One of CES’ major trends over the last few years has been the connected car — the concept of adding Internet connectivity and networking to our vehicles. Stealing the spotlight this year was Nvidia, which launched the Drive PX 2 — an in-car artificial intelligence system. PX 2 is designed for automakers exploring autonomous driving and includes 360-degree situational awareness, deep learning and the processing power of […]
Liberty plays football in Division I’s second rung. The university is run by Jerry Falwell Jr., a godly sort who understands the need for occasional accommodation with the secular world. Earlier this year he strolled around the Republican National Convention with his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a thrice-married man whom numerous women have accused of sexually harassing them. Photo Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, […]
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 […]
Every year, Brazilian venture capital firm Monashees takes entrepreneurs from its portfolio companies on an overseas discovery tour. This year, instead of Silicon Valley, the firm headed to the Yangtze Valley, in a clear sign of a new front opening for Chinese investment in Latin America. China is seeking to expand lending and investment in Brazil and elsewhere on the continent, as it shifts from its traditional […]
Apple iPhone 5s (Image: File photo) Taiwanese prosecutors on Friday indicted a former senior level Foxconn manager for allegedly stealing and selling 5,700 iPhone handsets in China, to pocket around $1.56 million, according to AsiaOne. Thousands of iPhone handsets were smuggled out of the factory, prosecutors said, at the direction of a Taiwanese manager name “Tsai” working in Foxconn’s handset testing area. The iPhone handsets stolen by […]
On April 7, 14 large blue letters quietly disappeared from the outer walls of an office building in an exclusive neighborhood in northern San Salvador. One by one, the letters came down from the blue and beige stucco walls, leaving behind faint traces of the name of the law firm that had been working there just days before: M-O-S-S-A-C-K-F-O-N-S-E-C-A. Employees of the El Salvador branch of Mossack […]
Photo Tiger Woods after a shot on the 11th fairway during the third round at the Hero World Challenge in Nassau, the Bahamas. Credit Lynne Sladky/Associated Press NASSAU, the Bahamas — On his fifth hole Saturday at the Hero World Challenge, Tiger Woods holed a bunker shot for his fourth birdie of the day. It had taken him only 41 holes in his first competitive start in […]
(Image: Liminal) Australian health insurer Medibank has launched an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience for Australian hospitals on Google Daydream View, in collaboration with a group of neuropsychologists at Melbourne-based VR developers Liminal. The “Joy” experience, which was entirely designed in 3D using Google’s Tilt Brush, provides hospital patients with a virtual experience to attempt to relieve loneliness and isolation, particularly for long-stay patients with restricted mobility. […]
Apple logo. Apple has revealed it is investing heavily in autonomous vehicles in a letter asking the government to make it easier to develop self-driving cars. The company is “excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation,” Apple said in a November 22 letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offering Apple’s opinion about draft regulations for the sector. “Apple looks […]
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 […]
The commission, if not dead on arrival, quickly ended up on life support. Mr. Stiglitz and another board member, Mark Pieth, a Swiss anticorruption expert, resigned after only one official meeting because the government, they said, would not promise to make their final report public. Continue reading the main story “You can’t have a committee on transparency and not be transparent,” Mr. Stiglitz said. Photo President Juan […]
It’s becoming an increasingly difficult chore trying to scour the App Store for decent apps given its very saturated library. A plethora of excellent apps intermingle with shovelware, and it’s often a tall order to sort the ones worthy of downloading from the ones that aren’t. A tall order, sure, but not impossible. Here’s a chief list of the best iPhone apps for 2016. Evernote Evernote has struggled […]
British Telecom (BT) has appointed a new general director for its operations in Brazil. Alex Inglês joined the company eight years ago and spent his four initial years working at the company’s London offices before returning to São Paulo. Prior to becoming the company’s main executive in Brazil, Inglês served as wholesale director for Latin America, leading BT’s business with telecommunications operators throughout the region. In London, […]
Apple has for the first time publicly acknowledged its plans to develop self-driving cars, with a letter that urges the US highways regulator to promote “fair competition” between newcomers to the automotive industry and traditional manufacturers. In an unusually direct statement accompanying the letter, an Apple spokesman confirmed its work on autonomous systems that could be used to transform “the future of transportation”. Apple’s letter touts the […]
(Image: File photo) The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sent letters to AT&T and Verizon on Thursday voicing displeasure with the practice of exempting their own video services from customers’ data caps. Specifically, the regulators said “zero rating” can hurt competition and consumers. In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, regulators make the case that other services could pay Verizon and AT&T to not eat into […]
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 […]
US technology shares faced one of their worst weeks of 2016 as investors shifted their focus to equities that will benefit from the soaring price of oil and the policies of the Trump administration. The S&P 500 technology index, a measure of large companies in the sector, has declined 3 per cent since Friday last week. The fall represents the steepest drop since late April, when Apple […]
In returning to competition, Woods, who turns 41 this month, is having to make up the blueprint as he goes. No former No. 1 player has been sidelined from competition for more than a year at Woods’s age and returned to resume his winning ways. Photo Tiger Woods, left, an assistant captain, with Patrick Reed during practice for the Ryder Cup. “You have to joke around with […]
The “Click” website Your web browser holds a lot of information about you, and this information is available to websites who want it. Want a peek at the sort of information that a website has access to? Read on! If you are interested in the sort of information that your browser can offer, there are two websites that you can visit. The first site is called ” […]
Amanda Wills devoted much of the past year to coverage of the presidential election. So when she listened to voicemails left for CNN after Nov. 8, she expected to hear a lot of screaming from both sides. Instead, she heard perspectives she’d never encountered before, ones that taught her not just about CNN’s audience, but about the country itself. “For me, personally, as a journalist, it’s really, […]
In London last month, Arabian Business was treated to a behind-the-scenes explanation of how in March Google’s AlphaGo computer programme thrashed the world’s best player at the ancient board game Go. The match represented a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) research being undertaken by Google’s DeepMind since the start-up was acquired for a reported $400m in 2014. Go involves two contestants moving black and white stones on […]
Like Christmas ornaments on Main Streets across America, Wall Street banks’ forecasts for the year ahead keep coming out earlier every year. At least this year analysts have something substantive to sink their intellectual teeth into: the impact of incoming president Donald Trump. The results are fascinating — especially for bonds. The fixed income market has been one of the biggest victims in the “Trumpflation trade” that […]
(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. […]
The managed services provider (MSP) model has had a remarkably long run, considering how much IT has changed over the last 20 years or so. Written off by many as the economics of cloud bit into the MSPs’ market share, at one point many were predicting the end of the MSP, displaced by a combination of SaaS and public cloud. Not any more. So what’s changed? MSPs […]
