PARTINGSHOTS
130 MARCH2020|COMPUTERSHOPPER|ISSUE385
Zygote
Contactlesspaymentsmay haveputmillionsofpoundsinTransportforLondon’scoffers,
butthey’recostingthe restof usdear, asZygoteexplains
THE MOUSETRAP
Computers have anasty habit of
mistaking adigital image for
something else,like when they
classify pork sausages as
pornography.Now researchers at
the Baylor College of Medicine in
Texas have foundawaytoget
rodents to model neural networks
forteaching computers to
recognise images more accurately.
Theysay,“We presented natural
images to mice and measured the
responses of thousands of
neurons from cortical visual
areas,”which is nice.
Theyfurther declare,“Next, we
used predictive models trained on
responses from the mouse visual
system, and calculated the
similarity formillions of pairs of
images.”Which is also nice.
What’s not quitesoniceis
seeing all this from the point of
view of the mice.Alarge number
of Mickeys and Minnies have had
their bodies squished intoa
treadmill, their heads bolted
forwards with their eyes forced
open, and aload of electrodes
stuffed intotheir brains. The
resulting data is used to model
the artificial neural network, and
Zygotewould very much like to
report that this barbarity is
worthwhile.Unfortunately,the
wordsofthe Texas researchers
must speak forthemselves.
“While our results show the
benefit of adopting more
brain-like representation in visual
processing, it is unclear which
aspects of neural representation
work. We think that is the most
important question, and we need
to understand the principle
behind it.”
In other words, theyhaveno
idea what theyare doing, or why.
TUBEWAY ARMY
Once upon atime,Londoners
paid to travel around using aslice
of plastic called an Oyster card. It
cost afiver to join the system,
and cards could be topped up for
aminimum of £10 discount
journeys, up to a£90 maximum
investment. Almost 90 million
Oysters have been sold since
theywere introduced back in
2003, but five years ago
contactless payments came
along, and the official figure
from Transport forLondon (TfL)
is that 66 million Oyster cards
have remained unused forat
least ayear.The average
refund and deposit balance on
these neglected cards is £8.46.
So you don’t need Zygote’s
trusty calculator to work out
that the operators are sitting
on wayover £500 million
because their customers simply
can’t be bothered to cash in
their unused cards. Perhaps TfL
will consider investing this
windfall to makemuch-needed
improvements to the network.
FAMILYTREES
Huang Zhisheng is the founder of
alife-saving artificial intelligence
service operating from the Free
University Amsterdam. He calls it
the Tree Hole Rescue,named
afteranIrish folk story about an
unhappyman who confides his
secrets to atree.
His program monitors
postings on Weibo,aChinese
social media platform with
around 460 million active users,
and what it does is to flagup
words associated with suicide.
It ranks the intensity and
frequency of these words from
one to 10, with 10 flagging a
suicide in progress, nine that it is
imminent, eight to six indicating
levels of causefor concern, and
below this threshold volunteers
simply adjust how often they
keep awatching brief.
Amazingly,itworks. In
Nanjing, astudent named Li Fan
got intodebt, experienced
severe depression and posted
that suicide was the only wayout.
5,400 miles away, aTree Hole
Rescuer alerted volunteers in
China who reported the matter to
local police,and theymanaged to
save the unconscious Li Fan.
This is one of more than 700
similar success stories among
Weibo users, and Zygote very
much hopes that the system
is emulated forour own
social media.
BUYER BEWARE
Electronic moneyisdominant.
So says the latest British Retail
Consortium review ofspending
statistics. Payments by
smartphone,touch card and
in-app purchases are
commonplace,and so is shopping
forbig ticket items online.Cash
transactions accounted foronly
£1 in every £5 spent last year,and
the decline of coins and
banknotes is speeding up.
This is fine forthe majority of
people,but Zygote is concerned
about workers reliant on direct
tipping, beggars on the streets,
and anyone who needs cash as a
failsafebecause of fraud, loss,
abusive relationships or any other
reason when digital services are
denied. And if you reckon none
of this affects you, then think
again. The cost imposed by a
retailer foracashtransaction is
around 1.5p,but the minimum
cost facing that same retailer
foradigital transaction is over
6p,rising to more than 18p for
some credit and charge cards.
We are all paying the price.
KINKY BOOTS
Sergiy Usatyuk is avery naughty
boy. He hasbeen running a
service called Exostresser for
clients who want to launch
distributed denial-of-service
(DDoS) attacks on target
websites and grind them to ahalt.
Theirvictims include schools,
video-game producers and the
Catholic church, and astaggering
total of 3,829,812 attacks have
caused more than four-and-a-half
thousand days of downtime.
Sergiy is the son of Professor
PeterUsatyuk of the University
of Illinois,Chicago,and his spawn
launched his wayward DDoS
booter services career aged 15.
The law waited until his 21st
birthdaybefore banging him to
rights, and US AttorneyRobert
Higdon has classified Exostresser
as a‘weapon’when imposing a
fine of $500,000, plus ajailterm
of 13 months to be followed by a
three-year supervisory order.
