WhatsApp Rises as a Major Force in News Media

WhatsApp - Purpose of News

 
According to a study, WhatsApp is said to be one of the most prevailing means wherein individuals can discover and discuss various topics. However the utilisation of messaging app seems to differ extensively among countries. Over 50% of those surveyed in Malaysia had informed that they utilised WhatsApp for the purpose of news at least once a week.

 However in the US, the figure was said to be around 3% while in the UK it was considered to be 5%. It had also been indicated by the Digital News Report that the Brexit debate had led to mounting mistrust of the media of UK. It stated that around 43% of respondents had declared that the news could be trusted, down from last year to around 5% with BBC disapproved for having a pro-EU bias as well as failing to uncover the `distortions’ of the leave campaign.

Research had been conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism which had covered 34 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia besides Taiwan and Hong Kong which had been sponsored by the BBC and Google among others. In January and February, an estimate of around 71,805 had been questioned by YouGov to generate its data. Facebook still tends to lead though WhatsApp seems to be on the rise, and percentage of people utilising individual service at least once a week.
 

Facebook – Most Well-known Social Media/Messaging Service

 
The results indicated that Facebook tends to be the most well-known social media and messaging service for new engagement in all, though two countries namely Japan and South Korea wherein YouTube and Kakao Talk tend to dominate. However it adds that the utilisation of Facebook for the purpose of news had dropped in over half of the territories with the possibility of year-on year comparison. Sharing new stories by contrast as well as chatting regarding them seems to be increasing with private instant messaging apps especially in the case of WhatsApp.

As per a report, WhatsApp is said to be now the second most well-known social service for information in nine of the 36 areas as well as the third most famous platform in further five countries. Numerous prospective clarifications have been provided by the journalists for the rise of WhatsApp. The use of its end-to-end encryption means that messages can be seen only by their senders and recipients, providing users with the protection from being scrutinized by the authorities.

Nic Newman one of the authors of the study had commented that some of the biggest growth seen is in places like Turkey where it is positively risky for people to express anti-government preferences on open networks like Facebook.
 

Share-to-WhatsApp Button

 
As a consequence, people tend to use closed groups where they are more confident of expressing their views. WhatsApp has also profited from the circumstance that in much of Latin America together with other mobile networks have been providing unlimited data usage within the program has encouraged its use.

Moreover, numerous Spanish as well as Chilean media channels have incorporated the app and radio stations usually request listeners to send short voice recordings through the service. Local news site have also included share-to-WhatsApp button to their pages. Mr Newman however had stated that beyond that it could be complex for the media to take benefit of the popularity of the app further than publishing stories which people would prefer to share.

He had explained that one can set up branded areas or group of people on their own though it would be extremely heavy and time consuming and there seems to be few tools for assistance.
 

Digital News Report

 
He further added that part of the appeal of WhatsApp is that users do not get interrupted by brands, thus making it a pure kind of messaging which is something its developers would really tend to hold to. The report had also highlighted the widespread concerns regarding the so-called `fake news’.

It stressed on the suspicions of the users that the lack of rules and use of viral algorithms of social media had supported low-quality false stories to spread around rapidly. However, they have stated that there tends to be a strong distrust of the mainstream media especially in Asian and central, southern as well as eastern European countries where industry is seen as being closely linked to the government.

 The Digital News Report this year is said to be even more sobering than normal. Several of the institutions in the West, which tend to contribute to democracy, have been going through a crisis of trust and new providers are not exempted. The citizens of UK’s trust in news in general have dropped by 7% since the referendum of Brexit according to report which is a cause for worry.

 

Internet – Daily General News – Common Commodity

 
The combination of Reuter’s revelations that the proportion of people have been paying for online news in the UK seems to be `among the lowest of all the countries which had been surveyed and is a cause for alarm. One of the reasons could be the BBC, whose control in news ecosystem could mean the less people feel the need to pay for good news.

The link for a new generation between high-quality general news together with payment for the news could be violation. Due to the internet, the daily general news has become a very common commodity. With the help of tech giants such as Facebook and Google having more of the advertising share, news providers could find they have to specialise if they need to get audience to gain revenue and these audiences would not agree to pay for content which are not trustworthy.

Gaining back that trust in a period of digital echo chambers together with false news would be difficult though it needs to be done. Yahoo News is said to be the most famous online news brand with regards to the number of people utilising it at least once in a week all over the 36 markets all together. Moreover it also tends to rank as the top online provider of online news in the US, Taiwan and Japan.

How to Create the Perfect App

App Streamlining Path to App Success

A lot of individuals would prefer pricing their app at the 99 cent price point and by default, it could not essentially be the best price for your app. But 99 cents could be a good offer for a game which kids tend to buy since it seems easy for them to convince their parents to spend some money on a game. However when it comes to an utility apps, there seems a sense that one would get what you pay for and hence people could really opt for a higher priced app in the same group.

Some may prefer to charge a million dollar from a user though no one would purchase it. However one needs to be realistic while not underestimating one’s services. An individual could experiment with their price and find a price where some seem to purchase your app at a fast speed. Several of the app makers tend to find the price to be about $4.

 App monetization assistance is provided to individuals by online service provider. The app had been developed in order to assist streamlining the path to app success and is expecting that with the help of videos they would be successful in directing the user step by step to their app career.

Various App Styles – Develop & Monetize

Guidance is provided in imparting knowledge on how to build an app from scratch, how to create an app from a template and how one could distribute your app. Moreover there are also videos which could explain the marketing techniques together with videos that provide full explanation.

At times reading on how to develop and market an Android app could be puzzling and daunting and essential information has been made available by the provider for every app making need though there could be requirement of further assistance and it is here that the provider offers the necessary guidance.

A short one minute video tutorials has been created which tends to portray how one could create an app from scratch, giving the user ideas for content, guiding them on how to make money from their app. They have also permitted the complete collection of app templates to be monetized which gives the user more than 50 various app styles that one could develop and monetize.

Style of Affiliate Ads

For creating apps one could log in and opt for the template style. Then you could insert your content either the URL of your company, your brand icon, family video, or any content which one may have developed and within a few clicks it is accomplished.

To monetize the app, one needs to insert the code of your ad publisher in your dashboard within the monetization tab. The best way to monetize your app in a passive way is the banner ads. The way it tends to work means that a person at any point of time is using your app and with the banners displayed, you tend to get revenue though the amount earned is not known since it is based on several factors.

This could comprise the style of affiliate ads one may have chosen, the number of times people may tend to view the banners and the time which is spent on your app.

Cyber Firms Warn of Malware That Could Cause Power Outages

Malicious Software – Modified with Ease Harming Critical Infrastructure

It was recently noted that malicious software had been uncovered by two cyber security firms which is presumed to have caused a December 2016 Ukraine power outage, cautioning that the malware could be modified with ease in harming critical infrastructure operations all over the world.

A Slovakian maker of anti-virus software – ESET together with Dragos Inc. a U.S. critical-infrastructure security firm had released information analyses of the malware called Industroyer or Crash override and had dispensed private alerts to governments as well as infrastructure operators to assist them in defending against the threat.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had mentioned that they were investigating the malware but it had not perceived any evidence to put forward that it had infected U.S. critical infrastructure. The two firms had stated that they were not aware of who had been behind the cyber-attack. Ukraine had put the blame on Russia but the officials in Moscow had denied the blame constantly.

The firms still cautioned that there could be added attacks utilising the same method by the group that built the malware or by imitators who alter the malicious software. ESET malware researcher Robert Lipovsky had stated in a telephone interview that the malware was easy to repurpose and utilise against other targets which was certainly alarming and could cause wide-scale destruction to organization systems that are dynamic.

System Compromised by Crash Override

That warning had been verified by the Department of Homeland Security stating that it was working to understand better the threat posed by Crash Override. The agency had mentioned in an alert post on its website that `the tactics, techniques and procedure described as part of the Crash override malware could be modified to target U.S dangerous information networks and systems’.

 The alert had posted around three dozen technical indicators that a system had been compromised by Crash Override and requested firms to contact the agency if they had doubted that their system had been compromised by the malware. Robert M. Lee founder of Dragos had stated that the malware had the potential of attacking power systems all over Europe and had the tendency to be leveraged against the United States with small modifications.

Risk to Power Distribution Organizations

Lee had further mentioned by phone that` it is able to cause outages of up to a few days in portions of a nation’s grid but is not strong enough to bring down an entire grid of a country’. Lipovsky had stated that through modifications, the malware could attack other kinds of infrastructure comprising of local transportation providers, gas and water providers.

A leader of Kroll’s cyber security practice, Alan Brill had mentioned in a telephone interview that power firms are concerned that there will be more attacks. He further added that they have been dealing with very smart people who came up with something and deployed it. It represents a risk to power distribution organizations everywhere.

Industroyer had been the only second piece of malware that has been uncovered till date which has the potential of disrupting industrial process to manually intervene, without the help of hackers. Stuxnet was first discovered in 2010 and is generally believed by security researchers to have been utilised by the United States as well as Israel for attacking nuclear program of Iran. The Kremlin and Federal Security Service of Russia had refrained from replying to their request for clarifications.

Deep Learning With Coherent Nanophotonic Circuits

Light processor recognizes vowels

Nanophotonic module forms the basis for artificial neural networks with extreme computing power and low energy requirements

Supercomputers are approaching the enormous computing power of up to 200 petaflops, ie 200 million billions of operations per second. Nevertheless, they lag far behind the efficiency of human brains, mainly because of their high energy requirements.

A processor based on nanophotonic modules now provides the basis for extremely fast and economical artificial neural networks. As the American developers reported in the magazine "Nature Photonics", their prototype was able to carry out computing operations at a rate of more than 100 gigahertz with light pulses alone.

"We have created the essential building block for an optical neural network, but not yet a complete system," says Yichen Shen, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. The nanophotonic processor developed by Shen, together with his colleagues, consists of 56 interferometers, in which light waves interact and form interfering patterns after mutual interference.

These modules are suitable for measuring the phase of a light wave between the wave peak and the wave trough, but can also be used for a targeted change of this phase. In the prototype processor, these interferometers, which in principle correspond, in principle, to a neuron in a neural network, were arranged in a cascade.

After the researchers simulated their concept in advance with elaborate models, they also practically tested it with an algorithm for recognizing vowels. The principle of the photonic processor: A spoken vowel unknown to the system is assigned to a light signal of a laser with a specific wavelength and amplitude. When fed into the interferometer cascade, this light signal interacts with further additionally fed laser pulses and different interference patterns are produced in each interferometer.

To conclude these extremely fast processes, the resulting light signal is detected with a sensitive photodetector and is again assigned to a vowel via an analysis program. This assignment showed that the purely optical system could correctly identify the sound in 138 of 180 test runs. For comparison, the researchers also carried out the recognition with a conventional electronic computer, which achieved a slightly higher hit rate.

This system is still a long way from a photonic light computer, which can perform extremely fast speech recognition or solve even more complex problems. But Shen and colleagues believe it is possible to build artificial neural networks with about 1000 neurons from their nanophotonic building blocks.

In contrast to electronic circuits of conventional computers, the energy requirement is to be reduced by up to two orders of magnitude. This approach is one of the most promising in the future to compete with the viability of living brains.

Gelsight Sensor Giving Robots a Sense of Touch

Innovative Technology – GelSight Sensor

The research group of Ted Adelson at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory – CSAIL had unveiled an innovative sensor technology known as GelSight sensor, eight years ago which utilised physical contact with an object in providing an amazing comprehensive 3-D map of its surface.

The two MIT teams have now mounted Gelsight sensors on the grippers of robotic arms providing the robots with better sensitivity and agility. Recently the researchers had presented their work in twofold paper at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Adelson’s group in one paper had utilised the data from the GelSight Sensor to allow a robot to judge the hardness of surfaces it tends to touch a crucial ability if household robots are to handle the daily objects. In the other Robot Locomotion Group of Russ Tedrake at CSAIL, GelSight Sensors were used to allow a robot to manipulate smaller objects than was earlier possible.

The GelSight sensor is said to be somewhat a low-tech solution to difficult issues comprising of a block of transparent rubber. The gel of its name is one face which is covered with metallic paint. When the paint coated face is pressed against an object, it tends to adapt to the objects shape

GelSight Sensor: Easy for Computer Vision Algorithms

Due to the metallic paint the surface of the object became reflective and its geometry became much easy for computer vision algorithms to understand. Attached on the sensor opposite the paint coated surface of the rubber block one will find three coloured light with a single camera.

Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences has explained that the system is said to have coloured light at various angles and it tends to have this reflective material and on viewing the colours, the computer is capable of figuring out the 3-D shape of what that thing would be.

A GelSight sensor in both the groups of experiments had been mounted on one side of a robotic gripper which is a device to some extent like the head of pincer though with flat gripping surfaces instead of pointed tips.

As for an autonomous robot, gauging the softness or hardness of objects is needed in deciding where and how hard to grasp them but also on how they would behave when moved, stacked or even laid on various surfaces. Moreover physical sensing would also assist robots in differentiating object which may look identical.

GelSight Sensor: Softer Objects – Flatten More

In earlier work, robot had made an effort to evaluate the hardness of object by laying them on a flat surface and gently jabbing them to see how much they give. However this is not how humans tend to gauge hardness. Instead our conclusion depends on the degrees to which the contact area from the object to our fingers seems to change as we press it.

Softer objects seem to flatten more increasing the contact area. This same approach had been utilised by the MIT researchers. A graduate student in mechanical engineering and first author on the paper from the group of Adelson, Wenzhen Yuan had utilised confectionary mould in creating 400 groups of silicon objects with 16 objects for each group.

 In each group, the object seemed to have the same shapes though with altered degrees of hardness which was measured by Yuan utilising a standard industrial scale. Then GelSight sensor was pushed against each object physically and thereafter documented on how the contact pattern seemed to change over a period of time thereby producing a short movie for each object.

In order to regulate both the data format and keep the size of the data adaptable, she had extracted five frames from each movie, consistently spaced in time describing the formation of the object which was pressed.

Changes in Contact Pattern/Hardness Movement

Eventually the data was provided to a neural network that mechanically looked for connections between changes in contact patterns and hardness movements resulting in the system taking frames of videos as inputs producing hardness scores with high accuracy.

A series of informal experiments were also conducted by Yuan wherein human subjects palpated fruits and vegetables ranking them according to their hardness. In every occasion, the GelSight sensor -equipped robot came to the same rankings.

The paper from the Robot Locomotion Group originated from the experience of the group with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotics Challenge – DRC wherein academic as well as industry teams contended to progress control systems which would guide a humanoid robot through a sequence of tasks linked to theoretical emergency.

 An autonomous robot usually tends to utilise some types of computer vision system in guiding its operation of objects in its setting. Such schemes tend to offer reliable information regarding the location of the object till the robot picks the object up.

GelSight Sensor Live-Updating/Accurate Valuation

Should the object be small most of it will be obstructed by the gripper of the robot making location valuation quite difficult. Consequently at precisely the point where the robot needs to know the exact location of the object, its valuation tends to be unreliable.

 This had been the issue faced by the MIT team at the time of the DRC when their robot had picked up and turned on a power drill. Greg Izat, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper had commented that one can see in the video for DRC that they had spent two or three minutes turning on the drill.

 It would have been much better if they had a live-updating, accurate valuation of where that drill had been and where their hands were relative to it. This was the reason why the Robot Locomotion Group had turned to GelSight. Izatt together with his co-authors Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics and Mechanical Engineering, Adelson together with Geronimo Mirano, another graduate student in the group of Tedrake had designed control algorithms which tends to utilise computer vision system in guiding the gripper of the robot towards a tool and thereafter turn location estimation over to a GelSight sensor when the robot is said to have the tool in hand.