Can You Hear Me Now?

 

Lombard - Split Second Act from Ear to Brain –

It has been observed that humans as well as animals while trying to be heard over sound tend to raise their voices. It is said to be a split-second act from the ear to the brain for vocalization. The first to measure how fast it tends to occur in bats – 30 milliseconds, are researchers from Johns Hopkins University. This is 10 times quicker than the blink of an eye, a record for audio vocal response.

 Since this deed is known as the Lombard, its effect tends to take place very fast; the researchers were capable of solving a long overdue mystery considering the neural mechanism behind it. Recently in a paper publishing in the journal `Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, they concluded that it could be a fundamental temporal reflex instead of a deeper, thinking behaviour as presumed earlier, which would be time consuming in processing.

The discoveries shedding light on the foundations of human speech control has also disclosed how species as diverse as fish, animals, and frogs together with humans tend to share the ability to be head over the fight. Co-author Ninad Kothari, a graduate student in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins stated that scientist have been speculating for a century that, could there be a common auditory process in explaining how this phenomenon occurred in fish to frogs to birds to human species with wildly various hearing systems and they had resolved this question.

Lombard Effect

The new statistics could lead to improved treatment for diseases and the Lombard effect could be intensified like Parkinson’s disease as well as support in building assistive medical devices. Studies conducted on bats, animals which tend to depend on sonar-like echolocation, releasing sounds and listening for echoes in order to sense, track and catch prey, had been carried out by the researchers.

In contrast to humans, where the vocalization tends to be reasonably long and slow, bats seems to be perfect for such sensorimotor study since their extraordinary frequency chirps, unnoticeable to the human ear are said to be quick and accurate enabling the researchers to test the parameters of a mammalian brain.

While tracking an insect moving towards the animal on a tether, the team had trained big brown bats to stay balanced on a platform and while the bat hunted for the insect, the researchers had recorded the vocalization of the bat with an array of 14 microphones. The researchers at time permitted the bat to hunt in silence while at other times they played bursts of interfering white noise at different intensities from a speaker which has been placed in front of the bat.

Brain Monitors Background Noise Continuously

It was observed that the white noise had interfered with the echolocation of the bat and had caused the bat to emit louder and louder chirps not different from two neighbours attempting in making a conversation, first over a lurid radio and then over the clamour of a lawn mower and thereafter over the blast of a passing fire engine.

When the noise had stopped, the bat would also stop shouting, to speak and voice at a more usual level. The researchers capable of creating a computational model for the Lombard effect which tends to be applicable to all vertebrate, reached a conclusion that the brain of a bat or a person or a fish tends to monitor continuously the background noise and is inclined to adjust the vocal levels whenever the need arises.

 At first the auditory system is said to notice the background noise. Then the auditory system measures the level of sound pressure and tends to adjust the vocalization amplitude in order to compensate and when the background noise stops, the sound pressure level dissipates as well as the level of vocalization.

Connection Between Hearing & Vocalizations

The author observed that this complete intricate process tends to take place in only 30 milliseconds. In terms of near-instantaneous brain reactions, they name this reflex as `remarkably short’. Lead author Jinhong Luo, a Johns Hopkins postdoctoral colleague had stated that `typically, we breathe every three to five seconds, our heart beats once per second and eye blinking takes one third of a second.

If we believe that eye blinking is fast, the speed at which an echolocating bat responds to ambient noise is truly shocking – 10 times quicker than we blink our eyes’. Scientists are of the belief that the Lombard effect seems to be much slower, around 150 to 175 milliseconds for humans.

Johns Hopkins professor of Psychological and Brian Sciences and Neuroscience and a co-author, Cynthia Moss commented that their study features echolocating bats as valuable animal models for understanding connections between hearing and vocalizations, including speech control in humans.

 The research has been supported by the national Science foundation IOS-1010193 and IOS-1460149, the Human Frontiers Science Program RGP0040 and LT000279/2016-L, the Office of Naval Research N00014-12-1-0339 and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research FA9550-14-1-0398

Watching Cities Grow

Great Resolution Civilian Radar Satellite

Major cities in the world have been increasing and as per the estimates of United Nations, presently half of the population of the world tends to be living in cities. Towards 2050, the figure is expected to mount to two thirds of the population of the world.

 Professor for Signal Processing in Earth Observation at TUM, Xiaoxiang Zhu has informed that this growth has given rise to high demands on building and infrastructure safety since destruction events could threaten thousands of human lives at once. Zhu together with her team had established a method of early detection of probable dangers for instance; subterranean subsidence could cause the collapse of buildings, bridges, tunnels or even dams.

The new system tends to make it possible in noticing and visualizing changes as small as one millimetre each year. Data for the latest urban images tends to come from the German TerraSAR-X satellite which is one of the great resolution civilian radar satellite in the world. Since 2007, the satellite, circulating the earth at an altitude of approximately 500 kilometres tends to send microwave pulses to the earth and collects their echoes. Zhu has explained that at first these measurements were only in a two dimensional image with a resolution of one meter.

Generate Highly Accurate Four-Dimensional City Model

The TUM professor worked in partnership with the German Aerospace Centre – DLR and was also in charge of her own working team. The DLR tends to be in control of the operation and use of the satellite for scientific purposes.

The consequence of the images is restricted by the statistic that reflections from various objects which are at an equivalent distance from the satellite, will layover with each other and this effect tends to decrease the three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional image. Zhu had not only created her own algorithm that tends to make it possible in reconstructing the third and also fourth dimension, but also set a world record at the same time.

 Four dimensional point clouds having a density of three million points for each square kilometre had been reconstructed. This rich recovered information gave rise to generate highly accurate four-dimensional city models.

Radar Measurements to Reconstruct Urban Infrastructure

The trick was that the scientists utilised images taken from slightly various viewpoints. Every eleven days, the satellite tends to fly over the region of interest but its orbit position does not always seem to be precisely the same. The researchers utilise these 250 meter orbital variations in radar tomography to localize each point in three-dimensional space.

This system utilises similar principle used by computer tomography that tends to develop a three-dimensional view of the inner area of the human body. Various radar images taken from different viewpoints have been linked in creating a three-dimensional image. Zhu states that since this system processes only poor resolution in the third dimension, additional compressive sensing system which makes it possible for improving the resolution by 15 times is applied.

Scientists could utilise the radar dimensions to restructure urban organization on the surface of the earth with great accuracy, from TerraSAR-X, for instance the 3D shape of individual buildings. This system has already been utilised in generating highly precise 3D models in Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas and Washington DC.

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The Secret to a Perfect Selfie

Trailblazing Self-Portrait – Over £6 Million

Though selfies are said to be a basic of our technology-fanatical generation they do not always seem to be creative. Andy Warhol had takes what could have been some of the most well-known selfies in the world portraying that the artist seems to be much ahead of his time.

 Tom van Laer, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at City University of London and Stefania Farace, a PhD Candidate in Marketing at Maastricht University in an article for The Conversation, had studied Warhol’s popular photo revealing the three simple rules to the perfect selfie for social media. Andy Warhol, in 1963 had walked in a New York photobooth and had taken what could have been the most famous selfies in the world.

One of the trailblazing self-portrait had been sold for just over £6 million. These selfies seemed to suit effortlessly Warhol’s vision of the pop art era of the late 1950s and 1960s and are typically all-American, mechanical and democratic. Although photobooth images did not go viral like social media images tend to do now, the use of a photobooth in making art was in 1963 fiercely innovative as well as added to the aura of technical invention which surrounded Warhol like it surrounds selfie together with social media presently.

Selfies – Holy Grail of Social Media

Selfies are said to be the holy grail of social media a kind of self-portraying images which tend to be posted on social networking site with details to involve large number of audience. According to latest study it had been revealed that three things could assist the user in taking images which are worth, if not millions of pounds but at least a thousand words and without the need of one risking their life for them.

 Three online experiments had been conducted by their team with workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk that had crowdsource expertise in a range of fields, one with students on computers in the university laboratory and one corpus analysis. It involved a method of looking at a body of evidence jointly with self-governing coders. To define precisely what people involve with, when they view images online, the participants various images were portrayed.

These images were rated on various photographic elements, point of view, content, artsiness and the like. Moreover they also specified how likely they were to comment on the images if they viewed them on social media. With these studies it became possible to segregate the things which seemed to affect people in stopping from caring about an online image and to locate images which would involve them.
Enthusiastic Selfie-Portrait Artist - Awareness –

Besides that they also helped to determine the type of images on which people possibly tend to comment. There are three things which enthusiastic selfie-portrait artist should be aware of:

1. People favour you before the camera

Point of view – POV, in photography is said to be a question of who it is people `see’ taking the image. The unassuming difference is that of `person’ of which there seems to be two principle types namely third person – Warhol taking an image of Marilyn Monroe for instance and first person – Warhol’s selfie.

In the case of Warhol’s time, several of the photographs had been taken from a third person point of view. However this has changed and research does not find much interest for third person images in social media age. From the point of view, it tends to add elaborately to how individuals feel and think as they view the images and just as the point of view could be from one within or outside the image, people then to pick up various feelings and thoughts.

Warhol has contributed immensely in the pictured story of his selfie than in his famous image of Marilyn Monroe and just he is more involved in the story he is conveying with his selfie, so also others are statically likely to get involved with the content of selfies.

2. People get bored of just you

Since the portrait had first been invented, painters and photographers seemed to set priority of importance to person or action. Several of the selfies are said to be about themselves, though our research recommend that this is a poor strategy for drawing attention since people are 15-14% likely in commenting on selfies of individuals doing that which is meaningful than on only selfies. Selfie-takers tend to have agency beyond only being the subject of their own images and tend to do things like eating of drinking of waving their free hand. Warhol had done something else; he had appeared as adjusting his tie.

3. Realistic images put people off 

The selfie of Warhol had been designed not for portraying or depict the truth but to accept the artifice and deception in-built to any kind of illustration. If the creative flexibility in reality and image had been wide in the photograph of Warhol, it would be vast since photography arrived in social media and this is essentially the case. Photographers, who tend to complain that selfies seem to be poor illustration of reality, overlook the fact that taking selfies is not illustration of anything but the unattached sense.

Research has shown that not changing images could wind up in failure and a variation could be silly or serious, unprofessional or professional and so on. Modern photographers need to organize the full power of procedure like emoji, lenses, filters as well as tools since selfie sticks to turn the original into something artful. These selfies tend to be superior with regards to engagement and it was observed that people tend to be 11.86% more likely in commenting on adapted selfies.

As users tend to become more sophisticated in their choice of images, it tends to pay to being more people-centric and to think harder regarding the value an image tends to provide the audience instead of just yourself. The outcome seems to be a renovated selfie of one doing something, an image which is worth a thousand words. In 1968, Warhol had written that `in future everyone would be world well-known for 15 minutes and that future is now.

Imagination Technologies Accuses Apple of Unethical Behaviour in Chip Dispute

Dispute Between Apple & Imagination Technology

Apple has been accused by Imagination Technology for breaking its own ethics as the clash between the British microchip company and its biggest customers have turned very bitter. The Hertfordshire founded group that had been abandoned in April by Apple after the Silicon Valley giant had stated that it would be taking the graphics technology in-house, informed that talks on determining the standstill between the two had stalled and recommended legal action would be the next step.

Apple had depended on the designs of Imagination for the graphics chip which tends to power the iPhone as well as the iPad for years and Apple accounts for almost half of the sales of Imagination. The dispute of Imagination is that Apple would be capable of designing its own chips without paying for access to the intellectual property of the British company and has put itself for sale with analyst stating that the company may combat to survive without further payments.

 Recently the chief executive of Imagination, Andrew Heath had informed that Apple’s claims that the maker of iPhone would no longer need to pay royalties that were `unsubstantiated’ and has labelled the actions of Apple as unacceptable.

Contract Dispute

He further commented that they do not believe that this is an acceptable business practice nor in line with the ethics statements of Apple considering suppliers. He also mentioned that there had been `no progress’ with regards to the contract dispute that Imagination had opened and that it is revising its options, signifying legal action as a prospect. The full-year results of the British company had been published recently indicating that there could be life after Apple.

It also exposed a pre-tax profit of £2.4m against a £29.4m loss the previous year and adjusted operating profits, which shred out the effects of recent rearrangement, increased to £29.2m. The revenues increased 19% to £145.2 due to a series of new contracts approved last year together with the weaker pound. The shares of Imagination had increased by 6.5% and had dropped in April when the company had confirmed that Apple intended to terminate its relationship in the next two years.

However it had recovered after Imagination had put it up for sale in June. The company had informed that it is in initial discussions with probable bidders and analysts vender such as Intel, Qualcomm and ARM Holdings as the potential owners.

Imagination – Big GPU Designers

Oliver Knott, an analyst at N+1 Singer had commented that `without Apple it was difficult to see how it survived as a viable business. He informed that failing to resolve the dispute would make it difficult for Imagination in signing up more customers in the near future.

Apple had refrained from commenting. Imagination had been one of the big GPU designers in the smartphone industry together with another British group – ARM Holdings, and America’s Qualcomm. Smartphones usually tend to have two processors, the brains which are at the core of the functions of the device, the central processing unit – CPU and graphics processing unit – GPU.

 Though the CPU is devoted to the number munching which runs the application, the GPU is said to be responsible in creating images and videos. In the case of smartphones, more commanding GPUs tend to be very important in the midst of the rise of sharper as well as superior screens together with higher-definition video.

Apple is said to be equally exclusive among smartphone manufacturers in which it builds the microchip utilised in its iPhone though it does not make them from scratch. It warrants the powerVR GPU technology from Imagination in its processors.

3D-Sensing Camera – Augmented Reality Technology

Apple has been paying Imagination a royalty for this on every iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple Watch as well as AppleTV it tends to sell. Considering that Apple is said to be the biggest smartphone, tablet and smartwatch maker by volumes and profits in the world, the same has been an extremely profitable relationship for Imagination.

The revenue for Imagination from Apple had been £60.7m just over half of its total sales and it had been expected to be £65m this year. Moreover Apple also had an 8% stake in Imagination and had reflected on purchasing the company outright at one point of time. Imagination had been informed by Apple that it intended in developing its own GPU technology, putting an end to the use of the technology of Imagination.

 It plans to do so in 15 months to two years’ time, in line with the anticipated time scale for the next one iPhone probably to be released in September 2018. GPUs are significant in the working of the camera and its function and reports propose that Apple has been working on a 3D-sensing camera for augmented reality technology, something which will need an increase in graphics processing power.

Moreover GPUs tend to also be critical to machine learning technology like speech and image recognition. Apple which tends to do more data processing on the device than its rivals, requires a high-powered processor for this purpose, for privacy reasons.