Articles - QESP
By Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast , Peter Hancock Professor of Psychology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, University of Central Florida, Tony Carden , Researcher, University of the Sunshine Coast
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
Artificial intelligence can play chess, drive a car and diagnose medical issues. Examples include Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, Tesla’s self-driving vehicles, and IBM’s Watson.
This type of artificial intelligence is referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – non-human systems that can perform a specific task. We encounter this type on a daily basis, and its use is growing rapidly.
But while many impressive capabilities have been demonstrated, we’re also beginning to see problems. The worst case involved a self-driving test car that hit a pedestrian in March. The pedestrian died and the incident is still under investigation.
By Stephen Easton
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
A teachable moment doesn’t have to arise naturally; even a simulated one helped make British police officers 21% less likely to be hooked by a phishing email, in one of a series of behavioural nudges tested in 2018.
Nudges often only influence a small fraction of the target group because they preserve choice by definition, as opposed to incentives or penalties, but are still good value as they can be scaled up at very low cost.
Several trialled over the past year have produced much larger effects, however, according to the latest yearly research report from the Behavioural Insights Team, a company jointly owned by its staff, the British government and the innovation quango Nesta.
By Ted Smillie
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
“Democratizing data science is the notion that anyone, with little to no expertise, can do data science if provided ample data and user-friendly analytics tools. Supporting that idea, the new tool ingests datasets and generates sophisticated statistical models typically used by experts to analyze, interpret, and predict underlying patterns in data.” So says a 15 January […]
By Australian National Audit Office
- Monday, January 28th, 2019
On 1 July 2016, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) was created through the merger of the CrimTrac agency (CrimTrac), the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) and the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).1 Prior to the merger, CrimTrac had commenced planning and initial administration of the Biometric Identification Services project (the BIS project or BIS).
By Springer
- Friday, December 28th, 2018
Once upon a time, people thought that electrons and ions always stuck together, living happily ever after. However, under low density of matter or high temperatures, the components of matter are no longer bound together. Instead, they form plasma, a state of matter naturally occurring in our universe, which has since been harnessed for everyday applications such as TV screens, chip etching and torches, but also propulsion and even sustained energy production via controlled fusion.
By Mikhail Dyakonov
- Friday, December 28th, 2018
In quantum computing, the classical two-state circuit element (the transistor) is replaced by a quantum element called a quantum bit, or qubit. Like the conventional bit, it also has two basic states. Although a variety of physical objects could reasonably serve as quantum bits, the simplest thing to use is the electron’s internal angular momentum, or spin, which has the peculiar quantum property of having only two possible projections on any coordinate axis: +1/2 or –1/2 (in units of the Planck constant). For whatever the chosen axis, you can denote the two basic quantum states of the electron’s spin as ? and ?.
By Stephen Easton
- Thursday, December 27th, 2018
The Australian government’s Information Security Manual has been simplified with the removal of 258 recommended cyber security controls and the addition of 63.
Words like “should” and “must” were also removed from the descriptions of 687 entries to get away from “compliance-based language” in the manual, according to a report listing all the changes.
Presumably, the idea is to encourage executives to take charge of managing cyber security risks and to use the ISM as a guide, but not to rely on it too much as a kind of checklist.
The latest update sees a net reduction of 20% on the 950 individual security tips that were listed in the previous version of the ISM.
By Ted Smillie
- Wednesday, December 26th, 2018
Yes, 2018 was a year of skepticism, where sound advice was often shouted down by unconscious bias, but by year end there were encouraging signs. On the down side: On climate change scepticism, a 20 December 2018 study led by researchers at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) notes that “The World Health […]
By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics and PLuS Alliance Fellow, UNSW
- Monday, December 3rd, 2018
What if we had an opportunity to double the size of the tourism industry, or to quadruple the size of the beef industry, or to boost the economy by more than any of the presently proposed tax switches?
What if we could do it while permanently improving the lives of disadvantaged young people?
We surely wouldn’t let it slip away.
By Stephen Easton
- Monday, December 3rd, 2018
If you think cyber risk management is not the end of the world you are dead wrong, according to the federal government’s top adviser on these matters.
Alastair MacGibbon thinks a potentially cataclysmic cyber security failure is “the greatest existential threat we face as a society today” and the relevant authorities have not been taking it seriously enough.
He told delegates at last week’s National Investigations Symposium — who came mostly from regulatory, law enforcement and public sector integrity agencies, as well as internal integrity units — that “cyber-related evidence” would soon become integral in most of their investigations.
