• Controversy on COVID-19 Mask Study Spotlights Messiness of Science during a Pandemic

    Late last week, a group of researchers posted a letter that they had sent to the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) requesting the retraction of a study published the week before that purportedly showed mask use was the most effective intervention in slowing the spread of COVID-19 in New York City. Stephanie Soucheray writes for CIDRAP that though PNAS editors have yet to respond to the request, scientists have roundly criticized the study’s methodology, and the entire kerfuffle has highlighted the difficulty of “doing science” amid a full-blown pandemic.

  • AI Could Help Solve the Privacy Problems It Has Created

    The stunning successes of artificial intelligence would not have happened without the availability of massive amounts of data, whether its smart speakers in the home or personalized book recommendations. These large databases are amassing a wide variety of information, some of it sensitive and personally identifiable. All that data in one place makes such databases tempting targets, ratcheting up the risk of privacy breaches. We believe that the relationship between AI and data privacy is more nuanced. The spread of AI raises a number of privacy concerns, most of which people may not even be aware. But in a twist, AI can also help mitigate many of these privacy problems.

  • How Much Control Would People Be Willing to Grant to a Personal Privacy Assistant?

    CyLab’s Jessica Colnago believes that in the future, the simple act of walking down the street is going to be a little weird. “You know how every time you enter a website, and it says: ‘We use cookies. Do you consent?’ Imagine that same thing walking down the street, but for a light pole, or a surveillance camera, or an energy sensor on a house,” Colnago says.

  • Sound Beacons Support Safer Tunnel Evacuation

    Research conducted as part of the project EvacSound demonstrates that auditory guidance using sound beacons is an effective aid during the evacuation of smoke-filled road tunnels. This is good news. It is a fact that vehicle drivers and passengers cannot normally expect to be rescued by the emergency services during such accidents.

  • Searching the Universe for Signs of Technological Civilizations

    Scientists are collaborating on a project to search the universe for signs of life via technosignatures. Researchers believe that although life appears in many forms, the scientific principles remain the same, and that the technosignatures identifiable on Earth will also be identifiable in some fashion outside of the solar system.

  • COVID-19 Sparks Technology Innovation

    Researchers say the swift development of wearable sensors tailored to a pandemic reinforces how a major crisis can accelerate innovation, Kane Farabaugh writes in VOA News. “I think it’s really opened people’s eyes to what’s possible, in terms of modern technology in that context,” said John Rogers of Northwestern University Technological Institute.

  • The Dangers of Tech-Driven Solutions to COVID-19

    Although few sensible people have anything good to say about the federal government response, reactions to tools for managing the pandemic designed by tech firms have been more mixed, with many concluding that such tools can minimize the privacy and human rights risks posed by tight coordination between governments and tech firms. Julie E. Cohen, Woodrow Hartzog, and Laura Moy write for Brookings that contact tracing done wrong threatens privacy and invites mission creep into adjacent fields, including policing. Government actors might (and do) distort and corrupt public-health messaging to serve their own interests. Automated policing and content control raise the prospect of a slide into authoritarianism. 

  • The Coronavirus App Was Always Doomed to Fail

    For months now, the British public has been told there’s only one way to resume normal life: a successful virus-tracing scheme. The public was prepped to download it as soon as it was made available UK-wide. Kate Andrews writes in The Spectator that months later, there is still no NHSX app to download. Today we learn there will never be.Far from being an exception to the rule, the app now joins in a long line of government IT projects to have glitched and failed, even before arrival.

  • The Answer to Groundwater Resources Comes from High in the Sky

    Groundwater makes up 30 to 50 percent of California’s water supply, but until recently there were few restrictions placed on its retrieval. Then in 2014 California became the last Western state to require regulation of its groundwater, and water managers in the state’s premier agricultural region – the state’s Central Valley – are tasked with estimating available groundwater. It’s a daunting technological challenge – but scientists can help by pairing satellite data with high-resolution monitoring to estimate groundwater depletion.

  • Bans on Facial Recognition Are Naïve — Hold Law Enforcement Accountable for Its Abuse

    The use of facial recognition technology has become a new target in the fight against racism and brutality in law enforcement. The current controversy over facial recognition purports to be about bias — inaccurate results related to race or gender. Osonde A. Osoba and Douglas Yeung write that “That could be fixed in the near future, but it wouldn’t repair the underlying dilemma: The imbalance of power between citizens and law enforcement. On this, facial recognition ups the ante. These tools can strip individuals of their privacy and enable mass surveillance.

  • The Dangers of Tech-Driven Solutions to COVID-19

    Although few sensible people have anything good to say about the federal government response, reactions to tools for managing the pandemic designed by tech firms have been more mixed, with many concluding that such tools can minimize the privacy and human rights risks posed by tight coordination between governments and tech firms. Julie E. Cohen, Woodrow Hartzog, and Laura Moy write for Brookings that contact tracing done wrong threatens privacy and invites mission creep into adjacent fields, including policing. Government actors might (and do) distort and corrupt public-health messaging to serve their own interests. Automated policing and content control raise the prospect of a slide into authoritarianism. 

  • Flight Tests Show B61-12 Compatible with F-15E Strike Eagle

    Dropped from above 25,000 feet, the mock B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb was in the air for approximately 55 seconds before hitting and embedding in the lakebed, splashing a 40- to 50-foot puff of desert dust from the designated impact area at Sandia National Laboratories’ Tonopah Test Range in Nevada. That strike was the last in a series of flight tests designed to demonstrate the refurbished B61-12’s compatibility with the U.S. Air Force’s F-15E Strike Eagle jet fighter.

  • Finding Links between Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Political Engagement

    A belief in the existence of conspiracies — particularly among followers of extremist movements — seems to go hand-in-hand with the assumption that political violence is an acceptable option. However, the role that a belief in conspiracies actually plays in political extremism and the willingness to use physical force has to date been disputed by psychologists.

  • Don’t Blame Social Media for Conspiracy Theories – They Would Still Flourish without It

    COVID-19 conspiracy theories have encouraged people to engage in some dangerous activities in the past few months. There is no simple explanation for why people believe conspiracy theories like these, and the best researchers can say is that the causes of such beliefs are complex and varied. And yet journalists, activists and politicians are increasingly blaming the internet, and social media in particular, for the spread of conspiracy theories. The problem with such accusations is that the evidence paints a more nuanced picture.

  • “Black Box” Study: Testing the Accuracy of Computer, Mobile Phone Forensics

    Digital forensics experts often extract data from computers and mobile phones that may contain evidence of a crime. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will conduct the first large-scale study to measure how well those experts do their job. But rather than testing the proficiency of individual experts, the study aims to measure the performance of the digital forensics community overall.