Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 10, 2019

Describing the uncanny valley in robotics; Android malware with unusual persistence puzzles security experts; Using obfuscation as a privacy tool; Nature-inspired architecture; Critics say nutrition science is performing poorly and lacks funding; and a Steem essay on technologies that will influence education in the future.

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Fresh and Informative Content Daily: Welcome to my little corner of the blockchain

Straight from my RSS feed

Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. What Is the Uncanny Valley? - For some reason, IEEE Spectrum doesn't have their "weekly selection of awesome robot videos" this week, so here's a post from Wednesday about the phenomenon known as the "uncanny valley". Basically, people are ok with robots that don't resemble humans at all, but as the robot (or prosthetic device) becomes more human-like, there's an area of perception where it makes people uncomfortable. The name was coined, somewhere around 50 years ago, by Masahiro Mori in a seminal essay, and illustrated in the accompanying chart, from wikimedia. This article contains a number of examples of technologies that seem to trigger the "yuck" response signaling that the uncanny valley has been reached. The concept was not proposed as a rigorous idea, but it has been criticized in that light. Karl MacDorman is quoted saying that he thinks of it more as a heuristic for organizing ideas than as a theory. In order to get across the Uncanny Valley, the article suggests that facial expressions need to match body movements and tones of speech.
   
   From the article, here is a video with a "virtual human" that occupies the valley:
   

Click through for some other examples.

xHelper Malware for Android - The infection method isn't particularly interesting, and neither is the function. It seems to be limited to delivering unwanted advertising. What is interesting, according to Bruce Schneier, is the app's persistence. It can reinstall itself after removal, and even survives factory resets of the phone. It has also been evolving steadily since its discovery in March, 2019. Schneier speculates that the evolution and stickiness seem to implicate a nation-state actor, but expresses puzzlement that a nation-state would direct this level of resources towards delivering unwanted ads.

Obfuscation as a Privacy Tool - I had this idea some years ago, but never did anything with it. You can't evade surveillance, so instead, flood the surveyors with useless data by hiding your actual, organic activities amidst an avalanche of automated and random actions. Schneier says that it might be useful, but he's skeptical.

Urban architecture inspired by mountains, clouds and volcanoes | - This TED talk was published in July, and it came across the ted.com RSS feed on November 7. In thi talk, Ma Yansong discusses his nature-inspired architectural design techniques. He points out that many city skylines look nearly identical because they all follow the same design principles, competing for efficiency, competing for space, competing for density. In his work, he says that he strives to make his designs an extension of nature. He also says that he uses a lot of hand-sketching to incorporate emotions that can't be created with computer design. Some of his designs include an opera house in China, a museum of art in Los Angeles, and a sports-complex with volcano shaped stadiums in China. Here's the closing paragraph from the transcript:

So, what we're trying to create actually is an environment that blurs the boundary in between architecture and nature. So architecture is no longer a functional machine for living. It also reflects the nature around us. It also reflects our soul and spirit. So, as an architect, I don't think in the future we should repeat those soulless matchboxes anymore. I think what I'm looking for is the opportunity to create a future with harmony in between humans and nature.

How Washington keeps America sick and fat - This Politico article laments that, although diet is critical for health, nutrition funding has been flat for decades and lags behind many other fields. The NIH responded that funding for nutrition science has grown over time, but Politico countered that it has shrunk in percentage terms. Jerold Mande is quoted, saying that unlike most fields of science, the state of nutrition science seems to get worse as time passes, and John Ioannidis offered biting criticism, as follows:

“I’ve worked in many different fields, and it’s hard to find another field that seems to be performing so poorly,” Ioannidis said in an interview, noting that he believes the epidemiological studies are particularly problematic. “It does draw amazing attention in the news, but nothing seems to be validated. I can’t think of any other field that has that constellation of failure.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the "funding == quality" paradigm of thought that permeates the article, but I think the critiques are important. It also occurs to me that an absence of funding could be a response to poor performance, and not a cause of it. h/t Retraction Watch

STEEM What Can We Expect from Classrooms of the Future? - In this short Steem essay, @sweetpea discusses some technologies that will change the face of education. These include virtual reality, personalized learning, flexible assignments, and cloud computing. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @sweetpea.)

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