2017 February | AIVAnet

25

Feb

Weekly Rewind: Insane stunt pilot lady, life beyond Earth, $700 self-driving car

A lot can happen in a week when it comes to tech. The constant onslaught of news makes it nigh impossible for mere mortals with real lives to keep track of everything. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of this week’s top 10 tech stories, from the discovery of seven Earth-sized exoplanets to a chair that helps you work out — it’s all here.

College student turns his Honda Civic into a self-driving car for $700

College students are permanently broke, constantly having to sacrifice the finer things in life (meals) in favor of the bare essentials (beer). By facing those hardships, few students are likely to be able to afford a self-driving car anytime soon. Can those college smarts be put to better use? That was the case for Brevan Jorgenson. A senior at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Jorgenson is the proud owner of a self-driving Honda Civic — and all it cost him was $700 (plus the cost of the car itself).

Read the full story here.

NASA just discovered 7 Earth-sized exoplanets, 3 in the habitable zone of a dwarf star

Seven Earth-sized planets have been discovered around a star that’s roughy 39 light-years from our solar system. The find comes from the team behind NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Three of these exoplanets are believed to orbit the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” the single largest haul of potentially habitable planets around a single star. The agency made the announcement today in a news conference and published the findings in the journal Nature.

Read the full story here.

Holographic 3D printer uses lasers to print thousands of times faster than its rivals

Fed up with the world-weary, jaded expressions of your additive manufacturing friends, who think they’ve seen it all when it comes to 3D printers? If so, you may be interested in Daqri, an augmented reality startup, which has developed a cutting-edge hologram-powered 3D printer. If you’ve felt that what was missing from 3D printing was green lasers and tubs of goo, this could be the technology you’ve been waiting for!

Read the full story here.

Steve Jobs’ spaceship-like ‘Apple Park’ is finally finished, and it opens in April

For months, we’ve come to call Apple’s next campus “spaceship” because of its UFO-like shape, but Apple had another name in mind. The new 175-acre headquarters in Cupertino will officially be called “Apple Park.” The move-in process from the company’s current facility will begin in April, and it’s expected to take more than six months as it involves moving more than 12,000 people. During this process, construction is scheduled to continue on park lands and various buildings.

Read the full story here.

Sprint will demonstrate gigabit connectivity at the Mobile World Congress

Don’t look now, but Sprint’s joining the gigabit club. On Wednesday, the Now Network announced a collaboration with electronics company Ericsson that will have data transferred at 1Gbps over a 4G LTE connection — fast enough to download an HD movie in about eight seconds. It is scheduled to take place at the upcoming Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona and Sprint says it is an industry first.

Read the full story here.

25

Feb

Weekly Rewind: Insane stunt pilot lady, life beyond Earth, $700 self-driving car

A lot can happen in a week when it comes to tech. The constant onslaught of news makes it nigh impossible for mere mortals with real lives to keep track of everything. That’s why we’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of this week’s top 10 tech stories, from the discovery of seven Earth-sized exoplanets to a chair that helps you work out — it’s all here.

College student turns his Honda Civic into a self-driving car for $700

College students are permanently broke, constantly having to sacrifice the finer things in life (meals) in favor of the bare essentials (beer). By facing those hardships, few students are likely to be able to afford a self-driving car anytime soon. Can those college smarts be put to better use? That was the case for Brevan Jorgenson. A senior at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Jorgenson is the proud owner of a self-driving Honda Civic — and all it cost him was $700 (plus the cost of the car itself).

Read the full story here.

NASA just discovered 7 Earth-sized exoplanets, 3 in the habitable zone of a dwarf star

Seven Earth-sized planets have been discovered around a star that’s roughy 39 light-years from our solar system. The find comes from the team behind NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Three of these exoplanets are believed to orbit the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” the single largest haul of potentially habitable planets around a single star. The agency made the announcement today in a news conference and published the findings in the journal Nature.

Read the full story here.

Holographic 3D printer uses lasers to print thousands of times faster than its rivals

Fed up with the world-weary, jaded expressions of your additive manufacturing friends, who think they’ve seen it all when it comes to 3D printers? If so, you may be interested in Daqri, an augmented reality startup, which has developed a cutting-edge hologram-powered 3D printer. If you’ve felt that what was missing from 3D printing was green lasers and tubs of goo, this could be the technology you’ve been waiting for!

Read the full story here.

Steve Jobs’ spaceship-like ‘Apple Park’ is finally finished, and it opens in April

For months, we’ve come to call Apple’s next campus “spaceship” because of its UFO-like shape, but Apple had another name in mind. The new 175-acre headquarters in Cupertino will officially be called “Apple Park.” The move-in process from the company’s current facility will begin in April, and it’s expected to take more than six months as it involves moving more than 12,000 people. During this process, construction is scheduled to continue on park lands and various buildings.

Read the full story here.

Sprint will demonstrate gigabit connectivity at the Mobile World Congress

Don’t look now, but Sprint’s joining the gigabit club. On Wednesday, the Now Network announced a collaboration with electronics company Ericsson that will have data transferred at 1Gbps over a 4G LTE connection — fast enough to download an HD movie in about eight seconds. It is scheduled to take place at the upcoming Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona and Sprint says it is an industry first.

Read the full story here.

25

Feb

HIV vaccine therapy could let people fight the virus without daily drugs

Why it matters to you

A new experimental vaccine therapy could help banish the need for HIV-positive individuals to take daily drugs.

HIV can currently be managed effectively so long as patients conform to a regime of regular antiretrovirals (ARVs). The treatment means that people with HIV can live a normal duration of life so long as they take daily drugs, although if they stop doing so the viral level rapidly increases and starts once again attacking their immune system.

However, a new piece of research suggests that this may not always have to be the case. In fact, the vaccine-based therapy currently being trialed among 13 HIV-active participants resulted in five patients being able to keep a retain a low, non-dangerous viral load — despite one of them not having taken ARVs for 27 weeks. The others were virus free for five, 13, 17, and 20 weeks after stopping taking their regularly scheduled medication.

More: Scientists managed to ‘cut out’ HIV virus from rats

“It is a proof of concept that with vaccines we might be able to re-educate our immune system to help control the virus once we interrupt treatment,” Beatriz Mothe, a clinician at IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, told Digital Trends. “It is still a small effect, as only five individuals out of the 13 that have interrupted to date show durable control. But still, it is a positive signal to start deciphering the mechanisms that can drive this control, and test how to improve it in future larger studies.”

This is far from a magic cure-all and it doesn’t claim to be. During the study, eight out of the 13 participants had to restart ARVs, while each of the remaining five had the virus temporarily detectable in their body, although never at sufficient levels to restart the daily drugs.

As Mothe notes, this is still early days. There is a long way to go, she said, to improve its efficacy in larger studies with novel vaccines and novel agents. Still, given the devastation that HIV can cause — and, in parts of the world ravaged by AIDS, the challenge of keeping people compliant with daily ARVs — this is a reason to be optimistic.

The findings were recently presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, the largest conference on HIV/AIDS in the world.

25

Feb

Ahead of MWC 2017, LG looks to take the battery life crown with the X Power 2

Why it matters to you

The LG X Power 2 might not be for Android purists, but those looking for a phone with remarkable battery life might want to take a hard look.

With Mobile World Congress right around the corner, LG is primarily focused on its upcoming G6 after the G5 was regarded as a financial disappointment for the company. That does not mean LG has nothing else up its sleeve, however, as the company announced the X Power 2 ahead of the mobile-centric conference.

As alluded to in its name, the X Power 2’s raison d’être is its enormous 4,500mAh battery, a nice bump from the original’s 4,100mAh power pack. LG claims the X Power 2 can survive 15 hours of continuous video playback, 14 hours of GPS navigation, and 18 hours of web browsing. The company even boasts that the phone was designed to last an entire weekend without the need to recharge. When it comes time for that, the X Power 2 will go from 0 to 50 percent in an hour, while a full recharge will take around two hours.

More: LG’s K series budget phones run Android 7.0 Nougat

On the outside, the X Power 2 features a 5-megapixel camera above its 5.5-inch, 1,280 x 720 resolution display, while a 13MP shooter sits around back. The display might seem like the same dull panel found on the original, but LG looks to have integrated the digitizer with the screen for improved colors and viewing angles. The company also improved the display’s outdoor visibility and baked a blue light filter into the software.

Speaking of which, the X Power 2 runs Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, something the original X Power still cannot say. An unnamed 1.5GHz octa-core processor and either 1.5GB or 2GB RAM run the show, with the 16GB of native storage augmented through the MicroSD card slot that takes up to 2TB cards.

When Digital Trends’ Ted Kritsonis took a look at the original X Power, there was not much to really enjoy apart from its battery life and low price. Hopefully, the same will not be said of the X Power 2 when it becomes available in Latin America in March, with the U.S., Asia, Europe, and other regions to follow. Before its launch, however, the X Power 2 will be shown off during MWC 2017 in Barcelona next week.

25

Feb

Small satellites, big impact: Researchers use images to help end food insecurity

Why it matters to you

Researchers are using new satellite technology to eliminate food insecurity, one small farm at a time.

Small satellites tens of thousands of miles above Earth may help farmers in sub-Saharan Africa escape poverty and food insecurity. Using high-resolution images, researchers from Stanford University have been able to measure and estimate crop yields with the goal to improve agricultural productivity in the region. They published their findings this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Earth-observing satellites have been used for decades, but recent advancements have enabled smaller, cheaper satellites to make more precise measurements of regions around the world. Where older, satellites have achieved a resolution of about 100 feet, today’s compact satellites can achieve a resolution of nearly 10 feet, according to the researchers. Meanwhile, the cost of building and launching these “smallsats” have been cut drastically and new techniques let researchers analyze land in more detail.

“By combining different wavelengths, we can tell a lot about plant health,” David Lobell, the study’s co-author, told Digital Trends. “That has been known for a long time. To predict yields, we have to piece together snapshots of plant health over the season and figure out how to interpret it in terms of yield. The method we developed to do that relies on crop simulation models, which allow us to create ‘fake’ data to then train our interpretation models.”

More: NASA sends eight small satellites into orbit to help monitor hurricanes

Working with corn farmers on small, one-half to one-acre farms, the researchers applied a couple techniques to measure crop yields.

The first approach entails heading out to the farms to compare the satellite imagery to what is actually happening on the ground. However, ground surveys demand lots of time and cost — and that means the approach can’t scale.

The more scalable approach doesn’t rely on ground surveys but instead uses computer models of crop growth to interpret the images, which has proved to be a relatively accurate predictor of crop yield.

“The hope is that, if it becomes really easy and cheap to accurately measure productivity, then it will become the norm to carefully track productivity over time and rigorously evaluate different activities being done in the name of better productivity,” Lobell said. “The fact is that most of what is tried in agriculture doesn’t work and learning more quickly what actually does work would eventually lead to big benefits for farmers and communities.”

The researchers plan to scale up their project to deliver accurate seasonal predictions for all regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

25

Feb

Google is shutting down Spaces, its experimental group discussion platform

Why it matters to you

You probably didn’t use Google Spaces, but what Google learned from the service could soon go into a Google product you may use.

Yet another Google service is being sent to the graveyard. Google Spaces, which launched in May 2016 shortly before Google I/O 2016, is being shut down. The service will be read-only starting on March 3, and it will close down for good April 17.

The move is interesting, but not all that surprising — Google catches a lot of criticism for launching, then shuttering messaging services, and Spaces, which was a group messaging service likened to a stripped-down version of Slack, is no exception to that. The goal of the service was to help groups organize conversations around specific topics — and it functioned less as a messaging service and more like a group forum app.

More: You can now search your Google Drive directly from Google’s Android app

The way it worked was relatively easy. You could simply set a topic, then invite anyone with a Google account to discuss said topic. Key to how it worked was its ability to use search to pull in YouTube videos, images, and search results.

“As we focus our efforts, we’ve decided to take what we learned with Spaces, and apply it to our existing products. Unfortunately, this means that we’ll be saying goodbye to supporting Spaces. We want to thank all of the Spaces users who tried out the app and shared their feedback,” said John Kilcline, Google product manager, in a Google+ post.

Spaces was undeniably a social service, and it highlights Google’s long and winding attempts at jumping into the social media network space. First, the company launched Google+, which largely failed despite the fact that it still exists. While Google+ is now a much different service than it was when it launched in 2011, the fact is that Google has a long way to go before it launches the Facebook and Twitter competitor that it has long hoped to create.

25

Feb

Computer says no: New Jersey is using an algorithm to make bail recommendations

Why it matters to you

New Jersey’s decision to use an algorithm for bail hearings may sound scary but it could be the solution to a broken system.

If you get arrested in New Jersey, you could find yourself either approved or denied bail based on the recommendation of an algorithm.

That is because, from the first day of 2017, the state decided to replace its busted human-led bail system with a new algorithm called the Public Safety Assessment, which adds the power of math and data science to an area that has often relied on nothing more scientific than gut instinct.

“When we first launched our initiative as an organization five years ago, we took a look at the whole criminal justice system and tried to find the areas where we could have the biggest positive impacts on fairness, public safety and efficiency,” Matt Alsdorf, vice president of Criminal Justice for the Texas-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which designed the algorithm, told Digital Trends. “There were a lot to focus on, but we thought that focusing on the front-end of the system — the initial decisions that are made in a potential criminal case — was somewhere we could really make a difference.”

More: The Sentinel is a robot designed to make police traffic stops safer

The PSA algorithm is designed to predict whether or not a person is likely to present a risk if they are released pre-trial. It was based on analysis of a dataset of 1.5 million cases around the U.S., and takes into account nine different factors about defendants. These include age at current arrest, current violent offense, pending charges at the time of the offense, prior felony convictions, prior violent convictions, prior sentences, and prior failures to appear in court — both recent and long-term. Using these data points, the algorithm then makes a prediction about how likely someone is to commit new criminal activity if released or to fail to show up at court.

If the idea of using algorithms to decide on bail sounds a bit, well, Orwellian to you, Alsdorf is keen to assuage fears. For one thing, the algorithm is only making recommendations to a judge, who can decide to take them or not. It is also interesting to note that a lot of the potentially biased reasons people previously accused bail decisions of taking into account (such as a person’s educational attainment, family structure or employment) didn’t turn out to be strong predictors of reoffending or not showing up to court and therefore don’t show up in the algorithm.

“The goal is to provide judges with better research-based, data-driven guidance about who should be in and who should be out of jail during the pretrial period,” Alsdorf said.