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(credit: Dawn Endico)

A Silicon Valley county has become the first in the United States to vote in a new law that requires "continued oversight and regular evaluation" for law enforcement agencies starting prior to the acquisition of surveillance technology.

The ordinance, which was unanimously approved by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, requires that the county sheriff and the district attorney’s office seek board approval before those agencies even begin the process of obtaining new snooping gear. The agencies are not required to immediately notify the board in exigent circumstances, but must do so generally within 90 days.

Agencies must also submit a usage policy to the county government, and notably, an "Annual Surveillance Report," which should describe what data the device captures, how the agency deals with information collected about people not suspected of any wrongdoing, and whether the gear has been effective, among other requirements.

Enlarge (credit: @ChelseaGatesTV)

Online miscreants took over the National Football League's Twitter account and used it to falsely report the death of league commissioner Roger Goodell.

During the brief span that @NFL was taken over, it followed exactly one new Twitter account—specifically, @IDissEverything, which has now been suspended. Before the account was suspended, it claimed the password protecting the NFL Twitter feed was "olsen3culvercam88." The Daily Dot said someone connected to the IDissEverything account claimed the password was revealed after someone managed to get into the email of a social media staffer at the NFL, where we found the credentials in a message." It's still not clear how the group got access to the e-mail account.

Tuesday's breach was only the latest one to affect a high-profile Twitter user. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently saw his dormant Twitter account taken over by someone who discovered its password—"dadada"—was the same one that protected his LinkedIn account. Zuckerberg's LinkedIn account, in turn, had been compromised in a 2012 breach of the career networking site. Other celebrities, including Kate Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Kylie Jenner have also reportedly had their Twitter accounts taken over in recent days.

(credit: Dennis Skley)

In adapting to our environment, we'd ideally use the results of previous actions to inform future choices, updating our expectations and decisions to reflect knowledge gained from earlier experiences. However, sometimes we ignore the past's feedback when we really should pay attention it, leaving us trapped in a series of bad decisions. A study published in PNAS demonstrates that this “bad choice persistence” occurs when changing our decisions would go against our existing biases. This means that our beliefs can trap us in a difficult-to-break bad-decision feedback loop.

To examine this phenomenon, researchers looked at how subjects integrated new experiences with their past history when completing a sensory stimulus task. The participants were asked to predict whether a visual stimulus would appear on the left side or the right side of a screen based on where the stimulus appeared in previous trials.

In the first set of experimental trials, the location of the stimulus was randomized. These trials assessed the subjects’ baseline biases towards choosing one side of the screen or the other. After establishing these biases, the participants began a second set of experimental trials. In these experiments, the stimulus' location was determined by a probabilistic model that set the odds of its location using both the participants' previous choice history and the item's previous locations.