Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 19, 2019

Iran's Internet has gone dark; Quantum physicists say reality yields fundamentally subjective measurements; A new way of comparing "dog years" and "human years"; House cats and lions see optical illusions; and a Steem challenge for "astronomical proof of work"

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1. Iran has shut off internet access for its citizens amid fuel price protests - On Friday, November 15, large protests broke out in Iran in response to a government announcement that they will begin rationing fuel and eliminating subsidies - moves that could increase the cost of energy by 50% or more. According to NetBlocks, these protests were followed on Saturday by a near total blackout of Iranian internet operators. The NGO, dedicated to monitoring Internet Freedom, says that as-of Monday, November 18, current levels of traffic from Iran are around 5% of normal. The organization adds that it is the most severe blackout ever seen in Iranian history, and that blackouts have an immense financial cost and they normally leave a dissatisfied populace feeling even more aggrieved


2. Quantum physics: our study suggests objective reality doesn’t exist - According to a new paper in Science Advances, at the quantum level facts are subjective. The act of observing a quantum object causes the object to change from a state of superposition to a single position. But what about the act of observing an observer observing a quantum object? To the 2nd-tier observer, the 1st-tier observer and the quantum object are in a state of combined superposition. According to thought experiments in 1961 and 1964, it would be possible for the 2nd-tier observer to observe the base object collapsing to one position whereas the 1st tier observer would observe it collapsing to a different position - a phenomenon named a Bell Inequality. This has remained purely theoretical until now, when Massimiliano Proietti and colleagues have conducted the experiment and published their results. As theorized, the researchers say that a first and second tier observer disagreed about the collapsed position of a quantum particle at the base of an experimental system. In short, two correct quantum observations are in conflict, demonstrating that there is a fundamental subjective aspect to nature. h/t RealClear Science


3. Here’s a better way to convert dog years to human years, scientists say - human age = 16 ln(dog age) + 31. But, this leads to the conclusion that a 50 year old dog is the age equivalent of a 93 year-old human and a 100 year old dog is the human equivalent of 104 in human-years. I'm not buying it. h/t RealClear Science


4. Lions See These Illusions the Same Way You Do - In 2013, Rasmus Bååth posted a video of his cat attacking a paper with an optical illusion of a rotating snake. In 2014, that inspired a team of researchers to perform a controlled study determining that cats could, indeed, observe the illusion. Now, another team of scientists has repeated the experiment with three lions. Christian Agrillo and colleagues presented lions with the rotating snakes illusion along with two control images and recorded video. Two of the lions exhibited clear preference for the image with the illusion by scratching, biting, or dragging the image. The third lion didn't engage with the image, but when the images were introduced she exhibited positive behavioral changes, such as decreased grooming and increased attentive behavior.
   
   Here is the 2013 video that started it all.

STEEM Astronomical Proof of Work - One of Steem's potential capabilities that has yet to be fully explored is the possibility to incentivize collaborative scientific and academic research. In this post, @inertia provides an interesting proof of concept with a suggestion for crowd examination of 1990s era astronomical data The post asks people to submit "astronomical proof of work" by opening a massive image file, zooming in on a particular location, and posting their results. A somewhat similar idea that once occurred to me is using upvotes, SMTs or steem-engine tokens to automate rewards for discoveries of new prime numbers or other computational challenges. Another is the possibility of rewarding crowd investigation of massive document dumps like wikileaks publications or government accountability data. In contrast to both of those, @inertia's idea combines computer-processing and human decision making into a single challenge. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @inertia.)

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