Month: July 2017

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. (credit: Z A Balti/Public domain)

I was confused for a few moments today, after one of my colleagues asked me if I'd heard about "fontgate."

"Fontgate?" I queried.

"Pakistan either loves or hates Calibri," I was unhelpfully informed.

Enlarge / Hey remember this movie from the 1980s about rank-reversal aversion? (credit: Paramount Pictures)

It's well known among economists that most people don't like income disparities, especially when they're on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. This is reflected in polls and scientific studies, but also just everyday common sense. Yet many of our societies suffer from a widening gap between the haves and have-nots. If we hate economic inequality so much, why do humans keep supporting institutions that concentrate wealth in a tiny percentage of the population? A new cross-cultural study led by economists working in China suggests one possible reason: people are not willing to redistribute wealth if they think it will upset the social hierarchy.

Zhejiang University business school professor Zhou Xinyue and his colleagues conducted a simple experiment using a game that allows players to redistribute income between two people. They describe the results in Nature Human Behavior. Players were shown pictures of two people and told that one has randomly been given a large amount of money and the other a small amount. Then players were asked whether they would be willing to allow the money to be redistributed under two basic conditions: one, if the redistribution leaves the "rich" person still richer than the other; and two, if the redistribution reverses the roles and leaves the "rich" person poorer than the other.

Zhou and colleagues did tests on subjects in China and continued their tests with Indian and Caucasian subjects via Mechanical Turk. They found that responses were surprisingly uniform: 76.87% of people were willing to redistribute money if the rich person remained slightly wealthier than the poor person, thus keeping "social ranking" intact. But only 44.8% of people were willing to redistribute the money if it meant reversing the fortunes of the "rich" and "poor" people.

Enlarge / A bitcoin token stands in this arranged photograph in London, U.K., on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

AlphaBay, one of the largest Tor-hidden drug websites that sprung up in the wake of Silk Road, has been shuttered for good after a series of law enforcement raids and arrests.

The site mysteriously went dark earlier this month. Some users on Reddit suspected an "exit scam," in which AlphaBay's founders had shuttered the site and absconded with piles of bitcoins.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the news on Thursday, police in the United States, Canada, and Thailand collaborated to arrest Alexandre Cazes, who allegedly was the head of the online operation. The Canadian citizen was arrested on July 5 in Thailand, the same day that two raids on residences in Quebec, Canada, were executed. On Wednesday, Cazes was found dead, hanged in his Thai jail cell.

Enlarge (credit: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library)

Here at Ars, we often speak of facial-recognition technology as some Orwellian surveillance method that will one day be deployed by governments or other evil actors to chronicle our every move—perhaps for nefarious purposes. We reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security is pushing a plan that would require all Americans to submit to a facial-recognition scan when flying out of the country. Whether that's good or bad is open for debate. And add to that, the nation's spy agencies have asked the public to help make biometrics more accurate.

While we're not at an Orwellian point in time yet with biometrics, facial-recognition technology is being used for good, no matter how scary the technology sounds. Consider that Nevada authorities have announced that biometrics was behind the arrest of a violent criminal who escaped from prison 25 years ago. It's another in a string of arrests in which biometrics essentially paved the way for a bad guy's capture.

What led to the recent arrest of 64-year-old career criminal Robert Frederick Nelson of North Las Vegas, who committed a number of felonies after escaping from a Minnesota prison in 1992? He applied for a Nevada ID card, and the Silver State's facial recognition tech doomed him.