The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top finance journals. For example, the most obvious cost of a replication policy is the additional burden it imposes on authors in answering questions about both the code and data. Indeed, this cost is disproportionately placed on our most productive researchers – potentially leading to less innovation. On the other hand, having a strong policy would likely reduce research misconduct – in particular, soft misconduct such as p-hacking. I present a framework to mitigate the costs associated with replication and maximize the benefits.
Here at Trail of Bits we review a lot of code. From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we’ve seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save you a bit of time and money and just say outright—if you come to us with a codebase that uses RSA, you will be paying for the hour of time required for us to explain why you should stop using it.
RSA is an intrinsically fragile cryptosystem containing countless foot-guns which the average software engineer cannot be expected to avoid. Weak parameters can be difficult, if not impossible, to check, and its poor performance compels developers to take risky shortcuts. Even worse, padding oracle attacks remain rampant 20 years after they were discovered. While it may be theoretically possible to implement RSA correctly, decades of devastating attacks have proven that such a feat may be unachievable in practice.
Fujitsu was drawn to Vancouver for close access to the lucrative North American market and to be close to its investment in quantum-computing firm 1QBit.
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Maureen Downey
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Georgia Tech students who received free Fitbits through a promotion intended for University System of Georgia employees will not have to return the fitness trackers after all.
USG said 8,000 Fitbits were sent to students and some employees who tapped into a promotion limited to USG staffers enrolled in a wellness program.
New Mexico State University is working to satisfy the regional and the national demand for data scientists and cyber security experts through two new degrees: a professional master’s degree in computational data analytics beginning in fall 2019 and a bachelor’s degree in cyber security beginning in 2020.
New Jersey Institute of Technology is creating a center that will conduct basic and applied research focusing on interdisciplinary research and development for all areas pertaining to digital data.
The Institute of Data Science, unveiled July 9, will be led by David Bader, a distinguished professor at NJIT.
At the institute, scientists, engineers and users will develop technologies applicable in the “real world,” NJIT said, working beyond academic research to solve “problems in the modern data-driven economy.” It will combine existing centers from across the university’s colleges and schools in big data, medical informatics and cybersecurity with new centers in data analytics and artificial intelligence.
According to a first-of-its-kind study, cities with a higher incidence of a certain kind of racist tweets reported more actual hate crimes related to race, ethnicity, and national origin.
A New York University research team analyzed the location and linguistic features of 532 million tweets published between 2011 and 2016. They trained a machine learning model — one form of artificial intelligence — to identify and analyze two types of tweets: those that are targeted — directly espousing discriminatory views — and those that are self-narrative — describing or commenting upon discriminatory remarks or acts. The team compared the prevalence of each type of discriminatory tweet to the number of actual hate crimes reported during that same time period in those same cities.
The research was led by Rumi Chunara, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and biostatistics at the NYU College of Global Public Health, and Stephanie Cook, an assistant professor of biostatistics and social and behavioral sciences at the NYU College of Global Public Health.
The U.S. Army’s new Futures Command is accelerating research into synthetic biotechnology to help the military develop next-generation living camouflage and other never-before-seen organisms and materials.
Dimitra Stratis-Cullum, who is overseeing the research in synthetic biology for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, detailed the effort on Thursday at the fourth annual Defense One Tech Summit.
Methane is responsible for 25% of global warming and by pinpointing the exact source of emission and frequently monitoring it, we can take effective action, and slow down climate change, says Yotam Ariel, CEO & Founder of Bluefield, in an exclusive interview with Geospatial World.
This year Facebook released a draft charter for the oversight board, and it has been holding roundtables and focus groups around the world to get input on how the oversight board should operate. But it’s still unclear who will sit on the board, how those people will be chosen, and exactly what types of problem content will fall into their purview.
The whole idea for an oversight board came from outside Facebook, from Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, who is the main architect of Facebook’s plan. I spoke to him by phone about the details of his plan, and about some of the problems it’s likely to face.
Elastifile is a pioneer in solving the challenges associated with file storage for enterprise-grade applications running at scale in the cloud. They’ve built a unique software-defined approach to managed Network Attached Storage (NAS), enabling organizations to scale performance or capacity without cumbersome overhead. Building on this technology, our teams are excited to join together and integrate Elastifile with Google Cloud Filestore.
If you have hangups about Amazon and privacy on its smart assistant, Alexa, you’re not alone. Even after Amazon sent answers to a US senator who had questions about how the tech giant retains voice data and transcripts, the lawmaker remains concerned about Alexa’s privacy practices.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in May, demanding answers on Alexa and how long it kept voice recordings and transcripts, as well as what the data gets used for. The letter came after CNET’s report that Amazon kept transcripts of interactions with Alexa, even after people deleted the voice recordings.
The deadline for answers was June 30, and Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Brian Huseman, sent a response on June 28. In the letter, Huseman tells Coons that Amazon keeps transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they’re manually deleted by users.
With lawmakers ramping up debate over privacy, antitrust and, in Hawley’s case, legal protections the platforms rely on, the Silicon Valley giants are unleashing some of the Washington power they’ve spent the past few years building up, going from a low-key player into the biggest spender in D.C.
And while tech-funded think tanks and advocacy groups have fought other initiatives, the fervor over Hawley’s bill has revealed just how well powerful companies have laid the foundation in Washington to fight efforts to rein them in.
“I’ve never seen pushback in such a fashion before,” Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project.
iMIRACLI (innovative MachIne leaRning to constrain Aerosol-cloud CLimate Impacts) brings together leading climate and machine learning scientists across Europe with non-academic partners, such as Amazon and the MetOffice, to educate a new generation of climate data scientists.
The project will start in 2020, with students beginning their projects in September 2020, kicking off with a summer school held at Oxford. It will fund 15 PhD student across Europe, with three of them directly supervised in Oxford (two in Physics, one in Statistics). Oxford is the overall lead of the project and Philip Stier, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, is the lead PI.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
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Washington, DC July 30, starting at 9 a.m., National Academies’ Keck Center (500 5th Street, NW). “In this public session, researchers from sociology, economics, and business management will examine the evidence for changes in the workplace and the resulting challenges and opportunities for workforce management.” [free, registration required]
“Organized by Hannah Haberkern, Misha Ahrens, Gowan Tervo, Alla Karpova, Josh Dudman and Vivek Jayaraman, this interactive workshop provides an exciting opportunity for graduate students and recent PhDs interested in the mechanistic basis of cognition to present their research to a diverse audience and discuss ideas for the future, while also discovering potential independent early-career options at Janelia.” Deadline to apply is July 12.
Investigative journalists from NDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ, for short), and multiple other international teams of journalists managed to get hold of a surveillance app that is used by Chinese border officials to scan mobile phones of people entering the country from Kyrgysztan. This sparked a collaboration with my advisor Prof. Thorsten Holz, who leads the Chair for Systems Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and myself to unveil the inner workings of the app and figure out what exactly the app searches for.
This post aims to shed some more light on our results.
