Month: April 2017

The following article contains some spoilers for Fate of the Furious.

Ten of the most expensive cars in the world. (video link)

To celebrate the Fate of the Furious—and the ridiculous rides that characterize the franchise—we've put together a video of the world's most expensive hypercars. But while there's a lot for the car-obsessed to like about the new movie, it at times left my brain ready to blow a gasket.

Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: NBC Today)

Theranos, Inc., the infamous and embattled blood-testing company, has agreed to pay the state of Arizona more than $4.65 million dollars in consumer restitution for blood tests that were allegedly misrepresented and, in some cases, voided.

The agreement, announced Tuesday by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s office, comes after Brnovich alleged that Theranos’ advertisements in the state “misrepresented, omitted, and concealed material information regarding its testing service’s methodology, accuracy, reliability, and essential purpose,” the consent judgement reads. The state also alleged that Theranos was out of compliance with federal regulators.

Theranos denies any wrongdoing but agreed to pay to avoid a trial.

Enlarge / An AI contemplates its own biases in the movie Ex Machina. (credit: UPI)

Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it's been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human prejudice. Now a group of researchers have figured out one reason why that happens. Their findings shed light on more than our future robot overlords, however. They've also worked out an algorithm that can actually predict human prejudices based on an intensive analysis of how people use English online.

The implicit bias test

Many AIs are trained to understand human language by learning from a massive corpus known as the Common Crawl. The Common Crawl is the result of a large-scale crawl of the Internet in 2014 that contains 840 billion tokens, or words. Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy researcher Aylin Caliskan and her colleagues wondered whether that corpus—created by millions of people typing away online—might contain biases that could be discovered by algorithm. To figure it out, they turned to an usual source: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is used to measure often unconscious social attitudes.

People taking the IAT are asked to put words into two categories. The longer it takes for the person to place a word in a category, the less they associate the word with the category. (If you'd like to take an IAT, there are several online at Harvard University.) IAT is used to measure bias by asking people to associate random words with categories like gender, race, disability, age, and more. Outcomes are often unsurprising: for example, most people associate women with family, and men with work. But that obviousness is actually evidence for the IAT's usefulness in discovering people's latent stereotypes about each other.

Enlarge (credit: Harrison Weber)

Smartphones know an awful lot about us. They know if we're in a car that's speeding, and they know when we're walking, running, or riding in a bus. They know how many calls we make and receive each day and the precise starting and ending time of each one. And of course, they know the personal identification numbers we use to unlock the devices or to log in to sites that are protected by two-factor authentication. Now, researchers have devised an attack that makes it possible for sneaky websites to surreptitiously collect much of that data, often with surprising accuracy.

The demonstrated keylogging attacks are most useful at guessing digits in four-digit PINs, with a 74-percent accuracy the first time it's entered and a 94-percent chance of success on the third try. The same technique could be used to infer other input, including the lock patterns many Android users rely on to lock their phones, although the accuracy rates would probably be different. The attacks require only that a user open a malicious webpage and enter the characters before closing it. The attack doesn't require the installation of any malicious apps.

Malicious webpages—or depending on the browser, legitimate sites serving malicious ads or malicious content through HTML-based iframe tags—can mount the attack by using standard JavaScript code that accesses motion and orientation sensors built into virtually all iOS and Android devices. To demonstrate how the attack would work, researchers from Newcastle University in the UK wrote attack code dubbed PINLogger.js. Without any warning or outward sign of what was happening, the JavaScript was able to accurately infer characters being entered into the devices.

Atlantis and the final landing of the Space Shuttle program. (credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons)

No humans have launched into space from US soil for more than five years, when space shuttle Atlantis made its final voyage. Since that spacecraft landed on July 21, 2011, a total of 2,098 days have passed. Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale noted on Twitter Tuesday that this gap has now surpassed the previous longest US spaceflight gap—2,089 days—which occurred between the end of the Apollo program and the first space shuttle mission.

The final Apollo mission, which launched in 1975 and featured an in-space rendezvous with a Russian spacecraft, presaged the end of the "space race" and future cooperation between the United States and Russia in space. And since the space shuttle's retirement in 2011, NASA has relied exclusively on Russia to get its astronauts to the International Space Station. It will do so again on Thursday, with the launch of Jack Fischer from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

It would be easy to pillory NASA for this gap, but the space agency largely doesn't deserve the blame. The failure belongs to the American government, which knew literally for more than a decade that the shuttle's end was coming, but it failed to prepare for its inevitable retirement or articulate a plan for what was to come next. This failure belongs to the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and especially to Congress, which underfunded the program both Bush and Obama settled on to replace the space shuttle—a commercial crew plan to leverage development of private spacecraft.

The sulfer-coal-burning John E. Amos Power Plant in West Virginia. (credit: Cathy)

Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry ordered a review (PDF) of electricity markets and reliability late last week, saying that "certain policies" have hindered the development and use of baseload energy sources like coal. Although Perry never mentions renewable energy explicitly in his letter, he references "significant changes within the electrical system." That seems to be a direct allusion to the record amount of renewable capacity that has been added to the grid in recent years.

The Obama administration had supported initiatives to increase renewable energy on the US grid given the urgency of climate change and with a mind to mitigate the health problems that come with pollution related to coal burning and mining. Although wind and solar power are intermittent resources (meaning they only produce power when there’s wind and sun), government agencies including the DOE have funded research (PDF) to improve renewable energy efficiency and energy storage. The idea has been that adding renewable energy to the grid makes it more resilient, because power generation doesn’t rely on shipments of natural gas, coal, or oil. It also decreases the grid's reliance on large fossil fuel-burning facilities and allows more distributed energy generation.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, has been openly critical of climate change science, with the president even falsely claiming that climate change is a hoax made up by China. In March, the president killed the Clean Power Plan and ordered agencies to ignore climate change. Perry, too, spent most of his early career rejecting climate change science, but during his January Senate confirmation hearing the former Texas governor said he now accepts science showing that the Earth is warming. Still, Perry has remained coy about whether he believes that climate change is caused by humans (which scientific evidence has been unambiguous about).