Archive for the ‘University Tech’ Category
Monday, February 6th, 2012
 “Online dating is definitely a new and much needed twist on relationships,” says Harry Reis, a co-authors of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. Photo courtesy of University of Rochester Online dating has not only shed its stigma, it has surpassed all forms of matchmaking in the United States other than meeting through friends, according to a new analysis of research on the burgeoning relationship industry.
The digital revolution in romance is a boon to lonely-hearters, providing greater and more convenient access to potential partners, reports the team of psychological scientists who prepared the review.
But the industry’s claims to offering a “science-based” approach with sophisticated algorithm-based matching have not been substantiated by independent researchers and, therefore, “should be given little credence,” they conclude.
A new and much needed twist
“Online dating is definitely a new and much needed twist on relationships,” says Harry Reis, one of the five co-authors of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Rochester.
Behavioral economics has shown that the dating market for singles in Western society is grossly inefficient, especially once individuals exit high school or college, he explains.
“The Internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health,” says Reis.
But online love has its pitfalls, Reis cautions.
Comparing dozens and sometimes hundreds of possible dates may encourage a “shopping” mentality in which people become judgmental and picky, focusing exclusively on a narrow set of criteria like attractiveness or interests. And corresponding by computer for weeks or months before meeting face-to-face has been shown to create unrealistic expectations, he says.
For a mobile take on online dating see: Meet.com wants mobile app to end online dating woes.
The 64-page analysis reviews more than 400 psychology studies and public interest surveys, painting a full and fascinating picture of an industry that, according to one industry estimate, attracted 25 million unique users around the world in April 2011 alone. The report was commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science and will be published in the February edition of its journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
Other highlights from the analysis include:
Online dating has become the second-most-common way for couples to meet, behind only meeting through friends. According to research by Michael Rosenfeld from Stanford University and Reuben Thomas from City College of New York, in the early 1990s, less than 1 percent of the population met partners through printed personal advertisements or other commercial intermediaries.
By 2005, among single adults Americans who were Internet users and currently seeking a romantic partner, 37 percent had dated online. By 2007-2009, 22 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of same-sex couples had found their partners through the Web. Those percentages are likely even larger today, the authors write.
Attitudes have changed radically. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, a stigma was associated with personal advertisements that initially extended to online dating. But today, “online dating has entered the mainstream, and it is fast shedding any lingering social stigma,” the authors write.
Men and women behave differently online.
- A 2010 study of 6,485 users of a major online dating site found that men viewed three times more profiles than women did (597,169 to 196,363).
- Men were approximately 40 percent more likely to initiate contact with a woman after viewing her profile than women were after viewing a man’s profile (12.5 to 9 percent).
Online sites may encourage “soulmate” search. The authors caution that matching sites’ emphasis on finding a perfect match, or soulmate, may encourage an unrealistic and destructive approach to relationships.
“People with strong beliefs in romantic destiny (sometimes calledsoulmate beliefs) — that a relationship between two people either is or is not ‘meant to be’ — are especially likely to exit a romantic relationship when problems arise … and to become vengeful in response to partner aggression when they feel insecure in the relationship,” the authors write.
Online dating sites are not “scientific”. Despite claims of using a “science-based” approach with sophisticated algorithm-based matching, the authors found “no published, peer-reviewed papers – or Internet postings, for that matter – that explained in sufficient detail … the criteria used by dating sites for matching or for selecting which profiles a user gets to peruse.” Instead, research touted by online sites is conducted in-house with study methods and data collection treated as proprietary secrets, and, therefore, not verifiable by outside parties.
Online dating fundamentally changes access to information. ”In the words of one online dater: ‘Where else can you go in a matter of 20 minutes [and] look at 200 women who are single and want to go on dates?’ “
Tags: Cupid's arrow goes digital, Harry Reiss, online dating, University of Rochester
Posted in Internet/New Media, Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech | No Comments »
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
 Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have published a new study that refutes three key criticisms of crowdsourcing, a popular tool for new idea generation for firms as they seek to develop new products and services and to improve on their existing offerings in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
The study finds that crowdsourcing is not the misguided fad that some critics have suggested but that the process of crowdsourcing actually — under the right conditions — creates more knowledgeable consumers and, in time, leads to more efficient, lower-cost generation of high potential ideas.
The study, “Crowdsourcing New Product Ideas Under Consumer Learning,” was conducted by Kannan Srinivasan, the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professor of International Business and the H.J. Heinz II Professor of Management, Marketing and Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business; Assistant Professor of Information Systems Param Vir Singh, also of the Tepper School; and Yan Huang, a Ph.D. student at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon.
The team set out to investigate the three most common criticisms of crowdsourcing: that individuals’ limited view about firms’ products leads to the contribution of mainly niche ideas; that consumers’ limited knowledge about firms’ cost structure leads to too many infeasible ideas; and that firms’ lack of response to customers’ ideas leads to customer dissatisfaction.
“Although crowdsourcing initiatives are being widely adopted in many different industries, the number of ideas generated often declines over time, and implementation rates are quite low,” Srinivasan said.
Understand the dynamics to find valuable ideas
“Our findings, however, suggest that a better understanding of the dynamics at work in the crowdsourcing process can help us to address the common criticisms and propose policies that draw out the most consistently valuable ideas with the highest potential for implementation from crowdsourcing efforts in virtually any industry.”
The policies suggested by the study for effective crowdsourcing rely on the implementation of a system for peer evaluation, rapid company response to ideas that receive significant positive endorsement from the community of idea contributors, provision of precise cost signals that enable contributors to assess the feasibility of their ideas, and a system to reward contributors whose ideas are implemented rather than one that rewards individuals when they post ideas.
“Using a peer voting system, consumers are empowered to both contribute their own ideas and vote on the ideas submitted by others, enabling firms to infer the true potential of ideas as they begin to screen for ideas that are truly worthy of implementation,” Singh said.
Singh added that the initial field of ideas generated in a crowdsourcing effort tends to be overcrowded with ideas that are unlikely to be implemented as consumers overestimate the potential of their ideas and underestimate the cost of implementation.
“However, individuals learn about their abilities to come up with high-potential ideas as well as the cost structure of a firm through peer voting and the firm’s response to contributed ideas, and individuals whose ideas do not earn the favor of their peers or the backing of the firm drop out of the process while contributors of high-potential ideas remain active,” he said.
“Over time, the quality of generated ideas — in terms of their actual potential for implementation — improves while the total number of ideas contributed through crowdsourcing decreases,” Huang said.
“So, the cost to screen contributed ideas is reduced, the efficiency of the process is increased and the crowdsourcing initiative yields high-value ideas with the greatest potential for implementation.”
Although crowdsourcing initiatives have become rapidly popular, the usefulness of this relatively new approach to idea generation has been heavily debated. There have been few academic studies of crowdsourcing despite the enormous business and media attention the topic has attracted, and this study by the team at Carnegie Mellon proposes answers to some of the most hotly contested concerns regarding the value of these initiatives.
Findings of the study in detail
Tags: Carnegie Mellon, crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing iniatives, peer voting system
Posted in Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech | No Comments »
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
 Kathryn McKinley The first systematic power profiles of microprocessors could help lower the energy consumption of both small cell phones and giant data centers, report computer science professors from The University of Texas at Austin and the Australian National University.
Their results may point the way to how companies like Google, Apple, Intel and Microsoft can make software and hardware that will lower the energy costs of very small and very large devices.
“The less power cell phones draw, the longer the battery will last,” says Kathryn McKinley, professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin.
“For companies like Google and Microsoft, which run these enormous data centers, there is a big incentive to find ways to be more power efficient. More and more of the money they’re spending isn’t going toward buying the hardware, but toward the power the datacenters draw.”
McKinley says that without detailed power profiles of how microprocessors function with different software and different chip architectures, companies are limited in terms of how well they can optimize for energy usage.
The study she conducted with Stephen M. Blackburn of The Australian National University and their graduate students is the first to systematically measure and analyze application power, performance, and energy on a wide variety of hardware.
This work was recently invited to appear as a Research Highlight in the Communications of the Association for Computer Machinery (CACM). It’s also been selected as one of this year’s “most significant research papers in computer architecture based on novelty and long-term impact” by the journal IEEE Micro.
Measurements no one did before
“We did some measurements that no one else had done before,” says McKinley. “We showed that different software, and different classes of software, have really different power usage.”
McKinley says that such an analysis has become necessary as both the culture and the technologies of computing have shifted over the past decade.
Energy efficiency has become a greater priority for consumers, manufacturers and governments because the shrinking of processor technology has stopped yielding exponential gains in power and performance. The result of these shifts is that hardware and software designers have to take into account tradeoffs between performance and power in a way they did not ten years ago.
“Say you want to get an application on your phone that’s GPS-based,” says McKinley, “In terms of energy, the GPS is one of the most expensive functions on your phone. A bad algorithm might ping your GPS far more than is necessary for the application to function well. If the application writer could analyze the power profile, they would be motivated to write an algorithm that pings it half as often to save energy without compromising functionality.”
McKinley believes that the future of software and hardware design is one in which power profiles become a consideration at every stage of the process.
Intel, for instance, has just released a chip with an exposed power meter, so that software developers can access some information about the power profiles of their products when run on that chip. McKinley expects that future generations of chips will expose even more fine-grained information about power usage.
Even consumers may get app energy use info
Software developers like Microsoft (where McKinley is spending the next year, while taking a leave from the university) are already using what information they have to inform their designs.
And device manufacturers are testing out different architectures for their phones or tablets that optimize for power usage.
McKinley says that even consumers may get information about how much power a given app on their smart phone is going to draw before deciding whether to install it or not.
“In the past, we optimized only for performance,” she says. “If you were picking between two software algorithms, or chips, or devices, you picked the faster one. You didn’t worry about how much power it was drawing from the wall socket. There are still many situations today—for example, if you are making software for stock market traders—where speed is going to be the only consideration. But there are a lot of other areas where you really want to consider the power usage.”
Tags: Austin, computer science, device battery life, energy use, Kathryn McKinley, University of Texas
Posted in Apple, Google, Hardware, Microsoft, University Tech | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
 Michael Porter While 57 percent see the current U.S. business environment as somewhat or much better than the average advanced economy, respondents are much less optimistic about the trajectory of the U.S. as a competitive location, according to the the results of Harvard Business School’s first Survey on U.S. Competitiveness.
When asked to assess how the trajectory of the U.S. business environment compares with emerging markets, 66 percent see the U.S. falling behind, while just 8 percent see it pulling ahead. Along with HBS Dean Nitin Nohria, Professors Michael E. Porter and Jan W. Rivkin presented the findings at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Father of competitiveness strategy
Porter is a leading authority on economic competition, Porter is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, as has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as the world’s most influential thinker on management and competitiveness.
The survey also examines the desirability of the U.S. as a business location and decisions by firms to relocate existing activities or establish new ones. Of 1,767 cases where respondents had been personally involved in U.S.-related location decisions within the past year, 57 percent considered the possibility of moving existing activity out of the U.S., while only 9 percent considered moving existing activities into the United States.
The remaining 34 percent weighed decisions to set up new activities. Of those offshoring decisions that had been resolved by the time of the survey, the U.S. lost the activity 84 percent of the time. While the country fared better in potential onshoring or new activity decisions (75 percent and 51 percent win-rates, respectively), its overall win record totals just 32 percent.
U.S. losing out on business location decisions
“The U.S. is losing out on business location decisions at an alarming rate, and those activities being offshored are more job-rich than those coming in,” said Porter, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard and head of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at HBS.
“However, the U.S. retains its core strengths in a number of important areas such as university education, innovation, and entrepreneurship, which means that we have the resources to reverse this trend. The vast amount of data from this survey highlights the need for business leaders, policymakers, and academics to collaborate on practical ways to make progress.”
The survey is part of the School’s ongoing U.S. Competitiveness Project, which defines competitiveness as “the ability of companies in the U.S. to compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for Americans.”
“When we were first laying the groundwork for this Project and this survey, we thought long and hard about how competitiveness should be defined, and why it was such an important goal for the nation’s future,” said Dean Nohria.
“We made sure not to focus on job growth or inequality alone, because that ignores the need for healthy wages that will support America’s middle class. Adopting a broader definition was paramount in this effort.”
Other major findings include:
- While the negative view of the future of U.S. competitiveness is widely shared among respondents, different perceptions across groups exist. For instance, respondents between the ages of 40 and 60 are most likely to expect a decline (more than 70 percent thought so) and least likely to foresee a gain (less than 15 percent). Similarly, alumni in America are more pessimistic about the country’s future competitiveness than their counterparts outside the U.S.
- Of activities reported to have been moved out of the country in the past, 11 percent consisted of 1,000 or more jobs, while only 5 percent of activities considered for movement but retained in the U.S. consisted of 1,000 or more jobs (none moving to the U.S. consisted of 1,000 or more jobs).
- Of the 1,005 location decisions about potentially moving out of the U.S., the most common alternatives considered wereChina (42 percent), India (38 percent), Brazil (15 percent), Mexico (15 percent), and Singapore (12 percent).
Greatest impediments to creating jobs
The survey also asked respondents about the greatest impediments their firms faced in investing in and creating jobs in the United States. Policy-related factors like regulation and taxes are cited as major factors, along with talent-related issues like personnel cost and immigration issues.
“One of the most important aspects of this survey was its effort to pinpoint the roots of the country’s competitiveness problem,” said Rivkin, the School’s Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Business Administration.
“The findings allow us to assess whether individual elements of the U.S. business environment, such as the complexity of our tax code or our K-12 education system, each strengthens or weakens U.S. competitiveness. This provides important insight for leaders who are seeking ways to boost America’s long-run prosperity.”
Tags: competitiveness survey, Harvard Business School, Michael Porter
Posted in Economic Development, Government/Defense, University Tech | Comments Off
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
 Listen up, pedestrians wearing headphones. Can you hear the trains or cars around you? Many probably can’t, especially young adult males.
Serious injuries to pedestrians listening to headphones have more than tripled in six years, according to new research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
In many cases, the cars or trains are sounding horns that the pedestrians cannot hear, leading to fatalities in nearly three-quarters of cases.
“Everybody is aware of the risk of cell phones and texting in automobiles, but I see more and more teens distracted with the latest devices and headphones in their ears,” says lead author Richard Lichenstein, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of pediatric emergency medicine research at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
“Unfortunately as we make more and more enticing devices, the risk of injury from distraction and blocking out other sounds increases.”
We certainly see more people using headphones with a variety of devices. More than once we thought someone was talking to us only to discover they were talking on a cellphone with a headset. More often, we see walkers, runners, even shoppers wearing headphones connected to smartphones, MP3 players, tablets, and iPods.
Dr. Lichenstein and his colleagues studied retrospective case reports from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Google News Archives, and Westlaw Campus Research databases for reports published between 2004 and 2011 of pedestrian injuries or fatalities from crashes involving trains or motor vehicles.
A troubling problem
Cases involving headphone use were extracted and summarized. The research is published online today in the journal Injury Prevention.
Researchers reviewed 116 accident cases from 2004 to 2011 in which injured pedestrians were documented to be using headphones. Seventy percent of the 116 accidents resulted in death to the pedestrian. More than two-thirds of victims were male (68 percent) and under the age of 30 (67 percent).
More than half of the moving vehicles involved in the accidents were trains (55 percent), and nearly a third (29 percent) of the vehicles reported sounding some type of warning horn prior to the crash. The increased incidence of accidents over the years closely corresponds to documented rising popularity of auditory technologies with headphones.
“This research is a wonderful example of taking what our physicians see every day in the hospital and applying a broader scientific view to uncover a troubling societal problem that needs greater awareness,” says E. Albert Reece, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., vice president for medical affairs at the University of Maryland and John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“I hope that these results will help to significantly reduce incidence of injuries and lead us to a better understanding of how such injuries occur and how we can prevent them.”
Dr. Lichenstein and his colleagues noted two likely phenomena associated with these injuries and deaths: distraction and sensory deprivation. The distraction caused by the use of electronic devices has been coined “inattentional blindness,” in which multiple stimuli divide the brain’s mental resource allocation. In cases of headphone-wearing pedestrian collisions with vehicles, the distraction is intensified by sensory deprivation, in which the pedestrian’s ability to hear a train or car warning signal is masked by the sounds produced by the portable electronic device and headphones.
Dr. Lichenstein says the study was initiated after reviewing a tragic pediatric death where a local teen died crossing railroad tracks. The teen was noted to be wearing headphones and did not avoid the oncoming train despite auditory alarms. Further review revealed other cases not only in Maryland but in other states too.
“As a pediatric emergency physician and someone interested in safety and prevention I saw this as an opportunity to — at minimum — alert parents of teens and young adults of the potential risk of wearing headphones where moving vehicles are present,” he says.
Tags: Baltimore, headphones pose pedestrian danger, Richard Lichensein, University of Maryland Medical Center
Posted in Hardware, Tech Culture, TechLife, University Tech | Comments Off
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
 The coming years will bring increased personalization, innovation and flexibility in the media landscape, according to the Georgia Institute of Technology.
These findings were announced in today’s release of the FutureMedia(SM) Outlook 2012, a multimedia report that offers Georgia Tech’s annual viewpoint on the future of media and its impact on people, business and society over the next five to seven years.
“Georgia Tech’s work in Future Media is part of our new Institute for People and Technology,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “By partnering with business and industry on interdisciplinary research, we are able to identify trends and challenges and work to develop transformative solutions.”
According to FutureMedia Outlook 2012, six megatrends will have a pervasive impact:
- Smart Data: In an increasingly noisy world, we’ll have to sift, filter and be smarter about what matters.
- People Platforms: Beyond “true personalization,” people will not just be consumers. They will be socially driven platforms made of algorithms from personal and associated data that they design and tailor themselves.
- Content Integrity: Pervasive mobile devices, sprawling networks, clouds and multi-layered platforms have made it more difficult to detect and address our digital vulnerabilities, drawing us to trusted content sources.
- Nimble Media: Media is evolving from a set of fixed commodities into an energetic, pervasive medium that allows people to navigate across platforms and through different content narratives.
- 6th Sense: Extraordinary innovations in mixed reality will change the way we see, hear, taste, touch, smell and make sense of the world – giving us a new and powerful 6th sense.
- Collaboration: We will harness the power of many in an increasingly conversational and participatory world.
For each of the six megatrends, the Outlook 2012 presents fresh and objective insights into those technologies and business practices that will significantly impact the converging media ecosystem. In addition, the report includes demonstrative clips and video interviews with leading Georgia Techresearchers offering real-world examples of the Institute’s innovation in these areas.
“Breakthrough research, innovation and collaboration with our partners have given us a rich and pragmatic basis from which to formulate this annual FutureMedia Outlook,” said Renu Kulkarni, founder and executive director of FutureMedia.
Tags: content integrity, Future Media Outlook 2012, Georgia Tech, nimble media, people platforms, personalization, smart data
Posted in Internet/New Media, IT, Studies, surveys, reports, Tech Culture, TechLife, University Tech | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011
 Brad Owens Humble leaders are more effective and better liked, according to a study forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal.
“Leaders of all ranks view admitting mistakes, spotlighting follower strengths and modeling teachability as being at the core of humble leadership,” says Bradley Owens, assistant professor of organization and human resources at the University at Buffalo School of Management. “And they view these three behaviors as being powerful predictors of their own as well as the organization’s growth.”
Owens and co-author David Hekman, assistant professor of managHuement at the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, asked 16 CEOs, 20 mid-level leaders and 19 front-line leaders to describe in detail how humble leaders operate in the workplace and how a humble leader behaves differently than a non-humble leader.
Although the leaders were from vastly different organizations — military, manufacturing, health care, financial services, retailing and religious — they all agreed that the essence of leader humility involves modeling to followers how to grow.
Growing involves failure
“Growing and learning often involves failure and can be embarrassing,” says Owens. “But leaders who can overcome their fears and broadcast their feelings as they work through the messy internal growth process will be viewed more favorably by their followers. They also will legitimize their followers’ own growth journeys and will have higher-performing organizations.”
The researchers found that such leaders model how to be effectively human rather than superhuman and legitimize “becoming” rather than “pretending.”
But some humble leaders were more effective than others, according to the study.
Humble leaders who were young, nonwhite or female were reported as having to constantly prove their competence to followers, making their humble behaviors both more expected and less valued. However, humble leaders who were experienced white males were reported as reaping large benefits from humbly admitting mistakes, praising followers and trying to learn.
Female leaders face a double bind
In contrast, female leaders often feel they are expected to show more humility than their male counterparts, but then they have their competence called into question when they do show humility.
“Our results suggest that female leaders often experience a ‘double bind,’” Owens says. “They are expected to be strong leaders and humble females at the same time.”
Owens and Hekman offer straightforward advice to leaders. You can’t fake humility. You either genuinely want to grow and develop, or you don’t, and followers pick up on this.
Leaders who want to grow signal to followers that learning, growth, mistakes, uncertainty and false starts are normal and expected in the workplace, and this produces followers and entire organizations that constantly keep growing and improving.
A follow-up study that is forthcoming in Organization Science using data from more than 700 employees and 218 leaders confirmed that leader humility is associated with more learning-oriented teams, more engaged employees and lower voluntary employee turnover.
Tags: Brad Owens, humble leaders more effectived, leadership style and efficiency, NY., University of Bufflalo
Posted in best practices, People, Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech | Comments Off
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
 David Maimon Computer security experts have long pointed out that human beings are often the weak link allowing cyber attacks to succeed. Now, researchers at the Maryland Cybersecurity Center have reaffirmed that security measures must aim at users, not just attackers. ”Users expose the network to attacks,” one said.
In a unique collaboration, an engineer and a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, are applying criminological concepts and research methods in the study of cybercrime, leading to recommendations for IT managers to use in the prevention of cyber attacks on their networks.
Michel Cukier, associate professor of reliability engineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, and David Maimon, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, are studying cyberattacks from two different angles – that of the user and that of the attacker. Both are members of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center.
Their work is the first look at the relationship between computer-network activity patterns and computer-focused crime trends.
“We believe that criminological insights in the study of cybercrime are important, since they may support the development of concrete security policies that consider not only the technical element of cybercrime but also the human component,” Maimon said.
In one study that focused on the victims of cyberattacks, the researchers analyzed data made available by the university’s Office of Information Technology, which included instances of computer exploits, illegal computer port scans and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.
Applying criminological rationale proposed by the “Routine Activities Perspective,” Maimon and Cukier analyzed computer focused crime trends between the years 2007-2009 against the university network.
According to this perspective, which is designed to understand criminal victimization trends, successful criminal incidents are the consequence of the convergence in space and time of motivated offenders, suitable victims, and the absence of capable guardians.
The researchers hypothesized that the campus would be more likely to be cyberattacked during business hours than during down times like after midnight and on weekends. Their study of the campus data confirmed their theories.
“Our analysis demonstrates that computer-focused crimes are more frequent during times of day that computer users are using their networked computers to engage in their daily working and studying routines,” Maimon said.
“Users expose the network to attacks,” Cukier said. Simply by browsing sites on the Web, Internet users make their computers’ IP addresses and ports visible to possible attackers. So, “the users’ behavior does reflect on the entire organization’s security.”
Maimon, a sociologist, takes the study a step further.
“Your computer network’s social composition will determine where your attacks come from,” he said. In a similar vein, “the kinds of places you go influence the types of attacks you get. Our study demonstrates that, indeed, network users are clearly linked to observed network attacks and that efficient security solutions should include the human element.”
Cukier adds, “The study shows that the human aspect needs to be included in security studies, where humans are already referred as the ‘weakest link.’”
Cukier and Maimon said the results of their research point to the following potential solutions:
- Increased education and awareness of the risks associated with computer-assisted and computer-focused crimes among network users could prevent future attacks;
- Further defense strategies should rely on predictions regarding the sources of attacks, based on the network users’ social backgrounds and online routines.
“Michel and David’s research exemplifies the interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center,” noted Michael Hicks, director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center.
“Resources are not unlimited, so true solutions must consider the motivations of the actors, both attackers and defenders, as well as the technological means to thwart an attack. Michel, an engineer, and David, a criminologist, are considering both sides of this equation, with the potential for game-changing results.”
More Information:
Maryland Cybersecurity Center: www.cyber.umd.edu
Michel Cukier Profile Page: www.enme.umd.edu/facstaff/fac-profiles/cukier.html
David Maimon Profile Page: www.ccjs.umd.edu/faculty/faculty.asp?p=209
Tags: College Park, criminologist studies cybercrime, cybercrime study, David Maimon, Maryland Cybersecurity Center, MD, Michel Cukier, security must focus on users
Posted in Internet/New Media, IT, Maryland, Potomac, Security, Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech | Comments Off
Monday, November 28th, 2011
 Playing violent video games for one week changed the brains of young men, according to a new study likely to raise once again the question of how playing such games might affect behavior.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play.
The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America(RSNA).
Controversy raged for years
The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect.
“For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home,” said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.
“These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.”
Shooter games tested
For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period.
Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task.
The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting task, compared to their baseline results and the results of the control group after one week.
After the second week without game play, the changes to the executive regions of the brain were diminished.
“These findings indicate that violent video game play has a long-term effect on brain functioning,” Dr. Wang said.
What do you think? We’ve noticed that playing violent shooter games can temporarily increase our aggressiveness, but the effect never seemed to last much longer than game play.
We suspect we’ll see a new wave of discussion about whether hyper-violent video games should be regulated, although any attempt to control free speech is apt to hit First Amendment road blocks.
Tags: affect of violent video games on cognitive function, brain regions important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior, fMRI video game study, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, shooter games changed brain function after one week of play, violent video games changed brain function
Posted in games, Internet/New Media, IT, Studies, surveys, reports, University Tech, video, Viewpoint | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 18th, 2011
 Harold Kung Imagine a cellphone battery that stayed charged for more than a week and recharged in just 15 minutes. That dream battery could be closer to reality thanks to Northwestern University research.
A team of engineers has created an electrode for lithium-ion batteries — rechargeable batteries such as those found in cellphones and iPods — that allows the batteries to hold a charge up to 10 times greater than current technology. Batteries with the new electrode also can charge 10 times faster than current batteries.
The researchers combined two chemical engineering approaches to address two major battery limitations — energy capacity and charge rate — in one fell swoop. In addition to better batteries for cellphones and iPods, the technology could pave the way for more efficient, smaller batteries for electric cars.
The technology could be seen in the marketplace in the next three to five years, the researchers said.
A paper describing the research is published by the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
“We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery’s charge life by 10 times,” said Harold H. Kung, lead author of the paper. “Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today.”
Kung is professor of chemical and biological engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He also is a Dorothy Ann and Clarence L. Ver Steeg Distinguished Research Fellow.
How Lithium-ion batteries work
Lithium-ion batteries charge through a chemical reaction in which lithium ions are sent between two ends of the battery, the anode and the cathode. As energy in the battery is used, the lithium ions travel from the anode, through the electrolyte, and to the cathode; as the battery is recharged, they travel in the reverse direction.
With current technology, the performance of a lithium-ion battery is limited in two ways. Its energy capacity — how long a battery can maintain its charge — is limited by the charge density, or how many lithium ions can be packed into the anode or cathode. Meanwhile, a battery’s charge rate — the speed at which it recharges — is limited by another factor: the speed at which the lithium ions can make their way from the electrolyte into the anode.
In current rechargeable batteries, the anode — made of layer upon layer of carbon-based graphene sheets — can only accommodate one lithium atom for every six carbon atoms.
To increase energy capacity, scientists have previously experimented with replacing the carbon with silicon, as silicon can accommodate much more lithium: four lithium atoms for every silicon atom. However, silicon expands and contracts dramatically in the charging process, causing fragmentation and losing its charge capacity rapidly.
Currently, the speed of a battery’s charge rate is hindered by the shape of the graphene sheets: they are extremely thin — just one carbon atom thick — but by comparison, very long. During the charging process, a lithium ion must travel all the way to the outer edges of the graphene sheet before entering and coming to rest between the sheets. And because it takes so long for lithium to travel to the middle of the graphene sheet, a sort of ionic traffic jam occurs around the edges of the material.
The best of both worlds
Now, Kung’s research team has combined two techniques to combat both these problems. First, to stabilize the silicon in order to maintain maximum charge capacity, they sandwiched clusters of silicon between the graphene sheets. This allowed for a greater number of lithium atoms in the electrode while utilizing the flexibility of graphene sheets to accommodate the volume changes of silicon during use.
“Now we almost have the best of both worlds,” Kung said. “We have much higher energy density because of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding and contracting. Even if the silicon clusters break up, the silicon won’t be lost.”
Kung’s team also used a chemical oxidation process to create miniscule holes (10 to 20 nanometers) in the graphene sheets — termed “in-plane defects” — so the lithium ions would have a “shortcut” into the anode and be stored there by reaction with silicon. This reduced the time it takes the battery to recharge by up to 10 times.
This research was all focused on the anode; next, the researchers will begin studying changes in the cathode that could further increase effectiveness of the batteries. They also will look into developing an electrolyte system that will allow the battery to automatically and reversibly shut off at high temperatures — a safety mechanism that could prove vital in electric car applications.
The Energy Frontier Research Center program of the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, supported the research.
Megan Fellman, science and engineering editor, and Sarah Ostman, content specialist at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, contributed to this story.
Tags: batteries charge 10 times faster, cellphone batteries that last a week, cellphones, electric cars, Harold H. Kung, iPods, new lithium-ion battery technology, Northwestern University
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