Who is to Blame for Cambridge Analytica?

By Ted Smillie - Saturday, March 31st, 2018

Mark Zukerberg’s 21 March 2018 public post about Cambridge Analytica  gives a timeline which starts In 2013, with   Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan creating a personality quiz app. However, our  March 2017 Cambridge Analytica article Fear the Geeks  tells a different story. That article is primarily about  “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency” […]

Off-the-shelf smart devices found easy to hack

By American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev - Tuesday, March 13th, 2018

Off-the-shelf devices that include baby monitors, home security cameras, doorbells, and thermostats were easily co-opted by cyber researchers . As part of their ongoing research into detecting vulnerabilities of devices and networks expanding in the smart home and Internet of Things (IoT), the researchers disassembled and reverse engineered many common devices and quickly uncovered serious security issues.

Making climate models open source makes them even more useful

By Martin Jucker - Wednesday, March 7th, 2018

Designing climate experiments is all but impossible in the real world. We can’t, for instance, study the effects of clouds by taking away all the clouds for a set period of time and seeing what happens.

Instead, we have to design our experiments virtually, by developing computer models. Now, a new open-source set of climate models has allowed this research to become more collaborative, efficient and reliable.

Randomistas: how radical researchers changed our world

By Andrew Leigh - Thursday, March 1st, 2018

Randomised trials are in your life, whether you like it or not. In most advanced countries, governments won’t pay for pharmaceuticals unless they’ve undergone a randomised evaluation. Increasingly, the world’s smartest aid agencies are looking for the same level of evidence before they allocate funds to a project.