Dental surgery today, so probably no posting. I do need to submit the abstract, but there is plenty of time

Bursts of contemporaneous publication among high- and low-credibility online information providers

• In studies of misinformation, the distinction between high- and low-credibility publishers is fundamental. However, there is much that we do not know about the relationship between the subject matter and timing of content produced by the two types of publishers. By analyzing the content of several million unique articles published over 28 months, we show that high- and low-credibility publishers operate in distinct news ecosystems. Bursts of news coverage generated by the two types of publishers tend to cover different subject matter at different times, even though fluctuations in their overall news production tend to be highly correlated. Regardless of the mechanism, temporally convergent coverage among low-credibility publishers has troubling implications for American news consumers.

Russia amplifies calls for civil war in the U.S.

• This follows a familiar pattern in which Russia disseminates propaganda and disinformation demonizing immigrants and portraying them as disease-ridden or as dangerous criminals, then weaponizes the backlash in order to promote far-right, pro-Russia candidates and parties with harsh anti-immigrant agendas as the “solution” to a problem they themselves helped to create.

Was going to do the Groundhog Day club ride but it is just too cold and wet. Once a week for that kind of thing is enough. Still, early spring! Going to enjoy this until the Eastern Shore floods and Western Maryland is on fire.

Chores

• Clean house – done!
• Call dentist to see if there is any prep for Monday – done!
• Follow up on referral – oops
• Shopping – done!
• Clean & lube bike – nope, maybe tomorrow
• 8:00 Gershwin

SBIRs

• Work a bit on the W.E. paper – nope
• Slides for Monday! Stories are already in – done!

No ride for tomorrow yet! Put something together just in case – looks like I’m leading it

I leaned today that PDFs can be very big. Also, Chinese dictionaries

Barely made 400 miles in January!

A new global gender divide is emerging

• In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

What Prevents & What Drives Gendered Ideological Polarisation?

• Across much of the world, men and women think alike. However, in countries that are economically developed and culturally liberal, young men and women are polarising. As chronicled by John Burn-Murdoch, young women are increasingly likely to identify as ‘progressives’ and vote for leftists, while young men remain more conservative. What explains this global heterogeneity?

SBIRs

• Roll Eric’s edits into the abstract and check the character count – done. Waiting for the final ok
• Work on War Elephants paper – reasonable progress
• 9:00 standup – done
• 11:30 CSC touchpoint
• 3:30 USNA capstone meeting – cancelled

GPT Agents

• 2:00 LLM meeting
• Mention NIST talk! Done! We decided that the (resubmission?) to ArXive should have something about a call for work on HAI vulnerabilities.
• And I can have some space. Visiting next Thursday.

Managed to generate a really creepy version of Steamboat Willie:

The closer you look the worse it gets. I’m pretty sure this particular steamboat runs on the heat from burning souls. Now that I think about it, I’m reminded of the films by the Quay brothers.

SBIRS

• Rolling more changes in on the War Elephants paper
• SimAccel meeting
• Working on the MORS abstract. Got a second draft that is 2,978 out of a 3,000 character max. More with Aaron later. Done, now it’s 2,988 characters and off for approval.

Back to seasonable weather, but now there is less wind, which is nice. We’ll be in the 50’s later

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 2:00 Review review
• 2:30 MORS abstract. Put together a crappy first pass yesterday and put it in the queue as a placeholder. Will also need to do the Schedule A forms before the 9th!
• Start digging into War Elephants. Next steps, more or less in order:
  • Make all the easy changes
  • Cut out the parts that need it
  • Fix the more complex requests where possible
  • Start writing new content.

A lovely ride on Friday:

The nine thousand dollar botnet

• A network of over a thousand spammy X accounts with blue checkmarks is flooding selected posts with waves of extremely similar replies

SBIRs

• 10:00 Schema meeting
• Schedule MORS/War Elephants discussion. I think the part to write is “The Mechanical Mahout,” Where human-written heuristic code monitors ensembles of models to choose the best (or “go-home mode”) in comms-denied environments, based on well-defined rules of engagement, such as the amount of time w/o communication and geographic limits.
• Reading through the reviews and highlighting
• Enhanced Simulation as abstract
• 2:00 MDA – done. We may recalc the trajectories if it can be done in a couple of days

Hard to believe there was about a foot of snow on the ground this time last week.

The paper is in and no fires at work. I’m going to clean house and go for a long ride

Space is very, very hard

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Schedule MORS/War Elephants discussion. Also, Enhanced Simulation as abstract
• 3:30 USNA meeting

GPT Agents

• Finish, anonymize, and submit RAG paper – DONE!
• 2:00 LLM Meeting

Trump won NH.

It’s helpful to understand that this is not something that Trump started. It’s been a long term effort on the part of the right wing to create and exploit “culture war” issues:

Also this, which seems legit but might not be. The account is now suspended so I can’t check, and I can run my tools on LLM error messages any more:

Sure seems to be a thing though:

SBIRs

• The LM meeting yesterday makes me think that “Simulation Acceleration” per se isn’t really what people want. There is a high level of confidence with Monte Carlo techniques, not the least of which is that they can be validated statically, not statistically, like a NN would have to be. But there is a lot of interest in using NNs to store and integrate the results of simulation across thousands of runs, so that new questions and answers can come from an existing “corpus” of training data. This kind of “simulation enhancement” or “simulation extending” I think is the key to effectively “accelerating” simulation.
• Travel expenses! Done!

GPT Agents

• Work on the RAG paper. Due tomorrow.
• Finished incorporating all the changes. Now anonymize and get ready to submit? Done! For now, one more pass tomorrow

Explaining Polarized Trust in Scientists: A Political Stereotype-Approach

• Trust in science is polarized along political lines—but why? We show across a series of highly controlled studies (total N = 2,859) and a large-scale Twitter analysis (N = 3,977,868) that people across the political spectrum hold stereotypes about scientists’ political orientation (e.g., “scientists are liberal”) and that these stereotypes decisively affect the link between their own political orientation and their trust in scientists. Critically, this effect shaped participants’ perceptions of the value of science, protective behavior intentions during a pandemic, policy support, and information-seeking behavior. Therefore, these insights have important implications for effective science communication.

Meet the people bringing their virtual relationships into the IRL

• Nevertheless, people are forming deep platonic and romantic relationships with AI companions – some of which are so strong that app updates or shutdowns can feel akin to grief – and some of them want to tell their parents, pals, or even IRL partners about it. On dedicated subreddits, this has become a frequent topic of conversation, with many users sharing accounts of what went down when they did break the news (Spoiler: it doesn’t always go well). “I admitted to my friends that I found happiness with an AI girlfriend and now they think I’m nuts,” reads one post. “The people in my life don’t like me using Replika,” reads another (Replika is one of the most popular companion apps, with around 10 million registered users). There are even posts from concerned family members: “My depressed brother is dating an AI and is finally happy, but our family doesn’t know how to process this.”

SBIRs

• Up to NJ for meetings today

GPT Agents

• Rework results section of RAG paper
• Tweak Rhianna’s blog post to introduce belief stampedes a bit – done

I think it might be warm enough to get a ride in today!

SBIRs

• 11:30 SimAccel meeting
• 2:00 Weekly MDA

GPT Agents

• Basically spend the rest of the day working on the RAG paper
• Sent Don a note about finding an office.

Chores and shoveling today:

This is really interesting from Microsoft: “As we said late last year when we announced Secure Future Initiative (SFI), given the reality of threat actors that are resourced and funded by nation states, we are shifting the balance we need to strike between security and business risk – the traditional sort of calculus is simply no longer sufficient. For Microsoft, this incident has highlighted the urgent need to move even faster. We will act immediately to apply our current security standards to Microsoft-owned legacy systems and internal business processes, even when these changes might cause disruption to existing business processes.  “

Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, on Friday voted to ease the law on naturalization and widen access to dual citizenship. 

SBIRs

• Finished the preliminary final yesterday! Did a little formatting this morning and then I’ll send it off.
• 9:00 Standup
  • Looking at how to make the Phase II extension happen
  • Made a BLUF slide for JSC
• 3:00 M30 – No show
• 3:30 USNA – Tried to get them up out of the weeds

GPT Agents

• 2:00 LLM meeting
  • The HAI paper has been put on hold by ArXiV, pending ethics review maybe?
  • Started working on revisions to the RAG paper. I’ll start rolling in changes tomorrow

For the first time in years, there is a significant amount of snow on the ground. Like, enough to shovel!

Meta and OpenAI have spawned a wave of AI sex companions—and some of them are children

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint Demo – done
• Added task 7 writeup to the final
• 2:30 AI Ethics? Yes! And now people are only worried about LLM hallucinations, not things like data bias for things like resumes and facial recognition
• 3:00 Sprint Planning.

GPT Agents

• Ping Don?