the stratollite has now been fitted with recording equipment and its being used to generate high quality images of the ground, which can be sold to governments and private companies. The camera equipment is capable of photographing at a resolution of 15cm, and the next generation of gear will photograph at a resolution of 5cm. The company has received expressions of interest from the US Department of Defense, and also from the energy sector. The company was founded in 2012 by Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter of the Biosphere 2 project. CEO, Ryan Hartman, is aware of concerns around privacy, but insists that the tools will be used responsibly, not for Big-Brother type of applications. The company plans to fly a constellation of the devices and keep them all in constant communication, and hopes to find more customers in the atmospheric and climate research communities.

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - The NY Times Privacy Project looks at a dataset from an anonymous source that allegedly offers a detailed look at the location data from 12 million phones in the cities of "Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles". According to the article, the team was able to find a dozen phones visiting the Playboy Mansion, as well as visits to the estates of "Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger". The article notes that this data doesn't come from the major wireless carriers that we might expect, but instead it comes from little-known companies who collect and sell location data from users who have installed their apps. The article notes that this sort of data collection is usually justified on 3 grounds: (i) people consent; (ii) the data is anonymous; and (iii) the data is secure. However, it claims that none of these arguments appear to be true. Instead, the researchers were able to use the database to track military officials with security clearances, law enforcement officers and their families, and other public figures like high-powered attorneys. They were also able to piece together " hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities." The authors point out that their search was focused on a very tight selection of time and place with data from just a single company. Overall the data covered a tiny slice of what's being collected. In the end, what this all says is that "Our privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on our device." h/t OS news

Study finds liberals are more accepting of scientific facts — and nonfactual statements - A new study in Psychological Reports found that college students who identified as politically liberal were more likely to accept factual statements like, "A typical cumulus cloud weighs about 1.1 million pounds", and also false statements like, "Humans only use about 10% of their brain." It also found that conservatives are less likely to identify with Pro-truth statements like, "It is important to me to align my opinions and my actions with true information." According to the authors, all this suggests that conservatives may be unduly skeptical and liberals might be too open, and therefore vulnerable to misinformation. The study is limited in that it only looked at one group of college students on a single campus, so it is not generalizable. h/t RealClear Science

Temple University shares insights on how leaders should prepare for the future of business - This article gives responses from Temple University's Fox School of Business to a series of questions. The questions are: (i) Will robots replace managers at work? (ii) Does emotion belong in the office? and (iii) What is the future of business? On the first question, Xue Guo and Zhi Cheng suggest that freelancing apps like TaskRabbit are eliminating some work for managers, but that the change is mostly positive. On the second question, Deanna Geddes argues that emotional expression is valuable in the work place and advises that, "companies build a culture of open dialogue within their organizations to promote expression up and down management lines." She also argues that, "Nonhierarchical, team-based structures, leadership’s encouragement of meaningful debate, and clear channels for expressing opinions all help employers address emotions while the employee is still in the workplace." They dodge the third question, advising readers to read about "The Future of Work in a recent issue of the school's annual research magazine, On the Verge.

STEEM Pythonic Tutorial Part 1-6 - This post begins a series of articles by @avenwedde to describe aspects of the pythongic graphical programming tool. First in the series, this article contains step-by-step instructions to install pythonic, it explains concepts like workflows, grids, elements, and toolbars, describes the tool's logging and scheduling capabilities, and finally provides steps to launch it on either Windows or Linux. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been assigned to this post for @avenwedde.)

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