Et tu, Watson? IBM’s supercomputer can critique your writing

It’s bad enough that robots are writing professionally (albeit badly), but now they’re criticizing, too? IBM has unveiled the Watson Tone Analyzer, the latest tool in its “cognitive computing” suite of cooking, health, shopping and other apps. Once you input a piece of text, the system will perform a “tone check” to analyze three different aspects of it: emotional, social and writing style. Each of those is divided into further categories — for instance, it can tell you if your writing style is confident or tentative, and whether the emotional tone is cheerful, angry or negative. From there, it can give you a breakdown of the overall tone and suggest new words to “fix” it.

But why? IBM says in the same way that you spell-check a document, you can now “tone-check” it too. For instance, if you want an employee letter to be more “agreeable,” Watson suggests changing the word “disappointing” to “unsatisfactory,” and “difficult” to “challenging.” By swapping out enough words, you eventually get the right level of “agreeableness” or “cheerfulness” in a passage. IBM thinks this could help, say, advertisers, to make sure a marketing campaign matches “the personality attributes of target customers.” In other words, Watson can help companies hawk beer.

Playing around a bit, I found it occasionally helpful, but it fell down more often than not. The main problem is that Watson was missing context, especially for words that have multiple meanings. In the sentence “I know the times are difficult!” it nonsensically suggested “arithmetic operation” for “times.” It also doesn’t understand sarcasm, humor and other styles, and just picks out individual words to determine the tone.

That said, the Watson Tone Analyzer is impressive considering that it’s still experimental. For fun, I had it analyze a financial story generated by another robot, Automated Insights’ WordSmith. If you’ll recall, it wrote that story in a competition against an NPR staff writer, with readers judging the final result. Watson found Wordsmith’s article unremittingly cheerful (96 percent), conscientious (94 percent) and analytical (49 percent). In other words, you’ll get the facts, but you won’t have any fun reading them. In comparison, Watson found the same story from an NPR writer to be negative (90 percent), but it was overwhelming voted more enjoyable to read — by humans, anyway.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: IBM

UK’s emergency surveillance law struck down by MPs

The High Court has ruled today that parts of the UK’s emergency surveillance legislation, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA), is unlawful. Conservative MP David Davis and Labour MP Tom Watson, represented by the Liberty human rights organisation, have successfully argued that the law breaks the public’s right to a private life and to the protection of personal data, set out in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Section 1 and 2 of DRIPA, which forces telecoms companies and internet providers to store customer data for up to 12 months, will now be abolished in March next year. The law is due to expire at the end of 2016 anyway, but bringing the date forward for these two crucial points could force the government to introduce replacement legislation earlier.

The government has slowly been increasing its powers to access people’s communications. In 2003, a code of practice was introduced that reimbursed companies for voluntarily storing customer data for longer than necessary. The Data Retention (EC Directive) Regulations 2006, incorporated into UK law in 2009, then made retention mandatory. The European Court of Justice ruled against it in 2014, however, so the UK government fast-tracked DRIPA to maintain its current surveillance powers.

While today’s court decision is a win for privacy advocates, it represents but one battle in their war. DRIPA was always going to be replaced, and the upcoming Investigatory Powers Bill is thought to be a stronger law similar to the panned Snooper’s Charter.

[Image credit: Gwenael Piaser, Flickr]

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Liberty

Pay What You Want: Web Hacker Bundle

Today’s deal will see you steeped in expert knowledge on hacking web development. We’ve put together a collection of web-seminars, training, sample projects and guidance from some of the most trusted sources around. If you’re ready to build web apps, master HTML, CSS & JavaScript components and add high-quality projects to your resume, then this today’s Pay What You Want: Web Hacker Bundle is for you!

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Easymind breaking boundaries

It’s not every day that you see a new kind of app. The Play Store seems flooded with just about every type of app you can get, almost like everything possible has already been thought of and made. The developers at Easymind saw an opportunity to make a tool that would bring convenience to the masses by allowing users to vote on polls, either private or public. The app is a small 23MB and requires an Internet connection.

Setup

You need to create an account upon opening Easymind. It is indeed a bit of a nuisance, however it is certainly necessary as users can create private polls and share it with their friends. This becomes particularly handy when you have a group chat. There are quite a few Settings but few of them are actually toggles, most of them are for account settings. There is a tutorial to help you in the beginning, so you’re not left in the dark

Function

I’m sure you’ve experienced the moment when everyone wants to eat at a different restaurant or watch a different movie. So, now someone can be assigned to create a poll and the rest of you go to his account and, granted that the poll creator has granted you access to his poll, vote for your option. It is easy to create a poll. You can add different voting options and set a time for how long the poll is open for. Unfortunately the results are only displayed when the time runs out, so you have to wait until the end to get any idea of the results. Easymind has added a nice feature here that shows you the demographics of voters (Age, Sex) on each option available. It knows your age and sex from when you signed up. A handy feature is that you can limit who can vote, if you feel it’s necessary. So if you only want females to vote, just change it when you create a poll!

The user interface is decent, however at times I found myself confused at where the previous screens could be found. You can follow people an easily view their public polls.

Is it for me?

Almost certainly! Unless you don’t text that often or aren’t that kind of person who would go have a picnic, you should definitely try it out. It might be a nuisance setting up, but that’t the only hurdle.

What we liked

• Its applicability in real life
• Easy to use
• For private and global use

And not so much…

• Confusing user interface
• Independent of any messaging apps

Easymind should try integrate it better with social messaging, as the work between inviting new users and having to use two apps may seem a bit demanding for some users. They have certainly created something that has the opportunity to be big, constant work and improvements on it should insure that the “possibilities are infinite”, as they say in the app description.

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Marshall created an audiophile smartphone

We always love when random companies decide to produce a smartphone.  Today we have a new one, by Marshall, who’s name is most associated with their historically successful pro-audio amplifier business.  It is called the London and you’ve guessed it, puts audio in front of everything else.

Let’s review what the London will do for your pricey set of cans, beginning with the on-board audio chipset.  The London uses a Wolfson WM8281 ‘Audio Hub’.  Wolfson has always been a highly regarded audio solution for smartphones (often found in Galaxy phones), so it’s a great choice.  The WM8281 is capable of high resolution 24-bit 192 KHz playback and probably the best solution for a smartphone at the moment.

Looking at the top of the device, we see a couple unique features.

First, those dual headphone jacks are sadly not for a balanced dual-channel setup.  They are two headphone sources, so another person can share your audio experience.  A neat thing is that each source has independent volume control.  Thus, your ears don’t have to be blasted due to your friend’s hearing loss.  Though I do wonder, can you watch a movie while the other listens to music?  That’d be rad.

Another thing you might’ve noticed on the top is a gold button, with Marshall’s signature ‘M’ on it.  This is a dedicated button to launch you into your music or the Global Equalizer that Marshall has developed for the phone.

Since you’re going to be rockin’ out frequently, there is also a gold scroll wheel for ‘tactile precision’ control of the volume.

With all this said, you’re probably expecting mediocre specs elsewhere?  You’d be right, they’re fairly yesteryear:

• Display:  4.7″ 720P IPS LCD, with Gorilla Glass 3 protection
• SoC:  Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, quad-core @ 1.2 GHz
• Memory:  2 GB of Ram
• Storage:  16 GB on-board, with microSD support
• Cameras:  8 MP rear and 2 MP front
• Battery:  2,500 mAh, removable
• OS:  Android Lollipop 5.0.2

A couple other notable mentions is that the London houses front-firing stereo speakers, contains the high quality Bluetooth aptX, and comes with Marshall’s Mode earphones.

The price of the London is quoted at 4,995 Swedish Krona, which translates to roughly $585 USD.  It is expected to begin delivery on August 17th.  Are you swayed to push specs to the side for a better audio experience?

Source: Marshall Headphones

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SanDisk launches new wireless flash drive

If you’re one of the many who values phone storage and upset over the disappearing microSD card slots, SanDisk may have a viable alternative for you.  They have just reinvented the flash drive, that works in our wireless era.

The SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick comes in 4 different capacities, starting at 16GB and doubling up to 128GB.  Prices range from $30-$100, respectively.  It communicates with any Wifi-enabled device via 802.11 b/g/n connectivity (up to three devices simultaneously), but can also plug in a USB port the traditional way.

The Connect Wireless Stick of course has a battery, which is rated to support a ‘single stream’ of transfer for up to 4.5 hours on a single charge.  To manage all the content zipping around, SanDisk has developed a Connect app, compatible with Android, iOS, Mac, and PC platforms.  You can find the Connect Wireless Stick right now on Amazon or Best Buy.

Are you open to this solution for your deteriorating on-board storage space?  I can see it being a double-edge sword.  It’s super nice that you can access files and media from a distance, but what if you forgot to charge it?  Also, it’s another device that you have to remember to carry around.

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