Wednesday, October 30, 2024

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

YOU CAN DO 99 THINGS FOR SOMEONE 

AND ALL THEY'LL REMEMBER IS THE ONE THING YOU DIDN'T DO.


 The first marine fish driven to extinction by humans BBC 


Even though the invention of the wheel around 6,000 years ago revolutionized everything from transportation to pottery making, its exact origins are still a mystery to archaeologists. But a new study using techniques from structural mechanics suggests that Eastern European copper miners may have been the driving force behind three major innovations in wheel technology as early as 3900 B.C.

1st wheel was invented 6,000 years ago in the Carpathian Mountains, modeling study suggests  LiveScience 


People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

Ars Technica: The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have. 

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. “Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not,” they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.




The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

Krebs on Security: “…Delaware-based Atlas Data Privacy Corp. helps its users remove their personal information from the clutches of consumer data brokers, and from people-search services online

Backed by millions of dollars in litigation financing, Atlas so far this year has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class that includes more than 20,000 New Jersey law enforcement officers who are signed up for Atlas services. Atlas alleges all of these data brokers have ignored repeated warnings that they are violating Daniel’s Law, a New Jersey statute allowing law enforcement, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers. Daniel’s Law was passed in 2020 after the death of 20-year-old Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a violent attack targeting a federal judge — his mother. 

Last week, Atlas invoked Daniel’s Law in a lawsuit (PDF) against Babel Street, a little-known technology company incorporated in Reston, Va. Babel Street’s core product allows customers to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area. Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Google Android and Apple mobile devices. 

Babel Street can offer this tracking capability by consuming location data and other identifying information that is collected by many websites and broadcast to dozens and sometimes hundreds of ad networks that may wish to bid on showing their ad to a particular user…”