Triple-Decker Weekly, 146

Self-Checkout Thievery “Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron.”

Scientists develop 'artificial tongue' to detect fake whiskies. The technology can also be used to identify poisons as well as to monitor rivers.

When you go to a website and load a page, in the milliseconds that it takes for that page to load, there are real-time auctions running in the background that determine which ads to load on your page. Almost all online ads are delivered in this way. How Digital Advertising Markets Really Work

Everything about the company is over-the-top: its growth, losses, potential conflicts of interest and financial gymnastics

Hackers working for the Russian government have been using printers, video decoders, and other so-called Internet-of-things devices as a beachhead to penetrate targeted computer networks

Human life is fragile but tardigrades and other extremophiles show that life itself is in little danger of disappearing

Dark matter may be older than the Big Bang

When our cherished ideas are contradicted by the facts, we must avoid the human tendency to double down on those ideas

Dynamic Information Design with Diminishing Sensitivity Over News

Having mastered Space Invaders, chess, and Go, AI tackles video soccer

Most American books published before 1964 never extended their copyright, meaning they’re in the public domain today. Where to download these free Public domain eBooks

Michel Foucault’s LSD Trip in the Valley of Death

James Joyce and the Writing of Odor

Fart-proof underwear

When faced with a personal problem people typically give better advice to others than to themselves. This has been termed ‘Solomon’s Paradox’, named after the biblical King Solomon who was wise for others, but not so when it came to making decisions that would have an impact on his own standing. Suppose that instead of imagining a problem from the perspective of another you were actually able to have a conversation with yourself about it, but from the embodied perspective of another. A previous study showed how it is possible to enact internal dialogue in virtual reality (VR) through participants alternately occupying two different virtual bodies – one representing themselves and the other Sigmund Freud. They could maintain a self-conversation by explaining their problem to the virtual Freud and then from the embodied perspective of Freud see and hear the explanation by their virtual doppelganger, and then give some advice. Alternating between the two bodies they could maintain a self-dialogue, as if between two different people. Here we show that the process of alternating between their own and the Freud body is important for successful psychological outcomes. An experiment was carried out with 58 people, 29 in the body swapping Self-Conversation condition and 29 in a condition where they only spoke to a Scripted Freud character. The results showed that the Self-Conversation method results in a greater perception of change and help compared to the Scripted. We compare this method with the distancing paradigm where participants imagine resolving a problem from a first or third person perspective. We consider the method as a possible strategy for self-counselling. [ Nature]

An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says.

Scientists are making human-monkey hybrids in China

Scientists create contact lenses that zoom when you blink twice

Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind

Apple has said that it will temporarily suspend its practice of using human contractors to grade snippets of Siri voice recordings for accuracy. Contractors “regularly hear confidential medical information, drug deals, and recordings of couples having sex” as part of their job.

Employee happiness and business success are linked, study

Living Near Trees, Not Just Green Space, Improves Wellbeing

More than 1 in 4 delivery drivers are eating orders and Delivery drivers involved in Amazon theft ring

Jeff Bezos has done something that even the nonprofits receiving his millions remark is highly unusual: He has given them life-changing money with virtually no restrictions, formal vetting, or oversight

A two-track algorithm to detect deepfake images -- can spot image manipulation at the level of single-pixels

A Few Thoughts about Deep Fakes

A research team is working on training mice to understand irregularities within speech, a task the animals can do with remarkable accuracy

How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality

Computers can’t tell if you’re happy when you smile. Emotion recognition is a $20 billion industry, but a new study says the most popular method is deeply flawed.

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

Joseph D'Alesandro, 20, made nearly $2,000 a month from phone farming back in 2017. Other phone farmers said they've made hundreds of dollars a month from passively running apps on their phones.

The project, which launched in July 2016, now hosts 82 tools that can be used to decrypt 109 different types of ransomware.

the method for taking a shit as an Apollo astronaut was horrifyingly simple

About 25% of American couples that eventually move in together do so after four months of dating, and 50% after a year. By two years, over 70% had moved in.

New study uses camera footage to track the frequency of bystander intervention in heated incidents

this study finds that brighter nights, those with a full moon and no clouds, have significantly more crime than nights without any moonlight

Never Commit a Crime When Your Phone Is Connected to a Wi-Fi Network

Sand and gravel are being extracted faster than they can be replaced. Roughly 32 billion to 50 billion tonnes are used globally each year, mainly for making concrete, glass and electronics.

History’s Greatest Horse Racing Cheat and His Incredible Painting Trick

Why everything you know about nutrition is wrong

In 2019, blockchain has been piercing the food industry at an accelerated pace. According to recent research, 20% of the top-10 global grocers will use blockchain by 2025

An 1851 manual on making ice cream [via Austerity Kitchen]

I spent a day eating food cooked by robots in America's tech capital [more Austerity Kitchen]

More than 400,000 people have joined a Facebook event page calling for storming Area 51

The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance—by their heartbeat

People keep spotting Teslas with snoozing drivers on the freeway

people judged that altering some moral facts was impossible—not even God could turn morally wrong acts into morally right acts. Strikingly, people thought that God could make physically impossible and logically impossible events occur.

In a technical tour de force, Japanese researchers created eggs and sperm in the laboratory. Now, scientists have to determine how to use those cells safely — and ethically.

An interoceptive illusion of effort induced by false heart-rate feedback

Cockroaches may soon be unstoppable—thanks to fast-evolving insecticide resistance

In recent weeks, hackers believed to be working for the Iranian government have targeted U.S. government agencies, as well as sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, sending waves of spear-phishing emails

China Snares Tourists’ Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App -- Border authorities routinely install the app on the phones of people entering the Xinjiang region by land from Central Asia, gathering personal data and scanning for material considered objectionable. [NY Times | Vice]

China may soon be home to half of the world's most powerful supercomputing systems

China’s Social Credit System Is More Kafka Than Orwell

Google takes another run at social networking with Shoelace

We analyzed over one million posts from over 4,000 individuals on several social media platforms, using computational models based on reward reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media qualitatively and quantitatively conforms to the principles of reward learning. [PsyArXiv]

To Break Google’s Monopoly on Search, Make Its Index Public

In a Constantly Changing San Francisco, Change is Constant -- by A.I. Algorithm [Thanks Tim]

How long does it take a man to collect his semen specimen in a busy infertility clinic? Patients accompanied by their female partners required significantly longer time to collect their sample.

Why a woman started lactating from her vulva: rare case study

In every single country, the average estimate of happiness is far lower than actual reported happiness

women’s voices are becoming deeper in some countries

Facebook’s AI researchers have developed a speech synthesizer capable of copying anybody’s voice with uncanny accuracy.

Smart devices are ripe for exploitation in domestic abuse scenarios because often one person, usually a man, controls the information technology (IT) for the house.

Student Used Snapchat Filter to Pose as Teen Girl, Ended up Busting Pedophile Cop

Men Are More Satisfied By ‘Bromances’ Than Their Romantic Relationships, Study Says [thanks GG]

Cocaine contamination in pubic hair

Woman banned from pooing in public has breached court order 20 times in two years

The Puzzle of Open Defecation in Rural India

The zero rupee note

Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths

US homicide rates fell sharply in the early 1990s, a decade that also saw the mainstreaming of cell phones – a concurrence that may be more than a coincidence, we propose.

Dead Duck Day also commemorates the billions of other birds that die(d) from colliding with glass buildings

Telegram blames China for cyberattack coinciding with Hong Kong protests + Telegram's description of DDoS attack is the best

The Economic Effects of the 2017 Tax Revision: Preliminary Observations

How Much Do Museum Employees Actually Make? A Tell-All Google Spreadsheet Is Now Making the Rounds

This paper explores the law and economics of “literary fan art,” i.e. unauthorized derivative works by third parties that are based on someone else's literary work product. What is the legal status of such fan art?

Dora Maar was one of the most important Surrealist photographers and the only artist to exhibit in all six of the group’s international exhibitions.

Using techniques coming from ultra intense laser science, we show that for high enough laser intensities, two lightsaber blades can `feel' solid to each other.

A Visit to Chernobyl as It Transforms Into a Solar Farm

A team of scientists have unveiled a vodka which has been produced using grains and water from the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which they claim is completely safe to drin

Instagram influencers are flocking to Chernobyl

It costs three times more to build a subway station in New York than in London or Paris.

This Vancouver market is handing out embarrassing plastic bags to customers

A digital 'dress' sold for $9,500