a-cubed.info

Jeff Hancock, Cornell
Detecting Deceptive Language and Promoting (more) Honest Behaviour

Detection of the difference between purchased reviews of hotels by people who had not stayed there and real reviews by those who had. Automatic detection could identify 90% of the fake reviews – only works for differentiating between those who had stayed there and those who had not.

Lab studies on identifying lying: psychological distancing leads to verbal immediacy, cognitive complexity leads to a different discourse structure, anxiety and guilt lead to emotional leakage. However, various types of situation lead to differences in how the models can be applied.

How to promote more honest behaviour.

Promoting honest behaviour. Triggering a feeling of a face triggers social constraints on lying.

Current research will include graphics to see what can improve honesty.

Tyler Moor, Wellesley College
Why user intent affects how we combat online wickedness

Online crime is mainly fought by private actors rather than state agencies.

Sometimes crime is difficult to distinguish from undesirable behaviour.

What is the distinction between bad behaviour and criminal behaviour?

Distinguishing between phishing and malware installation (which can lead to keylogging and loss of authentication details). Phishing is attacked by the banks. Malware installers are attacked by the search engine.

Transparent redirection by cracked sites depending on the referrer information from Google search pages.

Need to identify the intent of the user.

Robert Trivers, Rutgers
The Folly of Fools: the logic of self-deception.

Lying to others is indivisible from self-deception.

Psychologists tend to study only deception. Philosophers worry too much about self-deception. You need both to understand deception.

Choice of language as well as physiological reactions give clues to deliberate deception. Self-deception could be deliberately practised in order to avoid deception clues.

Interesting data on self-deception: we do believe our deceptive positive self-image.

Self-deception is offensive (aimed at deceiving others), rather than what the psychologists claim: that self-deception is defensive, aimed at making ourselves happier.

We need more evidence on detecting deception in real situations.

80% of accidentsd happen with the pilot instead of the co-pilot in actual charge. Co-pilots are hesitant to correct errors from their more senior colleagues, particularly if they do not have a pre-existing strong relationship.

When considering deception, you must always keep self-deception in mind.

Joseph Bonneau, Cambridge
Guessing human-chosen secrets

What’s easier to guess? Older or younger users’ passwords? Passwords or random 9-digit numbers. PIN or Mother’s Maiden Name?

Showed the cartoon of Jesus having 2512 as his PIN to his father, whose birthday is Christmas Day, and his father promptly went and changed his PIN.

Released files of stolen passwords allowed statistical analysis of password choices.

Gathering data within Yahoo via an encrypted hash to allow for statistical analysis without knowledge of the actual passwords.

Changing user behaviour (such as changing passwords occasionally) is better than just stressing the risk.

Language makes something of a difference, but at most a factor of two in difficulty.

Stuart Schecter, Microsoft
Better Passwords

P@ssword was a “strong” password accroding to Yahoo’s algorithm. P@$$word1 was a “strong password according to Google’s algorithm.

Ban popular passwords!

Important internal passwords for high value propositions (MS, Google) need better approaches.

This book is shiny. I mean physically shiny, not shiny as in Firefly-universe slang. This is not a good thing in a book, as the makers of ebook readers know. When I read it, I have to be careful how I hold it, otherwise the shiny ink on the shiny paper reflects the overhead light straight into my eyes making it impossible to read.

Although she has clearly done some very good research and talked to many, there are a few strange howlers in here. In chapter 1 she introduces Second Life and briefly refers to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) as their precursor, as played by people in the 1990s. Strange, that, as I remember being introduced to the local official MUD (many MUDs and similar systems ran unofficially, sometimes on cracked machines and sometimes just by a superuser running it overnight without authorisation) run on the VAX at the University of Leeds School of Computer Studies (as it was then) by the Computer Society. MUDs were already well advanced by 1988, so while they may have increased in user numbers as networking came to more people in the 1990s they were already out and about in the 1980s. Later she talks about MUDs more and goes into their history, but it’s almost like she wrote the first chapter early on before her foray into the history of multiplayer online games and never went back and corrected the first chapter. There’s also something of a categorisation difficulty here. SL is more reminiscent, to me anyway, of MUSHes than MUDs, while WoW and similar are the MUDs of today. The difference is an ethos of platform-driven definition of space and capability versus a user-driven one. As Coleman’s thesis is about user-driven network life enhancements, MUSHes are the place to start, not MUDs, just as she focusses on SL rather than WoW.

This is sympomatic of the entire book, actually. The author is a literary theorist and it shows. She neither really understands the technology, nor the psychology, sociology of online worlds. There are some flashes of insight and the interviews with some of the major figures in the field (Doctorow, Lanier etc) are worth reading, though more for their in-depth responses than the quality of her questions. I bought and read this primarily because a review in the THE mentioned that she had the thesis that the digital and physical worlds are not really separate any more, but that cross-reality (or x-reality as she insists on calling it) is now the norm. This fits with my own thinking on issues of identity and reputation (that often one now has a joint identity not two separate ones). She has a somewhat interesting take on the ideas and I don’t regret spending the time to read this mercifully short book, but in the end it’s quite disappointing. I think she needed collaborators on the project, from technology, sociology, psychology or similar.

Please complete with just one sentence “Facebook is…”.
We have some interesting results from Japanese students and I’m interested in gathering thoughts from other people.

As of writing (16:00 JST on Wednesday 18th January 2012) Wikipedia is blacked out apart from one page:

Wikipedia: SOPA

This is in protest at two bills currently being debated in the US Congress (PIPA in the House and SOPA in the Senate). These bills are being rushed through at quite a fast track in congress because they are bi-partisan (meaning: the big businesses who drafted the bills, and are corruptly paying congress-critters in campaign donations for their support, have bought peple in both parties).

In early January there was a movement by some opposed to this bill asking various large Internet organisations to black out in January in a coordinated effort to oppose these bills and raise public awareness about them. Most of the major service providers such as Google can’t really afford a day’s blackout. As Wikipedia is a non-profit and doesn’t make money per eyeball it was one of the few high profile sites to be able and willing to take this step.

There are more details from the EFF about these proposals.

Another example of the contempt with which people in business hold educators, at all levesl, came up in this Diverse Issues in Higher Education article. The most telling phrase was Change the Equation Board Chairman Craig Barrett’s statement that “suggested making sure that math and science teachers have mastery of their subjects, and that more is done to relax teacher licensing requirements so that accomplished individuals from STEM fields can teach math and science.” SO, the way to improve STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education is by removing licensing requirements which ensure that teachers know how to teach. Yes, that’s the way to get people who are good at these subjects to go into teaching and do it well. Of course the problems with teaching are all down to bad teachers who’re lazy layabout who don’t deserve the massive salaries they siphon from the public purse. Nothing about the problems particularly in STEM subjects is to do with the disparity between starting salaries and conditions for teachers (never mind what you earn after 20 years experience as a teacher, what does it cost to take the teaching qualification and what is your starting salary compared to what else you’re being offered if you’re good at STEM subjects). These CEOs, most of who undoubtedly claim to be proponents of  “free markets” refuse to see the free market conditions that constant pressure on teacher’s salaries compared to the private sector have been one of the significant problems in recruiting teachers to STEM subjects. Some teachers in those subjects are good, those who have a very strong vocation for teaching and are willing to put up with a lifetime earning capacity and in particular starting salaries much below what the private sector offers. Of course there are some problems here, in that teaching unions are generally unwilling to see a market price set for different subjects. But the claim that the bar to getting people who are good at STEM into teaching is the requirement to have a clue what teaching is (here’s a clue – it really does require more than just knowing the subject) is by removing the licensing requirements is just bizarre. Start paying teachers competitive salaries and make teacher training free for those who then go on to teach for five years (and provide teacher trainees with a decent income in their training years) and perhaps we’ll see an improvement in STEM teaching. Parachuting in subject experts who don’t know how to teach will do nothing to improve the situation on those who know how to teach but aren’t good at their subjects in the first place.

Of course this would all require those CEOs to be willing to pay higher taxes so they’re never going to support that obvious route.

I’ve just submitted a paper to Computers and Society. The draft submission is available on OpenDepot.

Here’s a message I sent to my MP Rob Wilson today, via writetothem. I encourage everyone else whose MP voted in December to raise tuition fees, to send a similar message to their MP.

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I just came across a book which I thought would be useful for one of the courses I’m teaching at Meiji University: Information Society. It’s a 2009 book called The Information Society and it includes the same kind of approach I’m using, with a historical background and various sociological, technological, economic and other facets explored. It’s a huge book, admittedly, at almost 2,000 pages. You can see the full details at the publisher’s web site. I’m not going to be using it as a book, though, even purchased for my University library, because it costs £675.00 (Amazon UK) $1,325.00 (Amazon US) $1,192 (Routledge List price). What on earth? That’s 25p per page! (more…)

As this blog has been down for a while due to technical issues, I posted this on my LJ already. From 1st April I have a new job. I will be a professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics, at Meiji University in Tokyo. I will be travelling to Japan at the beginning of March.

“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne; Meditation 17). Similarly, when an academic speaks it is with their own authority, and not as an “official spokesman” for their university unless they explicitly (and officially) claim to do so. Of course, any academic is always associated with their institution(s) and it is this association in part that legitimates the greater weight given by many in society to their statements. But the claim by UEL (University of East London) that it had good cause to suspend a professor over comments he made in advance of the G20 summit in London in 2009 (and the protests expected to surround it, which they did) regarding police expectations and violence because “the comments brought the university into disrepute” is utterly specious. These statements by university managers are reported in a recent THE article regarding a subsequent case between the professor and the university on which I make no comment here. What I find utterly abhorrent is the idea that any statement made by an academic could lead to a suspension on the grounds of “bringing the university into disrepute” unless that statement can be found to be factually inaccurate or an illegal statement (such as incitement to violence). And then the suspension should only happen after a suitable process (in the case of illegal speech, that process should be the conclusion of a court case). No academic speaks for their university rather than themselves unless they are officially and clearly doing so. The assumption when any academic speaks is that they are speaking as an individual academic. (more…)