India is an interesting country when it comes to Internet access. On the one hand, India has the second most Internet subscribers in the world. There are over 450 million people online here. On the other hand, we also have the largest number of unconnected people. Only about 35 percent of our population is online, including more than 70 percent of women. Between 70 and 80 percent […]
Motion capture technology helped researchers at NC State University develop an energy-efficient technique for accurately tracking a user’s physical activity based on data from wearable devices. Credit: Edgar Lobaton Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed an energy-efficient technique for accurately tracking a user’s physical activity based on data from wearable devices. One goal for wearable health technologies is to identify and track physical activity by […]
Jakarta – Rescuers have recovered a body from the waters off Pulau Lingga, in the Riau Islands, near the crash site of a police transport aircraft that went down on Saturday (Dec 3) morning, said local police. Riau Islands police spokesman S. Erlangga, said in a statement issued at 11pm on Saturday local time, that the body was found by Basarnas, Indonesia’s national research and rescue agency, […]
Apple has written a letter to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration telling that new companies entering the auto industry should be given the same rights as established companies. This letter hints that Apple has the rumored iCar in the works. Apple’s Letter To NHTSA Apple’s letter to the NHTSA indicates that the company still has plans of testing autonomous cars. “Apple uses machine learning to […]
In June, speaking at a former steelworks in western Pennsylvania that now processes scrap aluminium, Donald Trump promised a bright future for US steel if he became president. “It will be American steel that will fortify American’s crumbling bridges. It will be American steel that sends our skyscrapers soaring into the sky,” he said. “We are going to put American-produced steel back into the backbone of our […]
This figure compares a traditionally trained algorithm to Aarabi and Guo’s heuristically trained neural net. The left and centre columns show an aggressive and conservative image-recognition algorithm trained to recognized human hair, compared to the more precise heuristically trained algorithm at right. Credit: Courtesy: IEEE Trans NN & LS “Hey Siri, how’s my hair?” Your smartphone may soon be able to give you an honest answer, thanks […]
Submitted by Robert Parry via Strategic-Culture.org, Under the cover of battling “fake news,” the mainstream U.S. news media and officialdom are taking aim at journalistic skepticism when it is directed at the pronouncements of the U.S. government and its allies. One might have hoped that the alarm about “fake news” would remind major U.S. news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, about […]
Airline also picks up coveted accolade for 2016 World’s Leading Airline – First Class at the World Travel Awards 03 December 2016 Male, Maldives – Etihad Airways has once again collected the ‘World’s Leading Airline’ award at the 23rd annual World Travel Awards (WTA) Grand Final Gala Ceremony 2016. This marks the eighth consecutive year that the airline has received the prestigious accolade. Last night’s beachside event […]
(a,b) Eurasian eagle owl (Bubo bubo) (c) great gray owl (Strix nebulosi) and (d) snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus). Credit: Ian A.Clark, Conor A. Daly, William Devenport, W .Nathan Alexander,Nigel Peake, Justin W. Jaworski, Stewart Glegg Many species of owl are able to hunt in effective silence by suppressing their noise at sound frequencies above 1.6 kilohertz (kHz) – over the range that can be heard by humans. […]
ABU DHABI // Firework displays lit up the capital’s skies as Emiratis and expatriates came together on Friday to enjoy the National Day celebrations. People poured into the streets to take in the festive atmosphere and show their love for the country, while vehicles were plastered in the colours of the UAE flag and portraits of the leaders. Crowds gathered on the beach and the parks that […]
For the past few months, a number of Microsoft watchers have been predicting and hoping (incorrectly) that Microsoft was ready to roll out a competitor to Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. A discovery by Microsoft sleuth The Walking Cat, a k a @h0x0d, of something called “Home Hub” further fueled this rumor. However, as Walking Cat also discovered, Home Hub wasn’t hardware; it was some kind of […]
JAKARTA A twin-engine Indonesian police plane went missing on Saturday with 15 people on board en route to the island of Batam, south of Singapore, police said. The plane is thought to have crashed between the islands of Mensanak and Sebangka or Gentar, a police report obtained by Reuters said. A search team recovered items apparently identified as being from the missing aircraft, the report said. No […]
Frequent tornadoes and thunderstorms that kill people and destroy property have become a matter of grave concern. In the United States alone, the insured losses caused by severe thunderstorms have been put at $8.5 billion from the period between January to June 2016. A new study has tried a linkage between climate change and the increasing incidents of tornadoes. Calling for a deeper study on some meteorological factors, […]
A digital battle is being waged over the huge amount of technical data that will be stored in autonomous vehicles Just like credit cards, smartphones or search engines, autonomous cars will carry a trove of information about their owners as they make driving more comfortable, raising new concerns about privacy. Automakers are engaged in a fierce race to develop the first driverless car, which experts say should […]
This week was full of Big Data news, including new releases, a brand new product, a new acquisition and an update to one of the major Hadoop distros. Let’s get a survey of what was announced and then see if we can’t draw a conclusion or two. A big driver for much of the news was this week’s Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, providing an opportunity for […]
By Parisa Hafezi | ANKARA ANKARA Iran threatened on Friday to retaliate against a U.S. Senate vote to extend the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) for 10 years, saying it violated last year’s deal with six major powers that curbed its nuclear programme. The ISA was first adopted in 1996 to punish investments in Iran’s energy industry and deter its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. The extension was […]
Credit: Yale University On the wall of Aaron Dollar’s office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word “robot.” The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. He sees […]
Fitch Ratings-Moscow/London-01 December 2016 OPEC’s agreement to cut production by 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, and the potential agreement to cut with non-OPEC countries, should help accelerate market re-balancing and increases the chances of more rapid oil price recovery than previously expected, says Fitch Ratings. But implementation risks remain, including OPEC’s adherence to the agreement and the willingness of other participants, notably Russia, to co-operate […]
By Amr Abdallah Dalsh | SHIBIN EL KOM, Egypt SHIBIN EL KOM, Egypt Mohamed Hagras stands barechested as dozens of honeybees congregate around his face, eventually forming what he calls the “Beard of Bees”. To attract the insects he has a box housing their queen’s hormones strapped to his chin. The 31-year-old engineer-turned-beekeeper has been doing this for years both competitively – he fondly recalls a Canadian […]
By Terray Sylvester and Alicia Underlee Nelson | CANNON BALL/WEST FARGO, N.D. CANNON BALL/WEST FARGO, N.D. More than 2,000 U.S. military veterans are expected to join a protest at a camp in North Dakota on Friday where thousands of activists, braving frigid conditions, are demonstrating against a pipeline project near a Native American reservation. Veterans Stand for Standing Rock will spend the day building a barracks at […]
An Indian aerospace startup has said that it will launch its mission to the moon in a year’s time, as it takes part in a Google-funded competition to become the world’s first-ever privately held company to make a soft landing there. A group of more than 100 scientists and engineers, including around a dozen former ISRO scientists, make up Axiom Research Labs’ Team Indus. The team is […]
Tomaso Poggio, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, has long thought that the brain must produce “invariant” representations of faces and other objects, meaning representations that are indifferent to objects’ orientation in space, their distance from the viewer, or their location in the visual field. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT researchers and their […]
Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup adds something unique: a Touch Bar atop the keyboard that I believe is an important evolution of the laptop user experience. The first time I saw and played with the Touch Bar, the macros of yore popped into my mind. MacBook power users all know the value of creating macros to speed up a particular business process we may use […]
After securing a deal to save 1,100 jobs at a Carrier plant in Indiana from being exported to Mexico, Trump is set to kick off his Midwest “Thank You Tour” with a speech there which is expected to get started around 2pm EST. As we pointed out earlier this morning, Trump’s deal reached with Carrier keeps 1,100 jobs in the U.S. in return for $700,000 in […]
