Posts matching tags 'risks'
2008/1/13
A study in Singapore has shown that the sight or smell of appetising food can compel people to make impulse purchases, or else compromise their ability to judge risks and payoffs:
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater -- even when told they were on a tight budget -- than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).The researchers make the further claim that "the presence of an attractive woman in the trading room might propel an investor to choose the investment option providing smaller but sooner rewards".
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments]
2008/1/11
14-year-old "electronics genius" in Lódz, Poland, built a remote control for the city's tram system (apparently out of a TV remote control, though presumably they mean that he housed it in a TV remote control case ) and used it to change points, forcing trams onto the wrong tracks, until he was arrested.
"He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change.
Problems with the signalling system on Lodz's tram network became apparent on Tuesday when a driver attempting to steer his vehicle to the right was involuntarily taken to the left. As a result the rear wagon of the train jumped the rails and collided with another passing tram. Transport staff immediately suspected outside interference.
2005/12/7
The latest advance in Windows worms is a worm which takes over people's instant-messaging accounts and chats to their friends, attempting to talk them into downloading it; in short, an automated form of social engineering:
According to IMlogic, the worm, dubbed IM.Myspace04.AIM, has arrived in instant messages that state: "lol thats cool" and included a URL to a malicious file "clarissa17.pif." When unsuspecting users have responded, perhaps asking if the attachment contained a virus, the worm has replied: "lol no its not its a virus", IMlogic said.Which suggests that the Turing test may be easier to pass in an environment where people start messages with "lol". If your friends suddenly turn into giggling prepubescents and start trying to convince you to download a file, you know what's happening.
I wonder whether this will lead to an arms race in worm conversational abilities. Perhaps the next one will trawl message logs and pick out phrases/words used by that contact (or use them to change its own writing style)?
(via /.) ¶ [no comments]
2005/11/25
Scare meme of the day: if bird flu, al-Qaeda weaponised ebola or a meteor strike don't get us, alien computer viruses exploiting Seti@Home to take over Earth's computer systems just might. Assuming, of course, that the aliens understand enough about our puny earthling computer architectures, operating systems and library vulnerabilities to write a useful exploit and encode it the right way in a radio signal.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ [no comments]
The aftermath of the Christmas party season is the busiest time of the year for photocopier technicians, thanks to drunk office workers' propensity for photocopying their bottoms, with the increasing weight of McWorlders possibly adding to the problem:
Geoff Bush from the north of England said one case he'd attended, where a young lady had cracked the glass mid-scan, also jammed the scanner so that it wasn't until the machine was fixed and her colleagues all sober that copies of her backside starting pouring from the machine.
Partly in response to this trend--or perhaps because of the "supersizing" of the western physique--Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.
2005/10/15
A user of the social-network site MySpace has found a novel way of making lots of friends: by inserting a piece of JavaScript code into his page which caused all viewers to friend him:
The next step was to simply instruct the Web browser to load a MySpace URL that would automatically invite Samy as a friend, and later add him as a "hero" to the visitor's own profile page. To do this without a user's knowledge, the code utilized XMLHTTPRequest - a JavaScript object used in AJAX, or Web 2.0, applications such as Google Maps.
Taking the hack even further, Samy realized that he could simply insert the entire script into the visiting user's profile, creating a replicating worm. "So if 5 people viewed my profile, that's 5 new friends. If 5 people viewed each of their profiles, that's 25 more new friends," Samy explained.For a brief time, Samy had more than one million new friends. Then MySpace noticed that something strange was happening, shut the site down and cleaned the script off users' pages. Google's Evan Martin has an analysis of the code.
(via /.) ¶ [1 comment]
2005/9/26
First there were zombie sharks swimming down the main streets of New Orleans; now, it emerges, there may be US Navy hunter-killer dolphins on the loose in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting to start picking off unsuspecting surfers with toxic darts:
Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.
(via /.) ¶ [1 comment]
2003/12/6
In the US, there has been some concern recently over automated voting machines that allow elections to be easily and undetectably rigged (not that anyone in a position of power would do such a nefarious thing, of course). Now the state of Nevada is putting its expertise in auditing slot machines to use on the voting machines. Slot machines (of which Nevada is full) are apparently subject to extremely rigorous technical audits to find any possible security holes, vulnerabilities or bugs that could compromise their fairness or allow them to be rigged; voting machines face no such standards. (via Slashdot)
2003/10/24
A Californian hospital recently found itself blackmailed by a third-world data-entry worker threatening to post patient records on the internet unless she was paid. The UCSF Medical Center did not know that the clerical work had been exported to Pakistan, as the records went through a chain of three subcontractors (each probably being the lowest bidder, chosen hourly, where a fraction of a cent can mean bankrupcy). Looks like someone along the line needs to tighten up their paramilitary death squads, err, industrial-relations practices. (via /.)
2003/6/11
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have found that assessing a community's cancer risk could be as simple as counting the number of trucks and cars that pass through the neighborhood. Another reason to encourage the development of public transport. Not that anybody's listening here, with the government falling over itself to spend billions of dollars on new freeways and spending only the most grudging pittance on public transport (which is next to useless outside of the inner city). (thanks, Toby)
2003/1/15
Journalist almost freezes to death when trying to use a Microsoft Smartphone mobile to call for help after a ski accident in the Scottish Highlands. He was eventually rescued when a passerby lent him her Nokia phone. Proof that bad UIs can endanger your life. (via bOING bOING)
2002/3/29
Occupational hazards: English conceptual artist Tracey Emin (best known for exhibiting soiled bedsheets and the like) recently lost her cat, Docket. Doing what any cat owner would do, she put up posters with a picture of the cat -- only to find them taken down by art collectors who believed them valuable.
For no sooner had the notices gone up, than they were torn down as rumours circulated that they could be worth a fortune. A neighbour in Miss Emin's trendy East London artists' enclave, which also houses Gilbert and George, said: "Apparently people have been quoted £500 a poster."
(via bOING bOING)
2001/3/15
Not from Risks Digest: An elderly war veteran stabbed his next-door neighbour to death, after a fireworks display triggered a flashback to World War II and he mistook the frail widow for a German soldier. (via Leviathan)
2001/2/1
Chicks Don't Dig Losers: Another study confirms that women prefer risk-prone men to risk-averse nice-guy shmucks, much as evolutionary psychology predicted, and that flaunting wealth, strength and/or bravery increases mens' sexual success. One of the authors of the paper, Robin Dunbar, was involved in the survey which showed that mobile phones were a lekking device, flaunted by single males in the presence of females and competing males. Mind you, mobile phones have lost some of their lekking power, having become more or less ubiquitous; however, a London jeweler is working around that, by encrusting mobile phones with diamonds. Each unit (based on an off-the-shelf phone) sells for US$20,000 to US$50,000, though some are predicting fake gem-studded mobiles to become popular with teenagers. In decades to come, the Noughties may be known as the decade of those tacky fake-jewelled mobile phones.
2000/6/23
The technology for electronically faking video footage is coming to fruition. And we all know how the street finds its own uses for new technologies...
A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot. The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along. Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up.
Suddenly those large stretches of programming between commercials-the actual show, that is-become available for billions of dollars worth of primetime advertising. PVI's demo tape, for instance, includes a scene in which a Microsoft Windows box appears-virtually, of course-on the shelf of Frasier Crane's studio. This kind of product placement could become more and more important as new video recording technologies such as TiVo and RePlayTV give viewers more power to edit out commercials.
With just a few minutes of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person's mouth-area looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds. Drawing from the resulting library of "visemes" makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream up-including utterances that the subject wouldn't be caught dead saying. In one test application, computer scientist Christoph Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created "animations" of Kennedy's mouth saying things he never said, among them, "I never met Forrest Gump."