Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways Look at the late science and technology units. You can submit items that you think can entertain readers for feedback by e -maile feedback@newscientist.com
Streisand beats again
Unfortunately, some things are inevitable: Death, Taxes, another Coldplay album. Such an inevitability, long ago proven over any reasonable doubt, is that if you try to suppress an embarrassing story, you will only draw more attention to it.
This phenomenon is called the Streisand effect, after an incident in 2003, when Barbra Streisand sued to get an aerial photo taken off the Internet. The shot was part of a series that documented coastal erosion in California but identified her cliff-top mansion. She lost, and in the process she drew public attention to the picture. After having previously been a dooaded six times (twice by her lawyers), it was their accessed hung by thousands of times.
And then, with tired inevitability, we come and again to Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal empire Crompeasing Facebook, Instagram, Threats, WhatsApp and a significant part of Hawaiii. In March, Sarah Wynn-Williams-Facebooks is the Form Director of Public Policy for a Memoir about his time in the company that has Gatsby-Esque title Careless people. Feedback will not repeat the specific accusations of what Belcaus Meta has very high -powered libel attorneys and we will not be responsible for New scientist ‘S internal lawyers who all fall died of heart attacks. Sufficient to say it’s a real side-tourer.
Meta responded by taking litigation. By utilizing a non-Disclose agency, Wynn-Williams had signed when shet business, Meta prevented her from promoting Careless people. Any interviews you may have seen with her we led before Meta got the order.
The result? The book has become a global bestseller and you just read about it in the silly bit back New scientist.
Paridae offensive
Feedback recently told the story of researcher Nicolas Guéguen, who has had some of his papers withdrawn – including one about the benefits of having a big breast while lifting – as a result of studies by Datasleuth’s Nick Brown and James Heathers (March 15).
So, of course, we were fascinated by getting an e -mail from Brown that came across our coverage because he has “a Google alarm created for ‘Nicolas Guéguen’. We wondered if we may have been getting a detailed wrong or otherwise bungled story.
However, he wasted responsibility to another item in the same column. This related to the multi -year scuning problem: the fact that completely innocent words can contain letters that are offensive isolated so that the automated system that blocks questionable words often captures harmless in their nets.
“Before I became a scientist in the world in it,” explains Brown. “Maybe around 1999 someone came to me with a question. Her e -mail to the Royal Bank of Scotland had jumped and the rejection message literally said: ‘Reason: Dirty Word: Tits’.’
Readers: Take sometimes to recover after the shock. We were also stunned that the automated system used the term “dirty word”: We were not aware of RBS’s systems, we based on the behavioral guidance of the elementary school.
Brown examines the message, “which was quite innocent and contained no reference to birds in the Paridae family”. Then he uses a textsteditor to look at E -Mail -Header, and there he found the “dirty word”.
“We were in France and used names from Asterix Comics for our servers, “says Brown.” One of the mail servers that the message had gone through was named ‘Petituix’. “This is a innkeeper that appears in three Asterix Quantities: His name is a parody of small-skirt cheese if you didn’t get it. So, says Brown, contained the E -Mail header “Something like ‘Via: Petitsuix.domain.com’ and thus came up against the Scantorpe problem”.
This made Brown wonder what could have happened if his employers had used the same anti-spam software by some infernal coincidence. “Wow our spam filter server has folded up with ‘You said’ breasts ” and then they would have come back with ‘No, you said’ tits ”, and so on for anyone?”
So what happened next? “I remember saying at the time,” well, clearly that the bank will go to bust, “says Brown. He had to wait until 2008 – and legal feedback has been to say that the description of the glory of Brown’s word games that did not happen: The government saved the bank.
Tail
Sometimes feedback comes on a solution to a problem that is at the same time brilliant and rock-stupid. Such a solution was bushings for our attention from reporter Matthew kicks.
Three scientists tried to make tailor -made less deadly boring, so they developed a robot for people in cows to play with. As they explained, the robot is called “social tail”. It is “a robotic stanchion bar with a responsive tentacle on top that interacts[s] With people through three forms of interaction, ‘attracts’, ‘escapes’ and ‘friendly’. “Apparently this“ enhanced people’s improvement ”.
Feedback is not a robotics: not out of a complete lack of technical ability – bypassing the thought – that’s just what we saw Battlestar Galactica And decided not to be an accomplice in the robot apocalypse. Still, this sounds like a contribution.
But we were wondering why someone would go to the bother of designing a Taire robot when you could just create a timed entry system and elimize the stories.
Do you have a story for feedback?
You can send stories to feedback via e -mail at feedback@newscientist.com. Include your home address. This week’s and previous feedback can be on our website.