Are We Alone? NASA's 30-Year Goal to Answer Astrophysics' Greatest Question - 1 views
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The Corliss Technology Review Group, Tech Review: Be winter-ready with these apps - 1 views
Last week's snow, freezing rain and frigid temperatures were just a warm-up for winter, which doesn't start officially until Saturday. These apps will get you ready for the season by helping you tr...
Corliss Group Review Android devices await Heartbleed fix - 2 views
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The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful - 1 views
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Franchezca Mindaine on 21 Jul 14The way we navigate in cities has been revolutionized in the last few years by the advent of GPS mapping programs. Enter your start and end location and these will give you the shortest route from A to B. That's usually the best bet when driving, but walking is a different matter. Often, pedestrians want the quietest route or the most beautiful but if they turn to a mapping application, they'll get little help. That could change now thanks to the work of Daniele Quercia at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona, Spain, and a couple of pals. These guys have worked out how to measure the "beauty" of specific locations within cities and then designed an algorithm that automatically chooses a route between two locations in a way that maximizes the beauty along it. "The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant," they say. Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowdsourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org. Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowdsourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions. The idea here is that the user enters a start and end location and an algorithm then finds the most beautiful route, rather than the shortest one. It does this by searching through every possible route, adding the beauty scores for each and choosing the one that ranks highest.
The Corliss Group Review: What Consumer Electronics Show has in Store for the Future - 1 views
Here is a short Q&A that provides an overview of Consumer Electronics Show: Q: What is the Consumer Electronics Show all about? A: The Consumer Electronics Show aims to serve as a launching...
The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Cybercriminals Have Your Number, But Which One? - 1 views
The Star Wars Cantina of cybercriminals targeting your identity, health care, finances and privacy today might seem like a movie you've seen so many times you could lip sync the entire thing. Never...
The Corliss Group: White House Cybersecurity Event to Draw Top Tech, Wall Street Execs - 1 views
Government to Call on Companies to Help Improve Information Sharing as Breaches Get More Sophisticated President Barack Obama will convene top executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and a nu...
How a Database of the World's Knowledge Shapes Google's Future - 1 views
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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523846/how-a-database-of-the-worlds-knowledge-shapes-googles-future/ Compiling a giant database of all the facts in the world could help Google's future products understand you better. For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years. That's why in 2010 Google acquired Metaweb, a company building a database intended to give computers the ability to understand the world. Two years later the company's technology resurfaced as the Knowledge Graph (see "Corliss Tech Review Group: http://thecorlissreviewgroup.com/"). John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering at Google and a Metaweb cofounder, says that will lead to Google's future products being able to truly understand the people who use them and the things they care about. He told MIT Technology Review's Tom Simonite how a data store designed to link together all the knowledge on Earth might do that. What is the Knowledge Graph? It's a distillation of what Google knows about the world. An analogy I often use is maps. For a maps product you have to build a database of the real world and know there are things called streets, rivers, and countries in the physical world. That's creating a symbolic structure for the physical world; the Knowledge Graph does that for the world of ideas and common sense. We have entities in the knowledge graph for foods, recipes, products, ideas in philosophy or history, and famous people. We can have relationships between them, so we can say these two people are married or this place is in this country or we can say this movie is related to this person. How does that make a difference to Google's Web search? We've gone up a level from just talking about the words to talking about what the thing actually is. In crawling and indexing documents we can now have an understanding of what the document is about. If the docum
Windows Phone 8.1 Corliss Group Tech Review - 1 views
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Android, iOS, Windows Phone. Each of these mobile platforms had to start somewhere, and none were anywhere near perfect on the first try. Fortunately, each OS gets better with every iteration until, at some point, it all just clicks. Arguably, Windows Phone just came of age with its latest update, version 8.1. Even before today, Windows Phone only had a few big holes remaining and indeed, 8.1 appears to fill those gaps. In particular, the OS now has a fancy notification center in addition to those signature Live Tiles; the keyboard now allows for swipe gestures; and last but not least, it now has Cortana, a virtual assistant to take on Siri, Google Now and Samsung S Voice. The 8.1 update is a fairly significant one, and I got the opportunity to take it for a spin ahead of the official developer preview's launch. It may not be perfect yet, but it's clear Windows Phone has finally grown up. Cortana Windows Phone included a search option from the beginning, and though it was useful at the time, rivals like Siri, S Voice and Google Now have quickly turned the tide, rendering Microsoft first "voice assistant" completely obsolete. Thankfully, the 8.1 update introduces a personal assistant named Cortana to help bring Windows Phone into the modern era. Named after Master Chiefs trusty AI sidekick in Halo, Cortana is designed to help you do whatever you do on a phone. Think: scheduling appointments, alerting you to upcoming flights, telling you the weather, offering up directions, dictating messages, opening apps and adjusting settings. She even tells jokes and responds in humorous ways to (most) silly questions. Those are all givens these days, so let's instead move on to the more unusual things she can do.
Corliss Tech Review Group: Samsung Fined for Paying People to Criticize HTC's Products - 1 views
If you are planning to buy a new smartphone or laptop, you look up internet reviews and customer ratings to check out what device is best for you. But remember not to always believe everything you ...
The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review - Protect Your Assets By Practicing Common-Sense C... - 1 views
Let's get the scary stuff out of the way upfront: Cybercrime costs the global economy $575 billion annually, according to reports. The United States takes a $100 billion hit, the largest of any cou...
Corliss Tech Review Group: 2014 Tech Gadget Predictions - 1 views
As compare to last year, 2014 is more promising to become a better year for tech gadgets. There are many exciting gadgets planned to be released this year including the Apple iWatch, wearable tel...
The Corliss Group Review on Sierra Nevada Corporation Completes Critical Wind Tunnel Tests - 1 views
Sierra Nevada Corporation Completes Critical Wind Tunnel Tests for its Dream Chaser® Spacecraft - Passes NASA CCiCap Program Milestone - Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) announces the successful...
Two lighter laptops for the heavier workload - 2 views
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The Corliss Review Group: When emoji just isn't enough, ubertxt - 1 views
Who is not fond of cute little stuff that appears on your text messages, it somewhat adds excitement on the conversation. It feels like your texts lack a little something, maybe twirly bits and spa...
THE CORLISS REVIEW GROUP: SECURITY - 1 views
Amazon revealed late September this year, aside from their announcement of the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets, Fire OS 3.0 and a revised 7 inch Kindle Fire HD tablet, they also announced that its new ...
The Corliss Technology Review Group, REVIEW: Will 3D tech take Lytro mainstream? - 1 views
When the world's first light-field camera, Lytro, launched in Australia last year it was immediately greeted with a slew of scathing reviews. Review, after review warned consumers about replacing ...