Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Fully privatizing all bus transit would generate cost savings of $5.7b, or 30% of total US bus transit operating expenses. The corresponding increased use of public transit from this cost reduction would lead to a gain in social welfare of $524m, at minimum, and at least 26k additional transit jobs.
Month: September 2017
Restaurant Bookshelves
Her assignment: Gather 4500 books for a new hotel. The straight-forward assignment of gathering old science and math books took on a life of its own, turning into a massive project and tallying up 12k books. The Albert has shelves 12m high in the air stuffed with old algebra texts more visually stunning than the glossy collection of copper pots hanging just below.
Waymo World Simulation
At any time, there are now 25000 virtual self-driving cars making their way through fully modeled versions of Austin, Mountain View, and Phoenix, as well as test-track scenarios. Waymo might simulate driving down a particularly tricky road 100Ks of times in 1 day. Collectively, they now drive 13M km per day in the virtual world. In 2016, they logged 4B virtual km versus a little over 5M km by Google’s IRL self-driving cars that run on public roads. And crucially, the virtual km focus on what Waymo people invariably call “interesting” km in which they might learn something new. These are not boring highway commuter km.
SETI signals
After observing for 5 hours and across the entire 4 to 8 GHz frequency band, Gajjar and the Listen team analyzed the 400 terabytes of data gathered and found 15 new pulses from FRB 121102.
Automated Crowdturfing
Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced campaigns easy to detect. Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a 2 phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection, but also score high on “usefulness” metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by simple constraints imposed by online service providers.
Burning Man 2017
Each year, Burning Man participants travel to the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to form a temporary city—a self-reliant community populated by performers, artists, free spirits, and more. 70k people from all over the world came to the 31st annual Burning Man to dance, express themselves, and take in the spectacle, themed this year as “Radical Ritual.”
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