The researchers suggests several ways to make 3-D printing more secure. Perhaps the simplest deterrent from such an attack is distance. The ability to obtain accurate data for simple objects diminished to 87 percent at 30 centimeters, and 66 percent at 40 centimeters, according to the study.
Another option is to increase the print speed. The researchers said that emerging materials may allow 3-D printers to work faster, thus making it more difficult for smartphone sensors to determine the print nozzle's movement.
Other ideas include software-based solutions, such as programming the printer to operate at different speeds, and hardware-based ideas, such as acoustic and electromagnetic shields.
A new service developed at Binghamton University, State University of New York could improve performance of mobile devices that save data to the cloud.
Storage and computing power is limited on mobile devices, making it necessity to store data in the cloud. However, with the myriad of apps from a myriad of developers that use the cloud, the user experience isn't always smooth. Battery life can be taxed due to extended synchronization times and clogged networks when multiple apps are trying to access the cloud all at the same time.
"We may be using many different apps developed by different developers that make use of cloud storage services, whereas on PCs we tend to use apps offered by the official providers. This app and developer diversity can cause problems due to a developer's inexperience and/or carelessness," said Yifin Zhang, assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University's Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Zhang and a team of Binghamton University researchers designed and developed StoArranger, a service to intercept, coordinate and optimize requests made by mobile apps and cloud storage services. StoArranger works as a "middleware system," so there is no change to how apps or an iPhone or Android-device run, just improved performance of both the device and the network overall. Essentially, StoArranger takes cloud storage requests -- either to upload a file or to open a file for editing -- and orders them in the best way to save power, get things completed as quickly as possible and minimize the amount of data used to complete the tasks.
Even though the work could affect millions of mobile devices and users -- e.g. Microsoft's cloud computing and storage system Azure had 10 trillion objects stored on its servers as of January 2015 -- it is only a promising first step in the development of StoArranger, which isn't commercially available. Further research is scheduled for evaluation experiments, and a full paper will be submitted later this year.
"We are planning on developing an app for public use," Zhang said. "We are trying to solve problems without changing operating systems or the existing apps, which makes our solution practical and scalable to existing smartphone users."
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Zhang presented the paper with Binghamton PhD candidates Yongshu Bai and Xin Zhang, both co-authors of the paper, at the proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys '16) in Hong Kong in August.
"The programming committee thought the work presented is a good demonstration of the negative effects of the way that current cloud storage providers chose to deploy their services," said Zhang. "The solution we proposed could be a practical way to solve the problem."
This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Playing a violent video game can increase aggression, and when a player keeps thinking about the game, the potential for aggression can last for as long as 24 hours, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).
Violent video game playing has long been known to increase aggression. This study, conducted by Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University and Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University, shows that at least for men, ruminating about the game can increase the potency of the game's tendency to lead to aggression long after the game has been turned off.
The researchers randomly assigned college students to play one of six different video games for 20 minutes. Half the games were violent (e.g., Mortal Kombat) and half were not (e.g., Guitar Hero). To test if ruminating about the game would extend the games' effect, half of the players were told over "the next 24 hours, think about your play of the game, and try to identify ways your game play could improve when you play again."
Bushman and Gibson had the participants return the next day to test their aggressiveness. For men who didn't think about the game, the violent video game players tested no more aggressive than men who had played non-violent games. But the violent video game playing men who thought about the game in the interim were more aggressive than the other groups. The researchers also found that women who played the violent video games and thought about the games did not experience increased aggression 24 hours later.
This study is the first laboratory experiment to show that violent video games can stimulate aggression for an extended period of time. The authors noted that it is "reasonable to assume that our lab results will generalize to the 'real world.' Violent gamers usually play longer than 20 minutes, and probably ruminate about their game play in a habitual manner."
Playing video games for an hour each day can improve subsequent performance on cognitive tasks that use similar mental processes to those involved in the game, according to research published March 13 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Adam Chie-Ming Oei and Michael Donald Patterson of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Non-gamer participants played five different games on their smartphones for an hour a day, five days of the week for one month. Each participant was assigned one game. Some played games like Bejeweled where participants matched three identical objects or an agent-based virtual life simulation like The Sims, while others played action games or had to find hidden objects, as in Hidden Expedition.
After this month of 'training', the researchers found that people who had played the action game had improved their capacity to track multiple objects in a short span of time, while hidden object, match three objects and spatial memory game players improved their performance on visual search tasks. Though previous studies have reported that action games can improve cognitive skills, the authors state that this is the first study that compared multiple video games in a single study and show that different skills can be improved by playing different games. They add that video games don't appear to cause a general improvement in mental abilities. Rather like muscles that can be trained with repetitive actions, repeated use of certain cognitive processes in video games can improve performance on other tasks as well.
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