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Unique Connectivity Lets Highly Creative People’s Brains Take ‘Road Less Traveled’ to Their Destination

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Sourced from Neuroscience News.com

Summary: The brains of highly creative people appear to work differently from those who are less creative in terms of connectivity, a new study reports.

Source: UCLA

A new study led by UCLA Health scientists shows highly creative people’s brains appear to work differently from others’, with an atypical approach that makes distant connections more quickly by bypassing the “hubs” seen in non-creative brains.

Exceptionally creative visual artists and scientists—called “Big C” creative types—volunteered to undergo functional MRI brain imaging, giving researchers in psychiatry, behavioural sciences and psychology a look at how regions of the brain connected and interacted when called upon to perform tasks that put creative thinking to the test.

“Our results showed that highly creative people had unique brain connectivity that tended to stay off the beaten path,” said Ariana Anderson, a professor and statistician at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA, the lead author of a new article in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

While non-creatives tended to follow the same routes across the brain, the highly creative people made their own roads.

Although the concept of creativity has been studied for decades, little is known about its biological bases, and even less is understood about the brain mechanisms of exceptionally creative people, said senior author Robert Bilder, director of the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity at the Semel Institute.

This uniquely designed study included highly creative people representing two different domains of creativity—visual arts and the sciences—and used an IQ-matched comparison group to identify markers of creativity, not just intelligence. The researchers analysed how connections were made between brain regions globally and locally.

“Exceptional creativity was associated with more random connectivity at the global scale—a pattern that is less ‘efficient’ but would appear helpful in linking distant brain nodes to each other,” Bilder said.

“The patterns in more local brain regions varied, depending on whether people were performing tasks. Surprisingly, Big C creatives had more efficient local processing at rest, but less efficient local connectivity when performing a task demanding ‘thinking outside the box.’”

Using airline route maps for comparison, the researchers said the Big C creatives’ brain activity is akin to skipping flights to connecting hubs to get to a small city.

“In terms of brain connectivity, while everyone else is stuck in a three-hour layover at a major airport, the highly creatives take private planes directly to a distant destination,” Anderson said.

“This more random connectivity may be less efficient much of the time, but the architecture enables brain activity to ‘take a road less travelled’ and make novel connections.”

This shows a head with a colorful cloud above it
“Our results showed that highly creative people had unique brain connectivity that tended to stay off the beaten path,” said Ariana Anderson. Image is in the public domain

Bilder, who has more than 30 years’ experience researching brain-behaviour relations, said, “The fact that Big C people had more efficient local brain connectivity, but only under certain conditions, may relate to their expertise. Consistent with some of our prior findings, they may not need to work as hard as other smart people to perform certain creative tasks.”

The artists and scientists in the study were nominated by panels of experts before being validated as exceptional based on objective metrics. The “smart” comparison group was recruited from participants in a previous UCLA study who had agreed to be contacted for possible participation in future studies, and from advertisements in the community for individuals with graduate degrees.

Sourced from Neuroscience News.com

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For Purpose Marketing to Work, Start With Invertising

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By Max Lenderman

As businesses realize the potential windfall from becoming more purpose-driven, such initiatives are increasing. There is no shortage of evocative statements coming from companies that had historically found pride in espousing naked capitalism and ruthless efficiencies.

These outward-facing messages and campaigns are imperative to look good in the eyes of the consumer and salve the shareholder itch for performance. And yet, there’s a massive disconnect between external communications and internal cohesion: No matter what good an organization says it does, it matters very little if it does not collectively align on and believe in the mission.

As ESG becomes the standard-bearer of a company’s purpose, it will increasingly need coordination and buy-in from all sectors of the organization—not just the marketing department. From finance to procurement, HR and investor relations, everyone needs to have the same ambition and drive for accountability.

It is said that a purpose-driven organization knows why it exists and who it is built to serve. If these two imperatives are not fully understood and embraced by everyone involved, then the company is in peril of falling flat at best and failing miserably at worst.

A study from Gallup that surveyed thousands of employees across hundreds of U.S. companies has laid bare the disconnect: Only 27% believe their company delivers on its purpose promise.

This is a staggering revelation. Despite the slew of corporate purpose statements, campaigns and leadership pledges that companies espouse, it is not registered by the very workers who must live it.

Organizations that unambiguously know why they exist and who they’re built to serve are indeed purpose-driven. The problem is where that knowledge is stored and activated. For most organizations, this understanding is housed and articulated only at the top and, unfortunately, rarely trickles down to rank-and-file employees.

How can leaders get their people to reflect on the purpose of the company, let alone their own purpose within it? How do the building blocks of an organization—business units, functional expertise, performance hubs, recruitment and development—get the autonomy and incentive to work more purposefully? How can purpose-driven actions like corporate social responsibility and philanthropy get integrated into the core of the business rather than remaining siloed and side-lined?

Click HERE to continue reading

Feature Image Credit: andresr/Getty Images

By Max Lenderman

@maxlenderman

Max Lenderman is CEO of Mudfarm Ventures and a member of the Adweek Academic Council.

Sourced from ADWEEK

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10 Clear-Cut Ways to Land That Dream Job After Age 50

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By Jenny Cohen | Edited By Ellen Cannon 

Find ways to turn your age into an asset as you search for that dream job after 50.

Just because you’ve been working for decades doesn’t mean you have to give up the idea of landing that job you always dreamed of. There is still plenty of time to switch jobs, grow your wealth, or go into another field. The best jobs aren’t limited to the young, and there are plenty of openings available to workers over 50 years old. However, you may have to take a different approach to land that dream job than you did when you were 20 or 30. Here are some things to consider if you want to make a change after 50.

1. Shorten your resume

You may want to list all of your accomplishments over decades of a successful career, but try to curate your resume to focus on your most recent achievements. Potential employers might not want to wade through pages and pages of your resume searching for relevant experience. A longer resume could also bore hiring managers before they get to the important pieces for a particular job.

2. Emphasize your expertise

When you edit your resume, make sure you still have relevant work experience on there that could be vital for a new position. Perhaps you increased revenue for your current company or added more customers to a previous employer’s roster. You may also want to have multiple resumes that emphasize different expertise depending on the position you’re applying for.

3. Drop the dates

As part of your resume refresh, think about dropping the dates on things such as when you graduated from college or when you worked at a particular job. There isn’t always a need to mention when you worked for a particular company or even list your length of time there. As part of your work to shorten your resume, you may also want to simply cut out positions you had more than 10 years ago to make your resume look less dated.

4. Optimize for search engines

Search engines have become more important to hiring managers as they try to handle hundreds or even thousands of resumes sometimes. So managers may weed out resumes based on keywords they’re looking for — or hiring software might do it automatically. A good way to make it through the search process is to check the job listing and see which words or experience they’re specifically searching for, then add those words or phrases to your cover letter and resume.

5. Mention technology

It’s a sad fact that many employers think older workers don’t know technology. Show a potential employer that you are plugged into new and innovative technologies. Make sure to include a section on your resume for programs or programming languages that you work with already. Add any certificates that you may have earned for technology specific to a possible position. You also may want to check out free online education programs that can get you up to speed on the latest things you may need to know.

6. Network

This may have been something you did when you first started your professional career, but it could still be important when you’re a few decades into your career. Work your current network and find out if colleagues, friends, or other acquaintances in your profession may have leads on open positions. And consider joining and being active in professional organizations or local groups. This may help you get your name and face in front of potential hiring managers.

7. Update your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is a great professional resource for workers regardless of age. You can create a new profile or refresh your existing profile to make it more appealing to hiring managers and recruiters. Remember to add search-engine keywords that will help them find you on the networking site. LinkedIn also has a jobs section listing open positions that may be a good fit for you.

8. Prepare for hard questions

Some recruiters may bring up your age during the interview process; that is illegal. Workers over age 40 are protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If a recruiter says you’re overqualified or may want a higher salary than a younger applicant, remember to emphasize your experience and willingness to share your experience with other employees.

Perhaps you might want to talk about your experience as a mentor to younger co-workers as a way to pass what you’ve learned on to others. You might also want to mention your ability to adapt and try new things on a team with other employees who may not be the same age as you.

9. Update your wardrobe

While you should be judged on your experience, it is possible that a hiring manager or recruiter may also look at what you wear or how you look as part of their decision making. Try to find business clothes that are modern instead of relying on a suit or skirt you may have bought 20 years ago. And if you’re doing video interviews, think about using a neutral background and perhaps investing in a light that may brighten up your face and work space.

10. Start your own business

If none of these options work, it doesn’t mean you have to give up the idea of landing your dream job. Instead, consider creating the job you want by starting your own business. Do research on how to start a business and take into consideration issues such as a business plan, ideas for funding, and how to market your new business. You’ll also want to look into the legal aspects of a new business such as getting a license, filing paperwork for an LLC, or figuring out accounting issues related to running your new endeavour.

11. Bottom line

There are plenty of great opportunities for workers over 50, and that dream job is within your grasp if you approach it in a way that emphasizes your experience and desire to work. So think about little changes that can make a big difference in helping you move forward to a new job and potentially earn more.

By Jenny Cohen | Edited By Ellen Cannon 

Sourced from Finance Buzz

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5 simple exercises to kick-start your creativity

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By Arianna O’Dell

The pandemic has prompted us to re-evaluate our approaches and philosophies toward work—not just our work-life balance, but our working lives as a whole. When the world could so suddenly change, what is that we value most?

In August 2021, 4.3 million workers quit their jobs, another dramatic step during the so-called “Great Resignation.” I have explored a variety of creative outlets over the last few years, from creating music to an online design store to dabbling NFTs. When I tell others about my various creative endeavors, many people respond that they “wish they could do something like that” and tell me they don’t believe they are a creative person. Creativity is a skill that can be developed over time, and it can lead you down paths and into careers you never considered.

Create for yourself first

One of the biggest obstacles to creativity is fear, and worrying about what other people think of your work. When I used to create music, I would ask my friends what they thought. I would cling to every piece of feedback and would be hurt when someone didn’t like the piece of art I had worked so hard on. It would paralyze me from releasing songs and the music would change into something that didn’t feel authentic. I quickly learned that when creating art, don’t ask for feedback, make what feels authentic and true to you.

Octavia Goredema, author of Prep, Push, Pivot: Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women, echoes the sentiment saying, “Don’t get attached to validation. Often, people won’t get what you’re doing while you’re creating something, or even after you’ve created something. That’s okay. Validation often comes long after the hard work is done. Not all opinions are equal.” Value your own opinion and you will feel assured about whatever you create.

Try new skills you believe you’re bad at

We tell ourselves we can’t do things before we even consider them a possibility. Then it becomes a habit, involuntary: “I’m not musical,” “I can’t paint,” “I don’t understand poetry,” etc. We believe these things because we may have tried these things once when we were schoolchildren and did not immediately excel or show talent with. I can vouch for this idea of charging ahead. I began making music with zero experience, purely because I love music and now my songs are considered for placement in television shows and movies.

Practice visualization. Mehta Mehta, a global executive creative director at Hogarth Worldwide, suggests, “Visualize in your mind, the moment, the position or the feeling you want to achieve. See it in detail, move around it, make it real in your mind and explore the many possibilities.”

Build a community of fellow creatives

Although people often view creativity as an individual effort, that creatives may start for themselves, many creative people I’ve talked to have a community of creative colleagues they engage with on some level or another. These circles are composed of cohorts they trust to bounce ideas off of.

Justin Gignac, a founder, and CEO of Working Not Working, a community for creatives, says, “My most successful personal projects were ideas I sat on for months, even years. The ones that kept popping back up and I couldn’t shake them. I’d tell my friends about the ideas so much that they’d finally ask, ‘That’s great, man, but when are you going to do it?’”

Inspiration can spring from those moments when your friends push you to try something new. Collaboration can also move this process along.

“Learn from the best,” says Meng Kuok, Founder of Bandlab, an app that helps those with no musical experience to create their own songs. “Listen, watch, consume whatever you can find online. Imitate, copy from your favourite artists note for note, stroke by stroke—the more colours you add to your palette by learning from the best, the more ideas and options you’ll have at your disposal when you try to paint your own picture.”

Make the time for yourself

Creativity requires daily practice, and it’s important to put in the work. Dedicating some time each day is ideal, but that’s not always conducive to every individual’s creative process. Whether it’s a small daily practice or carving out full days for yourself, it’s important to make the time.

“Every day, I challenge myself to come up with a list of 10 new ideas to grow my business,” says Ajay Yadav, founder of Simplified, an application that allows non-creatives and creatives alike to create their own graphics. You don’t have to be lifting heavy weights every day, even a little quick exercise can help keep your creativity fresh.

Build up to greatness gradually

You’ll find that even the smallest steps can lead to big strides in progress. Chase Jarvis, CEO of CreativeLive and the author of Creative Calling, underscores the importance of patient effort: “Don’t underestimate the power of creating something small every day, whether that’s a photograph, doing something interesting in the kitchen, or picking up that dusty guitar in the corner. Even for just a moment.”

No matter what your schedule is or what you have going on, it’s possible to bring your dream projects to life. When you dive in and face new challenges, you lead yourself down a path of a more purposeful career and life.

Feature Image Credit: Elīna Arāja/Pexels

By Arianna O’Dell

Arianna O’Dell is the founder of Airlink Marketing, a digital design and marketing agency helping companies create digital programs that drive results. When she’s not working with clients or traveling, you’ll find her making fun gifts at Ideas By Arianna and songwriting at Outsourced Feelings. More

Sourced from Fast Company

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How To Decide Where Your Site Needs SEO Investment The Most

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By Rodney Laws

Budgeting is a key concern for every business, regardless of its size or nature. “What of giant companies with remarkable cash reserves?”, you might ask. Well, they only have such resources because they budget so efficiently. Everyone faces the same balancing act: on one hand, trying to invest in the future, and on the other hand, trying to keep expenses down.

This certainly applies to SEO, because it’s something that can be pursued indefinitely. There’s no such thing as a perfect page. Even if there were, a simple regular update to the ranking algorithm would once again leave it short of perfection. You need to know when to stop your efforts and move on — and for that, you need to know what you stand to gain by doing more.

Any page on your website that you want indexed could deserve SEO investment, depending on what you’ve already done. Due to this, you must carry out some analysis to determine where to focus your attention. In this post, we’re going to identify some tips that can help you figure out which pages on your website are most worthy of search optimization. Let’s begin.

Look for straightforward technical issues

When something isn’t working the way you want it to and there are numerous potential causes, you should check the simplest ones first. This isn’t just because they’re far more common. It’s also because they’re relatively easy to resolve. In the SEO world, there are basic technical issues that can completely ruin rankings, so look out for those.

The most obvious example involves discovering that a page you meant to index has been rejecting crawlers. No crawlers means no rankings. Another example is slow loading. Maybe the page that’s doing the worst in the rankings is loading several times more slowly than others on your site, causing it to be penalised. Google prefers speedy websites for obvious reasons.

PageSpeed Insights is great for finding slow pages.

Line up these basic issues and make a priority of fixing them as soon as possible. If there’s one page riddled with them, that should be your focus until they’re all resolved. You’ll never get more impactful results in SEO (and more ROI) than when you fix simple technical issues: making progress after that gets a lot trickier.

You may be able to improve performance sufficiently through tweaking, but it’s possible that you’ll need an infrastructure upgrade. If you created your site through a free or low-cost website builder and invested minimally in hosting, for instance, it’s time to scale things up. This doesn’t mean you need to give up the freedom of open source ecommerce, though. There are managed hosting providers (such as Cloud ways) that give users the freedom to choose which systems they use and make whatever modifications suit their goals.

Shoring up your technical foundation and achieving strong reliability doesn’t mean you can stop, though. SEO fully justifies consistent budgeting, and should remain a priority for years to come. It’s just a matter of ordering. Get the easy wins first, and face the tougher challenges later.

Consider what a page may one day become

Next, you should think not only about what a page is for now but also what it might be in the future. High-value pages should adapt to visitor preferences and SEO standards, but you may also want to expand them to do more with the visits they receive.

Take something like a roundup page listing the best pizza places in Winnipeg. If it got enough traffic, you could make the content more detailed to include more places. This would allow you to add more affiliate links and make some more money. It would also make the page feel more credible and authoritative.

You could even start linking out to other pieces of content like the best curry places in Winnipeg or the best pizza ovens for making pizza at home. Searches like that are extremely actionable, and valuable as a result. It could eventually become one of your most important pages, driving a lot of affiliate revenue and earning you myriad links.

This kind of affiliate page can be very lucrative.

If you can look at a page on your site and see that kind of potential, start investing in SEO for it immediately. That way, it will be ranking relatively well when you start broadening the content. Conversely, if you see a page that’s never going to be more complex than it already is, then is there much value in trying to get it ranking better?

Carefully review your page analytics

The problem that a lot of people have with reviewing analytics is that they expect arduous work. They imagine poring through spreadsheets and tables for hours on end. What’s more, they suspect that it might never meaningfully pay off. Why go through such strain if that’s the case?

Thankfully, that isn’t an accurate conception of what this process involves. This is due to the proliferation of convenient analytics tools: even Google Analytics is reasonably intuitive when you get to grips with it. Using such a tool, you can easily follow all the stats that matter. The result? Enhanced data aggregation and a drastic reduction in time spent on manual review. That’s a huge victory.

When you follow your on-page analytics, pay close attention to any metrics that represent general success for you. Look at things like average time on site and number of unique visits. This will help you understand which pages are performing well and which aren’t. As a result, you’ll find it easier to allocate resources effectively.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to factor in the broader context when you’re dealing with pages that aren’t destination pages (or at least aren’t solely destination pages). Category pages and homepages are good examples. A homepage should be a good landing page, set up to rank well for relevant keywords, but it must do something with that ranking success: pass it on to more actionable pages (namely product pages).

For each page, root through all the links leading to or away from it, and think carefully about what role it plays in your website overall, as well as what role it could play if improved. Remember that there must always be a purpose beyond promotion (boasting about your brand might feel good, but it won’t earn traffic, nor will it convince people to invest in you).

Use competitors’ websites for comparison

Let’s say that one of your pages — not one of your most important, but not insignificant — is fairly mediocre when it comes to SEO. Does that mean you should invest in it? Well, before you decide, do some searches for relevant terms and find rival pages to analyse. How do they compare to yours? Are they better? Worse? Similar?

Beyond that, take a close look at what those pages offer because that’s extremely important here. Imagine that your website sells hats, and you have a page that sells top hats specifically. If it isn’t ranking very highly but none of the pages outranking it sell anything, that lowers the need to invest in the page.

You should still work on getting the ranking up at some point, but it isn’t particularly urgent. Anyone who wants to order a top hat will probably make their way down to your site at some point if it’s the highest-ranking sales page. Consequently, you won’t lose any customers to other stores. Only some thought leadership and brand credibility through not being top.

If your page were ranking more highly in general but under another store page, that would be a bigger reason to invest in SEO. A searcher who just wanted to go ahead and buy might just order through the first viable store result. It’s all about understanding context. What do you stand to gain or lose by putting time into SEO?

Conclusion

SEO is a vital part of running a business with an online presence (which should be almost every business these days). Unfortunately, it’s complicated and costly to carry out thoroughly. To work more efficiently, you need to pick out the pages that most warrant that level of investment.

Try these tips to give you a strong indication of where to spend. You should be able to come up with a shortlist of pages that you can optimise without breaking the bank. The result? Stronger rankings, lower spend, and less work. Good luck.

Feature Image credit: Pixabay

By Rodney Laws

Editor at Ecommerce Platforms 

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VPNs are digital ‘snake oil,’ expert claims — here’s why

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Here’s the true pros and cons of VPNs

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Most consumer VPN services overpromise what they can deliver and exaggerate their own usefulness, two security researchers said at the ShmooCon hacker conference.

“Lots of people use VPNs because they don’t actually know what they do,” said Yael Grauer, an investigative reporter at Consumer Reports. “People are spending a lot of money and they’re still getting hacked, or they’re spending a lot of money for protections they already have.”

James Troutman, a director of technology at Tilson Broadband, was more blunt in his own presentation later that same day.

“VPNs are internet snake oil,” Troutman said, comparing them to the worthless miracle cures that traveling salesmen used to peddle at the turn of the 20th century.

VPN claims vs. reality

Like the real snake oil, Troutman and Grauer explained, VPNs claim to resolve all sort of security and privacy ills, tossing around impressive-sounding but meaningless terms such as “unbreakable security,” “true privacy” and “military-grade encryption.”

The VPNs may claim in their ads and on their websites that they can protect your PC from hackers, or keep your passwords safe, or make sure that websites can’t track you. For that, they claim, it’s worth paying between $50 and $150 a year for their services.

In 2021, Grauer and a team from the University of Michigan tested 51 consumer VPN service providers. Along with Consumer Reports colleagues, she made more extensive analysis of 16 major VPN brands, including CyberGhost, ExpressVPN, Hotspot Shield, IPVanish, NordVPN, Private Internet Access, ProtonVPN and Surfshark. (Grauer and Troutman both warned against using lesser-known VPNs, especially free VPN services that pop up in mobile app stores.)

Grauer found that of the 16 well-known VPN services she analyzed, 12 made exaggerated claims about how much protection they really could provide.

One well-known VPN said “your data will never be compromised” if you used it, Grauer  documented in her white paper. Another VPN said it would “protect [you] from hackers and online tracking.” A third promised “absolute privacy on all devices,” and another guaranteed “anonymous surfing.”

Better privacy, but not better security

The fact is, Grauer and Troutman said, that VPNs can’t protect you from hackers or malware. While VPNs do increase your online privacy, they’re not doing much to make your computers and systems more secure.

VPNs also can’t stop your personal information from being disclosed in data breaches. They can’t stop websites from tracking you — there are many other ways to track you online besides just following your Internet Protocol (IP) address.

VPNs can’t prevent you from landing on phishing sites or from being tricked into giving your passwords to a criminal. They can’t “guarantee” your privacy, Troutman said.

“When people ask me if they should use a VPN,” Grauer said, “I tell them no, they should use a password manager instead.”

However, four of the 16 VPNs that Grauer and her team closely analyzed got high marks for honesty.

IVPN, Mozilla VPN, Mullvad and TunnelBear were clear and accurate about what VPNs could and couldn’t do. They also gave potential customers suggestions about other security and privacy best practices they could take, such as using two-factor authentication (2FA) and blocking browser trackers.

What VPNs can do

Both Grauer and Troutman said that there are legitimate reasons to use VPNs, and that for the most part, the better-known VPNs do a good job of making your network connections more private.

VPNs protect against “man-in-the-middle” attacks that you might encounter using open Wi-Fi networks in a coffeeshop or hotel, even though the risks of that are small now that most websites use encrypted connections.

VPNs make it more difficult for internet service providers (ISPs) to see which websites you’re visiting, although Troutman pointed out that your VPN will be seeing that information instead.

VPNs can help people in repressive countries evade mass censorship, such as Russia’s recent blocking of Facebook and Instagram. And, of course, VPNs often (but not always) can let you access overseas Netflix and other services that are geographically restricted.

But, Troutman said, VPNs in practice can’t do much to protect specific individuals from state surveillance. National intelligence agencies have means at their disposal that can easily evade the protections a VPN would provide a targeted person.

“Mossad is gonna Mossad,” Troutman said.

Grauer and Troutman added that while VPNs do a good job of masking the “old” form of IP addresses, known as IPv4, they don’t always work well with IP addresses using the newer IPv6 standard.

That’s because many devices’ IPv6 addresses are tied to the devices’ unique network-hardware information, part of a well-documented network privacy flaw that extends beyond VPN use.

What’s behind the VPN push

Yet the consumer VPN industry has grown to take in an estimated $30 billion per year, partly through repeating unverifiable claims and exploiting consumers’ fear of surveillance technology, Troutman said.

One big impetus for VPN adoption was Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks of NSA documents that showed how extensive American data collection could be. Another was the U.S. Senate’s 2017 vote to block an FCC rule that would have prevented ISPs from reselling data about consumer behavior. And finally, many security experts and security-focused websites, including Tom’s Guide, did and do still recommend using VPNs.

VPN providers launched advertising campaigns around these issues, claiming that only paying for their services could preserve your online privacy. Advertising is still a big part of the industry.

“How many of you listen to podcasts?” Troutman asked the ShmooCon crowd. “It seems that every podcast is sponsored by a VPN.”

You can’t always count on review websites to provide honest information about VPNs. Troutman and Grauer pointed out that many of the VPN “review” sites you can find through a Google search are actually owned by VPN providers.

Even if a site recommends more than one VPN, recent VPN industry consolidation means that many of the largest brands are owned by the same few companies.

You bought the biggest threat to your privacy

Yet, as Troutman pointed out, the biggest threat to your privacy probably isn’t your ISP, or the websites you visit on your PC, or even (for most people) the NSA, CIA, Russians, Iranians or Chinese.

Instead, the biggest threat to your privacy is the smartphone you paid a lot of money for and carry around in your pocket.

It’s a state-of-the-art tracking device that constantly transmits thousands of data points about your online activities, your physical location, your travels, your health and your interests to the phone’s manufacturer, to your wireless carrier, and to the makers of most of the apps you have installed — “pervasive and sophisticated online user activity surveillance,” as Troutman put it.

Using a VPN on your smartphone will temporarily confuse some of these tracking methods, Troutman said, but not for long. There are many other methods of collecting your behaviour and information that don’t depend on an IP address.

What VPNs really are good for

So is there any downside to using a VPN that stretches the truth? Not that much, other than that you may be paying for something you may not need.

Grauer and her team found that most of the 16 top providers she looked at used strong encryption, had no known security flaws, didn’t collect much user information, didn’t share information with third parties, and had clear and easy-to-find terms of service.

They also found that if a VPN provider made exaggerated claims in bold letters about the benefits of using its services, those claims were often dialled back in the fine print.

Many of the top providers, however, could be more transparent about whether they log user activity, Grauer said. Almost all VPNs claim they don’t log what their users do, but Grauer’s team found that the VPN client software used by several top providers kept logs on users’ computers.

Many VPNs could also be clearer about how long they keep the user data they do collect, and many don’t let users see what has been collected about them.

Who should use a VPN?

So should you use a VPN? It depends what you want to use it for, said Troutman. Many ISPs keep logs of customer behaviour for years, and if that bothers you and you can find a VPN that you trust more than your ISP, go ahead and use it.

Frequent travellers who need secure connections while abroad will also need VPNs, although streaming content across national borders isn’t as reliable as it was a few years ago. And if you’re doing anything illegal in the country you happen to live in, a VPN should just be the first step in masking your online activities.

But for the average home user who isn’t concerned about what their ISP knows and doesn’t need to access streaming services from overseas, paying for a VPN might not be worth it.

Feature Image Credit: Wright Studio/Shutterstock

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Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom’s Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He’s been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom’s Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.

Sourced from tom’s guide

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A tool for predicting the future

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By Adam Zewe

Researchers design a user-friendly interface that helps nonexperts make forecasts using data collected over time.

Whether someone is trying to predict tomorrow’s weather, forecast future stock prices, identify missed opportunities for sales in retail, or estimate a patient’s risk of developing a disease, they will likely need to interpret time-series data, which are a collection of observations recorded over time.

Making predictions using time-series data typically requires several data-processing steps and the use of complex machine-learning algorithms, which have such a steep learning curve they aren’t readily accessible to nonexperts.

To make these powerful tools more user-friendly, MIT researchers developed a system that directly integrates prediction functionality on top of an existing time-series database. Their simplified interface, which they call tspDB (time series predict database), does all the complex modelling behind the scenes so a nonexpert can easily generate a prediction in only a few seconds.

The new system is more accurate and more efficient than state-of-the-art deep learning methods when performing two tasks: predicting future values and filling in missing data points.

One reason tspDB is so successful is that it incorporates a novel time-series-prediction algorithm, explains electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student Abdullah Alomar, an author of a recent research paper in which he and his co-authors describe the algorithm. This algorithm is especially effective at making predictions on multivariate time-series data, which are data that have more than one time-dependent variable. In a weather database, for instance, temperature, dew point, and cloud cover each depend on their past values.

The algorithm also estimates the volatility of a multivariate time series to provide the user with a confidence level for its predictions.

“Even as the time-series data becomes more and more complex, this algorithm can effectively capture any time-series structure out there. It feels like we have found the right lens to look at the model complexity of time-series data,” says senior author Devavrat Shah, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in EECS and a member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

Joining Alomar and Shah on the paper is lead author Anish Agrawal, a former EECS graduate student who is currently a postdoc at the Simons Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. The research will be presented at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference.

Adapting a new algorithm

Shah and his collaborators have been working on the problem of interpreting time-series data for years, adapting different algorithms and integrating them into tspDB as they built the interface.

About four years ago, they learned about a particularly powerful classical algorithm, called singular spectrum analysis (SSA), that imputes and forecasts single time series. Imputation is the process of replacing missing values or correcting past values. While this algorithm required manual parameter selection, the researchers suspected it could enable their interface to make effective predictions using time series data. In earlier work, they removed this need to manually intervene for algorithmic implementation.

The algorithm for single time series transformed it into a matrix and utilized matrix estimation procedures. The key intellectual challenge was how to adapt it to utilize multiple time series.  After a few years of struggle, they realized the answer was something very simple: “Stack” the matrices for each individual time series, treat it as a one big matrix, and then apply the single time-series algorithm on it.

This utilizes information across multiple time series naturally — both across the time series and across time, which they describe in their new paper.

This recent publication also discusses interesting alternatives, where instead of transforming the multivariate time series into a big matrix, it is viewed as a three-dimensional tensor. A tensor is a multi-dimensional array, or grid, of numbers. This established a promising connection between the classical field of time series analysis and the growing field of tensor estimation, Alomar says.

“The variant of mSSA that we introduced actually captures all of that beautifully. So, not only does it provide the most likely estimation, but a time-varying confidence interval, as well,” Shah says.

The simpler, the better

They tested the adapted mSSA against other state-of-the-art algorithms, including deep-learning methods, on real-world time-series datasets with inputs drawn from the electricity grid, traffic patterns, and financial markets.

Their algorithm outperformed all the others on imputation and it outperformed all but one of the other algorithms when it came to forecasting future values. The researchers also demonstrated that their tweaked version of mSSA can be applied to any kind of time-series data.

“One reason I think this works so well is that the model captures a lot of time series dynamics, but at the end of the day, it is still a simple model. When you are working with something simple like this, instead of a neural network that can easily overfit the data, you can actually perform better,” Alomar says.

The impressive performance of mSSA is what makes tspDB so effective, Shah explains. Now, their goal is to make this algorithm accessible to everyone.

One a user installs tspDB on top of an existing database, they can run a prediction query with just a few keystrokes in about 0.9 milliseconds, as compared to 0.5 milliseconds for a standard search query. The confidence intervals are also designed to help nonexperts to make a more informed decision by incorporating the degree of uncertainty of the predictions into their decision making.

For instance, the system could enable a nonexpert to predict future stock prices with high accuracy in just a few minutes, even if the time-series dataset contains missing values.

Now that the researchers have shown why mSSA works so well, they are targeting new algorithms that can be incorporated into tspDB. One of these algorithms utilizes the same model to automatically enable change point detection, so if the user believes their time series will change its behaviour at some point, the system will automatically detect that change and incorporate that into its predictions.

They also want to continue gathering feedback from current tspDB users to see how they can improve the system’s functionality and user-friendliness, Shah says.

“Our interest at the highest level is to make tspDB a success in the form of a broadly utilizable, open-source system. Time-series data are very important, and this is a beautiful concept of actually building prediction functionalities directly into the database. It has never been done before, and so we want to make sure the world uses it,” he says.

“This work is very interesting for a number of reasons. It provides a practical variant of mSSA which requires no hand tuning, they provide the first known analysis of mSSA, and the authors demonstrate the real-world value of their algorithm by being competitive with or out-performing several known algorithms for imputations and predictions in (multivariate) time series for several real-world data sets,” says Vishal Misra, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who was not involved with this research. “At the heart of it all is the beautiful modelling work where they cleverly exploit correlations across time (within a time series) and space (across time series) to create a low-rank spatiotemporal factor representation of a multivariate time series. Importantly this model connects the field of time series analysis to that of the rapidly evolving topic of tensor completion, and I expect a lot of follow-on research spurred by this paper.”

Feature Image Credit: Courtesy of the researchers and edited by MIT News

By Adam Zewe

Sourced from MIT News

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Report: The state of personalization in email marketing in 2022

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Given its privacy-oriented, opt-in nature, email is entering the spotlight as a tool for publishers to directly communicate with their readers and own more of the traffic that goes to their sites. As with all channels in the marketing mix, however, customers have expectations when it comes to personalization, context and relevance

However, given the increasing availability of utilizable, first-party data combined with advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, publishers are empowered to deliver personalization beyond a simple salutation to better serve their readers, drive loyalty and optimize the email newsletter as prime real estate for monetization.

To highlight the ways in which publishers are currently using personalization in email and how they plan to evolve their strategies, Digiday and Jeeng surveyed nearly 90 publisher representatives. This report delves into the results, and in conjunction with expert insights, provides an overview of the changing role of email personalization for publishers and how companies are adapting accordingly.

Download this new report to learn:

  • How personalization is evolving for publishers
  • How publishers are approaching personalization challenges
  • What outcomes are achieved with an optimized personalization strategy
  • Where personalization is heading in 2022 and beyond

 

Download Here

By Jeeng

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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6 Side Hustles You Can Start Today

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Sourced from Entrepreneur

These Upskillist Courses can help you start a side hustle.

These days, if it feels like everybody has a side hustle, it’s because a whole lot of people have a side hustle. More than a third of Americans have a side hustle today, and two-thirds of them started it in the last three years.

You haven’t been left behind if you haven’t picked up a side hustle yet, but consider it a good growth opportunity for 2022. During our Best of Digital Sale, you can save an extra 50 percent off courses from Upskillist to help you get started. Check out some of the courses on sale.

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Feature Image Credit: StackCommerce

Sourced from Entrepreneur

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