Life’s Trajectory Seen Through Facebook Data

Data donated by Facebook users to Stephen Wolfram yields interesting patterns that may reveal how people change over time.

 Visualizations of the friend networks of people that donated Facebook data to Wolfram Alpha (Credit: Wolfram Alpha).

Mathematician Stephen Wolfram has posted a lengthy and interesting dissection of Facebook user data collected through a free tool his company Wolfram Alpha offers that analyses and visualizes your friend network.

A Simple Way to Turn Any LCD into a Touch Screen

Electromagnetic interference can turn a plain LCD into a touch screen on the cheap.

• By Rachel Metz on April 24, 2013

Why It Matters

It’s cheaper and less wasteful to modify an existing screen than it is to replace it.

Electromagnetic interference can screw up cell phone and radio reception. But it may also be the key to cheaply transforming regular LCD screens into touch- and gesture-sensing displays, according to recent research.

How Tumblr Forces Advertisers to Get Creative

What the blog network’s monetization plans say about the future of publishing.

David Zax

April 24, 2013

 

Tumblr, sometimes unfairly shorthanded as the “hipster blogging service,” is now the ninth most visited site in the U.S. It’s a favorite of mobile phone users–to wit, Tumblr has even put out a dedicated app on Windows Phone 8, just this week. And yet Tumblr still isn’t profitable, six years in.

Microsoft to announce next-gen Xbox on May 21

Agam Shah, IDG News Service @agamsh

Eight years after the first Xbox 360 units shipped, Microsoft will finally pull the curtains off its long-awaited successor on May 21.

The company will hold a press event at 10 a.m. PDT at its Redmond headquarters that day that will be live-streamed on the Web on Xbox Live, Xbox.com, and Spike TV.

Hassle-Free PC Smart fixes for your PC hassles

Use SpeedTest To Help Diagnose Internet Problems

Rick Broida @justrick

Apr 24, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

For the past week or so, I've been trying to pinpoint a problem with my Internet connection.
 

Usually I blame Comcast, my ISP, but a typical Comcast outage is exactly that: a total interruption of service. I can tell from looking at the System Tray network icon that there's no connection.

Samsung testing brain-powered tablets

AFP Relax – Tue, Apr 23, 2013

Tech giant Samsung is looking to ditch not only the keyboard but the touch screen in favor of mind control.

The technology, which Samsung stresses is in its infancy, would allow users to control a computing device with their thoughts alone.

Another Reason to Clean Up Tweet

Stock plunge another reminder of social media’s power – and the need for fact-checking

David Talbot

April 24, 2013

 

Yesterday saw the most extreme example possible of why rapid crowdsourced corrections of Tweets and other social media (see “Preventing Misinformation From Spreading Through Social Media”) are critically needed– an issue that came to the fore last week as misinformation spread about the Boston bombings.

Yesterday, the Dow plunged about 150 points and then recovered after an Associated Press Twitter account was hacked, with the hackers then posting a false report that the White House had been bombed and President Obama injured.

Your Body Does Not Want to Be an Interface

Have you heard that Google Glass will let you snap photos by winking? Why that’s still going to feel weird.

John Pavlus

April 24, 2013

Image by Jason Brush

The first real-world demo of Google Glass’s user interface made me laugh out loud. Forget the tiny touchpad on your temples you’ll be fussing with, or the constant “OK Glass” utterances-to-nobody: the supposedly subtle “gestural” interaction they came up with–snapping your chin upwards to activate the glasses, in a kind of twitchy, tech-augmented version of the “bro nod”–made the guy look like he was operating his own body like a crude marionette. The most “intuitive” thing we know how to do–move our own bodies–reduced to an awkward, device-mediated pantomime: this is “getting technology out of the way”?

Google Joins PayPal-Backed Effort to Kill the Password

The search giant has signed up to a consortium that wants hardware to have a role in authenticating people.

Tom Simonite

April 23, 2013

 

Google has joined a consortium of tech companies including PayPal and Lenovo attempting to stop passwords being the sole protector of personal accounts.

The group, the FIDO Alliance, is working on technology that would give the device a person was using a role in authenticating them so that a password alone is not enough to unlock an account (see “PayPal, Lenovo Launch New Campaign to Kill the Password”). That approach can make it impossible to compromise accounts just by stealing passwords, as hackers did in order to break into Twitter this year and LinkedIn last year.

BeagleBone Black: A Maker’s Dream?

If Arduino is too underpowered and Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough hardware inputs for you, BeagleBone’s $45 microcontroller board will let you have your cake and eat it too.

John Pavlus

April 23, 2013

Constraints can liberate creativity: “Make anything you like” might sound nice, but “Make anything you like using this box of crayons” is even better. Cheap, simple, maker-friendly hardware kits like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are the technology equivalents of a little carton of Crayolas–they may not have a lot of processing power (in the case of an Arduino microcontroller) or much in the way of I/O (like Raspberry Pi), but their simplicity makes them great for doodling in electronic interaction design. But what if you’re a little more advanced–or simply too indecisive to choose between Arduino’s barebones connectivity and Raspberry Pi’s full-fledged Linux CPU? The new BeagleBone Black is the best of both worlds: for $45, you get a little credit-card-sized board with enough pin headers, network interfaces, and peripheral ports to choke a cat, plus a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor that can run Linux and Android. It’s like that huge Crayola box of 96 colors with the sharpener built into the side: it’s all about options.

“12 Hours of Separation” Connect Individuals on Social Networks

Social networks can be used to track random individuals in just 12 hours provided the right incentives are on offer, say computer scientists.

The Physics arXiv Blog

April 23, 2013

 

In 1967, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent out 160 packages to randomly chosen individuals in the U.S. and asked that they be forwarded to a single individual living in Boston. The task included a simple rule: the recipients must send each parcel on to somebody they knew on a first-name basis.

To his surprise, Milgram found that the first package arrived at its destination via only two people. On average, he found, the parcels reached their destination via five pairs of hands, which amounts to six degrees of separation.

Can IT Cure Congress?

In 1968, an instructor of political science had reason to hope that computers would make government wiser.

 April 23, 2013

Computer-based analysis as it is refined over the remaining decades of this century will make possible an advance in human intellectual capacity comparable to the invention of language, Arabic numerals, and calculus. With his new ability to understand the dynamics of complex organizations and social processes, the congressman of tomorrow will explore a range of problems previously beyond the grasp of his predecessors.

Baxter: The Blue-Collar Robot

Rethink Robotics’ new creation is easy to interact with, but the innovations behind the robot show just how hard it is to get along with people.

By Will Knight on April 23, 2013 

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/513746/baxter-the-blue-collar-robot

Temporary Social Media

Messages that quickly self-destruct could enhance the privacy of online communication and make people feel freer to be spontaneous.

 

By Jeffrey Rosen and Christine Rosen on April 23, 2013 

 

Why It Matters

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming permanent records of our interactions.

Breakthrough
A social-media ­service that ­replicates the unrecorded nature of ordinary ­conversation.
 

Key Players
• Snapchat
• Gryphn
• Burn Note
• Wickr

One essential aspect of privacy is the ability to control how much we disclose to others. Unfortunately, we’ve lost much of that control now that every photo, chat, or status update posted on a social-media site can be stored in the cloud: even though we intended to share that information with someone, we don’t necessarily want it to stay available, out of context, forever. The weight of our digital pasts is emerging as the central privacy challenge of our time.

Big Data from Cheap Phones

Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.

By David Talbot on April 23, 2013

Why It Matters

Poor countries lack data-gathering infrastructure; phone data can provide it.

Breakthrough
Creating disease–fighting tools with cell-phone mobility data.
 
Key Players
• Caroline Buckee, Harvard University
• William Hoffman,
World Economic Forum
• Alex Pentland, MIT
• Andy Tatem, University of Southampton

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

Friendly Machines

Making human-friendly robots is a pressing challenge and a big opportunity.

 By Leila Takayama on April 23, 2013

As a research scientist I hear this question all the time: when are your robots going to replace me? But that is certainly not my goal.

A more important objective, to my mind, is making robots more human-friendly in their form, behavior, and function. By this I mean that robots should be appealing and approachable. They should behave in ways that are easy for humans to interpret, and they should perform functions that meet human needs. This applies in places like factories where more robots can work effectively alongside people (see “Baxter: The Blue-Collar Robot,”). This is not about making human-like robots. Humanoid robots have a place in entertainment, medical training, and possibly other domains, but human-friendly robots are not necessarily humanoid. In fact, by setting user expectations too high, looking too human could make it more difficult for a robot to interact with people. We are often disappointed and frustrated with the limited capabilities of robots that look as if they should be just as smart as we are.

Data Sources

Mobile phones are great sources of data—but we must be careful about privacy.

By Vincent Blondel on April 23, 2013

Anyone who has worked with mobile-phone data knows how incredibly useful such information can be, even when it’s anonymous. It is amazing—but at the same time frightening—what massive quantities of spatio-temporal data points from mobile phones can tell us about ourselves, our lives, and our society in general.

Deep Learning

With massive amounts of computational power, machines can now recognize objects and translate speech in real time. Artificial intelligence is finally getting smart.

By Robert D. Hof on April 23, 2013 

 

Why It Matters

Computers would assist humans far more effectively if they could reliably recognize patterns and make inferences about the world.

Breakthrough
A method of artificial intelligence that could be generalizable to many kinds of applications.

Key Players
• Google
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto

Google Glass Testers “Spam” Google’s Social Network

Tom Simonite

April 22, 2013

 

The first flood of photos taken using Google’s wearable computer are underwhelming.

If you want to know what people with early access to Google’s wearable computer Glass are doing, take a look at the public feed on Google+, the company’s social network. Photos and videos taken with the device, most of them unexciting, are flooding the service under the tag #throughglass. A couple of Google+ users even complained about the sudden rush of activity last week, calling it “spam.”

How to Carbon-Date a Web Page

The Physics arXiv Blog

April 22, 2013

 

If a Web page lacks a time stamp, how do you know when it was created? A new Web application could help.

Ever needed to know the age of a Web page only to discover that it lacks a time stamp saying when it was published?

IBM Solar Dish Does Double Duty

Martin LaMonica

April 22, 2013

IBM Researchers build solar concentrator that generates electricity and enough heat for desalination or cooling.

Researchers envision giant concentrators, built with low-cost materials, that produce electricity and heat for use in desalination or cooling. Credit: IBM Research.

Cooling a supercomputer can provide clues on how to make solar power cheap, says IBM.

IBM Research today detailed a prototype solar dish that uses a water-cooling technology it developed for its high-end computers (see “Hot Water Helps Super-Efficient Supercomputer Keep Its Cool”). The solar concentrator uses low-cost components and produces both electricity and heat, which could be used for desalination or to run an air conditioner.

Novel Heating System Could Improve Electric Car’s Range

A prototype system can heat and cool without draining battery power.

• By Kevin Bullis on April 22, 2013

Why It Matters

Restricted driving range limits the appeal of electric vehicles.

Power saver: A prototype heating and cooling system for electric vehicles works without battery power.

Buyers considering an electric car must bear in mind that using battery-powered heating and air conditioning can decrease the car’s range by a third or more (see “BMW’s Solution to Limited Electric-Vehicle Range: A Gas-Powered Loaner”). A New York Times reviewer recently ran into this problem on a test drive, ending up stranded with a dead battery (see “Musk-New York Times Debate Highlights Electric Cars’ Shortcomings”).

The Enduring Technology of Coal

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/graphiti/513836/the-enduring-technology-of-coal

How DisplayPort multi-streaming delivers new levels of multi-monitor madness

Michael Brown @brownieshq

• Apr 19, 2013 3:30 AM

When a vendor sends us a demo system, it typically take great care to ensure that we experience the system exactly as the maker intends us to. So when VESA, the trade group responsible for the DisplayPort standard, said that it was sending PCWorld a multiple-monitor demo system similar to the one it exhibited at CES in January, I expected it to arrive bundled with a detailed guide and all the software needed to present DisplayPort in its best light.

Microsoft says small Windows touch devices are in the works

Ian Paul @ianpaul

• Apr 19, 2013 6:10 AM

Microsoft may be busy making changes to the Windows technical requirements and licensing terms to pave the way for smaller Windows tablets. For the most part, however, the company has only hinted that sub 10-inch tablets could be in the works. That changed recently after the company came awfully close to confirming a 7-inch Windows tablet was on the way.

Windows Blue wish list: 15 must-see improvements

Brad Chacos @BradChacos

• Apr 18, 2013 3:00 AM

For all the grief it gets, Windows 8 brought a wealth of welcome improvements to Microsoft’s seminal operating system. In fact, once you stop worrying and learn to love (or at least ignore) the Live Tiles, the Windows 8 desktop is nothing short of the best Windows desktop ever—fast, useful, and all-around awesome.

Ads on Google Glass Will Never Work

David Zax

April 19, 2013

 

An ad delivered straight to the eyeball feels like a violation.

Some curious information came to light this week about Google Glass. For a company that owes its solvency to advertising–95% of its revenue comes from it–remarkably, Google is planning an ad-free experience for its on-eye computing experiment. At least, for now.

Building a Picture of the Bomb Suspects through Social Network Analysis

Police can obtain huge quantities of social network data, but must sort out the junk to glean useful information.

• By David Talbot on April 19, 2013

Data mine:The Twitter account thought to have been used by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
 

Within hours of obtaining identifications of the Boston marathon bombing suspects, police likely obtained search warrants and extensive digital records from mobile phone networks and social media and e-mail providers.