Morning Tidings

Tag: study

  • Elon Musk Loses Half of Top 100 Advertisers on Twitter in Less Than a Month After Take Over: Study

    Elon Musk Loses Half of Top 100 Advertisers on Twitter in Less Than a Month After Take Over: Study

    San Francisco, November 27:  Elon Musk has lost half of the top 100 advertisers on Twitter in less than a month after the billionaire took office, the study revealed.

    According to Media Matters in America, 50 of the top 100 advertisers have spent nearly $2 billion on the platform since 2020, and more than $750 million on advertising in 2022 alone. Elon Musk Reveals Twitter 2.0 – The Everything App; Says World-Class Software Aces Joining Microblogging Site.

    Furthermore, as of November 21, seven additional advertisers seem to be reducing their advertising on Twitter to almost nothing, in addition to those who appear to have stopped advertising. Since 2020, these seven advertisers have spent more than $255 million on Twitter and nearly $118 million in 2022, according to the study. Elon Musk Shares Slides From Presentation on Twitter 2.0, Video, Longform Tweets and Payments Among Proposed New Initiatives (See Pics).

    The report followed a number of large companies that could be considered “quiet quitters” that are slowly pulling ad spending from social platforms. This comes after companies like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., Ford, and Chevrolet issued statements confirming their intention to pause their ads on Twitter, said the study.

    Even with these advertising losses, Elon Musk has continued to engage in brand-unsafe actions, including amplifying conspiracy theories, unilaterally reinstating banned accounts like former US President Donald Trump, courting and engaging with far-right accounts, and implementing a haphazard verification system that allowed extremists and scammers to purchase blue checks.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Nov 27, 2022 05:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • ‘Samsung’ Most Commonly-Used Passwords in 30 Countries: Study

    ‘Samsung’ Most Commonly-Used Passwords in 30 Countries: Study

    San Francisco, Nov 22: Samsung, or rather “samsung” with a lowercase S, is one of the most commonly used passwords in at least 30 countries, a recent study by password management solution company Nordpass has showed.

    According to SamMobile, using the name of your smartphone/TV/home appliance brand, for example, Samsung, as a password is not the worst offender, but it has grown in popularity in recent years. Cybercrimes: One Lakh Cyber Fighters Will Be Trained in Jharkhand To Thwart Jamtara Gangs.

    While the “samsung” password ranked 198th in popularity in 2019, it rose to 189th in 2020 and 78th in 2021, breaking the top-100 mark last year.

    The most popular password is “password,” which was reportedly chosen by nearly 5 million users, while other commonly used passwords include “123456,” “123456789,” and “guest”, according to the report.

    In the case of “samsung,” it turns out that it is not the only brand-based password used by a large number of online users. Airtel Payments Bank Announces E-KYC-Based ‘Face Authentication’ for Opening Saving Accounts.

    According to a recent report, a simple and predictable password can be decrypted in less than one second, whereas combining lowercase and uppercase letters with numbers can also produce variable results.

    A seven-digit password containing all of those elements can be decrypted in about seven seconds, while an eight-digit password takes about seven minutes, said the report.

    The research firm discovered that the majority of commonly used passwords can be decrypted in less than one second because they are short and consist only of numbers or letters with no uppercase characters, the report added.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Nov 22, 2022 06:15 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • Masturbation for Productivity? 14% of British People Self-Please During Work Hours, Says a New Study! Everything You Need To Know

    Studies and research on topics related to sex are always super interesting BUT the most recent one will boggle your mind. Did you know that a staggering 7.4 million Brits have been found to have masturbated while at work? Yes, according to a recent study. You’d think that working from home has made you lazier BUT apart from changing lives and having several benefits, like sleeping in, and not having to commute. Reportedly WFH has made more self-pleasure aka masturbation for Brits. In a survey by Chemist4U, which polled 2,000 people, 14% of respondents acknowledged engaging in some form of self-gratification at work. Can Too Much Masturbation Make You Impotent? Facts About Self-Sexual Stimulation That Will Surprise You!

    The survey found that 7% of women had indulged in some alone time, compared to 22% of men who had masturbated at work. Additionally, 18% of those who responded to the study admitted to accessing XXX porn while at work. With 16% of respondents confessing to doing so, London is the city where people masturbate most frequently. The survey also revealed that the most likely to masturbate were Brits earning between £35,001 (INR 32,16,330) and £45,000 (INR 41,35,163).

    People who made between £15,0001 and £25,000 a year were 18% more likely to practise some form of self-love than those who made between £25,0001 and £35,000. The greatest age group, 25 to 34, supplied 27% of the total, followed by 35 to 44, who gave 18%, and 45 to 54, who contributed 15%. Researchers claim that masturbating at work increases productivity. In terms of your physical and emotional well-being, masturbation might be beneficial. Additionally, there is virtually little risk of getting pregnant or contracting an STD, making it the safest kind of sex available.

    Your body releases endorphins during an orgasm, which are substances that reduce pain and improve mood. Having sex or masturbating doesn’t affect how nice you feel during an orgasm. Some people masturbate frequently—daily, if not several times. Some people masturbate sometimes, once every few weeks, or perhaps once a week or so. Masturbation only becomes “too much” if it interferes with your social life, employment, or obligations. If you find it to be an issue, you might wish to speak with a therapist or counsellor.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Oct 07, 2022 12:51 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • Smartphones May Help Improve Memory Skills Rather Than Causing People To Become Lazy or Forgetful, Says Study

    London, August 2: Contrary to popular belief, a new study has found that smartphones and other digital devices could help improve memory skills rather than causing people to become lazy or forgetful. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that digital devices help people store and remember important information. This, in turn, frees up their memory to recall additional less important things.

    “We wanted to explore how storing information in a digital device could influence memory abilities,” said researcher Sam Gilbert from the University College London. “We found that when people were allowed to use external memory, the device helped them to remember the information they had saved into it. This was hardly surprising, but we also found that the device improved people’s memory for unsaved information as well,” he added. Smartphones May Be Causing Attention Deficit Disorder in Teens.

    Neuroscientists have previously expressed concerns that the overuse of technology could result in the breakdown of cognitive abilities and cause “digital dementia”. However, the findings show that using a digital device as external memory not only helps people to remember the information saved on the device, but it also helps them to remember unsaved information too.

    For the study, researchers developed a memory task to be played on a touchscreen digital tablet or computer. The test was undertaken by 158 volunteers aged between 18 and 71.

    Participants were shown up to 12 numbered circles on the screen, and had to remember to drag some of these to the left and some to the right. The number of circles they remembered dragging to the correct side determined their pay at the end of the experiment.

    One side was designated ‘high value,’ meaning that remembering to drag a circle to this side was worth 10 times as much money as remembering to drag a circle to the other ‘low value’ side.

    Participants performed this task 16 times. They had to use their own memory to remember half of the trials and they were allowed to set reminders on the digital device for the other half.

    The results found that participants tended to use digital devices to store the details of the high-value circles. And, when they did so, their memory for those circles was improved by 18 per cent.

    Their memory for low-value circles was also improved by 27 per cent, even in people who had never set any reminders for low-value circles.However, results also showed a potential cost of using reminders.

    When they were taken away, the participants remembered the low-value circles better than the high-value ones, indicating that they had entrusted the high-value circles to their devices and then forgotten about them.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Aug 03, 2022 10:57 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • Neighborhood With More Dogs Have Less Chances of Crime, Robbery and Homicide, Suggests Study

    Washington [US], July 5: In a study conducted in Columbus, researchers found that neighborhoods with more dogs had lower rates of homicide, robbery and to a lesser extent, aggravated assaults compared to areas with fewer dogs, at least when residents also had high levels of trust in each other. The results, published recently in the journal Social Forces, suggest that people walking their dogs puts more “eyes on the street,” which can discourage crime, said Nicolo Pinchak, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in sociology at The Ohio State University.

    “People walking their dogs are essentially patrolling their neighborhoods,” Pinchak said. “They see when things are not right, and when there are suspect outsiders in the area. It can be a crime deterrent.” Sociologists have long theorized that a combination of mutual trust and local surveillance among residents of a neighborhood can deter criminals, said study co-author Christopher Browning, a professor of sociology at Ohio State.

    But there hasn’t been a good measure of how residents provide surveillance of neighborhood streets. “We thought that dog walking probably captures that pretty well, which is one reason why we decided to do this study,” Browning said. For the study, researchers looked at crime statistics from 2014 to 2016 for 595 census block groups – the equivalent of neighborhoods – in the Columbus area. Study: Dog Ancestry Traces Back to Two Wolf Populations

    They obtained survey data from a marketing firm that asked Columbus residents in 2013 if they had a dog in their household. Finally, they used data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (which Browning runs) to measure trust in individual neighborhoods. As part of that study, residents were asked to rate how much they agreed that “people on the streets can be trusted” in their neighborhoods.

    Research has shown that trust among neighbors is an important part of deterring crime, because it suggests residents will help each other when facing a threat and have a sense of “collective efficacy” that they can have a positive impact on their area, Pinchak said. Results of this study showed, as expected, that neighborhoods with high levels of trust had lower levels of homicide, robbery and aggravated assaults when compared to neighborhoods with low levels of trust.

    But among high-trust neighborhoods, those with high concentrations of dogs showed an additional drop in crime compared to those with low concentrations of dogs. Among the high-trust neighborhoods, neighborhoods high in dog concentration had about two-thirds the robbery rates of those low in dog concentration and about half the homicide rates, the study found. It really has to do with the dog walking, Pinchak said. “Trust doesn’t help neighborhoods as much if you don’t have people out there on the streets noticing what is going on. That’s what dog walking does,” Pinchak stated. And that’s why dogs have a crime-fighting advantage over cats and other pets that don’t need walking. Dog Home Foundation, a Foundation With the Vision of Providing the Greatest Medical Care to Ill-Treated Pets

    “When people are out walking their dogs, they have conversations, they pet each other’s dogs. Sometimes they know the dog’s name and not even the owners. They learn what’s going on and can spot potential problems.”

    Results showed that the trust and dog-walking combination helped reduce street crimes: those crimes like homicides and robberies that tend to occur in public locations, including streets and sidewalks.

    The study found that more dogs in a neighborhood was also related to fewer property crimes, like burglaries, irrespective of how much residents trust each other, Pinchak said. That’s because barking and visible dogs can keep criminals away from buildings where the dogs are found – and neighborhood trust and surveillance is not needed as a factor, as it is in street crimes.

    The protective effect of dogs and trust was found even when a wide range of other factors related to crime was taken into account, including the proportion of young males in the neighborhood, residential instability and socioeconomic status. Overall, the results suggest that it is beneficial to have a lot of trust in your neighbors to prevent crime – particularly if you add a lot of dogs and dog walkers. “There has already been a lot of research that shows dogs are good for the health and well-being of their human companions,” Pinchak said. “Our study adds another reason why dogs are good for us.”

    (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, Morning Tidings Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)

  • Google Searches May Be a Predictor of Domestic Violence: Study

    London, June 29: Google searches are an effective tool to track and predict domestic violence, especially in times of crisis, such as the period that followed the Covid-19 outbreak, suggests a research.

    When the Covid pandemic broke out and countries experienced a strict lockdown, news stories started reporting anecdotal evidence about women forced to live under the same roof with abusive partners.

    A team of Italian researchers, including from Bocconi University in Milan, analysed the relations between Google searches for nine domestic violence-related keywords on one hand, and calls to the Italian domestic violence helpline 1522 and to the emergency number 112 in Lombardy.

    The selected keywords were: 1522, abuse, home & abuse, home & rape, feminicide, rape, domestic violence, gender-based violence, and sexual violence. Google To Shut Down Hangouts in November 2022, Tells Users To Switch To Chat.

    The idea underlying the study is that the Internet — and Google in particular — may offer a medium to anonymously voice concerns about abusive partners and collect relevant information, the team wrote in the paper published in the European Journal of Population. Calls to the helpline measure potential risk of experiencing domestic violence, while calls to the emergency number measure actual violence.

    The frequency of queries for the keywords were consistently positively and significantly correlated with helpline calls across the whole investigated time period (2013-2020), with a time lag between search and call of around one week.

    But their predictive power increased after the Covid-19 outbreak, when traditional help mechanisms became harder to reach. The team also observed a worrying socio-economic divide.

    “Forecasts proved more reliable among high socio-economic status populations because they are better than other socioeconomic strata at googling effectively in this context,” said Selin Koksal, a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Bocconi.

    “It may be the case that individuals with lower socio-economic status use dialect or less targeted keywords, which could prevent them from reaching accurate online resources for seeking help,” Koksal added. Google Trains 8.4 Million MSMEs in Asia-Pacific Region, Helps App Makers in India.

    The study advises policymakers to track domestic violence-related searches and to accordingly intensify their support activities, both reinforcing services where and when searches become more frequent and raising awareness through the media.

    “They could also intervene in favour of disadvantaged people,” Koksal said, “by promoting internet literacy and, in the short run, convincing Google to show domestic violence support services among the top results, as it has done in the US.”

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Jun 29, 2022 06:09 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • UFO Sightings: NASA Creates Research Team To Study ‘Unidentified Areal Phenomena’ (UAPs)

    Washington, June 10: NASA on Friday announced that it is commissioning an independent study team to examine unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), the updated term now used to refer to “unidentified flying object” (UFO).

    The agency defined UAPs as observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena. It emphasised that the nine-month long study will be from a scientific perspective and that “there is no evidence UAPs are extra-terrestrial in origin”.

    “NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. NASA To Launch Three Research Rockets From Private Australian Space Port.

    The limited number of observations of UAPs currently makes it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events, the agency said. Thus, the study will focus on identifying available data, how best to collect future data, and how NASA can use that data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward.

    “We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space — and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That’s the very definition of what science is. That’s what we do,” Zurbuchen said.

    Unidentified phenomena in the atmosphere are of interest for both national security and air safety. Establishing which events are natural provides a key first step to identifying or mitigating such phenomena, which aligns with one of NASA’s goals to ensure the safety of aircraft.

    While NASA is coordinating across the government regarding how to apply the tools of science to shed light on the nature and origin of unidentified aerial phenomena, it will not be part of the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force or its successor, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronisation Group.

    “Given the paucity of observations, our first task is simply to gather the most robust set of data that we can,” said astrophysicist David Spergel, who will lead the independent study team.

    “We will be identifying what data — from civilians, government, non-profits, companies — exists, what else we should try to collect, and how to best analyse it,” he added.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Jun 10, 2022 12:32 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • One-Fourth Global Internet Users Susceptible to Attacks, Says Study

    New York, May 29: About a quarter of the world’s Internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their Internet infrastructure, find researchers.

    The structure of the Internet can differ dramatically in different parts of the world.

    According to computer scientists at the University of California San Diego, who surveyed 75 countries, 34 nations have transit ecosystems that render them particularly exposed, where a single autonomous system is privy to traffic destined to over 40 per cent of their IP addresses. Internet Services Temporarily Suspended in 7 Districts of West Bengal To Prevent Unlawful Activities

    In many developed countries, like the US, a large number of Internet providers compete to provide services for a large number of users. These networks are directly connected to one another and exchange content, a process known as direct peering. All the providers can also plug directly into the world’s Internet infrastructure.

    “But a large portion of the Internet doesn’t function with peering agreements for network connectivity,” said Alexander Gamero-Garrido, from UC San Diego.

    In other nations, many of them still developing countries, most users rely on a handful of providers for Internet access, and one of these providers serves an overwhelming majority of users. Not only that, but those providers rely on a limited number of companies called transit autonomous systems to get access to the global Internet and traffic from other countries. Researchers found that often these transit autonomous system providers are state owned.

    This, of course, makes countries with this type of Internet infrastructure particularly vulnerable to attacks because all that is needed is to cripple a small number of transit autonomous systems. These countries, of course, are also vulnerable if a main Internet provider experiences outages.

    In the worst case scenario, one transit autonomous system serves all users. Cuba and Sierra Leone are close to this state of affairs. By contrast, Bangladesh went from only two to over 30 system providers, after the government opened that sector of the economy to private enterprise.

    This underlines, the researchers noted, the importance of government regulation when it comes to the number of Internet providers and transit autonomous systems available in a country.

    The team presented their findings at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2022 online.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on May 29, 2022 05:58 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • Study Shows COVID-19’s Lingering Impacts on Brain

    New York, April 2: Covid-19 patients commonly report having headaches, confusion and other neurological symptoms but doctors do not fully understand how the disease targets the brain during infection.

    And now, researchers have found severe brain inflammation and injury consistent with reduced blood flow or oxygen to the brain, including neuron damage and death.

    The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, is said to be the first comprehensive assessment of neuropathology associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in a nonhuman primate model.

    The study also found small bleeds in the brain. Surprisingly, these findings were present in subjects that did not experience severe respiratory disease from the virus. COVID-19 Now More Prevalent Than Ever in England, Says Report.

    “Because the subjects didn’t experience significant respiratory symptoms, no one expected them to have the severity of disease that we found in the brain,” said lead investigator Tracy Fischer from Tulane University in the US.

    “But the findings were distinct and profound, and undeniably a result of the infection,” Fischer added. The researchers said that the findings are also consistent with autopsy studies of people who have died of Covid-19, suggesting that nonhuman primates may serve as an appropriate model, or proxy, for how humans experience the disease.

    Neurological complications are often among the first symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection and can be the most severe and persistent. They also affect people indiscriminately — all ages, with and without comorbidities, and with varying degrees of disease severity.

    (The above story first appeared on Morning Tidings on Apr 02, 2022 07:24 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website morningtidings.com).

  • Social Media Use Impacts Wellbeing in Teenagers, Finds Study

    London, March 28: Girls and boys might be more vulnerable to the negative effects of social media use at different times during their adolescence, according to a UK research on Monday.

    In a study involving University of Oxford and Cambridge experts published in ‘Nature Communications’, data shows that girls experience a negative link between social media use and life satisfaction when they are 11-13 years old and boys when they are 14-15 years old. Social Media Platforms Such As Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook Fuelling Eating Disorders in Teens: Study.

    Increased social media use also predicts lower life satisfaction at the age of 19 years for both genders. This suggests sensitivity to social media use might be linked to developmental changes, possible changes in the structure of the brain, or to puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls.

    “The link between social media use and mental wellbeing is clearly very complex,” said Dr Amy Orben, from the University of Cambridge, who led the study.

    “Changes within our bodies, such as brain development and puberty, and in our social circumstances appear to make us vulnerable at particular times of our lives,” she said.

    “I wouldn’t say that there is a specific age group we should all be worried about. We should all be reflecting on our social media use and encouraging those conversations but we need to understand what is driving these changes across the age groups and between genders,” she added.

    The expert noted the very large individual differences, which means there may be certain teenagers that benefit from their use of social media whilst at the same time, someone else is harmed.

    For both girls and boys, the research revealed that social media use at the age of 19 years was associated with a decrease in life satisfaction. At this age, say the researchers, it is possible social changes – such as leaving home or starting work – may make us vulnerable.

    “Currently the amount of time young people spend on social media is a ‘black box’ to scientists and parents alike,” said Professor Andrew Przybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute.

    “To improve our science we need better data and to improve parenting around tech we need to start a new conversation. It’s not about social media being good or bad, it’s about what young people are up to, why they are using it, and how they feel about it fits into the greater picture of family life,” he said.

    The study notes that social media has fundamentally changed how young people spend time, share information and talk to others. This has led to widespread concern about its potential negative impact. Yet, even after years of research, there is still considerable uncertainty about how social media relates to wellbeing.

    The team, therefore, set out to look for a connection between estimated social media use and reported life satisfaction and found key periods of adolescence where social media use was associated with a subsequent decrease in life satisfaction. The researchers also found teens who have lower than average life satisfaction later use more social media.

    “With our findings, rather than debating whether or not the link exists, we can now focus on the periods of our adolescence where we now know we might be most at risk and use this as a springboard to explore some of the really interesting questions,” adds Dr Orben.

    The team, including psychologists, neuroscientists and modellers, analysed two UK datasets comprising some 84,000 individuals between the ages of 10 and 80 years old. These included longitudinal data – that is, data that tracks individuals over a period of time – on 17,400 young people aged 10-21 years old.

    The team also included researchers from the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. They point out that, while their findings show at a population level that there is a link between social media use and poorer wellbeing, it is not yet possible to predict which individuals are most at risk.

    (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, Morning Tidings Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)