Weekly Web Harvest for 2017-06-04

  • Breathless – Futility Closet

    I wonder if this was the equivalent of IM speak translators for parents.

    ——
    Drawing it across the lips: Desiring an acquaintance
    Drawing it across the cheek: I love you
    Drawing it across the forehead: Look, we are watched

  • Trump’s blocking of Twitter users violates U.S. Constitution: rights institute | Reuters

    A free-speech institute on Tuesday sent a letter to President Donald Trump demanding the prolific tweeter unblock certain Twitter (TWTR.N) users on grounds the practice violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

  • Major league litter — Can a strategic bat toss turn trash into treasure?

    Anytime the batter makes contact with the ball, he drops his bat, and for as long as that ball is in play the bat stays there, literal deadwood, a three-pound piece of trash cluttering up the area around the plate. Like most litter, the bat is usually passive pollution. It gets flung off into the periphery by the batter, and it sits there until a bat boy comes to sweep it up. Sometimes it’s left to be a nuisance, knocking around the catcher’s feet until he or the umpire kicks it out of the road. Very occasionally it gets turned into art, as in the case of a beautiful bat flip.

  • Safe Visual Data Exploration

    Exploring data via visualization has become a popular way to understand complex data. Features or patterns in visualization can be perceived as relevant insights by users, even though they may actually arise from random noise. Moreover, interactive data exploration and visualization recommendation tools can examine a large number of observations, and therefore result in further increasing chance of spurious insights. Thus without proper statistical control, the risk of false discovery renders visual data exploration unsafe and makes users susceptible to questionable inference.To address these problems, we present QUDE, a visual data exploration system that interacts with users to formulate hypotheses based on visualizations and provides interactive control of false discoveries.

  • This Robot Fish Could Make Fish Farms More Productive

    the Centre for Automation and Robotics have developed a robotic fish that mimics the motions of a real fish while monitoring pH levels. The robot fish is equipped with sensors that detect changes of pH in the water. When it finds areas that are overly acidic or poisonous, the fish will change its swimming pattern to signal a disruption.

  • Zoo says that it was a disgruntled shareholder that threw live donkey to the tigers: Shanghaiist

    When they were prevented from leaving by the zoo’s staff, the shareholder decided instead to just throw the unfortunate animals to the tigers.

  • Russian malware communicates by leaving comments in Britney Spears’s Instagram account / Boing Boing

    A new analysis by Eset shows that Turla is solving its C&C problems by using Britney Spears’ Instagram account as a cut-out for its C&C servers. Turla moves the C&C server around, then hides the current address of the server in encrypted comments left on Britney Spears’s image posts. The compromised systems check in with Spears’s Instagram whenever they need to know where the C&C server is currently residing.