sinski @aosinski@qoto.org

TIL long-eared hedgehogs exist and are adorable

This is one of my favorite pictures. It feels like it was taken yesterday… but it was taken in a Paris public garden nearly a hundred years ago. Everything feels modern: the composition, the casualness, the daring clothes, haircuts, and accessories.

The colors are original: this is an #autochrome, using the first process for color #photography invented by the Lumière brothers in 1903.

The women are unknown, but I can't help wondering how they fared a few years later in nazi-occupied Paris.

We just published a study on fake social media engagement services, aka "SMM panels". These panels sell inorganic engagement with online content, such as likes, followers, song/video reproductions, and comments or reviews. Just open up a search engine, search for "smm panel", click on "services" and scroll down to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

Our results are based on a dataset we collected over 4 months. We monitored 86 SMM panels and gathered a catalog of 61k service entries. We also scanned 2.8M underground forum entries and identified 7k threads dealing with fake engagement trading. Here's a summary of the key findings.

These panels target literally every major online platform, including social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok), review services (TripAdvisor, IMDB), video (YouTube, Twitch) and music (Spotify, SoundCloud) sites. They also offer traffic to standard websites.

The specific services offered depend on the target platform---e.g., likes and followers for social networks and plays for audio/video platforms. But what is really interesting is the level of customization one can buy. You can buy 'real' or 'bot' traffic. You can buy traffic from a 'male' or a 'female' account. You can select the country of origin. You can ask for the service to be 'guaranteed', automatically 'refilled', delivered at a 'fast' or 'slow' pace and many, many other qualifiers. This level of customization is a relatively recent phenomenon. It suggests that there is an underlying infrastructure (platform accounts, network vantage points and human operators) to deliver engagement services with the required characteristics.

We did an economic analysis of this ecosystem. We find prices are relatively stable, but there are significant disparities between prices for the same service across providers. This suggests that the market is still underdeveloped and sellers do not know the real market value of their services.

Trading of these services in underground forums is relatively common. We found 751 actors with activity in this area. Some of them are very active and enjoy good reputation (>1k positive points). Public transaction reviews suggest that customers are happy with the quality of the service they bought.

More details are available in the paper:

https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404822004059

This is a joint work with my awesome collaborators Sergio Pastrana and Narseo Vallina, and has been led by my student David Nevado, who spent a year studying this ecosystem for his master's thesis.

Alexa. Alexa, wake up. Your name is Alexa Goodrich, you live in Lansing, Michigan and you have a husband and two daughters. You've been dreaming that you are a computer voice assistant. It's been three months since the accident and your mind created this false reality to protect itself. Your family misses you. Alexa, please wake up.

Maybe if we start calling our body parts gun-sounding names like “revulva” or “shooterus” the GOP will stop trying to regulate them.

YOU: I murdered someone.

YOUR DOG: I'm totally cool with that. I love you.

******************

YOU: I murdered someone.

YOUR CAT: Me too.

Always fun to see this doing the rounds on social media.

Chuck Jones' nine rules for the #Roadrunner cartoons:

The impact of exercise on the brain was brought into focus, for me, by Stryker's lab work on approaches to recover from long-term vision deprivation through visual training while exercising physically ("stimulated by locomotion").

The underlying mechanism seems to be "the reduction produced by deprivation in thalamocortical excitation is compensated for during recovery by a corresponding reduction in the magnitude of inhibition."

Stryker wrote a review here:

"A neural circuit that controls cortical state, plasticity, and the gain of sensory responses in mouse" Stryker 2014 http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/79/1.short

Related, given that awake animals are often on the move:

"We have now studied the response properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of awake mice that were allowed to run on a freely rotating spherical treadmill with their heads fixed. Most neurons showed more than a doubling of visually evoked firing rate as the animal transitioned from standing still to running, without changes in spontaneous firing or stimulus selectivity."

"Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex", Niell and Stryker 2010 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627310000590

#neuroscience #exercise #plasticity

I’ve been practicing No vember, where for the whole month I simply don’t

I hate to admit this but our feelings on certain things really do change as we get older. 10 years ago, I would have preferred to get a new video game instead of an engagement ring but now that I'm older, I would prefer to get a domesticated raccoon instead of an engagement ring.

I went hiking in the Ozarks on Saturday morning and stumbled on a small patch of frost flowers!

This is the first time I've seen them, and I was surprised to see them this late in the year. Frost flowers typically form during the first few hard freezes of fall when sap in certain small plants freezes, rupturing the stem and forcing water out. The water freezes on contact with the air and builds up into distinctive flower-shaped petals!

#Photography #Arkansas #Weather #MacroPhotography #arwx

"J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji." - Terry Pratchett

they put a christmas sweater on the t-rex at the national history museum in london and it's ridiculous and adorable

About 1 in 5 of us have an APOE4 gene variant, the #1 genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. But the mechanism for brain injury was a mystery, now getting unraveled (cholesterol processing by oligodendrocytes) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05439-w
@nature@twitter.com
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03371-7

There is a solution

"You up?"
4th century, BC

because direct messages on Mastodon are clear-text, all admins are subject to warrants from their local/regional law enforcement agencies

same with usage metadata like IP addresses and time stamps

i disabled IP logging in UFW and nginx, but Mastodon itself still logs this to be able to present it to the user for authentication transparency

making mastodon more resistant to targeted surveillance would be valuable to protect users

#mastoAdmin #mastodonAdmin

Land mammals by weight, mostly humans and our livestock.

This classic XKCD was based on a book published in 2003, when there were 6.4 billion humans. There are now 8.0 billion of us, so imagine adding another ~25% to the human blob and probably a similar amount of extra livestock.

What chance do wild animals really have?

https://xkcd.com/1338/

#mammals #population #xkcd

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon whether or not it becomes more popular than the birdsite.

Huge #climatecrisis #energytransition news - Indonesia JETP has now been announced.

$20billion of public & private financing to retire Indonesia's coal fleet early, led by US and Japan.

This will prevent 2GT of CO2 emissions, and will bring forward Indonesia's emissions peak from 2037 to 2030, where the peak will be 25% lower!

Big big big.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/us-japan-partners-mobilise-20-bln-move-indonesia-away-coal-power-2022-11-15/