New smartphone game lets you solve real-world ecological puzzles

by Imperial College London

EcoBuilder, which is downloadable now on smartphones and tablets, teaches players how ecosystems work and aims to crowdsource solutions to unsolved ecological puzzles.

Ecosystem research looks at how animals and plants interact with each other and their environment. Climate change and other human interventions pose ongoing threats to how ecosystems function, resulting in changes to carbon flows and even extinctions of certain species.

EcoBuilder lets players build their own ecosystem of plants and animals. They throw together a bunch of species of different shapes and sizes, decide who eats who within the confines of the game, and depending on their decisions species will either survive or go extinct.

The in-game processes that decide extinction and survival are modelled using the same equations used by scientists to study real world ecosystems. This means that natural phenomena can be reproduced inside the game, creating ecosystems that behave in realistic ways to provide real-world answers.

Therefore, players' successful game strategies could make their way into the research literature and expand our understanding of ecology, potentially helping conservationists to save endangered species and conserve biodiversity.

Jonathan Zheng, who developed the game as part of his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: "This game presents a fun opportunity to contribute to real research that could change policy and affect our natural world. Players will learn about various ecological phenomena along the way, and their solutions could help real researchers to understand ecosystems better."

Canine inspiration

The game's designers took inspiration from a project to save the habitat of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S.. In 1926, wolves were declared extinct in the park due to a lack of hunting regulations. The lack of wolves meant that the population of elk boomed. The elk in their vast numbers ate too much vegetation and, in turn, caused smaller animals such as beavers and fish to struggle and eventually go extinct as well.

Following failed attempts to control the elk population by hunting and moving them, ecologists reintroduced 14 wolves into the park from Canada in 1995.


The new wolves suppressed the elk, triggering a chain of effects rippling through the ecosystem. Fewer elk meant plants could grow bigger and taller; more plants meant beavers could return and build dams again; the dams drew fish and more water back into the rivers and lakes. Thus, the ecosystem was saved.

However, the Yellowstone ecosystem still hasn't recovered to pre-1926 levels—a conundrum the researchers say highlights how complex and sensitive to human intervention these communities are.

In EcoBuilder, players can make the same sorts of decisions that ecologists made in Yellowstone.

Project co-supervisor Dr. Dan Goodman, also of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, said: "Since scientific understanding informs governmental policy, perhaps one day the strategies designed by players may influence decisions made by real conservationists, just like those made to reintroduce wolves back to Yellowstone park."

The game

EcoBuilder is divided into two 'Worlds'.

The first world, 'Learning World', gradually teaches players how different sizes and biomasses of animals and plants interact with one another, using colourful graphics and characters. In the scenarios presented, the researchers already know the 'answers', or the best ways to preserve the ecosystem without extinctions.

Once players master the Learning World they move on to the Research World, which presents ecological puzzles to which the researchers are unsure of the answers, making decisions about which species to introduce and seeing who survives and who goes extinct.

The research team collects data on players' solutions within both Worlds, but hope that players in the Research World might help solve real-world ecological puzzles that are reflected in the game.

Project co-supervisor Dr. Samraat Pawar, of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: "As well as crowdsourcing the intellectual power of the general public, the game has a powerful capacity for outreach and teaching purposes, as players learn how ecosystems function and why they may collapse from even small changes to their structure."

The researchers hope players will find interesting and unique strategies that lead to the healthiest ecosystems, which researchers can learn from—a form of 'citizen science'.

Jonathan added: "Raising awareness for environmental issues is as important as ever, especially given the fragility of many ecosystems around the world because of global warming."

What Jenga can teach us about wildlife conservation before it's too late

Provided by Imperial College London

Post-pandemic brave new world of agriculture
Robots working in abattoirs, sky-high vertical farms, more gene-edited foods in our supermarkets and automated farming systems could all help guarantee food supply in the next pandemic.

by University of Queensland

Robert Henry is a Professor of Innovation at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Director of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI). Credit: QAAFI

University of Queensland Professor Robert Henry said the technologies had all been in various stages of planning prior to COVID-19, but food producers would now be moving much faster to prepare for the next pandemic.

"Food processing facilities like meat works have had to close due to a staff member being infected with the coronavirus, and all food processing industries where you have workers in small confined spaces are similarly at risk," Professor Henry said.

Professor Henry, who is the Director of the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI), said roboticized abattoirs and automated harvesting and production facilities would also reduce the risk of transmission of pathogens among workers but also the spread of viruses via the food itself.

"COVID does not seem to be transmissible from an infected human touching food but a future pandemic virus might be transmitted this way, so automating the food supply chain reduces this risk.

"It also minimizes reliance on human workers that are not available due to migration restrictions and border closures."

Professor Henry said protected cropping, including vertical farms—or growing food in vertically stacked layers similar to a skyscraper building—would optimize plant growth and enable control over climate variations, chemical inputs and water resources.

"There will have to be policies that drive consumer acceptance of gene edited foods, which some consumers consider as GMOs.

"Advanced technologies need to be adopted globally, in each region, to deliver local food production capability that could provide secure sources of food in future pandemics.

"We will need to design crops to suit automated systems—for example for fruit to grow in places where it can be harvested robotically."

Professor Henry said the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to fully assess the impact on agriculture and food supply.

He said despite growing stocks of foods such as cereals, it was estimated the number of people facing a food crisis will grow from 135 million to 265 million by the end of 2020.

"It may seem to those of us in Western countries that the only impact on food supply has been a rush on pasta and rice in the supermarket and home-baking but the loss of income caused by the pandemic has hit some countries in Africa hard.

'We are in a situation where we have food surpluses while there has been a doubling in the number of people who can't afford to eat—and the situation is likely to get worse."Professor Henry said increased investment in agricultural research and development would support enhanced food security.

Ensuring global food security during COVID-19

More information: Robert Henry, Innovations in Agriculture and Food Supply in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Molecular Plant (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.molp.2020.07.011

Journal information: Molecular Plant 

Provided by University of Queensland

Perceived 'whiteness' of Middle Eastern Americans correlates with discrimination
by Rutgers University

A new Rutgers-led study examined discriminatory attitudes toward Middle Eastern and North African Americans. Credit: Rutgers University

The perceived 'whiteness' of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent is indirectly tied to discrimination against them, and may feed a "negative cycle" in which public awareness of discrimination leads to more discrimination, according to a Rutgers-led study.

The study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, points out a tension between the fact that Middle Eastern and North African Americans are instructed to select "white" on U.S. Census forms, although they are culturally perceived as not being white.

"Middle Eastern and North African Americans are left in a precarious position of not being legally classified as a racial minority group, while at the same time not being able to fully occupy the white racial category," said study co-author Kimberly Chaney, a doctoral graduate student in social psychology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Arts and Sciences.

The researchers reviewed the extent to which discriminatory attitudes toward Middle Eastern and North African Americans is tied to the perception of them as white or not white.

A group of white adults were asked whether they supported discriminatory policies such as "America would be safer if we prevent Middle Easterners from entering the country" or "America would be safer if there was a registry of Middle Easterners." Then they were shown faces with a range of complexions, and asked to indicate which one most represented Middle Eastern Americans.

Those who saw Middle Eastern Americans as typically white were less likely to support discriminatory practices against them. Those who viewed Middle Eastern Americans as less typically white were more likely to support discriminatory policies.

The researchers also examined whether highlighting the discrimination faced by Middle Eastern and North African Americans would shift perceptions of them. After reading an article about discrimination against Middle Easterners in the United States, a group of white adults were more likely to perceive Middle Eastern Americans as not being white. But the researchers noted that if awareness of discrimination leads white Americans to see Middle Easterners as "less white," this perception may, in turn, lead to more discrimination.

"It is a negative cycle of exclusion and discrimination," said Diana Sanchez, a professor of psychology.
The next step for the research would involve examining Middle Eastern and North African Americans' own experiences and self-identities, the researchers said.Racial discrimination may adversely impact cognition in African Americans

More information: Kimberly E. Chaney et al, White Categorical Ambiguity: Exclusion of Middle Eastern Americans From the White Racial Category, Social Psychological and Personality Science (2020). DOI: 10.1177/1948550620930546

Journal information: Social Psychological and Personality Science Provided by Rutgers University

Study examines stay-at-home worker productivity potential 

by David Bradley, Inderscience JULY 31, 2020

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Working from home has become part of the so-called "new normal" for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there has been a move underway towards increased telecommuting for many years. Writing in the Global Business and Economics Review a research team from Portugal has set out to explore the potential of telecommuting in terms of productivity and quality of life gains, cost savings for workers and employers, and perhaps even environmental improvements through reduced transport pollution.

Commuting generates enormous economic, social, and environmental costs, although it has been the conventional approach to "going out to work" since the industrial revolution if not before. There are some benefits, of course, but largely these are often outweighed by infrastructure and transport requirements and ultimately increased use of energy and resources and an increase in pollution and carbon emissions. However, with a big shift to online services and the increased use of information technology in this so-called digital age many traditional jobs can readily be performed from the home at least some of the time if not the whole of the working week. Obviously, some jobs, such as construction and manual factory work, farming, and healthcare can rarely be reduced to the working from home paradigm.

Deveani Babu, Nelson Ramalho, and Pedro Falcao of the University Institute of Lisbon suggest that increasing the level of telecommuting across various sectors is entirely feasible. Moreover, given the global pandemic that emerged since the time of their review, it is likely that we will garner more evidence for the personal and societal benefits of this form of working. Our unwitting experiment caused by the pandemic might also offer insights into previously unknown problems with telecommuting too.Remote work worsens inequality by mostly helping high-income earners

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More information: Deveani Babu et al. Telecommuting potential analysis, Global Business and Economics Review (2020). DOI: 10.1504/GBER.2020.108396

Provided by Inderscience 

One-size does not fit all for post-disaster recovery, study finds

by Portland State University

Residents in Kashigaun used work exchange to build and renovate homes according to the new building codes at 2.5 years after the earthquakes. Because of the high building costs, they are being forced to construct very small houses to code in order to get funds through the government reconstruction program. Credit: Jeremy Spoon / Portland State University

When a natural disaster strikes, it often takes years for vulnerable communities to recover, long after the news coverage fades and the rest of the world seems to move on. A new Portland State University study that followed 400 households after the 2015 Nepal earthquakes provides insight into better understanding the factors that contribute to resilience and change in short-term rural natural disaster recovery.


"Recovery is a dynamic process with multiple dimensions which means that government and outside aid programs cannot be one size fits all," said Jeremy Spoon, the lead researcher and an associate professor of anthropology at PSU.

Spoon's team conducted surveys with 400 households in four communities both nine months and 1.5 years after the April and May 2015 earthquakes. The team also returned at 2.5 years for research workshops to connect the results to the participant experiences and perspectives. They used a novel methodology to document and analyze recovery as a multidimensional phenomenon with more than 30 recovery indicators, from rebuilding of homes and access to electricity to impacts on herding, farming, and wage labor.

Researchers found substantial geographic variation in recovery across the sites but were also able to identify several common patterns in recovery.

The households that appeared the most resilient nine months after the earthquakes were those that had less herding and farming-based livelihoods, more market connections to shops and tourism, and easier access to rebuilding funds from the government and through loans.

The results suggest that a settlement's proximity to the road and access to outside aid and government services may be negatively or marginally benefitting recovery in certain situations.

In Gatlang, a cluster of two settlements in northern Nepal, their growing dependence on outside aid and a more tourism-centric economy as a result of being close to the road actually impeded their recovery. For most households, their circumstances were getting worse a year and a half after the earthquakes. Only 8% of households had returned to their homes from temporary shelters and they were experiencing greater impacts to their herding, farming, and forest product collection.

The study suggests that access may be a trap, where individuals receiving assistance adapted to waiting for help rather than helping themselves. The aid received was also not enough to help the residents recover to a point that was comparable to where they were before the earthquakes and contained generic rebuilding solutions that did not take into account local knowledge or perspectives.

By contrast, in Kashigaun, a cluster of three settlements that is a two- to three-day walk from the road with very few aid organizations serving the area, households pooled their resources and collectively worked together to rebuild their community through work exchange. A year and a half after the earthquakes, 92% of households returned to their homes from temporary shelters; however, few, if any, were rebuilt to code. The earthquakes helped to revive and reinforce communal traditions of work exchange, which served as a safety net for the poorest and most marginal.

Spoon said the lessons learned can help evaluate relief and reconstruction interventions where outside expert knowledge ignores cultural diversity and place-specific dynamics, such as the roles of local knowledge and institutions.

"We feel that governments and aid organizations can use our approach to capture some of the most important facets of recovery in a variety of contexts over the short- and long-term, especially if they use participatory methods and outreach to develop appropriate recovery indicators," Spoon said. "Better understanding recovery dynamics then leads to improved natural disaster response."

Spoon, along with Drew Gerkey from Oregon State University, and their team received another grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their work in Nepal and collect data from the same 400 households in years six through nine. The study was published in the journal World Development. Its co-authors include Alisa Rai and Umesh Basnet from PSU; Gerkey from OSU; and Ram Bahadur Chhetri from Tribhuvan University in Nepal. Additional publications from this study are forthcoming.Volunteer tourism can aid disaster recovery

More information: Jeremy Spoon et al, Navigating multidimensional household recoveries following the 2015 Nepal earthquakes, World Development (2020). 

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105041

We urgently need new tools to measure economic recovery after coronavirus
by Ala'a Shehabi, The Conversation

Economic recovery: a Nike swoosh? Credit: Thomas Serer/Unsplash, FAL

Economies across the world are on course to face the worst fall in GDP figures since 2008. In the UK, GDP fell by 10.4% in the first three months of 2020, and a whopping 20.4% in the month of April, the largest fall since records began in 1997. The Bank of England predicts that GDP will fall by 14% this year, probably more. The IMF has revised downward its forecast for global economic growth from -3% to -4.9% this year.


This is scary. But these GDP figures also hide the deep inequalities that our economic system produces. It confuses the growth of markets and prices with prosperity and value. It is assumed that if we make, consume and sell more things, our welfare and life quality improves. Is this true?

Governments all over the world still mostly rely on the use of GDP for economic planning and to set monetary and fiscal policy. Companies, meanwhile, use it to make investment decisions: choosing who to hire, what to build, borrowing ability, interest rates. Whatever the economy's recovery looks like—U, a V, W or Nike swoosh – GDP is the main metric that will be tracked, reported and acted on, with enormous implication for our lives.

GDP was itself borne in times of crisis, just after the first world war. Even its inventor, the progressive economist Stephen Kuznets, understood its severe limitations. When tasked with finding a way of measuring total national income, he said: "The welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income." Since then, the case against GDP has been made over and over again, particularly after the 2007 financial crash, which demonstrated that macroeconomic data and models failed to reflect the reality of the economy. So why do we still use it?

An unhelpful gage

Recessions cannot be fully captured by GDP—it understates costs on health, the environment, society, community, and trust. This tells us that economic welfare is probably much worse than it is: the models that we use systematically underestimate decreases in wealth and hide widening income disparities that fuel political resentment.

Millions of pounds has gone into research to upgrade these economic models through multiple projects, but they still seem to be failing us.


A recent poll published on behalf of Positive Money showed that 80% of people in the UK believe that health and wellbeing should be prioritized over economic growth. Just 12% opted for economic growth over health and wellbeing. Government targets should reflect this. Some are pushing to get rid of GDP altogether. What is certain is that the compounded crises we face today in health, climate and racial inequality require economic reconfiguration.

GDP is insufficient, distortive, and requires replacement. It ignores social value and the worst tendencies our economic system has produced: inequality and the climate emergency. Because GDP ignores the depreciation of physical and environmental capital goods, we will continue running down our human and natural assets, even if GDP begins to rise.

And what about the pandemic? GDP may not have created coronavirus, but it has certainly determined our capacity to respond to it—just consider how many resources have been misdirected over the years through policies of austerity that used GDP-based metrics to justify reducing government spending.

The alternatives

So how do we measure economic recovery in a way that reflects what matters to us? There are several alternatives. The difficulty is in balancing useful but reductive simplicity versus the complicated reality of what makes a "good life." Left, liberal and right leaning organizations have all waded in with alternatives.

The main alternative approach that has emerged is to move away from a single metric to a bunch of indicators on a dashboard, such as housing, health, and the environment. This would reflect the multi-dimensionality of prosperity and quality of life. Examples of this include the OECD Better Life Index, UN Human Development Index and its environmentally-inclusive version, the Sustainable Development Index.

A subset of this approach are those that measure prosperity at more local levels, such as the Thriving Places Index. Another approach is to directly ask people about what matters to them. The results include the Happy Planet Index and my own department's Prosperity Index. These focus on people's wellbeing and quality of life as they see it.

Another suggestion is to use other single metrics to GDP, like the Genuine Progress Indicator. This includes financial estimates of unpaid household labor, environmental damage and income inequality.

The next step is to embed these metrics into policy, as targets. In 2019, New Zealand did so, launching its "wellbeing budgets," which include 43 indicators across 12 wellbeing areas such as housing, environment, and social connection. More countries and cities may follow their lead in their pandemic recovery, with Amsterdam leading the way.

Views from the ground

At UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity, we have been asking people what a good life means for them as the basis of constructing a citizen-led prosperity index. We work with local councils and community groups in several countries to understand what metrics should be used to reflect community needs. These metrics differ from community to community and what gets measured nationally might not be the same as what should get measured locally. Knowing which inequalities exist across given groups can help redistribute resources across and within households.

For example, our data shows that in the area of Hackney Wick in London, childhood development is particularly concerning residents, while in Coventry Cross, housing affordability is of acute concern.

As we recover from the current crisis and reconstruct our economic systems, we need to have a conversation about what we value in life and begin to measure the things that matter. I am not calling for the abandonment of growth, only to abandon the concept of growth that is defined by GDP.

New metrics will force states not to seek to restore GDP without also restoring social equity and ecological equilibrium.


Explore further New framework will help to make 'net zero' a reality
Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Academic achievement is influenced by how pupils 'do' gender at school

by University of Cambridge

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Pupils' achievements at school are often shaped by the way that they 'act out' specific gender roles, according to a new study which warns against over-generalising the gender gap in education.

The study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge, suggests that young people's attainment is linked to their ideas about what it means to be male or female. Those who defy traditional gender stereotypes appear to do better in the classroom.

Annual GCSE results in the UK, in common with many western countries, typically show that boys lag behind girls academically, but the research argues that this broad pattern masks a more nuanced picture. In particular, the researchers warn that a large sub-group of girls, who conform fairly rigidly to some traditional 'feminine' norms, could be academically at-risk. They point out that these girls are often 'invisible' in broad surveys of attainment by gender that show girls performing well as a group.

The researchers examined the English and Maths results of almost 600 GCSE candidates at four schools in England. On average, the girls did significantly better in English, while boys were slightly better at Maths. Girls outperformed boys overall.

But the study then went a step further, analysing sub-groups of boys and girls according to how they expressed their gender identity. This revealed that around half of the girls displayed 'maladaptive patterns of motivation, engagement and achievement'. By contrast, around two-thirds of boys were motivated, engaged and did well in exams. The pupils' academic performance corresponded closely to their sense of gender.

Dr. Junlin Yu, a researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: "There has been a lot of justifiable concern about low attainment among boys, but we really need to move on from looking at averages, and ask which specific groups of boys and girls are falling behind. These findings suggest that part of the answer is linked to how pupils 'do' gender at school."

The study asked pupils to complete questionnaires which measured their motivation and engagement, and also examined how far they conformed to certain gender 'norms'.


These norms were drawn from two widely-used scales that identify the characteristics which people in western countries consider 'typically' masculine or feminine. The supposedly 'masculine' traits were emotional control, competitiveness, aggression, self-reliance, and risk-taking. The 'feminine' traits were thinness, an interest in appearance, concern with relationships, and an inclination towards domesticity.

In reality, most people exhibit a combination of masculine and feminine traits and the researchers found that pupils typically belonged to one of seven gender profiles that blended these characteristics. They classified these as:
'Resister boys' (69% of boys): typically resist traditional ideas about masculinity.
'Cool guys' (21%): competitive risk-takers, but concerned with appearance and romantic success.
'Tough guys' (10%): have an emotionally 'hard' image, self-reliant.
'Relational girls' (32% of girls): shun appearance norms, comfortable connecting with others emotionally.
'Modern girls' (49%): concerned with appearance, but also self-reliant and emotionally distant.
'Tomboys' (12%): uninterested in feminine qualities, often regarded as 'one of the lads.'
'Wild girls' (7%): embrace masculine behaviours, but also display an exaggeratedly 'feminine' appearance.

These profiles were then cross-referred with the pupils' GCSE results.

On average, the sample group performed as international trends predict. Girls had an average grade of 6.0 (out of 9) in English, compared with the boys' average of 5.3. In Maths boys averaged 5.9; slightly higher than the girls' 5.5.

But the researchers also found strong correlations between the specific gender profiles and patterns of engagement, motivation, and attainment. The two groups who resisted conventional gender norms—resister boys and relational girls—were found to be 'better academically adjusted' and typically did well in exams. The lowest overall performers were the 'cool guys' and 'tough guys'.

This significantly affected the average patterns of attainment by gender. In English, for example, relational girls far outperformed all other pupils in the cohort (averaging 6.3), almost single-handedly raising the girls' average.

The 'modern' and 'wild' girls typically had more mediocre GCSE results. More worryingly, these groups also displayed signs of low engagement and motivation: they gave up easily when faced with difficult tasks, and generally put less effort into their work. Collectively, these girls represented 56% of the total, but their underachievement was partially obscured by the high attainment average for girls.

The study suggests that one reason for the close correspondence between gender profile and academic achievement is that adolescents tend to express strong and inflexible ideas about gender, which influences their attitude towards school. For example, 'cool guys', who prize risk-taking and winning, consistently admitted to not trying hard at school—probably because doing so maintained the illusion that they would succeed if they put in more effort.

Attitudes towards gender probably also influence pupils' engagement with certain subjects. Previous studies have, for example, shown that Maths is often perceived as 'male'. Tellingly, within the sample, tomboys—girls who rejected 'feminine' traits—earned higher grades than the other girls in Maths.

The study's main recommendation is that efforts to close the gender gap in attainment need to focus less on 'girls versus boys' and more on these nuanced profiles. However, the researchers also suggest that schools could support pupils by encouraging them to think beyond traditional gender stereotypes.

"Among boys in particular, we found that those who resist gender norms were in the majority, but at school it often doesn't feel that way," Yu said. "Teachers and parents can help by encouraging pupils to feel that they won't be ridiculed or marginalised if they don't conform to traditional gender roles. Our findings certainly suggest that resistance to stereotypes is fast becoming less the exception, and more the rule."

The research appears in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.Researchers study videogame use patterns and the differences in gender among adolescents

More information: Journal of Youth and Adolescence (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s10964-020-01293-z

Journal information: Journal of Youth and Adolescence

New algorithms could reduce polarization driven by information overload

by Mary L. Martialay, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

As the volume of available information expands, the fraction a person is able to absorb shrinks. They end up retreating into a narrow slice of thought, becoming more vulnerable to misinformation, and polarizing into isolated enclaves of competing opinions. To break this cycle, computer scientists say we need new algorithms that prioritize a broader view over fulfilling consumer biases.


"This is a call to arms," said Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Informed citizens are the foundation of democracy, but the interest of big companies, who supply that information, is to sell us a product. The way they do that on the internet is to repeat what we showed interest in. They're not interested in a reader's growth; they're interested in the reader's continued attention."

Szymanski and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, explore this troubling "paradox of information access," in a paper published on arXiv.org.

"You would think that enabling everybody to be an author would be a blessing," said Szymanski, an expert in social and cognitive networks, with previous work that includes findings on the power of a committed minority to sway outcomes. "But the attention span of human beings is not prepared for hundreds of millions of authors. We don't know what to read, and since we cannot select everything, we simply go back to the familiar, to works that represent our own beliefs."

Nor is the effect entirely unprecedented, said Tarek Abdelzaher, a professor and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign lead on the project.

"It's not the first time that affordances of connectivity and increased access have led to polarization," said Abdelzaher. "When the U.S. interstate freeway system was built, urban socioeconomic polarization increased. Connectivity allowed people to self-segregate into more homogenous sprawling neighborhoods. The big question this project answers is: how to undo the polarizing effects of creating the information super-highway?"

The effect is exacerbated when our own human limitations are combined with information curations systems that maximize "clicks."

To disrupt this cycle, the authors contend that the algorithms that provide a daily individualized menu of information must be changed from systems that merely "give consumers more of what these consumers express interest in."

The authors propose adapting a technique long used in conveying history, which is to provide a tighter summation for events further back from the present day. They call this model for content curation "a scalable presentation of knowledge." Algorithms would shift from "extractive summarization," which gives us more of what we consumed in the past, to "abstractive summarization," which increases the proportion of available thought we can digest.


"As long as you do balance content, you can cover more distant knowledge in much less space," said Szymanski, who is also the director of a Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer. "Although readers have a finite attention span, they still have a slight knowledge in new areas, and then they can choose to shift their attention in a new direction or stay the course."

Few analytical models exist to measure the trend toward what the authors call "ideological fragmentation in an age of democratized global access." But one, which the authors considered, treats individuals as "particles in a belief space"—almost like a fluid—and measures their changing positions based on the change in content they share over time. The model "confirms the emergence of polarization with increased information overload."

The more ideologically isolated and polarized we are, the more we are vulnerable to disinformation tailored to reinforce our own biases. Szymanski and his colleagues offer a slew of technical solutions to reduce misinformation, including better data provenance and algorithms that detect misinformation, such as internal consistency reasoning, background consistency reasoning, and intra-element consistency reasoning tools.

"The very sad development discussed in this paper is that today, people are not conversing with each other. We are living in our own universe created by the data which is coming from these summarization systems, data that confirms our innate biases," Szymanski said. "This a big issue which we face as a democracy, and I think we have a duty to address it for the good of society."

Szymanski and his co-authors are working on mathematical models that both measure the extent of polarization in various media, and predict how trends would change under various mitigating strategies.


Explore furtherForces behind growing political polarization in congress revealed in new model

More information: Abdelzaher et al., The Paradox of Information Access: Growing Isolation in the Age of Sharing. arXiv:2004.01967 [cs.CY]. arxiv.org/abs/2004.01967

Provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

TEEN AGE HACKERS,EH UPDATED
3 charged in massive Twitter hack, Bitcoin scam (Update)

by David Fischer
\

The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, Fla., released the photo Graham Ivan Clark, 17, after his arrest Friday, July 31, 2020. Clark is accused of hacking Twitter, gaining access to the account of Bill Gates, Elon Musk and many others. Clark was able to scam people around the glove of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin. (Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office via AP)

A British man, a Florida man and a Florida teen were identified by authorities Friday as the hackers who earlier this month took over Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around the globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin.


Graham Ivan Clark, 17, was arrested Friday in Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office will prosecute him as adult. He faces 30 felony charges, according to a news release. Mason Sheppard, 19, of Bognor Regis, U.K., and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, were charged in California federal court.

In one of the most high-profile security breaches in recent years, hackers sent out bogus tweets on July 15 from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.

The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

"There is a false belief within the criminal hacker community that attacks like the Twitter hack can be perpetrated anonymously and without consequence," U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson for the Northern District of California said in a news release. "Today's charging announcement demonstrates that the elation of nefarious hacking into a secure environment for fun or profit will be short-lived."

Although the case against the teen was also investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren explained that his office is prosecuting Clark in Florida state court because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases such as this when appropriate. He added that Clark was the leader of the hacking scam.

"This defendant lives here in Tampa, he committed the crime here, and he'll be prosecuted here," Warren said.

Security experts were not surprised that the alleged mastermind of the hack is a 17-year-old, given the relative amateur nature both of the operation and the hackers' willingness afterward to discuss the hack with reporters online.

"I think this is a great case study showing how technology democratizes the ability to commit serious criminal acts," said Jake Williams, founder of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. "I'm not terribly surprised that at least one of the suspects is a minor. There wasn't a ton of development that went into this attack."


Williams said the hackers were "extremely sloppy" in how they moved the Bitcoin around.

Williams said it did not appear that the three used any services that make cryptocurrency difficult to trace by "tumbling" transactions of multiple users, a technique akin to money laundering.

He also said he was conflicted about whether Clark should be charged as an adult.

"He definitely deserves to pay (for jumping on the opportunity) but potentially serving decades in prison doesn't seem like justice in this case," Williams said.

Twitter previously said hackers used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access. It said hackers targeted "a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack."

"This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems," the company tweeted.

In this Wednesday Nov. 6, 2013, file photo, the Twitter logo appears on an updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter says the hackers responsible for a recent high-profile breach used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access. The company revealed a few more details late Thursday, July 30, 2020 about the hack earlier this month, which it said targeted "a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack." (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

After stealing employee credentials and getting into Twitter's systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said.

The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.

Internal Revenue Service investigators in Washington, D.C., were able to identify two of the hackers by analyzing Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain—the ledger where transactions are recorded—including ones the hackers attempted to keep anonymous, federal prosecutors said.

Spear-phishing is a more targeted version of phishing, an impersonation scam that uses email or other electronic communications to deceive recipients into handing over sensitive information.

Twitter said it would provide a more detailed report later "given the ongoing law enforcement investigation."

The company has previously said the incident was a "coordinated social engineering attack" that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools. It didn't provide any more information about how the attack was carried out, but the details released so far suggest the hackers started by using the old-fashioned method of talking their way past security.

British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley said his guess was that a targeted Twitter employee or contractor received a message by phone asking them to call a number.

"When the worker called the number they might have been taken to a convincing (but fake) helpdesk operator, who was then able to use social engineering techniques to trick the intended victim into handing over their credentials," Clulely wrote Friday on his blog.

It's also possible the hackers pretended to call from the company's legitimate help line by spoofing the number, he said.

Fazeli's father said Friday he hasn't been able to talk to his son since Thursday.

"I'm 100% sure my son is innocent," Mohamad Fazeli said. "He's a very good person, very honest, very smart and loyal."

"We are as shocked as everybody else," he said by phone. "I'm sure this is a mix up."

Attempts to reach relatives of the other two weren't immediately successful. Hillsborough County court records didn't list an attorney for Clark, and federal court records didn't list attorneys for Sheppard or Fazeli.

© 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.


Twitter says hackers used phone to fool staff, gain access

by Kelvin Chan

Twitter says the hackers responsible for a recent high-profile breach used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access.

The company revealed a few more details late Thursday about the hack earlier this month, which it said targeted "a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack."

"This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems," the company tweeted.

The embarrassing July 15 attack compromised the accounts of some of its most high profile users, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, in an apparent attempt to lure their followers into sending money to an anonymous Bitcoin account.

After stealing employee credentials and getting into Twitter's systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said.

The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.

Spear-phishing is a more targeted version of phishing, an impersonation scam that uses email or other electronic communications to deceive recipients into handing over sensitive information.

Twitter said it would provide a more detailed report later "given the ongoing law enforcement investigation."

The company has previously said the incident was a "coordinated social engineering attack" that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools. It didn't provide any more information about how the attack was carried out, but the details released so far suggest the hackers started by using the old-fashioned method of talking their way past security.

British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley said his guess was that a targeted Twitter employee or contractor received a message by phone asking them to call a number.

"When the worker called the number they might have been taken to a convincing (but fake) helpdesk operator, who was then able to use social engineering techniques to trick the intended victim into handing over their credentials," Clulely wrote Friday on his blog.

It's also possible the hackers pretended to call from the company's legitimate help line by spoofing the number, he said.


Explore further Bitcoin scam shows Twitter needs better internal controls, expert says

© 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

SURPRISE, SURPRISE, SURPRISE
 Florida teen charged in massive Twitter hack, Bitcoin theft

RANSOMWARE TOOL OF THE JUVENILE HACKER

By DAVID FISCHER

FILE - In this Wednesday Nov. 6, 2013, file photo, the Twitter logo appears on an updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter says the hackers responsible for a recent high-profile breach used the phone to fool the social media company's employees into giving them access. The company revealed a few more details late Thursday, July 30, 2020 about the hack earlier this month, which it said targeted “a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack.” (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

MIAMI (AP) — A Florida teen hacked the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people around globe out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin, authorities said Friday.

The 17-year-old boy was arrested earlier Friday in Tampa, where the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office will prosecute the case. He faces 30 felony charges, according to a news release.

The hacks led to bogus tweets being sent out July 15 from the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities Kanye West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were also hacked.

The tweets offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

Although the case was investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren explained that his office is prosecuting the teen in Florida state court because Florida law allows minors to be charged as adults in financial fraud cases such as this when appropriate.

“This defendant lives here in Tampa, he committed the crime here, and he’ll be prosecuted here,” Warren said.

Twitter previously said hackers used the phone to fool the social media company’s employees into giving them access. It said targeted “a small number of employees through a phone spear-phishing attack.”

“This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems,” the company tweeted.

After stealing employee credentials and getting into Twitter’s systems, the hackers were able to target other employees who had access to account support tools, the company said.

The hackers targeted 130 accounts. They managed to tweet from 45 accounts, access the direct message inboxes of 36, and download the Twitter data from seven. Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders has said his inbox was among those accessed.

Spear-phishing is a more targeted version of phishing, an impersonation scam that uses email or other electronic communications to deceive recipients into handing over sensitive information.

Twitter said it would provide a more detailed report later “given the ongoing law enforcement investigation.”

The company has previously said the incident was a “coordinated social engineering attack” that targeted some of its employees with access to internal systems and tools. It didn’t provide any more information about how the attack was carried out, but the details released so far suggest the hackers started by using the old-fashioned method of talking their way past security.

British cybersecurity analyst Graham Cluley said his guess was that a targeted Twitter employee or contractor received a message by phone asking them to call a number.
Full Coverage: Technology

“When the worker called the number they might have been taken to a convincing (but fake) helpdesk operator, who was then able to use social engineering techniques to trick the intended victim into handing over their credentials,” Clulely wrote Friday on his blog.

It’s also possible the hackers pretended to call from the company’s legitimate help line by spoofing the number, he said.

___

Associated Press Writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.


Three people charged in US for alleged roles in massive Twitter hackIssued on: 31/07/2020 -

A massive Twitter hack on July 15, 2020 has seen charges laid against three people in the US. © Olivier Douliery, AFP

Text by:NEWS WIRES

US prosecutors on Friday announced they have charged three people, one of them from Britain, for roles in hijacking celebrity Twitter accounts and tricking people out of money.

The US attorney's office in California said 19-year-old Mason "Chaewon" Sheppard of Britain along with Nima Fazeli, 22, of Florida were facing criminal charges in the case.

Details about the third individual were not released by US officials, but state prosecutors in Florida separately announced criminal charges against a 17-year-old accused of masterminding the massive hack of high-profile Twitter users.

(AFP)

Q&A: Sociologist discusses why women's careers have suffered more than men's during the pandemic
by Lindsay Dowling-Savelle, Dalhousie University
Impacted by the pandemic, many women are trading present and future earnings and putting a costly gap in their resumes, says Dr. Foster. Credit: Thought Catalog

It's been more than four months since the COVID-19 pandemic forced many parts of the economy to shut down almost instantaneously. Businesses, daycares, healthcare practices and education systems were required to close their doors to help prevent the spread of the deadly virus.


While many people faced job loss, others were forced to enter uncharted territory as their home and professional lives collided. They were asked to adapt to a new way of life that involved working from home while fulfilling many other roles all at once, including providing primary care to children and elders, homeschooling and more.

The move to remote working and the closure of offices and daycares has had a significant impact on the careers of women for a number of reasons. Subsequently, the pandemic has forced us to take a hard look at gender equity in the workplace.

We asked Karen Foster, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, to explain why women's careers have been more negatively impacted by the pandemic than their male counterparts.

How does gender inequity impact women in the workforce and how were these inequities exacerbated by the pandemic?

As much as we like to think we've made great strides in gender equity, I can think of three ways, right off the bat, that the pandemic has exacerbated existing gendered problems. The most obvious is probably that during the pandemic, women with children were far more likely to drop out of the labor market, quit their jobs, stop looking for work etc., to take care of their kids compared to men with children, and women and men without children. My former doctoral supervisor, Andrea Doucet, has done a lot of research on men taking on more of the responsibility for children, but even she notes that women continue to do the lion's share of that work, and moreover, to feel responsible for it. When push came to shove, because women's earnings typically are lower than men's within couples (despite a growing proportion of female breadwinner couples in Canada) it would have made sense for women to stay home with the kids because they earn less. But it also made sense on a cultural level—because we have gendered assumptions about who's best suited to care for children, and because women are socialized to prioritize care. There are people who think we should preserve those assumptions, but even they ought to recognize that if care work is important, it should be supported and even remunerated. Women shouldn't have to trade economic security for their caring roles and responsibilities, and we are seeing women do that because of the pandemic. My colleague Sylvia Fuller at UBC has crunched the numbers to show that, despite your awesome neighbor who quit his job to care for the kids, statistically it is mothers who are bearing the brunt of the closure of daycares and schools. They're trading present and future earnings and putting a costly gap in their resumes.


A second gendered aspect of the pandemic is that the types of jobs that disappeared first were public-facing service jobs. Women dominate jobs in retail and the service sector, and social distancing threw a lot of that work into jeopardy. Economist Armine Yalnizyan has, accordingly, termed what we're going through a "shecession" and, to link it back to the first point, she is urging us to commit to a "shecovery," in which childcare is essential. Tammy Schirle at Wilfrid Laurier had similar findings.

But at the same time, many of the jobs that got deemed essential during the pandemic are also dominated by women: mainly grocery store workers and health care support workers across a range of specific occupations. Women got the worst of both worlds here—they were more likely to be in sectors that shut down, and also more likely to be working the jobs that got busier, more dangerous and more stressful as a result of COVID.

What steps need to be taken to create gender equity for women in the workplace?

Not all women have children, but a significant proportion of working women do. So childcare must be part of a recovery plan that puts gender at the forefront. So should mandatory, universal sick days for all employees in every province. When school goes back, little outbreaks are going to send kids home again, and kids will be made to stay home if they have so much as a sniffle. If we don't want parents sending sick kids to school out of desperation, they need to have paid leave from their employers. Governments might need to enact strong legislation about what employers can and can't do if their employees have to take time off or work compressed hours to meet childcare obligations. Moreover, we should think ahead to next summer. This summer showed us that a certain age of kid—say, 5-9 or 10, is too old for daycare but too young to stay home alone. These kids would typically be in summer camps or some other congregate setting (or cared for by an informal network of neighborhood kids and family), but much of that fell apart when summer camps closed and people were restricted to bubbles. What is the solution for next year, if we need it?

We need to also look at the types of jobs that will be growing post-pandemic and take steps to ensure that there is good gender representation in the training programs that prepare people for those jobs. Often gender segregation in certain sectors and jobs can be traced to the pipeline of trainees. If there aren't many women in the school programs, there won't be many women in the jobs. If we know the service sector is going to be susceptible to future shocks, we probably want to take early steps to ensure that it's not comprised of mostly women. No field should be, if we believe that economic gains and losses should be spread equitably across the population.

Finally, employers should instill a culture that encourages male employees with children to share the load with their partners. I have heard so many anecdotes about mens' employers assuming their employees' wives will take care of the kids and being shocked by anything else. There is no good reason for that beyond gendered stereotypes and discrimination. Just like more men should take parental leave when their children are born, more men should step up and share the emergency childcare burden if we enter another phase of lockdown or school closures.

What can employers, co-workers, and governments do to support women employees as they return to work during and following the pandemic?

In addition to the steps I just noted, employers could get creative. I've heard of employers hiring a childcare provider and creating an in-house daycare if they have a few employees who need it. They should continue to emphasize equity and diversity in hiring, which means understanding that gender affects the routes people take in and through the labor market, and assessing them only by controlling for those factors. We need to appreciate that women's labor force participation grows the economy. I'm not even a champion of growth, but that's the dominant objective, so why aren't we using it as an excuse to support women? Now more than ever, we probably need a universal childcare program, one that is funded enough to ensure a spot for every child and family that wants it. The cost of leaving childcare up to individual families is far greater than the cost of a universal program.

We should also look at the essential jobs we've needed more than ever during the pandemic—grocery store and health care jobs—which are female-dominated, and bump up their wages so they truly reflect the value of this work. Ditto for the newly dangerous jobs we're starting to need desperately now that we are slowly opening up: daycare workers, and, in a couple months, teachers. Insofar as these jobs are dominated by women, bringing their remuneration in line with their social value—which we can no longer ignore—is an act toward gender equity.
Women doing more childcare under lockdown but men more likely to feel their jobs are suffering
Provided by Dalhousie University

 

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