02.27.08

Privacy & Facebook

Posted in Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, ethics, technology at 12:05 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Andrea Arco, marketing director for the School of Engineering and Applied Science we observe at the research of Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concerning privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms.

Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. According to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.

Felt, a fourth-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at UVa, leads a research project on privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms and is investigating the information sharing that occurs when users download a Facebook application — a program that allows the user to interact with other users in interesting ways, from sharing music to playing games.

Although these applications add variety to a Facebook user’s profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Here’s how: anyone with an account on Facebook can create an application. Although this application appears as if it is part of Facebook’s platform, it is actually running on application developer’s server. When a user installs an application, that application’s developer is given the ability to see everything the user can see — name, address, friends’ profiles, photos, etc.

An experienced Facebook application developer, Felt said, “The Facebook privacy policy always seemed unsatisfactory to me.” It was this unsettling feeling that led her to investigate Facebook’s vulnerabilities. Working with David Evans, an associate professor in UVa’s Department of Computer Science and fourth-year physics major Andrew Spisak, Felt examined the 150 most popular Facebook applications.

She discovered that 8.7 percent of these applications needed no personal information to run, while 82 percent needed only the user’s public information: name, network, list of friends. Still, 9.3 percent require a user’s private information in order to function. Felt said, “since all applications receive access to private information, this means that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications unnecessarily have access to private data.”

Felt said, “there are currently no restrictions on what applications, and their developers, can do with user data. And though the Facebook “Terms of Use” warn developers not to abuse the data they have access to, Facebook cannot enforce this rule. In fact, when a user installs an application, the user’s computer communicates with the Facebook servers and the Facebook servers then communicate with the application developer’s servers. Once users’ private data leave the Facebook servers, the company has no way of knowing what happens to it.

Evans said, “an application developer could easily acquire personal information for millions of users. There is a risk it could be used to launch targeted phishing attacks, exploited by identity thieves or sold to marketing companies.”

Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.

Felt has developed and refined a privacy-by-proxy system and is building a prototype implementation — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name and other personal information.

Felt said, “this is the first step… Hopefully the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be a recent study by University of Virginia sociologist Elizabeth Gorman whose work came to the same conclusion, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.

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02.20.08

Pathogens & Parasites

Posted in Biology at the University of Virginia, Infectious Disease, Jacob Canon, Parasites, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, biology, biomedical engineering, immune, physical health at 12:10 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Mary Jane Gore, we look at the research of Dr. William Petri, chief of the UVa Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, and his study of a voracious parasite that is said to kill nearly 100, 000 people each year.

If you have ever contemplated working as a biological researcher then you would probably have considered these questions: what happens when a cell’s life ends? And, what are the mechanisms that control decay?

Contemplating just these types questions during a recent study, a UVa-led research team, directed by Dr. William Petri, chief of the UVa Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, made discoveries which are helping to stop one of the world’s most voracious parasites.

The team included Douglas Boettner (now completing postdoctoral work in Miami), U.Va. graduate students Alicia S. Linford and Sarah Buss and faculty colleagues Dr. Eric Houpt and Dr. Nicholas Sherman of UVa and Dr. Christopher D. Huston of the University of Vermont.

Their work revolved around the hypothesis that identifying molecules involved in the corpse ingestion would provide insight into how the amoebae cause colitis in children. These amoebae, properly known as entamoeba histolytica, cause colitis, or inflammation of the colon. They do this by attacking and killing human immune cells in mere seconds. It then it hides the evidence by eating the cells’ corpses.

In doing so, per data from Dr. Gerald Mandell of U.Va. Infectious Diseases and editor of Mandell, Douglas and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, 6th edition, this murderous marauder “on a global basis, affects approximately 50 million people each year, causing diarrhea, malnutrition and nearly 100,000 deaths.

Dr. Petri’s team identified a particular protein on the surface of the ameba called a kinase, PATMK. Their work, published in the Jan. 18 issue of PLoS Pathogens, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science, outlined a special technique called RNA interference, which inhibits the actions of this kinase, thus preventing the amoebae from eating the dead cells.

Dr. Petri, said, “by blocking this kinase, we have for the first time prevented the ameba from colonizing and invading the gut. This means that we are a step closer to preventing this disease, which wreaks havoc among children worldwide.”

The first author of the paper, Douglas Boettner said, “infection and further invasion into the gut require the clearance of dead cells in order to prevent immune recognition of the damaged tissue. PATMK is the first individual member of a large family of proteins to be assigned a function related to the clearance of dying tissue during pathogenesis.”

Boettner added, “this protein may be a pivotal vaccination target because these preliminary studies show that alterations in PATMK function reduced progression of amoebiasis in mice, a vaccine that ultimately would prevent this ameba from clearing the damaged host may draw in helpful immune cells, and thus help to clear this infection.”

Their work has shown how infection depends upon the ameba’s consumption of dead cells. By identifying the molecule that controls this consumption, scientists are one step closer to the ultimate goal of preventing the diseases caused by this parasite.

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concerning privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms such as Facebook.

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02.13.08

Financial Fraud

Posted in Business, Fraud, Jacob Canon, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, philosophy at 3:21 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Melissa Maki, we look at business ethics and strategy through the eyes of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and his search for the answers to these questions:

“What motivates a company to cook the books? AND What happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”

Arthur Anderson… Enron…The Mortgage Loan Crisis, these names and events are synonymous with corporate malfeasance. They symbolize a loss of business ethics that occurred when financial profits were prioritized above all else, even to the long-term detriment of the firm. So, what motivates a company to cook the books? And what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?

Such business ethics and strategy questions drive the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Harris joined Darden’s faculty in 2006 and has taught ethics and strategy courses for the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar on corporate governance and ethics. His teaching responsibilities in business ethics and strategy align with his research interests. Harris said, “at the Darden School, cross-disciplinary work is valued… we take ethics seriously, not only within the classroom but also in our research, it’s a great fit for me.”

Harris recently won accolades for his dissertation research at the 2007 annual meetings of the Academy of Management — one of the foremost professional associations dedicated to the study of management and organizations. His work titled, “Financial Misrepresentation: Antecedents and Performance Effects” won the Best Dissertation Award from the academy’s Social Issues in Management Division and was also one of six finalists in the academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division, an unusual cross-disciplinary accomplishment.

Harris’ thesis builds his academic theory through two related empirical studies. He examined nine years of data from a large sample of publicly traded corporations that were identified by the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, as having misrepresented their financial information.The first study, featured as the lead article in the May-June 2007 issue of Organization Science, focuses on predictors of a company’s propensity toward financial fraud.

In his study, Harris found two factors — relative performance and CEO incentive pay — were highly influential. That is, companies performing below average for their industry are more likely to compensate by misrepresenting their financial data. And surprisingly, the higher a CEO’s stock options as a percentage of total pay, the more likely a company is to cheat — running counter to the notion that incentive pay aligns the individual aspirations of management with the collective ambitions of a company. Harris controlled for other possible predictors, such as increasing board independence by having outsiders on the board and separating the CEO and chair roles in a firm, but he notes that they had “no effect whatsoever on preventing the cheating.”

In the second study, Harris looked at what happens to these companies once ethical violations are announced to the public. Predictably, they see an immediate downturn in their stock prices, but he also found that a firm’s operating performance was severely impaired. This negative impact on profitability was more persistent than market-based effects; even a year or two later, companies were still feeling the effects of their transgressions. On average, the companies’ operational profits dropped by nearly 50 percent. Harris said, “Firms do worse by doing bad. If they cheat, they take a big hit in overall performance.”

But, as with much of life…public perception matters more than reality. Despite his earlier finding that an autonomous board does not deter companies from committing financial fraud, Harris noted that corporations are able to recover from some of this negative fallout if they took swift steps to increase the number of outsiders on their board and replace their CEO. Harris went on to say, “the research shows that stakeholders value these things. Firms get rewarded for making such changes because we all think it is part of good governance — yet in the case of something like board independence, this is ironic, given that the data shows it has no actual preventative effect.”

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Dr. William Petri who directs a U.Va.-led research team doing research on a parasite said to kill nearly 100,000 people each year.

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02.06.08

Locked-In Syndrome

Posted in Cognitive Science, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, nuerology, physical health, physiology, sensory inputs, technology, visual processing at 12:06 pm by Jacob Canon

In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Linda Kobert, we examine the work of Dennis Proffitt, Professor and Director of the Cognitive Science Program, whose research focuses on creating computer interfaces to help make life more bearable for patients with ALS and other diseases that are the cause of locked-in syndrome.

Up to now, the most iconic connection to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is the famous farewell in Yankee stadium By Mr. Gerhig. Forced to retire from baseball, the profession he loved and was best known for, he became the personification of this devastating disease.

In 2002, Peggy Chun, a popular artist was diagnosed with ALS. This debilitating neurological disorder progressively destroys a person’s motor neurons. As a victim of this incurable disease, Chun can feel, see, smell, taste, think and imagine, but she can no longer move in any way. She is, in the parlance of the medical profession, “locked-in.” ALS is the most frequent cause of locked-in syndrome, which begins with numbness in the extremities and progresses upward until all motor function disappears.

Usually the last thing you lose is eye movement,” says Dennis Proffitt, U.Va. cognitive psychologist and Commonwealth Professor of Psychology. “When you lose that, you are cognitively alert, you can think, you can feel, but you can’t move a thing. As a result, you can’t communicate in any way. It’s awful.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Proffitt, his colleagues at Georgia Tech and a company called Archinoetics in Hawaii are working to develop computer interfaces that may one day make life for locked-in patients more bearable.

Scientists know different parts of the brain are activated when a person performs different functions. For example, moving the left arm activates an area on the right side of the brain, the back of the brain is active with visual imagery and the frontal lobe is active when one tries to focus attention on something. Proffitt’s system simply detects whether or not a particular area of the brain is actively engaged at the time.

With this in mind, researchers are currently testing a technology that allows Chun and other locked-in patients to answer simple yes/no questions. An interface using functional near infrared imaging (fNIR) assesses activity in Broca’s area, a part of the brain where verbal working memory occurs. They strap a device, just above the left ear that projects a light beam through the skull measuring changes in blood volume and oxygenation when Broca’s area is engaged.

With the device in place, subjects are asked to count in their head when they want to activate the verbal working memory and initiate a “yes” response. When they want to say “no,” subjects think of clouds or rest or think “la la la.” It’s a process that most people can engage easily without having to spend a long time training to do it.

Proffitt said, “it was hard for us to think of something we could ask a person to do — something easy to control, something you can turn on and off — that we could measure in this way. What we came up with was sub-vocal speech … talking to yourself. You could be counting, or you could be reciting a poem. We couldn’t tell the difference. We have no idea what you’re doing. We just know the kind of thing you’re doing.”

He stresses, “It’s not reading your thoughts, we can’t do that.”

Proffitt admitted, “at this time the system is primitive, but it’s a start. Right now it’s an on/off switch. What we want to do is to get continuous control so the person is not just activating … Not just ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but small to large, continuous control within some range. If we could achieve that in the next few years, that would be a huge improvement in what we will be able to do with the technology.”

For the half million people in the world with locked-in syndrome, having the ability to communicate, even in this primitive fashion, can make the difference between suffering in silence and a meaningful life.

But Peggy Chun isn’t waiting for the technology to evolve. This future icon of the human spirit refuses to be shut down. She uses the system now as a tool for creativity. With the sensor in place over her left ear, the artist activates Broca’s area to select shades from a palette that show up on a computer screen as horizontal gradations of color. She calls it “brain art,” and it may be simple, but it’s selling like hotcakes.

You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business concerning business ethics and strategy, as he looks to answer the questions, “What motivates a company to cook the books? And, what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”

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