Are the Well Read More Likely to Succeed?

By: Alexandria Addesso

With television, movies, and the internet to entertain us many have been reading less and less. So much information can now be attained in small sound bites or social media posts, which often leaves large knowledge filled tomes on the shelf. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “reading has declined among every group of adult Americans,” and for the first time in American history, “less than half of the United States adult American population is reading literature.” But could this trend be detrimental? How important is reading and how does it affect a person’s chances at achieving success in their lifetime?



Studies done at The New School, a New York City private University found that reading is crucial for socialization especially in children. Researchers also found evidence that literary fiction improves a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling. In one study done by the university and published in Science, participants read non-fiction/nothing, popular fiction, or literary fiction then were tested on their ability to understand other people’s thoughts and emotions. Participants that read non-fiction/nothing showed unimpressive results. When they read excerpts of popular fiction their test results were dually insignificant. But, when they read literary fiction their test results improved vastly and so did their capacity for empathy.

Reading is also the key for those who want to be leaders or chief executive officers (CEO). Reading in general has shown to increases verbal intelligence, making a leader a more adept as well as a more articulate communicator. Being that reading is a form of leisurely recreation, it has been shown to be a good stress reliever which overall leads to a more peaceful work environment. Some very well read successful people include Steve Jobs the founder of Apple, Phil Knight the founder of Nike, and Winston Churchill who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.



Currently about 60 million Americans suffer from some form of a sleep disorder. A lack of sleep can negatively affect a person’s mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Sleep experts often recommend establishing a regular de-stressing routine before bed to calm your mind and ready your body for rest. Reading is one of the top strategies recommended to add to your routine right before going to sleep. Bright lights from electronic devices signal the brain to wake up, whereas reading a book under a dim light can tell your system to do the inverse.

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The Internet and your brain are more alike than you think

Salk scientist finds similar rule governing traffic flow in engineered and biological systems. Credit: Salk Institute

A similar rule governs traffic flow in engineered and biological systems, reports a researcher. An algorithm used for the Internet is also at work in the human brain, says the report, an insight that improves our understanding of engineered and neural networks and potentially even learning disabilities.

Although we spend a lot of our time online nowadays -- streaming music and video, checking email and social media, or obsessively reading the news -- few of us know about the mathematical algorithms that manage how our content is delivered. But deciding how to route information fairly and efficiently through a distributed system with no central authority was a priority for the Internet's founders. Now, a Salk Institute discovery shows that an algorithm used for the Internet is also at work in the human brain, an insight that improves our understanding of engineered and neural networks and potentially even learning disabilities.



"The founders of the Internet spent a lot of time considering how to make information flow efficiently," says Salk Assistant Professor Saket Navlakha, coauthor of the new study that appears online in Neural Computation on February 9, 2017. "Finding that an engineered system and an evolved biological one arise at a similar solution to a problem is really interesting."
In the engineered system, the solution involves controlling information flow such that routes are neither clogged nor underutilized by checking how congested the Internet is. To accomplish this, the Internet employs an algorithm called "additive increase, multiplicative decrease" (AIMD) in which your computer sends a packet of data and then listens for an acknowledgement from the receiver: If the packet is promptly acknowledged, the network is not overloaded and your data can be transmitted through the network at a higher rate. With each successive successful packet, your computer knows it's safe to increase its speed by one unit, which is the additive increase part. But if an acknowledgement is delayed or lost your computer knows that there is congestion and slows down by a large amount, such as by half, which is the multiplicative decrease part. In this way, users gradually find their "sweet spot," and congestion is avoided because users take their foot off the gas, so to speak, as soon as they notice a slowdown. As computers throughout the network utilize this strategy, the whole system can continuously adjust to changing conditions, maximizing overall efficiency.

Navlakha, who develops algorithms to understand complex biological networks, wondered if the brain, with its billions of distributed neurons, was managing information similarly. So, he and coauthor Jonathan Suen, a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University, set out to mathematically model neural activity.



Because AIMD is one of a number of flow-control algorithms, the duo decided to model six others as well. In addition, they analyzed which model best matched physiological data on neural activity from 20 experimental studies. In their models, AIMD turned out to be the most efficient at keeping the flow of information moving smoothly, adjusting traffic rates whenever paths got too congested. More interestingly, AIMD also turned out to best explain what was happening to neurons experimentally.

It turns out the neuronal equivalent of additive increase is called long-term potentiation. It occurs when one neuron fires closely after another, which strengthens their synaptic connection and makes it slightly more likely the first will trigger the second in the future. The neuronal equivalent of multiplicative decrease occurs when the firing of two neurons is reversed (second before first), which weakens their connection, making the first much less likely to trigger the second in the future. This is called long-term depression. As synapses throughout the network weaken or strengthen according to this rule, the whole system adapts and learns.

"While the brain and the Internet clearly operate using very different mechanisms, both use simple local rules that give rise to global stability," says Suen. "I was initially surprised that biological neural networks utilized the same algorithms as their engineered counterparts, but, as we learned, the requirements for efficiency, robustness, and simplicity are common to both living organisms and the networks we have built."



Understanding how the system works under normal conditions, could help neuroscientists better understand what happens, when these results are disrupted, for example, in learning disabilities. "Variations of the AIMD algorithm are used in basically every large-scale distributed communication network," says Navlakha. "Discovering that the brain uses a similar algorithm may not be just a coincidence."
Story Source:
Materials provided by Salk Institute.

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DDoS Attacks: Bringing Websites to a Halt

By: Alexandria Addesso

Imagine your personal, business, or corporate computer servers completely flooded to the point that they cannot be accessed, halting any attempts at transactions on a given website. This could be crippling to a small business, devastating to a large corporation, and a threat to security for a government.

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is usually carried out by a group of hackers that create a swarm of false traffic to a website by commonly done by requesting information. This form of hacking is not done to steal user information or money but to cease business for a matter of time which would result in a lost of capital gains for the amount of time that the website is inaccessible.



“Well it's not that hard, there are places on the web you can acquire software that can do it with relative ease. Some of the more sophisticated software can be found on the dark web,” said IT specialist Eric Torres.

Just recently a DDoS attack was carried out against Australian Census Bureau's server. The site had to be immediately shut down to secure the integrity of the data. In the past two years there have also been DDoS attacks done against Irish and Thai government servers.
“Any server on the public internet is at risk. When a DDoS attack takes place basically you are overwhelming a particular system or systems with requests that it basically comes to a crawl or stop responding all together,” said Torres.

Even highly secure United States government servers have fell victim to DDoS attacks. In March 2015 a group of hackers connected to the twitter handle “ @Vikingdom2015” took down several government sites including Maine.gov and In.gov.

“We will knock all American government’s websites offline. We do not care if we get caught. We all like doing this. So you better be prepared for the battle,” said an audio clip on a SoundCloud account connected to @Vikingdom2015.

Although there is now a market out there of software to supposedly stop DDoS attacks, in reality every server online is at risk.



“Don’t connect to the internet,” said Torres. “Not connecting to server to the Internet may not be feasible and 99.9 percent of the cases but it's the only way almost guarantee you will not be attacked.”

Or at the very least, don’t piss off any hackers.

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