cura

joined 1 year ago
 

TLDR

  • A Bluetooth enabled battery monitor that records car battery voltages. The hardware requires a smartphone for pairing
  • The product collects GPS co-ordinates, cell phone tower data and nearby Wifi beacons
  • Location data is sent over the Internet to servers in Hong Kong and mainland China
  • App store misleads consumers by stating that no personal data is collected or shared. Since the Android app requires location permissions to use the hardware device, users are effectively forced to continuously broadcast their physical location to 3rd parties in order to use the product.

There are no legitimate reason for a car battery monitor application to track it’s user’s location. With over 100,000 downloads on Android alone, this raises significant privacy concerns

Discussion on HN.

[–] cura@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm assuming lemmy's bug is acting up again lol. Anyway, I am also very excited about Sync.

[–] cura@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Surveys After each song, participants were asked to rank how much they liked the song (1 to 10), if they would replay the song (0, 1), recommend the song to their friends (0, 1), if they had heard it previously to assess familiarity (0, 1), and if they found the song offensive (0, 1). We also showed participants lyrics from the song and lyrics created by the researchers and asked them to identify the song lyrics to measure their memory of the song (0, 1).

I still think your concern is legitimate.

[–] cura@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Abstract

Identifying hit songs is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, song elements have been measured from large databases to identify the lyrical aspects of hits. We took a different methodological approach, measuring neurophysiologic responses to a set of songs provided by a streaming music service that identified hits and flops. We compared several statistical approaches to examine the predictive accuracy of each technique. A linear statistical model using two neural measures identified hits with 69% accuracy. Then, we created a synthetic set data and applied ensemble machine learning to capture inherent non-linearities in neural data. This model classified hit songs with 97% accuracy. Applying machine learning to the neural response to 1st min of songs accurately classified hits 82% of the time showing that the brain rapidly identifies hit music. Our results demonstrate that applying machine learning to neural data can substantially increase classification accuracy for difficult to predict market outcomes.

So they use synthetic data to both train and test their model, this is because the original dataset contains only 24 songs.

Next, we assessed the bagged ML model's ability to predict hits from the original 24 song data set. The bagged ML model accurately classified songs with 95.8% which is significantly better than the baseline 54% frequency (Success = 23, N = 24, p < 0.001).

So the 97.2% accuracy is reported on the synthetic data. On the original one, it is 95.8%. But the authors do acknowledge the limitations.

While the accuracy of the present study was quite high, there are several limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our sample was relatively small so we are unable to assess if our findings generalize to larger song databases.

 

Why it matters: A recent study at Claremont Graduate University has applied machine learning to neurophysiological data, identifying hit songs with an astonishing 97% accuracy.

Read more: 'Neuroforecasting': How science can predict the next hit song with 97% accuracy.

Read the Research article.

Discussion on Hacker News.

[–] cura@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Their prequel on Meta: A few thoughts about #Meta's #ActivityPub project (and whether we should instantly block it)

To recap: I'm also very, very suspicious of Meta and I know they don't have good intentions - I'm not suggesting that maybe they've changed and they will do things differently, to "give them a chance" first. I just don't think that declaring to block them makes much sense at this point in time. Maybe they will give us real reasons to block them once they launch their platform. But I'm not by principle against interacting with Meta users, as long as I can avoid Meta's ads, black box algorithm and data mining.

I guess you do need to know the domain name first to block it.

[–] cura@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

"Same bigotry, different religion"

[–] cura@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

It happened to my Pixel 4a.