Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for February 25, 2020

Better information doesn't always lead to better decisions; A new robot passed its first trial at taking blood samples from human patients; Archaeologists discovered a sophisticated Soviet Spy radio when digging for a Roman villa; University of North Carolina survey finds surprisingly broad support for free speech, but also disparities between political conservatives and liberals; and a Steem essay reporting on the Sunday Night Soft Fork

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First posted on my Steem blog: SteemIt, SteemPeak^*, StemGeeks.

1. More Information Doesn't Necessarily Help People Make Better Decisions - In an article in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, researchers from the Stevens Institute of Technology report that "too much information can lead people to make worse decisions." The effort was led by Samantha Kleinberg, who says that having accurate information is not enough, because the new information needs to be integrated into an existing knowledge base. People generally assume that analytics can uncover great information, which can be handed to people who will make good decisions. However, this misses the step of merging the information into existing knowledge, beliefs, and goals. It turns out that more information can often make that integration step more difficult, and impede the quality of decisions. The team reached their conclusions by surveying 4,000 volunteers on topics that reflected a variety of levels of expertise. People who were making decisions in novel situations generally made good decisions, but in other areas, if the new information conflicted with prior knowledge, it actually reduced the quality of decisions. The point, says Kleinberg, is not that information is bad, but that information delivery should be tailored to take prior knowledge and beliefs into consideration.


2. New Robot Does Superior Job Sampling Blood - Rutgers University has completed the first-ever trial of a robot that can draw blood samples from human patients. The results were comparable to human performance in a clinical setting. Of 31 patients, the overall success rate was 87%, and for the 25 patients who had "easy to access" veins, the success rate was 97% (not sure how that's possible. Maybe it took multiple samples per patient?) The results were published in the journal, Technology. Lead author, Josh Leipheimer said, "A device like ours could help clinicians get blood samples quickly, safely and reliably, preventing unnecessary complications and pain in patients from multiple needle insertion attempts". -h/t Daniel Lemire


3. Sophisticated Soviet spy radio discovered buried in former forest in Germany - A team of archaeologists was digging at the site of a Roman villa in a forest near the city of Cologne, in Germany, when they found a hermetically sealed large metal box that contained a Soviet era spy radio. The device had been buried shortly before the fall of the iron curtain, and it was recovered in August of 2019, a gap of about 30 years. The radio is a model R-394KM transmitter and receiver, and although it has dead batteries, it was in pristine condition. It hasn't been tested, but the team thinks it would work if the batteries were replaced. The team suspects that the device was intended to send intelligence about the Jülich Nuclear Research Centre, which is about 6 miles from where it was found, perhaps by the East German Stasi. The device's range would have permitted it to broadcast for about 750 miles, which could have reached Warsaw, Poland, which was in the Soviet bloc. Most of these devices have controls that were labeled in Russian with the Cyrillic alphabet, but this one has English language controls with the Roman alphabet. This labeling may suggest that it was intended for use by German or English speakers, or else it may have been used for camouflage. It was wrapped in a paper that had Russian language handwriting. The device is on display at the LVR-Landes Museum in Bonn until March 29. -h/t archaeology.org


4. The Hidden Consensus on Free Expression - In this article, Timothy J. Ryan discusses the results of a recent survey involving 1,087 survey responses from students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His summary includes an interesting hodge-podge of findings. Importantly, majorities of students who identified themselves as liberal, conservative, or moderate all reported that professors in their classrooms encouraged participation from people of all viewpoints. Additionally, majorities in all groups agreed that "ideological out groups" are an important part of the campus community, that it's inappropriate to silence a person with whom one disagrees, and that there are too few opportunities to hear speakers from a conservative perspective on campus. All of these reveal a frequently unrecognized consensus in favor of free speech and free expression. However, the students also revealed a large divide where conservatives are far more likely than liberals to self-censor, and to believe that others will think less of them if they reveal their true ideas. Most concerning, when asked if they had heard inappropriate and disparaging remarks about groups, including: men, women, whites, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Students born outside the US, Christians, Muslims, LGBT individuals, political liberals, and political conservatives, majorities of students that were liberal, moderate, and conservative all reported inappropriate remarks about political conservatives more than any other group.


5. Steem @softfork222: Steem Consensus Witness Statement: Code Updated - For better or worse, a number of Steem's stakeholders and consensus witnesses have invented a new class of ransomware and deployed it on the blockchain Sunday evening, thereby freezing the Steeem-based accounts of Justin Sun and the Tron Foundation, and forcing Steem's single largest stakeholder to the negotiating table. Whatever you think of this action by our block producers, it's probably a good time to take a careful look at your witness votes. (I don't think it makes sense to set a beneficiary for the utility account, @softfork222, so a 10% beneficiary setting for @null has been added, instead.)

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