177484553
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
In a study titled Entrepreneurial Spawning from Remote Work researchers used Linkedin and other data sources to track new business creation among remote workers. They conclude "remote work increases spawning by providing the time and downside protection needed for entrepreneurial experimentation." The Register noted "All those return to office mandates make a lot more sense now"
173119878
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18% From the study's abstract: "One threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50% and men to increase it by 18%. "
I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that.
124206928
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
Academic study challenges the notion that "some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills, abilities, and talents of these programmers exert an outsized influence on that organization's success or failure."
Instead, the author shows productivity variation is often a result of poor performing outliers and some wide variation in individual's productivity from day to day. Once these factors are eliminated, the gap between top performers and normal performers isn't that great, and there is a very small supply of consistent top performers anyway. This result has a lot of implications for how software teams and projects are managed.
107252096
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a group of scientists has theorized that sound waves possess mass, meaning sounds would be directly affected by gravity. They suggest phonons, particlelike collective excitations responsible for transporting sound waves across a medium, might exhibit a tiny amount of mass in a gravitational field. “You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now,” says Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper. “It’s something we stumbled upon almost by chance.”
106011830
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
Threatpost has a link to some recent research about ways web pages can exploit browser extensions to steal information or write files. Did we need another reason to be deeply suspicious of any browser extension? Not only do they spy on us for their makers, now other people can use them to spy on us as well. Original paper is here.
96719481
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
Microexpressions are fast, involuntary facial expressions which other people may not consciously recognize, but arise from our real emotions instead of the face we wish to present to the world. Carnegie Mellon University released an interesting blog entry about new approaches to using computers to recognize these microexpressions with a focus on the security and military applications. If you haven't taped over the cameras on your devices, it might be time to start thinking about it. Just imagine how advertisers would (mis)use this sort of technology.
62027495
submission
jbmartin6 writes:
The Panopticon may be coming, but perhaps not how we think. Instead of a massive government surveillance program, we might end up subjected to ubiquitous monitoring to save on our insurance premiums. The "internet of things (you can't get away from)" makes this more and more possible. Here a company saved money on its health insurance premiums by distributing Fitbits and an online service to enable reporting fitness gains back to the insurance company. We've already seen the stories on using black boxes to monitor drivers. There is even an insurance company named Panoptic! Heck why not a premium hike for owners of this or that "aggressiveness gene"? What if in the future we got a quick "+50 cents" tweet for every scoop of iced cream? I suppose the natural stopping point might be the balance between an individual's willingness to be monitored and the desire to reduce insurance premiums.
