Third-party web cookies are often used for privacy-invasive behavior tracking. Partly due to privacy concerns, browser vendors have started to block all third-party cookies in recent years. To understand the effects of such third-party cookieless browsing, we crawled and measured the top 10,000 Tranco websites. We developed a framework to remove third-party cookies and analyze the differences between the appearance of web pages with and without these cookies. We find that disabling third-party cookies has no substantial effect on website appearance including layouts, text, and images. This validates the industry-wide shift towards cookieless browsing as a way to protect user privacy without compromising on the user experience.

Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an increased workspace, with potential application in home environments. This paper presents an approach for design optimization of such robots to reach specified targets while minimizing the number of discrete joints and thus construction and actuation costs. We define a maximum number of allowable joints, as well as hardware constraints imposed by the materials and actuation available for soft growing robots, and we formulate and solve an optimization problem to output a planar robot design, i.e., the total number of potential joints and their locations along the robot body, which reaches all the desired targets, avoids known obstacles, and maximizes the workspace. We demonstrate a process to rapidly construct the resulting soft growing robot design. Finally, we use our algorithm to evaluate the ability of this design to reach new targets and demonstrate the algorithm's utility as a design tool to explore robot capabilities given various constraints and objectives.

This paper explores the question as to whether there is a relationship between a student's spatial abilities and her achievement in learning to program. After noting that there does seem to be a correlation, the paper explores the impact of trying to improve a student's spatial abilities. The paper reports on a preliminary study involving high school students. The study results suggest a correlation exists between receiving training in spatial skills and improved student performance in introductory computing. While the sample size in the study is small, this improvement appears to occur for students of different races/ethnicities and across different socio-economic statuses.