Plus: Bonuses Increase Cheating, Quantum Teleportation Breaks Records and Bill Nye Judges Oil Spill Solutions.

Man “Infects” Himself with Computer Virus
Computer viruses may have finally crossed the barrier between the digital and biological realms, as a British scientist recently claimed to be the first person to have successfully infected himself with a computer virus.

In an attempt to highlight the potential risks caused by the increasing prevalence of mobile technologies, Dr. Mark Gasson, of the United Kingdom’s University of Reading, implanted a tiny, virus-infected RFID chip into his hand, which enabled him to pass through security doors and transfer the virus onto external control systems, BBC News reports.

“We may improve ourselves in some way, but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses,” Gasson told the BBC. “Many people with medical implants also consider them to be integrated into their concept of their body, and so in this context it is appropriate to talk in terms of people themselves being infected by computer viruses.”

For the time being, Gasson’s experiment remains more a statement of principle than an examination of an existing threat, but as device implantation become a more widespread practice and networks increasingly incorporate mobile technologies, the chance of computer-to-human viral infections may grow.

“The issue of viruses moving from computer to human may not be the nightmare that Hollywood makes it out to be,” Yahoo! News’ Today in Tech blog notes, “but the threat is becoming more real than we might like to believe.”

Do Bonuses Make Employees More Likely to Cheat?
New research suggests bonus systems increase the likelihood of employees to cheat, calling into question the very notion of having this kind of incentive structure in the first place.

According to a study published in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy last month, “target-based compensation produced significantly more cheating” among subjects than other forms of performance-based compensation, which means that paying bonuses to encourage employee performance may improve productivity but also significantly raises the rate of false data from workers.

“The dark side of behavior can be affected by pay-for-performance schemes,” Fei Song, a co-author of the study and a professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, said in an announcement of the findings. “Faced with certain types of incentives, some people are tempted to make up or misrepresent their performance numbers, which can cause companies to lose revenue.”

The researchers tested 200 subjects for their ability to find anagrams under a time limit, using financial incentives to motivate their performance. One group had a linear system in which members received a bonus for each unit, a second group had a tournament system in which payment was relative to each others’ performances, and a third group used a target-based system wherein compensation was only received if a pre-set goal was met.

“Students receiving bonuses for meeting certain pre-set goals were ‘significantly more’ likely to cheat compared to students offered bonuses based on their performance compared with their peers or based on each word created,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Real Time Economics blog reports. The cheating rate also increased the closer a subject’s real performance was to the pre-set goal.

“To combat cheating, companies must have effective internal auditing/monitoring systems in place,” Song said. “This will help to control and weed out any misrepresentation, which can occur under any payment scheme.”

Bill Nye Tackles Oil Spill Solutions
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is probably already the worst in U.S. history, larger than even the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. Due to insufficient results from earlier containment methods, authorities have been accepting the public’s submitted ideas for capping the gusher.

In the following CNN.com video, beloved children’s television host Bill Nye the Science Guy, who has worked at skimming oil slicks in the past, evaluates some of the more appealing suggestions from concerned engineers:

Quantum Teleportation Breaks New Record
Quantum teleportation — the process of transferring the quantum state of one object to another over a given distance — reached a new milestone this month, when scientists succeeded in teleporting data over a record-breaking 10 miles.

Using new entanglement techniques coupled with spatial and polarization modes, researchers in China managed to teleport information between two photons 10 miles apart and through free space, according to Popular Science. Previous quantum teleportation experiments have only reached a maximum distance of a few hundred feet and only through fiber channels.

“‘[Q]uantum teleportation’ is quite different from how many people imagine teleportation to work,” science and technology blog Ars Technica explains. “Rather than picking one thing up and placing it somewhere else, quantum teleportation involves entangling two things, like photons or ions, so their states are dependent on one another and each can be affected by the measurement of the others’ state.”

The researchers claim the result of their findings, published this month in the journal Nature Photonics, “confirms the feasibility of space-based experiments, and is an important step towards quantum-communication applications on a global scale.”

The successful experiment is a major step toward communicating without relying on traditional signal transmissions, which is “decent enough for information, but still dangerous for the whole-body human teleportation that we’re all looking forward to,” Ars Technica notes.

In observance of Memorial Day, we will be shuttering IMT on Monday. We will back with a daily post on Tuesday. We wish all our readers a safe and happy holiday weekend, folks. Cheers.