April 16, 2022
Music From Nancy (1979)
Music From Nancy is a an experimental music and performance piece based on the comic strip "Nancy".
You’re muted — or are you?
Kassem Fawaz’s brother was on a videoconference with the microphone muted when he noticed that the microphone light was still on — indicating, inexplicably, that his microphone was being accessed. Alarmed, he asked Fawaz, an expert in online privacy and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to look into the issue. Fawaz and graduate student Yucheng Yang investigated whether this “mic-off-light-on” phenomenon was more widespread. They tried out many different videoconferencing applications on major operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows and Mac, checking to see if the apps still accessed the microphone when it was muted. [more inside]
A drab, gray dream, ‘The Secrets of Dumbledore’ is best forgotten
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation. As previously discussed on MetaFilter, the Dunning-Kruger effect is probably not real. In this blog post, economist Blair Fix explains how it is a statistical artifact. [more inside]
Reading the Stone
An experiment in a public reading endeavor of Chinese classic 紅樓夢 "Dream of the Red Chamber" where scholars, readers, and translators participate using the hashtag #ReadingtheStone, from Duke professor Eileen Chengyin Chow inspired by a previous public reading experiment on reading War & Peace online during the early days of the pandemic with author YiYun Li with the hashtag #TolstoyTogether. [more inside]
How well do you know your own neighborhood?
Like the Back of Your Hand? (Requires location services to be turned on.)
That kid terrified me.
"With a little sweat equity and American entrepreneurship"
"Private prisons are the single greatest real estate investment vehicle around... To increase my cash flow I spent a significant amount of money on lobbying efforts to win a judge who was hard on crime. This paid off by the end of year two. To pay me back the judge sent most young men (higher margin than older men) to my facility. Cash flow went up 3x. By year four cash flows were $15 million at 95% occupancy. To maximize my investment I started to market the facility to outside investors. Halfway through year four we sold the facility to private equity for 10x cash flow or $150 million. In four years I turned $7.5 million into a clean $150 million." (SLThreadReader) [more inside]
blank blank in the blank of blankety blank, blank blank?
Redactle is a daily browser game where the user tries to determine the subject of a random obfuscated Wikipedia article, chosen from Wikipedia's 10,000 Vital Articles (Level 4).
« Previous day | Next day »