Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Average, Reserved, Role Model, and Self-centered: not everyone falls into these four categories, but you might. (credit: Northwestern University)

People love taking online quizzes; just ask Buzzfeed and Facebook. A new study has sifted through some of the largest online data sets of personality quizzes and identified four distinct "types" therein. The new methodology used for this study—described in detail in a new paper in Nature Human Behavior—is rigorous and replicable, which could help move personality typing analysis out of the dubious self-help section in your local bookstore and into serious scientific journals.

Frankly, personality "type" is not the ideal nomenclature here; personality "clusters" might be more accurate. Paper co-author William Revelle (Northwestern University) bristles a bit at the very notion of distinct personality types, like those espoused by the hugely popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Revelle is an adamant "anti-fan" of the Myers-Briggs, and he is not alone. Most scientists who study personality prefer to think of it as a set of continuous dimensions, in which people shift where they fall on the spectrum of various traits as they mature.

What's new here is the identification of four dominant clusters in the overall distribution of traits. Revelle prefers to think of them as "lumps in the batter" and suggests that a good analogy would be how people tend to concentrate in cities in the United States.

Enlarge / Apple introducing its AirPower wireless charging mat in September 2017.

One surprise from Apple's iPhone launch event last week was the complete lack of new information about the company's AirPower wireless charging mat. Apple first introduced the charger at its iPhone X unveiling last year, with reports later claiming that the device would ship in March. That never happened, though, and by June Bloomberg reported that Apple was dealing with numerous "technical issues" related to overheating and the complexity of the circuitry involved with the device.

That report said Apple hoped to get AirPower out the door by June, but it later changed its aim to September. While that second launch frame is still possible, it now looks extremely unlikely. Besides not mentioning AirPower whatsoever at its iPhone XS unveiling, the company appeared to scrub all mentions of the charging mat from its website following the event.

Over the weekend, a pair of reports from noted Apple bloggers John Gruber and Sonny Dickson said the delay still boils down to technical problems Apple has struggled to overcome. Both reports note that the AirPower mat is still having major issues with overheating, while Dickson says the device has struggled to communicate with corresponding iDevices and accurately report charge level information. Dickson says Apple has struggled to cleanly integrate the number of charging coils built within the mat, too, a problem that has reportedly been exacerbated by the relatively compact size of the device. Gruber cites "multiple little birdies" he has heard "third-hand," while Dickson cites "multiple internal sources."

(credit: Getty Images)

Amazon began investigating reports that some of its employees have been leaking company information in exchange for bribes, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The report claims that Amazon employees have been revealing sales information, deleting negative reviews, and offering up reviewers' email addresses in exchange for money from third-party Amazon sellers. Typically, these interactions have been facilitated by intermediaries that seek out Amazon employees who are willing to offer such services.

While some instances have been traced to US employees, the practice is reportedly rampant in China among Chinese Amazon employees and local third-party sellers. Amazon employees in China may decide to participate because their salaries are quite low, and Chinese sellers may pay up in order to get information that can help them better position their merchandise on Amazon or to contact those who have left negative product reviews.

"We hold our employees to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our Code faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties," an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. "We have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action."

United Launch Alliance

On Saturday morning, the most successful rocket the United States has ever developed flew its final mission. During the pre-dawn hours, United Launch Alliance's Delta II rocket lifted NASA's ice-monitoring mission ICESat-2 into space. It was a bittersweet moment, as the Delta II's retirement marks both a step into the future of US rocketry, while representing a definitive break with the past—and the very origins of US spaceflight.

"Historic day," the chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance, Tory Bruno, said on Twitter. "Retired the shark, Delta II and the mighty Thor." The "shark" was a reference to the shark teeth painted on the payload fairing of GPS launches, an homage to the "Flying Tigers," American volunteer pilots who helped defend China from Japan in 1941 and 1942.

Enlarge / Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.). (credit: Doug Collins)

Judicial records are public documents that are supposed to be freely available to the public. But for two decades, online access has been hobbled by a paywall on the judiciary's website, called PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charges as much as 10 cents per page. Now Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) has introduced legislation that would require that the courts make PACER documents available for download free of charge.

The PACER system has been on the Web since the late 1990s. To avoid using taxpayer funds to develop the system, Congress authorized the courts to charge users for it instead. Given the plunging cost of bandwidth and storage, you might have expected these fees to decline over time. Instead, the judiciary has actually raised fees over time—from 7 cents per page in 1998 to 10 cents per page today. Even search results incur fees. The result has been a massive windfall for the judiciary—$150 million in 2016 alone.

(credit: Free Law Project)

Critics like the legal scholar Stephen Schultze point out that this is not what Congress had in mind. In 2002, Congress required that the courts collect fees "only to the extent necessary" to fund the system. It obviously doesn't cost $150 million per year to run a website with a bunch of PDFs on it. Despite that, federal courts have used PACER revenues as a slush fund to finance other court activities. For example, one judge bragged at a 2010 conference about using PACER funds to install flatscreen monitors and state-of-the-art sound systems in court rooms.