Here they are – the five most-visited stories from the past week. A precocious black hole; powering Facebook’s new deep learning machine; a vision for next-gen experimental cybersecurity research; computing with time travel; and how a simple 1800s observation about patterns in big data can fight fraud are all among the top stories.
How a Simple Observation from the 1800s about Patterns in Big Data Sets Can Fight Fraud
Benford’s law was first mentioned by the American scientist Simon Newcomb in the 1880s, when he noticed that in books of tables of logarithms, the pages of numbers whose leading digit was 1 were more worn than the pages of numbers whose leading digit was 9. For some reason, people seemed to be consistently looking up certain numbers more frequently than others.
Computing with Time Travel
Why send a message back in time, but lock it so that no one can ever read the contents? Because it may be the key to solving currently intractable problems. That’s the claim of an international collaboration. It turns out that an unopened message can be exceedingly useful. This is true if the experimenter entangles the message with some other system in the laboratory before sending it.
Roadmap to Safer Cyberspace: A Vision for Next-gen Experimental Cybersecurity Research
How do cybersecurity experts discover how to properly defend a system or build a network that’s secure? As in other domains of science, this process involves hypothesis, experimentation and analysis — or at least it should. In reality, cybersecurity research can often happen in crisis mode in the wake of an attack. However, researchers imagined a different approach, where experts test their theories, and peers review their work…
Powering Facebook’s New Deep Learning Machine
NVIDIA announced that Facebook will power its next-generation computing system with the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, enabling it to drive a broad range of machine learning applications. While training complex deep neural networks to conduct machine learning can take days or weeks on even the fastest computers, the Tesla platform can slash this by 10 to 20x.
A Precocious Black Hole
In July 2015, researchers announced the discovery of a black hole that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. The discovery calls into question previous assumptions on the development of galaxies. The black hole was originally discovered using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and was then detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and by ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
