Month: October 2019

Enlarge (credit: Thanee Hengpattanapong / EyeEm)

Personality tests are two a penny, and most of them are no more meaningful than astrology (spoken like a true Capricorn). But there are ways to study personality empirically—they just involve accepting a lot of imperfection and fuzziness.

The "Big Five" personality traits do seem to get at something meaningful about human personality. They certainly don't capture everything, but Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism are traits that can be measured with a high degree of stability from one test to the next. They change in predictable ways across people's lifespans and with therapy, and they seem to be related in measurable ways to people's lives outside the context of a personality test.

One of those traits—conscientiousness—is, unsurprisingly, strongly related to how people perform at work. But why, and in what settings? A paper published this week in PNAS used the data from more than 2,500 studies to summarize what we know about conscientiousness. Unexpectedly, the authors find that conscientiousness scores make less of a difference to people's performance when they're in high-complexity careers. Instead, they mainly seems to matter in low- or moderate-complexity jobs.

Enlarge / The Facebook app displayed on the screen of an iPhone. (credit: Fabian Sommer | picture alliance | Getty Images)

Facebook about a month ago confirmed that politicians are exempt from its speech policies and ad standards. That policy frees up holders of political jobs, and candidates seeking those jobs, to, basically, lie their entire faces off in Facebook ads if they choose to do so.

The Internet and the 21st century being what they are, of course, many people greeted this news with responses along the lines of: "Does that mean I can just sign up for any local race and then put any ads I want on Facebook?" One man decided to find out. And so far, at least, the answer seems to be: No.

Adriel Hampton lives in California and runs a digital marketing firm that promotes progressive causes. On Monday, he formally registered as a candidate for the state's gubernatorial race, and his stated platform explicitly challenges both President Donald Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Enlarge (credit: Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr)

A day after Facebook-owned WhatsApp sued NSO Group, the social media platform has permanently deleted the accounts of employees who work at the Israel-based spyware maker, according to message boards and a security researcher who spoke to one worker.

"Your account has been deleted for not following our terms," said a message sent to one employee by Facebook-owned Instagram. "You won't be able to log into this account, and no one else will be able to see it. We're unable to restore accounts that are deleted for these types of violations."

A message Instagram sent to an NSO Group employee.

The action comes after WhatsApp sued NSO Group on Tuesday for allegedly mass exploiting a critical vulnerability that targeted 1,400 devices with spyware. WhatsApp presented evidence that about 100 of the targets were lawyers, dissidents, human-rights advocates, and other members of civil society. The exploits allowed the attackers to install spyware on iOS and Android phones simply by making a video call to the device.

Enlarge / An AT&T repair truck. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

AT&T is planning to spend just $20 billion on capital investment in 2020, down from $23 billion this year.

AT&T announced the $20 billion forecast for 2020 Monday in its quarterly earnings. A year ago, AT&T said it would spend $23 billion on gross capital investment in 2019. (These numbers include network construction and vendor-financing payments but do not include some spending on AT&T's FirstNet public safety network, which is reimbursed by the federal government.)

The company is on pace to exceed its 2019 goal as it averaged more than $6 billion per quarter in the first three quarters. But with a forecast of $20 billion across all of 2020, AT&T expects to spend about $5 billion per quarter on capital investments going forward. The company is under pressure from investors to control spending, in part because its TV business is tanking and because of AT&T's giant debt load stemming from the purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner.

Enlarge / Soldiers of the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade (Cyber) set up for AvengerCon IV, a "hacker" event for members of the US Cyber Command and government cyber operations community at the US CYBERCOM DreamPort facility in Columbia, Maryland, on October 17 and 18 . (credit: 780th Military Intelligence Brigade)

COLUMBIA, Md.—In a business park that plays home to a number of tech and cybersecurity firms situated strategically between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, there's a two-story building that looks externally like many other office buildings, remarkable this day only for the food trucks in the parking lot and the stream of people in camouflage swarming in and out. The building, called DreamPort, is a collaboration facility leased by US Cyber Command—and on October 18, it was the location of AvengerCon IV, the latest incarnation of a soldier-led cybersecurity training event that takes the shape of a community hacking conference.

The event also offered USCYBERCOM a chance to show off DreamPort—and a chance for me to meet with David Luber, the Executive Director of USCYBERCOM.

"AvengerCon is an event that is attracting the very best talent both from our DoD participants and also from some of the folks that are working with us outside of the DoD," Luber said. "When you bring those very best cyber experts together, they get to learn, test out new ideas, and work in an environment that is hosted by and for DoD cyber operations community experts. They're working in a community of peers—they get to learn together, they get to fail together. And what we've seen from previous activities with AvengerCon is that it's an exhilarating, fun environment for them to work in, and they learn a ton while they're here. And the private sector benefits because as AvengerCon shows, we're all working on some of the same cyber challenges together."

Enlarge / AlphaStar (Protoss, in green) dealing with flying units from the Zerg players with a combination of anti-air units (Phoenix and Archon). (credit: DeepMind)

Back in January, Google's DeepMind team announced that its AI, dubbed AlphaStar, had beaten two top human professional players at StarCraft. But as we argued at the time, it wasn't quite a fair fight. Now AlphaStar has improved on its performance sufficiently to achieve Grandmaster status in StarCraft II, using the same interface as a human player. The team described its work in a new paper in Nature.

"This is a dream come true," said DeepMind co-author Oriol Vinyals, who was an avid StarCraft player 20 years ago. "AlphaStar achieved Grandmaster level solely with a neural network and general-purpose learning algorithms—which was unimaginable ten years ago when I was researching StarCraft AI using rules-based systems."

Late last year, we reported on the latest achievements of AlphaZero, a direct descendent of DeepMind's AlphaGo, which made headlines worldwide in 2016 by defeating Lee Sedol, the reigning (human) world champion in Go. AlphaGo got a major upgrade last year, becoming capable of teaching itself winning strategies with no need for human intervention. By playing itself over and over again, AlphaZero trained itself to play Go from scratch in just three days and soundly defeated the original AlphaGo 100 games to 0. The only input it received was the basic rules of the game. Then AlphaZero taught itself to play three different board games (chess, Go, and shogi, a Japanese form of chess) in just three days, with no human intervention.

Enlarge (credit: CA Food and Agriculture)

Bacterial blight attacks rice crops in Southeast Asia and West Africa. It is a very well-studied crop disease, and it often serves as a model system to examine the interactions between microbes and their host plants. The pathogen is called Xoo, for Xanthomonas oryzae pathovar oryzae, and it makes its living by hijacking a number of rice genes that export sugars.

Now, researchers have figured out how to edit the rice's genome to block this hijacking.

A TALe of sugars

Xoo secretes TALes (transcription activator-like effector molecules) that bind to the DNA near the rice's SWEET genes, activating them. These SWEET genes (Sugars Will Eventually Be Exported Transporters) are ubiquitous in plants. As their name indicates, the SWEET proteins transport sucrose across the cell membrane. Their expression is required for susceptibility to Xoo.