Did I really watch that? Here’s how to delete your Netflix viewing history

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Are you sharing a Netflix account with friends or family and don’t want them to know you watched The Cobbler? Is one of your college roommates still using your login to watch weird anime? Or maybe you’re simply tired of Netflix recommendations that don’t hit the mark.

There are plenty of reasons you might want to clear your Netflix viewing history, and thankfully, the process for doing so is incredibly simple — even if it’s not immediately obvious. Everybody has streaming skeletons in their closets, so go ahead and clear yours out. Here’s how to delete your Netflix viewing history.

Step 1: First, log into your Netflix account using your browser of choice. Because your viewing history is specific to your individual profile, you’ll need to make sure you choose the right profile if there are multiple users under your login. If you accidentally select the wrong profile, don’t worry, you can choose a different one using the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner.

Step 2: Next, head to the aforementioned drop-down menu in the right corner and select the button labeled Your Account.

Step 3: Once there, scroll down to the My Profile section, and click the blue link labeled Viewing activity. This will take you to a page showing everything you’ve watched.

Step 4: To the far right of each entry will be an X.

Clicking this X will remove the entry from your history (and, thus, eliminate any impact it may have had on your personalized recommendations). It may take up to 24 hours for the change to take effect, though.

Something to keep in mind: For television shows, each episode will be listed individually, labeled by season and episode title. Clicking the X on a single show will only remove that specific episode. You will then receive a prompt asking if you want to remove the entire series, and a quick click will do just that.

Step 5: Want to delete your entire viewing history in one fell swoop? Netflix doesn’t really have an option for this from within your profile, but the best solution is just to delete your profile entirely and start fresh! To do this, head to Netflix and log in, then instead of selecting a profile, choose Manage Profiles below.

Click the little pencil icon on the profile you want to delete, then choose Delete Profile (you’ll need to do this twice to confirm). Then, just click Add Profile and type in the name you want to use for your shiny new profile.

And that’s all there is to it! The offending titles — or episodes, as it were — will be removed from your history and nobody will know of your secret love for Happy Tree Friends.

If you found this article helpful, you may also want to check out our guide on how to download movies from Netflix, as well as our picks for the best TV shows on Netflix and the best movies on Netflix. Happy streaming!

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A.I. outperforms astronomers, predicts whether exoplanets will survive

It’s been just thirty years since the first exoplanet was scientifically detected. At the time of this publication, astronomers have added 3,767 to the list.

Most of these far off planets are cruel and inhospitable places, but a few of them may have just the right conditions to harbor life. That is, they’re not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist. Like Goldilocks picking porridge, scientists think conditions have to fall between two extremes for life to take hold.

At its core, the search for exoplanets is the search for habitable exoplanets and a new system developed by astronomers at Columbia University may help made that hunt easier. Using machine learning algorithms, the researchers were able to make better predict about whether certain exoplanets could survive in stable orbits.

The work focused on “Tatooines,” or exoplanets that orbit two stars, much like Luke Skywalker’s desert home planet in Star Wars. These circumbinary planets, as they’re more formally known, can undergo huge orbital changes as they’re tugged between stars, sometimes causing them to get ejected from the system all together or crash into one of their host stars.

There’s an equation out there that astronomers use to determine longterm stability of a circumbinary planet, but lead researcher Chris Lam explained that it doesn’t give an accurate answer in all circumstances.

“The trouble is that motion becomes what physicists and mathematicians call ‘chaotic’ when you have three or more bodies in a system,” Lam, a recent graduate of Columbia University, told Digital Trends. “So there are some boundary cases where the equation predicts an unstable system where it’s stable and vice versa, and we honed in on that as something a neural network could potentially address.”

Predicting whether or not a planet gets flung out of its solar system may seem like little more than a galactic drinking game, but it actually determines life’s ability to exist. It takes billions of years for life as we know it to establish. There’s no hope for life on a planet floating aimlessly through space.

So to determine whether or not a Tatooine has survivability potential, Lam and his colleagues built a machine learning algorithm, which they trained on ten million simulated Tatooines. After a few hours and a bit of tuning, the system was able to outperform the conventional equation on “all metrics,” Lam said.

A paper detailing the study was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Who’s to blame for the GPU pricing crisis? Everyone

Graphics cards have been impossibly expensive for over a year now. It’s a problem that could drive gamers to consoles, stifle the do-it-yourself PC industry, and hamper start-ups hoping to use GPUs for research.

The GPU drought may not be a passing fad, either. High pricing has left everyone pointing fingers, from gamers, to retailers, to the manufacturers themselves. It’d be comforting to think that a single greedy business might be blamed for the problem, but the reality is more complex, and worrisome for anyone who hopes to buy a reasonably priced video card.

Timeline of a crisis

Let’s get right to the facts. Most graphics cards sold today are selling for above the manufactured suggested retail price, and that’s been true for the past year.

We first began reporting on the problem back in mid-2017 when we noted prices for graphics cards had begun to skyrocket. It was particularly noticeable with the new RX 500 series cards which had only just launched in April. An RX 580 which debuted at $230 could cost you as much as $700 at some retailers. Similar problems were faced by those looking to buy RX 570, and even RX 560 cards. Nvidia wasn’t immune, either. While its high-end cards were only seeing small price rises, the GTX 1060 and 1070 were often at least 50 percent more expensive than they should be.

 GPU
MSRP
Newegg
Amazon
Tiger Direct

Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
$700
$700
$700
$762

Nvidia GTX 1080
$550
$530
$500
$582

Nvidia GTX 1070
$380
$658
$700
$500

Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB
$250
$400
$400
$375

Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB
$200
$357
$243
$230

AMD RX 580
$230
$600
$700
Out of Stock

AMD RX 570
$170
$500
$650
No listing

AMD RX 560
$100
$100
$110
$117

Somehow, those problems became even worse in the months that followed. Alongside mid-range card pricing explosions, entry-level and high-end cards also ramped up in price. By January 2018, A GTX 1060 which launched at $200 could cost as much as $800. The GTX 1080 Ti, which debuted at $700, could sell for more than $1,200.

There is a stark difference in the makeup of this generation’s Nvidia card purchases.

AMD’s new flagship cards, the Vega 56 and 64 — which debuted in August four months prior — jumped from launch prices of $400-500, to more than $1,000 at most retailers. That’s if they were available at all which, usually, they weren’t.

As of April 2018, there’s perhaps a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel – but prices are still far higher than they should be. As a new generation of Nvidia graphics cards approaches on the horizon, gamers are concerned we’ll see a new generation of cards that are once again out of stock, and overpriced.

What have AMD and Nvidia done about it?

While the GPU pricing crisis has been ongoing for over a year now, responses from the two companies at the heart of the issue, AMD and Nvidia, have been vague when they’re available at all. Both promise gamers remain important to them and have stated an intent to improve supply, but the details of their efforts are scarce.

They’ve allowed global stocks to deplete to the point that this pricing problem was created in the first place, and they’ve certainly benefited from the pricing crisis. Both companies posted strong earnings in the latest quarterly reports, and overall discrete desktop graphics shipments were up near 10 percent year on year. AMD even appears to have increased its share of the add-in-board market over the past year, despite the shortages.

Unfortunately, both AMD and Nvidia refused to speak to Digital Trends for this article. Both companies sent us a statement saying they were entering a typical “quiet” period and wouldn’t be commenting on the topic of graphics card finances. That leaves us to speculate about their part to play in the GPU pricing crisis. While it’s debatable whether they could have done more to combat this crisis when it first began, the actions of each company suggest their priorities have shifted away from gamers. According to the people we’ve spoken to, those buying expensive cards in larger quantities are of more interest to both companies than the typical DIY PC builders and retail gamers.

Even companies that buy stock for sale to individual consumers are finding acquisition difficult. The head of purchasing at Overclockers UK, Andrew Gibson, told us that his company has found it increasingly difficult to get hold of graphics cards at competitive prices throughout the past year, from both manufacturers and distributors. His solution was to offer aggressive discounts to members of the site’s forum to make sure GPUs ended up in the hands of gamers. That, however, was done on his own initiative.

Left to right, Nvidia GTX1080 Ti, AMD Radeon RX Vega 64

“What I am doing is purely and solely done by OCUK,” he said. “We’ve had no outside assistance from Nvidia, AMD, or board partners, to try and reduce prices for gamers, so we do it ourselves by buying extremely aggressive, reducing our margins etc.”

Companies that focus on selling pre-built systems don’t appear to have had quite as much of an issue. Falcon Northwest, a system builder based in Medford, Oregon, voiced more support for the manufacturers.

“We’ve had no outside assistance from Nvidia, AMD, or board partners to try and reduce prices from gamers.”

“We’ve got a decades long history selling Nvidia, and it’s been good to work with through the madness of the mining craze,” Falcon NW founder and president, Kelt Reeves told Digital Trends.  “[Nvidia has] people dedicated to supporting system building companies like us.  We provide it with sales forecasts for the quantities we think we’ll need for our system builds, and it’s done its best to allocate the GPUs we’ll need through the board partners and distribution.”

Large retailers have faced the same supply problems as everyone else, but they hold a different position from most. Often, they’re the storefronts that allow listing video cards at inflated prices. Amazon and Newegg don’t increase prices themselves, but they do make money off third-party sellers who use their websites to scale video cards.

One source in the PC hardware industry, who wished to remain anonymous, told Digital Trends of severe scalping in the early days of the graphics card price hikes. Specifically citing Newegg, they told us of situations where 50 or more graphics cards would be purchased from Newegg and then immediately listed at an inflated price on the same site, thereby receiving Newegg promotion, and the benefits of an official-looking listing.

Newegg’s small items warehouse Gary Friedman/Getty

“It’s like concert tickets,” our source commented, “Except imagine Ticketmaster owned Stubhub, and Stubhub was just a reseller on Ticketmaster’s own website.” Newegg did not reply to Digital Trends’ request for comment. Newegg has recently implemented purchase limits on video cards to curtail this practice.

Amazon, meanwhile, is arguably more transparent when identifying third party sellers, which makes the difference between first-party listings and vendor listings more obvious. However, Amazon has no sales limit for video cards, so nothing stops scalpers buying everything they can find.

Selling cards down the mines

While Nvidia and AMD said they were putting gamers first, they don’t seem to have qualms about other industries buying up large stocks of cards. While certain retailer purchase limits might stall individuals gaming the system, that doesn’t stop companies who buy directly from the manufacturers or add-in-board partners.

Indeed, it may even be that AMD, Nvidia, and their partners have been giving preferential treatment to cryptocurrency mining hardware companies due to their volume purchases. During our chat with mining rig builder Easy Crypto Hunter earlier this year, Digital Trends was told the company had little difficulty buying large quantities of cards.

“Commercially we’re at a different scale,” explained founder, Josh Riddett, who told us that his company alone buys several hundred graphics cards a month. No wholesaler, retailer or manufacturer had shown any interest in limiting his number of purchases either. Although prices have gone up for him too, he said he frequently sees favorable rates for buying in bulk.

Edgar Bers, the head of business development and communications at cloud mining company HashFlare, told us his firm buys hundreds of AMD 400, 500 and Nvidia GTX 1060 cards a month. While it sources its cards from Estonian retailers, he did say that his company regularly secured discounts for the bulk purchases, and never had any problems with supply – even if the prices had gone up in recent months.

Despite this, AMD and Nvidia claim that cryptocurrency miners have made little difference to their bottom line. AMD released a statement reiterating numbers released during its Q4 2017 earnings call, that “annual revenue related to Blockchain was approximately mid-single digit percent in 2017.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a recent chat with TechCrunch that cryptocurrency mining attributed to a small percentage of Nvidia’s overall business.

Easy Crypto Hunter mining rig

Gamers come third

Another pressure on Nvidia’s graphics card business is machine learning. If you watched CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at the GDC earlier this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Nvidia was an AI hardware developer. Its recent financial report made it sound like one, too. The first graphics card it debuted for its new Volta generation was the Titan V, a multi-thousand dollar card that was designed to facilitate machine learning and AI development, far more than it is to push additional pixels through to your new 4K display. AMD is also working on AI hardware, with an ongoing partnership with Tesla to power the AI in its self-driving cars and the hint of a new, AI-focused Vega card on the horizon.

Gamers and hardware enthusiasts are no longer the only market for graphics cards.

With this pivot by both companies towards AI development, gamers are once again sharing the global stock of graphics cards with a burgeoning industry. A seeming confession from Russian bank, Sberbank, appeared online in late 2017, which claimed that it had been buying up masses of GPUs for AI research. It claimed that that was the main reason for shortages in Russia, and associated price hikes.

That kind of purchasing may be replicated in western markets. Forbes released a report in September 2017 which suggested a sizeable portion of Nvidia’s “gaming” sales were down to machine-learning and data-center companies buying gaming graphics cards for their own AI development purposes.

It suggested that gaming graphics cards were far cheaper, and often performed better, than existing server-grade chips. The report cited AI start-up Clarifai as a major proponent of using Titan graphics cards, often overclocked to achieve higher levels of performance, for its goals. Clarifai’s CEO, Matt Zeiler, even suggested that Nvidia has entirely new targets in mind when it comes to its hardware in the near future. “If you look back a few years ago, Nvidia was just a gaming company,” Zeiler told Forbes. “They’ve completely shifted to machine learning.”

Avatars in NVIDIA Holodeck

That’s certainly been the case over the last year. The combination of AI and cryptocurrency purchases providing a rapidly increasing demand, and rabid retailers (both first and third-party) only too happy to capitalize on the trend, drive prices to unprecedented levels. While prices have subsided some in recent months, these trends give reason to fear they won’t return to normalcy soon.

If even large retailers dedicated to these audiences have struggled to get the stock they need, it seems likely that problems will continue for gamers in the future – especially as automotive adoption of AI looks set to explode in the next few years.

While supply may one day catch up with demand, and pricing may return to some semblance of normality, gamers will need to wait for that day to come. Even if it does happen, one thing’s for certain —  gamers are no longer the only child of graphics card companies. They are going to have to learn to share.

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CRISPR could one day help conservationists save our ocean’s coral

The oceans are under attack and all signs point toward humans as the perpetrators. Sea temperatures are rising, fish populations are dwindling, and coral reefs are experiencing an unprecedented die-off called bleaching. For most accounts, the future for plants and animals on Earth looks pretty grim.

One could argue that rampant advances in technology are what got us here in the first place. But, in a similar vein, technological progress may be the planet’s last hope for survival.

In a recent study by an international team of researchers, scientists for the first time demonstrated that the groundbreaking gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 can be successfully used on coral. The breakthrough paths the way for CRISPR to potentially offer a boost for conservationists trying to save these ancient animals.

“Corals are facing unprecedented declines due to climate change, motivating researchers to understand molecular basis of their thermal tolerance, how they complete their life cycle, and interactions with algae that live inside them,” Phillip Cleves, a Stanford geneticist who co-led the research, told Digital Trends. “Our ability to understand how specific genes contribute to these traits in corals is held back by the lack of methods to test how a particular gene functions in corals.”

By using CRISPR, a fast and precise gene-editing tool considered a resolution in biology, Cleves and his colleagues hope to make precise edits to the coral genomes, in order to study how certain genes function and why coral are so sensitive to changes in the environment.

But there was a problem. Coral are selective breeders, releasing gametes (eggs and sperm) just once a year in accordance with water temperature and moon cycles.

“We wanted to introduce CRISPR into newly fertilized coral eggs, so we needed to be there right when they spawned,” Marie Strader, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who co-led the research, said. “Because of limited access to gametes, the timing in which to perform these experiments was limited. Luckily, Dr. Line Bay (co-author of the paper) and others at the Australian Institute of Marine Science have decades of experience on when and where corals will spawn.”

After traveling to Australia, the researchers used CRISPR to knock out a select few genes. Their breakthrough came when they successfully edited a gene that is thought to help regulate new coral colonization.

The researchers admit that this is a small step down a long road, and they insist they aren’t trying to create a species of super coral. Rather, their goal is to better understand coral biology and, through that understanding, help these organisms survive the environmental trials that lay ahead.

“We intended this paper to serve as a humble blueprint for how researchers can use this technology to study the functions of coral genes,” Strader said. “We are currently conducting experiments investigating how specific genes regulate coral skeletal formation, or calcification, for example. However, we expect this technique could be useful to identify genes involved in many other ecologically important traits such as thermal tolerance or coral bleaching.

“There are so many open questions about which genes help corals thrive in these vibrant and changing ecosystems,” she added. “It is a very exciting time to do this type of work.”

A paper detailing the research this was published this week in the journal Processing of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Ingenious digital swear jar uses voice recognition to penalize you for bad words

Want to stop *@$%ing swearing so much? Then get yourself a swear jar. Want to stop *@$%ing swearing so much, while also getting a unique new gadget for the home? Then get yourself a god&%@ smart swear jar.

That’s the premise behind a somewhat unusual new gadget that has popped up on Kickstarter. Called JarGone, it’s basically an “always listening” speaker like the Amazon Echo or Google Home — only with the sole function of recognizing whenever you use a naughty word.

“Like its inspiration, the purpose of the jar is to clean up the language around it,” creator Bryan Rogers told Digital Trends. “But unlike the classic mason jar, into which users place money after swearing, our device is a smart device that does the detection automatically. JarGone uses speech recognition to listen to nearby speech for user-entered ‘flagged words,’ which are entered via our mobile application. Multiple family or team members can pair to the device via Bluetooth and send their own set of flagged words to the jar. When anyone speaks a flagged word within range of the device, it sets off an audible alarm and the device glows red.”

JarGone

While filtering out age-inappropriate language is one use case, however, Rogers points out that there are others. The idea originally came to him as a way to have some fun by calling people on using jargon (hence the name) in an office setting. “I was to the point of cringing when someone in the office said, ‘let’s take a deep dive,’” he noted. It could also be used to identify sexist language being used in these same environments, such as terms like “sweetheart” or “hun.” While it’s primarily intended as a fun device, the embarrassment of setting JarGone off may be just the thing people need to prompt them to think more carefully before they speak.

“The initially workplace use cases have been very popular with our test groups, which also uncovered many other user demographics who want the product as well,” Rogers continued. “Teachers expressed an interest in using JarGone in the classroom to help with anti-bullying programs. Oftentimes, teachers are behind on the lingo used by their students and knowing what is derogatory. Involving students in the process without calling individual attention to them could help improve the situation. Teachers also would love to set off an alarm when students use ‘filler’ words, such as ‘like,’ ‘um,’ and ‘you know’ during presentations.”

While we offer our usual warnings about the risk inherent in crowdfunding campaigns, if you want to pledge your hard-earned money you can do so over on the project’s Kickstarter page. Prices start at $35, with shipping set to take place in December.

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A coat of conductive paint can transform regular walls into giant touchpads

The late Mark Weiser, the former chief scientist at Xerox PARC, once stated, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Few tech projects summarize that vision of ubiquitous computing better than a new project carried out by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research. Through the use of conductive paint and some low-cost electronics, they have found a way to transform regular, boring internal walls into smart infrastructure able to detect human touch.

“One side of this is input everywhere: walls that are touch sensitive so we can add functionality wherever we want,” Chris Harrison, head of Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group (FIG), told Digital Trends. “Want a light switch here? Sure! Play your favorite music playlist if you touch this part of your living room? Sure! Fully customizable, like software, but for the world around you. Second, and I think even more powerful, is giving computers awareness. If you ask your Alexa device or Google Home, ‘let me know when my laundry finishes,’ it will reply that it has no idea what you are talking about. That’s a missed opportunity. These devices could be so much smarter if they knew what was going on around them and inside of buildings in general.”

The Wall++ walls are made smart by using painter’s tape to create a crisscross pattern, which is then covered with two layers of conductive paint to create a diamond-shaped electrode pattern. The tape is subsequently removed and then the electrodes are connected. Finally, the wall is painted with a top coat of standard latex paint to improve its durability, while hiding the electrodes.

The finished electrode wall can either function as a giant capacitive touchpad or else an electromagnetic sensor for picking up the signature of different devices. As such, it could be used for everything from creating virtual buttons to identifying which devices are being used in the room at any one time.

“A major thread of our research has been investigating ways to make environments smarter,” Harrison continued. “This is easy to do in a very aesthetically obtrusive and high-maintenance way, with sensors stuck on everything. Much harder is to make sensing technologies that blend into the background, essentially invisible. Walls are a great target for this — they are everywhere, and yet they don’t really command our attention.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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AMD combats upgrade woes with ‘crates’ featuring discounted hardware bundles

Looking to upgrade your desktop on the cheap? AMD just revealed its new Combat Crate hardware bundles starting at $263. For now, there are only three, focused on AMD’s first-generation Ryzen 5 1600 processor sporting an included Wraith Spire CPU cooler, but the company says it plans to provide bundles with its first-generation Ryzen 7 1700 processor at a later date. 

For $276, you can get AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 processor bundled with Gigabyte’s GA-AB350-Gaming 3 motherboard. Featuring AMD’s B350 chipset, this board provides four memory slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR4 system memory clocked up to 3,200MHz. It also provides two USB-A 3.1 Gen2 ports supporting 10Gbps transfers, an M.2 slot supporting PCIe Gen3 x4 connectivity, integrated illumination with multiple lighting zones, and more. 

Meanwhile, AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 processor consists of six cores with a base speed of 3.2GHz and a maximum speed of 3.6GHz. Other notable features include 12 threads, 16MB of L3 cache, a default power requirement of 65 watts, and the included non-illuminated Wraith Spire cooler. The chip is unlocked so you can push the CPU beyond its out-of-the-box limits. Note that it only supports memory at 2,667MHz or slower. 

If you root for Team MSI, AMD offers a bundle with the MSI B350 Gaming Plus motherboard for $263. It provides four slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR4 system memory clocked at 3,200MHz. Other ingredients include USB-C 3.1 Gen1 connectivity, an M.2 slot for a stick-shaped SSD, four SATA 3 connectors, AMD CrossFire support, and more. The board supports MSI’s Mystic Light Sync platform as well. 

The third bundle in AMD’s Combat Crate arsenal costs $549 and includes a graphics card. This bundle consists of AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 processor, MSI’s B350 Tomahawk motherboard, and MSI’s Radeon RX 580 Armor 8G OC graphics card. This latter component packs 2,304 cores grouped together in 36 “compute units” with a base speed of 1,257MHz and a maximum speed of 1,340MHz although MSI overclocks that top speed to 1,366MHz. The card includes 8GB of onboard memory dedicated to graphics. 

Meanwhile, MSI’s B350 Tomahawk motherboard provides four memory slots supporting up to 64GB of DDR4 memory clocked at 3,200MHz. You’ll also find a turbo M.2 slot for a stick-shaped SSD, four SATA 3 connectors, USB-C connectivity, onboard red illumination, support for MSI’s Mystic Light Sync platform, and more. It even sports golden audio jacks and what MSI calls DDR4 Boost, which provides optimized traces and isolated memory circuitry. 

Keep in mind that everything listed here is essentially previous-generation hardware. AMD introduced its Radeon RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 graphics cards last year based on its latest “Vega” graphics chip design. Of course, if you can’t afford the $399 starting price, AMD’s Radeon RX 500 Series cards are a good way to upgrade if you can find them at a decent price given the current graphics card shortage. 

As for the Ryzen processor, AMD just introduced four second-generation models, one of which replaces the Ryzen 5 1600 chip. Still, the current bundles are a great deal especially if you’re upgrading from ancient AMD hardware, or want to switch over from the Intel/Nvidia dynamic duo. 

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A new system could bring life-sized holograms to a meeting near you

We’ve all done it. You’re scheduled for a video chat and, rather than pull on a pair of slacks, you just put on a button-down shirt and hope no one knows you’re pantless. (Everyone knows.)

Well, those days may be coming to an end.

Researchers at Queen’s University in Canada recently unveiled the TeleHuman 2, a system they are boasting as the “first truly holographic video conferencing system.” It’s designed to bring video conferences to life, letting people pick up on the subtle body language that is often essential to communication.

“If you remember Princess Leia as a hologram in Star Wars, the idea of being able to teleport oneself to another location has been the stuff of science fiction,” Roel Vertegaal, a Queen’s University researcher who studies human-computer interaction and led the development of the TeleHuman system, told Digital Trends. “We are finally able to project people as well as objects as a hologram across the internet with a fidelity that, at least when it comes to angular accuracy judgments, cannot be distinguished from reality. No helmets or glasses required, and without obscuring parts of the face.”

The system works by using an array of depth cameras to capture a 3D object on one end, and a ring of “smart” projectors positioned around a cylindrical pod on the other end. The cameras capture an image from all angles and transmit them to the projectors, which cast the dynamic hologram into the tube, creating something like a holodeck from Star Trek. A retroreflective coating on the outside of the tube keeps the image looking relatively crisp from all sides.

As the name suggests, it’s the second iteration of the TeleHuman. The first required a headset to view the 3D hologram.

But the TeleHuman 2 isn’t perfect — the image seems to glitch and flutter like a reflection on the water. Still, a viewer on the receiving end can pick up on body nonverbal cues from the hologram, and that is the key, according to Vertegaal, who worries that lack of nonverbal cues makes communication difficult, if not downright hostile.

“The lack of nonverbal communication cues is one of the reasons we see so many flame wars on tools like Twitter,” he said. “Nonverbal visual information such as head orientation, size of the projected image, eye contact, pointing direction, but also proximity, are crucial for successful group conversations. These cues are not transmitted by Skype, and they are very subtle. This system was designed to broadcast the richest possible set of information, allowing users to feel more comfortable and intimate, but also more expressive and effective in their communication. For example, to start talking, people often approach each other, and to end conversation, they might turn around. This works as normal in TeleHuman.”

Moving forward, Vertegaal and his team want to expand the TeleHuman 2 to encompass an entire room while cutting its cost to make it more viable.

No word yet on when you might be asked to dial-in to a videoconference via hologram.

Vertegaal and his colleagues presented the TeleHuman 2 at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems conference in Montreal this week.

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A lack of cryptocurrency miner demand may create discounts on graphics cards

Unnamed sources close to Taiwan-based graphics card manufacturers such as Gigabyte and MSI claim these companies will be forced to slash prices due to a dramatic 40 percent drop in month-on-month shipments starting in April. The plunge stems from a surprising drop in demand from large cryptocurrency mining farm operators and channel distributors who simply don’t need to place additional orders. 

The news seemingly paints a picture of the current cryptocurrency mining “craze” and the graphics card market. The high demand from cryptocurrency miners reportedly took a huge nosedive at the beginning of April, as many now reportedly await Ethereum mining machines manufactured by China’s Bitmain in the third quarter. Even more, Bitcoin and Ethereum values took a sharp decline in early 2018. 

Obviously, this scenario is problematic for companies who enjoyed soaring profits due to cryptocurrency mining throughout 2017. Gigabyte sold 4.5 million graphics cards last year, up one million units from 2016, totaling $67.37 million in profits. The company even surged in the first quarter of 2018 with a 51.38 percent increase compared to the first quarter in 2017, and a 29.9 percent increase over the last quarter of 2017. 

Graphics card and motherboard competitor MSI saw similar profits, earning $3.95 billion in March, up 33.49 percent compared to the same quarter in 2017, and up 27.17 percent from the previous quarter. TUL, another company dedicated to manufacturing graphics cards, also experienced higher revenues for March and the first quarter of 2018. 

But now customers are either halting orders for graphics cards and motherboards, or canceling purchases altogether. That means manufacturers likely have a large supply of hardware on hand, collecting dust and killing profit margins. To move this unwanted hardware off warehouse shelves, manufacturers and channel partners will be forced to offer discounts. Card makers are hoping the market will rebound in May or June, sources claim. 

Bitman’s Antminer E3 is slated to ship around the end of July. It relies on an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) built specifically for mining Ethereum, eliminating the need to purchase a batch of graphics cards. It will supposedly be more efficient in the mining process, but like all other ASICs invading the cryptocurrency market, it allegedly encourages currency centralization and threatens to put the majority of the computing power into the hands of large mining operations. 

With farms looking toward ASICs to do the bulk mining, their focus suggests a less-barren graphics card market for PC gamers in 2018. At least for a year, cryptocurrency miners have scooped up the majority of graphics cards on the market, making the supply extremely scarce and highly inflated prices for the units shoppers manage to find. An abundant supply means “normal” pricing for gamers and general customers alike. 

We have already seen a slight discount of sorts from AMD. The company introduced its Combat Crate program that bundles MSI and Gigabyte motherboards with AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 CPU and Radeon RX 580 graphics card. Are they simply moving stock at a discounted price due to the low cryptocurrency miner demand? 

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Amazon and Tesla listed among the most dangerous US workplaces

Amazon and Tesla are usually proud of appearing on lists, but not this time around. The advocacy group National Council for Occupational Safety and Health has placed both companies on a “Dirty Dozen” list of the most dangerous places to work in the US based on their factory and warehouse conditions. In both cases, they reached the list due to reported higher-than-average injury rates, unnecessary risks and an unwillingness to address workers’ concerns.

The Council noted that seven Amazon warehouse workers have died since 2013, and that there’s a “relentless demand” to fulfill orders that leads to harsh working conditions. It’s even exploring ultrasonic wristbands that would track even the slightest deviation from the work schedule, according to the report. This is particularly concerning when Amazon is helmed by the richest person on Earth and is pushing for tax breaks from states eager to host its new headquarters, the Council said.

Tesla was in at least as much trouble. The report said that significant injuries at Tesla factories were 31 percent higher than the rest of the car industry in 2016, and 83 percent higher when limited to serious injuries. The Council also pointed to OSHA safety violations, and cited the Reveal investigation claiming that improvements in factory injury rates were due to inaccurate reporting, not a genuinely safer environment.

Other companies on the list include Lowe’s (for using and selling deadly paint strippers), the parent company of Applebee’s and IHOP (for frequent sexual harassment complaints) and farms that punish workers for protesting unfair conditions.

Tesla has already responded to the report, pointing Gizmodo to a blog post that countered Reveal’s report. It noted multiple improvements to training and monitoring and ultimately hoped to have the safest conditions on the planet. We’ve asked Amazon if it can comment, although it has historically defended its warehouse labor practices.

This isn’t an official report — the Council relies on multiple local workplace safety groups and documented violations for its studies, and they may not catch everything. Even so, the findings suggest that working conditions are quickly becoming major concerns at tech giants like Amazon and Tesla. Whatever they’re doing to improve safety, it’s not enough to counter impressions that they’re putting workers in unnecessary danger for the sake of profit.

Via: Gizmodo

Source: National COSH (PDF)