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Vladimir Antonov

Project Skybender: Google's secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed | Technology | T... - 0 views

  • Google is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air
  • Project SkyBender is using drones to experiment with millimetre-wave radio transmissions, one of the technologies that could underpin next generation 5G wireless internet access
  • High frequency millimetre waves can theoretically transmit gigabits of data every second, up to 40 times more than today’s 4G LTE systems. Google ultimately envisages thousands of high altitude “self-flying aircraft” delivering internet access around the world.
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  • “The huge advantage of millimetre wave is access to new spectrum because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded. It’s packed and there’s nowhere else to go,” says Jacques Rudell
  • However, millimetre wave transmissions have a much shorter range than mobile phone signals. A broadcast at 28GHz, the frequency Google is testing at Spaceport America, would fade out in around a tenth the distance of a 4G phone signal. To get millimetre wave working from a high-flying drone, Google needs to experiment with focused transmissions from a so-called phased array. “This is very difficult, very complex and burns a lot of power,” Rudell says
  • The SkyBender system is being tested with an “optionally piloted” aircraft called Centaur as well as solar-powered drones made by Google Titan, a division formed when Google acquired New Mexico startup Titan Aerospace in 2014. Titan built high-altitude solar-powered drones with wingspans of up to 50 metres
  • Project SkyBender is part of the little-known Google Access team, which also includes Project Loon, a plan to deliver wireless internet using unpowered balloons floating through the stratosphere.
  • In 2014, Darpa, the research arm of the US military, announced a program called Mobile Hotspots to make a fleet of drones that could provide one gigabit per second communications for troops operating in remote areas.
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    Could this be a next gen. technology that would bring hi-speed internet access literally to every place in the world?
ksenia12348

The Sex Recession Is Making Young Americans Unhappy - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 2018, happiness among young adults in America fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 reporting that they were“very happy” in life fell to 25 percent—the lowest level that the General Social Survey, a key barometer of American social life, has ever recorded for that population.
  • Happiness fell most among young men—with only 22 percent of young men (and 28 percent of young women) reporting that they were “very happy” in 2018.
  • We wondered whether this trend was rooted in distinct shifts in young adults’ social ties—including what The Atlantic has called “the sex recession,” that is, a marked decline in sexual activity for this group in recent years.
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  • We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.
  • So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain
  • married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married
  • As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.
  • Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all
  • The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.
  • The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.
  • Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*
  • And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.
  • This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,
  • Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.
  • What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.
Maria Gurova

What Happens When Medical Science Meets Data Science? | Co.Exist | ideas + impact - 0 views

  • If data from personal biometric devices is ever going to be truly useful to researchers, big medical centers will have to pull it into electronic health records (EHRs), de-identify it, and make it public. Without the medical data found in EHRs, like CT scans, X-rays, and blood tests, researchers have little context for wearable sensor data and there is little useful information that can be gleaned from just the raw data
  • Practice Fusion, a popular EHR company, will begin opening up its API over the next year to pull in data from wearable sensors to its platform.
  • Basis, a startup that makes a health sensor-laden watch, is working on the first step: a device-agnostic platform that puts all of a person’s health sensor data into a single online repository.
Vladimir Antonov

After Investing In A Local Services Startup, Google Turns Around And Builds A Competito... - 1 views

  • Google is working to create a new product in the home services market
  • Calif.-based technology giant is working on an offering through its ads team that will allow customers to connect with roofers and repairmen and put it in direct competition with Thumbtack and Amazon.com
  • As Buzzfeed reported, there will likely be some integration with Google Ad Words, which will likely create targeted ads for users searching for certain services that will allow them to receive direct quotes.
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  • This isn’t the first time that Google’s investing has created a possible conflict of interest. In February, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Google was developing an Uber competitor in anticipation of the launch of its self-driving cars. The search company, through its venture capital arm Google Ventures, had previously invested $258 million in the ride-sharing service in Aug. 2013, with Google chief legal officer David Drummond taking an Uber board seat
  • Google is extremely wary of the expansion of the vertically-integrated tech giants into other spaces, said sources, and it’s not staying still with Amazon announcing its entry into a local services market that some experts estimate does more than $400 billion in business every year.
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    Big tech companies expansion // to be added to the 'clash of giants' trend
Maria Gurova

2 | Samsung Introduces A Wearable Health Tracker That Geeks and Insurance Companies Wil... - 0 views

  • The popularity of wearable health trackers, such as Fitbit, Jawbone UP, and Nike FuelBand, have created a problem
  • Hardly anyone has developed algorithms that derive actionable insights from the data that your body generates, and the dashboards are separate
  • Samsung is not planning to release a wearable health monitor to consumers, but expects other developers to build on the reference design shown today.
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  • In a study conducted with the University of Chicago involving 15 patients who had experienced heart failure, sensors and predictive analysis were able to detect early signs of heart problems
  • Though Samsung will still compete on a consumer level, the data on its platform could ramp up its business serving health care professionals.
  • "big data to small data, and small data to insights that people can understand--that are actionable,"
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    Samsung is trying to find a solution on how to interpret the big data collected from the health tracking wearable devices 
Maria Gurova

How To Get More People Into Movie Theaters (Without Higher Ticket Prices) - 3 views

  • Its newest toy is called Barco Escape and right now it’s essentially three theater screens in one space — the main screen and then additional screens on the left and right walls. The effect is a 270-degree image that makes viewers feel like they are in the middle of the action.
  • It’s the kind of premium experience that most people would expect to pay extra for but Schilowitz says part of the point of Escape is to give viewers a more theme-park like experience without charging any more for a ticket.
  • One of the biggest trends right now is people watching other people play video games.
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  • Schilowitz hopes to engage brands to make 270-degree short films to show before the actual movie. Think Red Bull's Red Bull's many extreme sports videos. Now picture them in an immersive experience.  The money coming from brands could help offset the costs of the Escape screen.
  • Schilowitz believes you could take that experience into the theater. Have two people playing a virtual reality game while strapped into Oculus Rift-type devices and people would pay to watch the game on the big screen if top- ranked players were competing.
  • Escape will also be used to show things like concerts which can be better experienced with a wider screen. A Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett show will debut in Escape theaters in 2015.
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    The new technology that may transform all that real estate Theaters owns into the arcades of the future.  
Maria Gurova

Nickelodeon hopes SpongeBob SquarePants will get kids coding | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Nickelodeon UK’s launch of a website called Code-It that aims to teach programming skills to 6-12 year-olds.
  • While they will earn badges for their progress through the site’s set lessons, children will also be able to write their own programs animating the characters, and share them with their peers.
  • In May 2014, producer Aardman Animations launched Shaun’s Game Academy - a website challenging children to create and share their own games
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  • the BBC followed with The Doctor and the Dalek, a web game based on Doctor Who that featured a series of programming challenges
Maria Gurova

Should You Trust Big Pharma With Your DNA? | Popular Science - 0 views

  • In January, the biotech company Genentech reportedly committed $10 million for access to the DNA of 3,000 Parkinson’s patients and their families. A week later, Pfizer made a similar deal for the genomes of 5,000 people with lupus.
  • A trove of data could give scientists the tools they need to develop gene-specific drug therapies for certain diseases. “We are hoping to ultimately develop Parkinson’s medicines, for example, that actually modify the disease as opposed to just treating symptoms,”
  • “this has the possibility of not only helping us find new cures, but it also helps us create a genuine health care system as opposed to just a disease care system.”
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  • Even a small segment of DNA (23andMe looks at 750,000 base pairs out of 3 billion) can reveal a history of illness or predict future risks and be used
  • The 2009 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act makes it illegal for employers or health insurance companies to discriminate based on genetic data. The Act doesn’t address who controls data once it’s out there
alexbelov

Stae wants to prepare cities for the future | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • innovation is coming from private companies. These companies are starting to have better insights about how a city works compared to local governments.
  • Cities should be collecting all the data these companies are generating — Airbnb, Uber, drone delivery, Google self-driving cars. You can run analytics and look at the efficiency of the city
  • The startup is building a platform so that all the companies can send their data to this platform using an API approach.
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  • Stae is starting with a compliance and payment platform for the sharing economy. Stae wants to create an API that would let Airbnb seamlessly pay (for example) $.75 to the city for a one night stay
  • Boston is the first partner city to test the platform.
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    A NY startup is trying to build a platform that would collect data generated by a city to make the city smarter. The accumulated information will be used for making management decisions data-driven. They will start with providing payment platform to collect local taxes from cervices like Airbnb and Uber. The first city to take part in this experiment is Boston.
al_semenchenko

Smartypants: the fart-filtering future of underwear | Art and design | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The term “enhancing underwear” might summon images of go-go-gadget pants that help you run faster and jump higher, but it actually refers to a new breed of briefs that promise you a bigger bulge. Push-up bras and “butt-lifters” have long been a staple of women’s lingerie aisles, but genital scaffolding has now spread to menswear. Featured in the V&A exhibition, the “Wonderjock” is the work of Australian company AussieBum and aims to do for men’s bits what the Wonderbra did for women’s busts – hoisting them up and thrusting them out.
  • US army researchers have developed smart underwear, with sensors secreted inside elastic waistbands that track heart rate, body temperature and perspiration, and beam the stats back to a central monitor. This “wear-and-forget” sensory system is also designed for stressful training situations, identifying which soldiers remain more balanced, so they can be picked for the harder missions.
  • Underwear is already a common place for smuggling drugs of the illegal variety, but a recent pharmaceutical innovation could soon make putting pills in your pants a legitimate activity. Swiss textile giant Schoeller has developed a fabric that administers drugs to the surface of your skin over time, and thinks the best place to put it is in your undies – as those are the garments you’re least likely to forget to put on.
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  • A more practical innovation comes from British manufacturer Shreddies, which has developed flatulence-filtering underwear, allowing you to “fart with confidence”. Their magic farty pants incorporate a layer of Zorflex, a microporous carbon-based material more commonly used in chemical warfare.
alexbelov

Big Data Is Transforming Medicine - 0 views

  • “We’re in a new world in terms of the way healthcare is going to be practiced, based upon these data-driven insights.” A future which combines both evidence-based and practice-based medicine is likely to produce the best outcomes for patients
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    We're in a new world in terms of the way healthcare is going to be practiced, based upon these data-driven insights. A future which combines both evidence-based and practice-based medicine is likely to produce the best outcomes for patients.
Maria Gurova

The Movie Theater Of The Future Is All About Big Screens And Big Data - 2 views

  • With huge-flat screen TVs becoming more affordable — and more original TV content being produced — cinemas have to step up their game to keep pace in the arms race with home theaters. That’s why theater chains are coming out with better food, reclining chairs, and more supersized screens like Imax to take full advantage of the special effects in many tentpole blockbusters.
  • The theater, which opens to the public Friday night, now has a lobby that’s part of the show (and soon, a camera-based audience data gathering tool to go with it), and a cinema equipped with the showpiece Barco Escape, which combines three screens in a U-shaped pattern that gives the viewer almost a cockpit-type perspective of the action.
  • “The Maze Runner” and its sequel, “Maze Runner: Scorch Trials,” were the first — and only — two films with scenes optimized for Barco Escape, but with dozens of Imax films coming out every year, there needs to be a much broader pipeline of content to compete with other large format
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  • Hoddick said he wants to develop three additional films this year, then eight in 2017 and then 12 a year after that
  • The Barco Escape costs exhibitors $100,000 with an additional fee per movie.
  • there are currently 21 Barco Escape theaters in the world — 16 in the United States, two each in Europe and China, and one in Mexico.
  • the plan is to have more than 100 by the end of this year, and 1,000 within three to five years. Oh, and they want an additional 1,000 just in China, soon to be the world’s biggest movie market — and one where Imax is in the process of opening hundreds of its own screens
  • Hoddick said while Barco Escape is only for 2D films at this point, he imagines it’s only a matter of time before 3D comes to the platform
  • it’s currently about 4 percent more expensive to produce a movie for Barco Escape, because the work has to happen in post-production, Hoddick said new cameras from manufacturers including Sony that can film in the 7:1 aspect ratio necessary for the medium will slash costs significantly
  • the theater will soon install a camera-based surveillance system to analyze demographics and customize which “lobby dominations” go live — think superhero trailers going up when a crew of high school kids walks in
Maria Gurova

The Future of Advertising Hinges on Understanding Identity | Adweek - 0 views

  • . The future of identity lies in digitizing the physical world, and the context in which we collect data about identity needs to become transparent.
  • Will consumers understand that better identity data equals higher-quality messaging to them throughout their lives? Context will allow us to exchange value better and build deeper networks in physical world data collection.
  • We need better systems to understand and provide access to individuals’ identity by service and by object
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  • How do we get the right message to the right user to maximize the value to the consumer? In doing so, we can minimize waste and theoretically deliver a much more accurate and compelling experience
  • The Internet of Things phenomenon is in the early days of posing the question: Can we, or should we, bring the intelligence and efficiency of the Internet to everyday objects?
Ekaterina Yanovskaya

Mary Lou Jepsen: Could future devices read images from our brains? | Transcript | TED.com - 0 views

  • We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year -- will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer.
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    Could future devices read images from our brains? As an expert on cutting-edge digital displays, Mary Lou Jepsen studies how to show our most creative ideas on screens. And as a brain surgery patient herself, she is driven to know more about the neural activity that underlies invention, creativity, thought.
Olga Bykova

The future of customer relations | Conversation Management - 0 views

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    Customer relations are in transformation! Pre-sales, sales & after sales are changing at high speed. Companies need to figure out the current customer journey, the role of self service, their data strategy and much more. A little while ago I conducted a global study on the future of customer relationships in collaboration with data collection company SSI and translation agency No Problem!. The study looks into all aspects of a modern customer relation.
Oleg Batluk

Will Big Data Be Used to Create Ad Zombies or Digital Assistants? | Gary Eber... - 0 views

  • unable to separate reality (or as "real" as the online world can be, cartoon or otherwise) and the fictional world of advertising.
  • Dr. Domingos' recent article in the Wall Street Journal paints a utopian scenario where consumers are able to wrest control of the personal information stolen by big business and use it to create "digital models".
  • we really need to ask if creating millions of digital models to remove us even further from face-to-face interaction is the right thing to do.
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  • Big Brother government is replaced by Big Business.
  • the perils of aggregating vast amounts of personal data in huge centralized repositories of purportedly trusted third-parties.
anna_nelidova

Head tracker knows what you're doing and helps you multitask | New Scientist - 1 views

  • wearable system that tracks human movements to understand what task you’re doing, how difficult it is, and when you switch to something else. His goal is to help us control our multitasking lives
  • Gathering patterns of data that describe humans doing different tasks has more potential than just helping us work more efficiently.
  • the device could turn your phone to silent or deliver only emergency notifications. It could also tell you when you need to take a break
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  • Epps’s team has made a device which straps to a baseball cap that can work out the intensity of a task and when a person switches to another task – just from their head movements.
  • o use the data from wearables to train artificial intelligences.
  • Epps’s team is building a new prototype made from cheap components that can be worn on glasses, which tracks eye movement and speech as well as head motion.
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    A wearable system that tracks head movements could help people to multitask and handle distractions. The data generated by wearables on millions of humans can be useful for learning purposes of robots and AI. 
al_semenchenko

There Are Some Super Shady Things in Oculus Rift's Terms of Service - 1 views

  • If you create something with the Rift, the Terms of Service say that you surrender all rights to that work and that Oculus can use it whenever it wants
  • Oculus can collect data from you while you’re using the device
  • Furthermore, the information that they collect can be used to directly market products to you
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  • What’s most worrisome here is that the emergence of VR technology opens up an new type of data for companies to mine en masse which can be collected efficiently. The fact that Oculus, the clear leader in the new VR marketplace, is setting this precedent could be dangerous for the future of the technology.
  • the Oculus Rift is a device that is always on (much like Microsoft’s Xbox One Kinect feature) which leads to further concerns about when the information will be collected.
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    Oculus already gathering much more personal data than were possible before, and owns any UGC created with the help of Oculus.
Maria Gurova

AMC Could Allow Moviegoers to Use Cellphones Inside Theaters to Appeal to Millennials - 2 views

  • AMC Theaters issued a statement on Twitter saying that due to the negative response, it will not proceed with the plan to allow cellphones inside its theaters: "With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theaters. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future."
  • "When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear 'please cut off your left arm above the elbow,'" Aron told Variety. "You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That's not how they live their life ...
  • and one way would be taking "specific auditoriums and make them more texting friendly." 
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  • "Given that so many of today's moviegoers are passionate about preserving the purity of watching movies undisturbed in our theatres, there is no specific timeframe as to when we might introduce such a test, if ever,"
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    in the attempt to satisfy Millennial consumer AMC tried to allow texting and using the smartphones during shows. Twitter reaction was outrageous and they have changed their mind, but say that they might reconsider this policy in the future or maybe not
Maria Gurova

Google: The new GE: Google, everywhere | The Economist - 0 views

  • Its latest purchase is Nest Labs, a maker of sophisticated thermostats and smoke detectors: on January 13th Google said it would pay $3.2 billion in cash for the firm. Google’s biggest move into hardware so far is its $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility
  • With Google’s collection of hardware businesses, the common factor is data: gathering and crunching them, to make physical devices more intelligent.
  • Packed with sensors and software that can, say, detect that the house is empty and turn down the heating, Nest’s connected thermostats generate plenty of data, which the firm captures.
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  • This month Samsung announced a new smart-home computing platform that will let people control washing machines, televisions and other devices it makes from a single app. Microsoft, Apple and Amazon were also tipped to take a lead there, but Google was until now seen as something of a laggard.
  • it is likely to do what it did with driverless cars: take a technology financed by military contracts and adapt it for the consumer market.
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