How do you teach people how to use an interface that’s invisible? That’s been the marketing communications problem for Apple since the day Siri became the first big mass-market voice assistant.
They’ve taken stab after stab at it. The splash page that offers Siri suggestions if you activate it and don’t say anything. TV spots; tool tips; App Store promotions and interviews you may or may not have read about how much work they’re putting into Siri. They’re all an attempt to get you beyond the basic timer and weather queries.
And you tell me not be weary of the possibility of Skynet
Amazon’s Alexa is going to sound more human. The company announced this week the addition of a new set of speaking skills for the virtual assistant, which will allow her to do things like whisper, take a breath to pause for emphasis, adjust the rate, pitch and volume of her speech, and more. She’ll even be able to “bleep” out words – which may not be all that human, actually, but is certainly clever.
Augmenting the human brain with computers... literally
As if self-driving cars and space travel aren't extraordinary enough, Elon Musk is planning another startup straight out of the pages of science fiction: augmenting the human brain with computers.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has put his weight behind a new company dedicated to working on implants designed to interface with one's literal brain to increase human computing potential, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
In the future, it’s likely that many aspects of human society will be controlled — either partly or wholly — by artificial intelligence. AI computer agents could manage systems from the quotidian (e.g., traffic lights) to the complex (e.g., a nation’s whole economy), but leaving aside the problem of whether or not they can do their jobs well, there is another challenge: will these agents be able to play nice with one another? What happens if one AI’s aims conflict with another’s? Will they fight, or work together?
Photonic computing is not longer just a theoretical exercise.
The year has been chock-full of scientific breakthroughs, but the University of Colorado is determined to finish 2015 with a bang. Its researchers have created what they say is the first full-fledged processor to transmit data using light instead of electricity. The design isn't entirely photonic, but its 850 optical input/output elements give it the kind of bandwidth that make electric-only chips look downright modest -- we're talking 300Gbps per square millimeter, or 10 to 50 times what you normally see. The key was finding a way to reuse existing conventional processes to put optics in places where regular circuitry would go.
The design isn't a powerhouse with a tiny size (3mm by 6mm, or 0.1in by 0.2in) and just two cores. However, it shows the potential for dramatic improvements in computing power without having to completely reinvent the wheel. You could have networking gear that copes with massive amounts of data, for example. And there's plenty of room for optimization, too, so the possibilities for this technology remain wide open.
Chances are, like me, the first time you heard about the Dark Web it was described as a foul and depraved marketplace, where children, drugs, and pirated movies could be bought for mere Bitcoin. Tabloids paint it as a place where a veritable "Top 10" of our biggest fears resides. Opportunistic security companies sell threat intelligence services that allude to hunting for bad guys in dark dens that deal in organ harvesting, involuntary human experiments, and more.
Like most people, I find the siren song of lurid, spooky bullshit to be irresistible.
Sampling rates are important when we want to observe or record phenomena extending through time – for a stream of information of a given bit depth, we can capture a richer and more accurate portrait of whatever it is that we’re processing when we take samples or measurements more times per second. We measure the quality of an audio file in its bitrate, the performance of a monitor in its refresh rate, and the smoothness of a video by its frame rate. Now scientists from the University of Georgia have devised an elegant method of testing the visual sampling rate of the human brain.
The researchers used a metric called critical flicker fusion to assess the sampling rate of the brain in this recent experiment involving two cohorts: college-aged (average: 21 years old) and elderly (average: 72 years old) participants. Critical flicker fusion occurs when the observer can no longer distinguish between changing visual stimuli, like two colors of light flickering at increasing frequencies, the approach used by the researchers in this experiment. Many factors act upon the sampling rate of the human eye, but the processing speed of the brain determines the rate at which it can use the information provided to it by the optic nerve. Individuals in either cohort with a higher critical flicker fusion score went on to score higher, in the second half of the experiment, on tests of executive function: cognitive tasks requiring planning, reflection, and self-control.
Sony's had its Remote Play tech in one form or another since the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable, but it didn't truly take off until its implementation on PlayStation 4 and the PS Vita handheld. But that's kind of wasted when nobody is buying the Vita and it's getting zero love from its parent company. Remote Play PC is exactly what its name implies: an application that tricks the PS4 into thinking a PC is a Remote Play device. Microsoft changed the game (sorry) with the ability for the Xbox One to stream its games to Windows 10-based hardware and until Sony catches up we're just going to have to settle for an unofficial app that costs money to perform the task.
The developer (operating under the pseudonym "Twisted") says that the reasoning for charging for the application is to help make ends meet while working on it full time. "The only way to support this is to charge for the app, all my previous projects have been free and I don't want to have to, but sadly it's the only way to support my living costs," Twisted writes. In case you're curious about how it works before dropping the $10 (£6.50) on Wednesday, there's a video just below. It honestly looks like a better experience than Sony's PlayStation Now game streaming service, but until we go hands on with it for ourselves it's hard to tell exactly how this will work out in the wild.
Why would anyone even want this? Because while streaming to the Vita (or certain Android devices) works, having a bigger screen to play Fallout 4 or Until Dawn while traveling without the hassle of taking a PS4 through airport security honestly sound really awesome. There's also mouse and keyboard support. The question is how long Sony will let this slide before issuing a cease and desist. As homebrew and console hacking site Wololo points out, folks who pay for the app could be out their hard-earned money if the company steps in and shuts this down.
Google is looking to design its own smartphone CPUs and GPUs, according to new reports, because it can't find mobile processors that could push Android devices into new worlds of virtual and augmented reality. Camera and image processing performance are also areas Google needs help with, according to Ars Technica.
Earlier this year, a hacking group broke into the personal email account of CIA director John Brenner and published a host of sensitive attachments that it got its hands on (yes, Brenner should not have been using his AOL email address for CIA business). Now, Wired reports the group has hit a much more sensitive and presumably secure target: a law enforcement portal that contains arrest records as well as tools for sharing info around terrorist events and active shooters. There's even a real-time chat system built in for the FBI to communicate with other law enforcement groups around the US.
Neurosurgeons are being given given a new tool to improve the safety of their operations - lasers that show them where the edges of a tumour are.
As you might imagine, operating on a brain is not an easy task. Cancerous tissue looks just like healthy tissue, and surgeons have traditionally just used their best judgement in working out how much brain to remove.
Now however, a new type of microscope could change all that. The Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscope lets surgeons see the difference in real-time between normal brain tissue and tumour tissue.
Yeah, yeah — of course
a computer won at a math competition. That’s not the point. This story,
which concerns a rather amazing program called GeoS from the Allen
Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), is about the ability of AI
to usefully engage with the world. To a computer, with a brain literally
structured for these sorts of operations, the math SAT is not a test on
calculation, but reading comprehension. That’s why this story is so
interesting: GeoS isn’t as good as the average American at geometry,
it’s as good as the average American at the SAT itself.
One nice thing about 3D printing is that it doesn’t just make things possible, but that it makes them easier. Some complex shapes, intricate lattices of splines — sure, those might be hard to make by conventional means, but generally 3D printing is about putting old abilities in new hands. For instance, we’ve always been able to make precise casts of ancient artifacts — but it’s always been difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Now, 3D printing is making accurate recreation of relics as easy as passing it through a scanner, and that has big implications for science.
Space is big and mostly empty, but it’s the small part that isn’t empty that ends up being an issue for space exploration. Even a tiny piece of debris from a derelict satellite or ancient bit of space rock can cause damage to a spacecraft, and that damage can expose your fragile atmosphere-loving body to the harsh vacuum of space in a real hurry. Researchers from the University of Michigan working with NASA have developed a material that might add an extra layer of protection from space debris, a material that can heal itself to seal hull breaches.
Japan is yet to create any towering bio-machines in the style of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it's doing the next best thing: decorating a Shinkansen bullet train to look like the iconic purple Unit-01.
It's being put together by Japanese train operator JR West to celebrate the the 20th anniversary of the hit mecha anime, as well as the 40 years that have passed since the completion of the Sanyo Shinkansen line. In addition to its striking paint job, the "500 Type Eva" train will have an Evangelion-themed interior and heaps of special memorabilia for fans to buy. JR West says it'll launch this autumn and run until March next year, completing two trips between Hakata and Shin-Osaka each day. We're on board, as long as the train isn't required to fight any formidable Angels along the way.
WITH EACH PASSING DECADE, THE MARSHALL STORY HAS GROWN STRONGER. AND NOW WE ANNOUNCE THE NEXT CHAPTER. INTRODUCING MARSHALL LONDON.
With over 50 years of audio wisdom, Marshall London is the phone of choice for those who like to live life in stereo. High quality listening, minimal fuss. It’s time to change the way you listen to music. Join the revolution.
To celebrate the upcoming EVO 2015 fighting game tournament, Sony has launched a sale featuring fighting games discounted up to 60 percent across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita.
PlayStation 4 features a number of recent fighting game releases, including discounts on Mortal Kombat X, WWE 2K15, Towerfall Ascension, and Guilty Gear Xrd Sign. The bulk of the discounts can be found on PlayStation 3, including sales on Ultra Street Fighter IV, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle, Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma, and Darkstalkers Resurrection.
Last week, giant robot builders MegaBots slapped Japan with a white glove. They decided to challenge an imposing and impressive robot from Japan, Kuratas, to a mecha battle. The video above, released this weekend by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, confirmed that it is indeed on.
And Japan doesn’t seem intimidated in the slightest by MegaBots’ mech. “Come on guys, make it cooler,” said Suidobashi Heavy Industry founder Kogoro Kurata.
“Just building something huge and sticking guns on it. It’s….Super American.” (Awww sh**.)
Citing the role of giant robots in Japanese culture, Kurata accepted the duel, claiming that another country couldn’t win on principle. But Kurata doesn’t want just a manned mech paintball battle. He wants actual steel on steel melee contact.
“If we’re gonna win this, I want to punch them to scrap and knock them down to do it.”
There’s no word on when or where the battle will take place, but I think we’re all imagining the same thing:
Heads up, YouTube users: The Google-owned video service on Tuesday announced that you can now watch videos at a smooth 60 frames per second on its mobile apps.
"HFR FTW! High frame rate playback is available on the YouTube app for both Android and iOS," according to a post on the YouTube Creators Google+ page. This brings the mobile apps in line with YouTube on the desktop, Apple TV, PlayStation 3, and PS4.
The move comes after YouTube in June 2014 first announced plans to begin supporting 60 frames-per-second videos. Initially, just a handful of game trailers were available at the full 60 frames per second, but the feature began rolling out more broadly that fall.
In May, YouTube extended support for 60fps to livestreams as well, bringing it up to speed with Twitch. Before that, YouTube's live streams were only able to run at 30fps.
At this point, however, the new 60fps support on iOS and Android is just for videos, not livestreams, according to VentureBeat. You'll also need the official YouTube apps to take advantage of the higher frame rate playback, as it's not available via YouTube on a mobile browser or third-party apps (such as the one for Windows Phone).
To see the silky smooth video for yourself, check out the video below on your iOS or Android device. Just be sure to change the quality to either 720p60 or 1080p60.
Meanwhile, YouTube last month announced plans to launch a new gaming-focused site, which will rival Twitch. YouTube Gaming, slated to arrive this summer on mobile apps and the Web, will exist as a separate entity from YouTube so searches for "call" will bring up Call of Duty, not Call Me Maybe.
