Science and technology micro-summaries for July 22, 2019

Public domain, open source particle physics simulations that can run on a laptop; Product review of Disney's Circle porn filter; Amazon venturing into the home robotics sector; An analysis of machine-learning algorithms finds challenges; Chimpanzees observed bonding after watching videos together

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Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. STEEM Precision computer simulations for particle colliders - a window on my research - Steem's resident particle physicist, @lemouth, describes his six-year work with simulating phenonenon within and beyond the standard model of partical physics. Discussing a paper from earlier this month, the article notes that physicists can now use open source, public domain software to simulate "the model of his/her dream", along with the process of interest. The software is efficient enough to perform these complex calculations on a laptop. (@lemouth will receive 5% of the rewards from this post.)


2. Can Disney’s Circle really deliver a porn-free Internet? - From the article: "As we already mentioned, family Internet filtering isn't a completely reasonable proposition. Filtering can do a good job keeping your middle-schooler from stumbling into things he or she is neither ready for nor trying to find, but it absolutely won't prevent a determined adolescent or adult from circumventing it." You can purchase Circle embedded in a Netgear router, or as a standalone device, and it can be used as a free service or with premium features at a monthly rate of about $5. Criticisms include the fact that "kid mode" doesn't automatically put Internet image searches in "safe mode", and the product doesn't put DuckDuckGo image searches into safe mode at all. The standalone device received a number of criticisms, summarized in the section heading: "Circle did not work well as a standalone device".


3. If Amazon is really working on a robot for the home, it's going to take on a challenge that caused at least 3 startups to fail - Bloomberg reported in 2018 that Amazon is working on a project that's code-named, Vesta. The report claims that the goal is to produce a waist-high version of Alexa, that could follow around the house using computer vision. According to Bloomberg, the product was initially slated for release to employees and consumers during 2019. So far, the home robotic field has been littered with failures and product announcements that only ever appeared at consumer electronics shows, with iRobot's Roomba electronic vacuum - released in 2002 - still being the closest thing to a robotic home butler of science fiction imaginings.


4. Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches - Researchers considered 18 published machine learning algorithms, and determined that only 7 were feasible to replicate. Of those, six were less effective than comparably simple and well-understood heuristic algorithms. The final reproducible method outperformed heuristic baselines, but did not consistently out-perform a well-tuned neural network. h/t Daniel Lemire


5. Chimpanzees Bond by Watching Movies Together, Too - According to a new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Chimpanzees that watched a video of another family of chimps playing together would spend more time grooming and interacting with each other than they would have without watching the video. The video topic was selected because past studies have shown that chimps are most interested in videos of other chimps. The chimps were given fruit juice to keep them calm during the video, and eye-tracking software monitored to determine if they actually watched the video. It is unknown whether videos of other subjects would have the same effect. The capability to bond through shared experiences was believed to be uniquely human, but this study may call that claim into question.

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