Your smartphone is a very versatile tool that contains a huge amount of computational power. By using the right apps and augmenting the smartphone with other hardware you can make it do some very unusual things. Turn your smartphone into a tool to diagnose car problems Got a ‘Check Engine’ light on your dash, staring at you? In the trade that’s called ‘the money light.’ Wonder what […]
The basic format of political fact-checking is identical the world over: Start from a widely circulated claim by a public figure, then rate the truthfulness of its objectively verifiable components. Tom Rosenstiel, executive director at the American Press Institute, thinks it may be time to rethink this model. Local newsrooms especially, he suggests, should make “the key unit of fact-checking not a claim or a fact, but […]
After centuries of getting around primarily via horses, many people viewed the first automobiles with apprehension. This newfangled “horseless carriage” was considered too fast and dangerous to ever catch on. In the late 19th century, England even had a law called the Red Flag Act, which required self-propelled vehicles to be led at walking pace by someone waving a red flag. In 1895, the New […]
One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the Internet’, is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost […]
Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from reality. That’s an extreme paraphrase of Poe’s Law, but it applies to so much of our world today. Including the management of Twitter. On Thursday, Twitter announced more changes to the way it works. Soon after, an image started circulating which supposedly explained these changes. And it was so confusing. “Replies now part of Timeline. Timeline and TimelLine are now […]
For as long as man has looked up at the heavens, he’s pondered one question: Are we alone in the universe? While the answer remains unclear, there’s a tonne of research being conducted to determine just what life-sustaining planets beyond Earth might exist — and what they might look like. There’s no shortage of imaginative renderings and fiction about what such worlds may entail, as well. Countless […]
Fused deposition modeling printing is the most common printing method used in 3D printing. The two key words are “deposition” and “fused”. Basically, what an FDM 3D printer does is heat up plastic, extrude it out of a nozzle, deposit that plastic onto either a printer plate or already deposited plastic, and fuse that new plastic to the old. As the printer head moves on a given […]
Last week, a colleague received the printer’s proofs for an article that she submitted two years ago. You read that correctly. In the time that it takes to earn a master’s degree, she managed to navigate the labyrinth of academic peer review in order to publish one essay. It’s a success story, if you can maintain your sense of humor. Journal publishing in the humanities […]
In the wake of the terror attacks in England, France, Germany and elsewhere, can we finally admit that the war on terror is an utter and complete failure? 10 Ways to Reduce Terrorism So if the war on terror has failed, what should we do to stop terrorists? I. Stop Overthrowing the Moderates and Arming Crazies We know it’s a difficult concept to grasp, but if we […]
Iona Craig, who reported on the aftermath of the botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen for The Intercept from Yeman, did so with the help of the Pulitzer Center. Iona Craig. Grants from the Pulitzer Center go a long way for international journalists who eke out a difficult existence covering tough stories from dangerous places. The details of her recent Yemen experience should give pause to most […]
Smart Voice & One Remote Making TVs “smart” is one thing, but being able to use them smartly and to their full potential is another. Smart TVs have come a long way since Samsung first introduced theirs as a “connected-TV” back in 2009. In 2011, Samsung was the first to use the term “Smart TV” that converged the computer and its integrated internet, a conventional TV, and […]
DevOps is a great concept — but many enterprises are still struggling to get out the starting gate with it. Photo: CERN Press Office That’s the key takeaway from a recent survey of 2,045 IT managers and professionals, released by Quali, an IT automation solutions provider. While most people in enterprises would say at this point that they have DevOps underway in some shape or form, achieving […]
The parkas that have made it to the top of Mount Everest and the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition have found their way to Wall Street. Shares of Canada Goose, the maker of down winter coats with coyote fur trim and a circle patch logo, soared in their New York debut on Thursday, rising 26 per cent to $16.08 after pricing at $12.78 a piece, above […]
By Jackie Cai and Adam Jourdan | SHANGHAI SHANGHAI China’s annual consumer rights day TV show turned its spotlight on U.S. sports brand Nike Inc (NKE.N) for misleading advertising and Japanese brand Muji for selling food products allegedly sourced from part of Japan affected by radiation. The state-run China Central Television (CCTV) show – which can have brands and their corporate PR teams scurrying to take evasive […]
(Image: CNET) The Amazon Echo was the first mass-market, consumer-level device responding to voice control with general purpose functions, such as playing music. It was launched in the US in 2015. Then, in 2016, Google released its competing device, Google Home. Framingham, Mass.-based digital agency Stone Temple collected 5,000 questions to ask both Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Itverbally asked the devices each question and noted many […]
Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Nate Silver’s “March Madness” analysis is out and, knock on hardwood, he’s not picking Hillary Clinton. I know, I know. Cheap (jump) shot. It’s that time of year when FiveThirtyEight, the ESPN-owned politics and sports data site founded by Silver, […]
Rumor has it that the successor to OnePlus 3T will skip the “4” and just jump into OnePlus 5, a la Note 5 jumping into the Note 7 naming scheme. The 3T has only been out for a few months, becoming available this past November. Yet, because of how fast-paced smartphone development has become, we’re now seeing rumors of the OnePlus 5, and they’re all sounding pretty good […]
The Wikum interface provides readers with detailed summaries of online discussions. Credit: Jason Dorfman/MIT CSAIL From Reddit to Quora, discussion forums can be equal parts informative and daunting. We’ve all fallen down rabbit holes of lengthy threads that are impossible to sift through. Comments can be redundant, off-topic or even inaccurate, but all that content is ultimately still there for us to try and untangle. Sick of […]
Snapchat is displayed on a smartphone on September 27, 2016 in Berlin, GermanyImage: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images By Kerry Flynn2017-03-01 06:19:41 UTC Snap Inc. has been playing with drones. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the company has worked on building its own drones, citing three people “briefed on the project who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential.” The piece doesn’t get […]
Image by Arafat Uddin (Creative Commons) The financial services industry is undergoing digital disruption and change. Insurance, as part of that industry, also faces new opportunities and challenges. To explore these issues, I spoke with the CIO for Information at Swiss reinsurance giant, Swiss Re. Rainer Baumann handles the data and tools that experts inside the company use to understand and evaluate a broad range of insurance […]
The Shepherds Flat Wind Farm is an 845 MW wind farm in the U.S. state of Oregon. Credit: Steve Wilson / Wikipedia. The sight of propeller-like rotating blades positioned high up the pole of a tall horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) may be familiar to many. Often grouped in wind farms, HAWTs provide significant amounts of energy for local communities. One drawback to HAWTs is the large space they […]
February in Romania has brought 27 consecutive days of protests against the current government, at a scale unmatched since the Revolution in 1989. In a record day, more than 600,000 people gathered in the capital’s Victory Square and around the country to overturn a decision by the current ruling party to decriminalize some acts of corruption and abuse of office. This decision was especially self-serving given the […]
This much we can tell you for sure: the still-untitled Han Solo spin-off movie will not be called “Red Cup.” That’s the working title, a nod to the fact that George Lucas named Solo’s character for the plastic drinks brand. (True story.) But what about the actual title for the standalone film, which as of Tuesday is scheduled for May 25, 2018? Thus far Lucasfilm has it […]
iPad sales are in serious decline, but Apple CEO Tim Cook remain “very bullish” about the tablet. Can a March refresh turn things around? Must read: OLED iPhone 8 may finally have the feature that owners have been craving The Internet of Things 10 types of enterprise deployments As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are emerging. Here are some of […]
