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.

Hot Electrons Move Faster Than Expected

Ultrafast Motion of Electrons

A new research has given rise to solid-state devices which tend to utilise excited electrons. Engineers and scientists at Caltech have for the first time, been in a position of observing directly the ultrafast motion of electrons instantly after they have been excited by a laser. It was observed that these electrons tend to diffuse in their surroundings quickly and beyond than earlier anticipated.

This performance called as `super-diffusion has been hypothesized though not seen before. A team headed by Marco Bernardi of Caltech and the late Ahmed Zewail had documented the motion of electrons by utilising microscope which had captured the images with a shutter speed of a trillionth of a second at a nanometer-scale spatial resolution and their discoveries had appeared in a study published on May 11 in Nature Communications.

 The excited electrons had displayed a diffusion rate of 1,000 times higher than earlier excitation. Though the phenomenon had lasted only for a few hundred trillionths of a second, it had provided the possibility for operation of hot electrons in this fast system in transporting energy and charge in novel devices.

Assistant professor of applied physics and materials science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Bernardi had informed that their work portrayed the presence of fast transient which tends to last for a few hundred picoseconds at the time when electrons move quicker than their speed of room temperature, indicating that they can cover longer distance in a given period of time when operated with the help of lasers.

Ultrafast Imaging Technology

He further added that this non-equilibrium behaviour could be employed in novel electronic, optoelectronic as well as renewable energy devices together with uncovering new fundamental physics. Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry, professor of physics as well as the director of the Physical Biology Centre for Ultrafast Science and Technology at Caltech, colleague of Bernardi had passed away on 2nd August 2016.

The research had been possible by scanning ultrafast electron microscopy, which is an ultrafast imaging technology initiated by Zewail, with the potential of creating images with picosecond time with nanometer spatial resolutions. The theory and computer models had been developed by Bernardi which clarified the tentative results as an indicator of super-diffusion.

Bernandi has plans of continuing the research by trying to answer the fundamental questions regarding the excited electrons, like how they equilibrate among themselves as well as with atomic vibrations in material, together with applied ones like how hot electrons could increase the efficiency of energy conversion devices such as solar cells and LEDs.

Super Diffusion of Excited Carriers in Semiconductors

The paper has been entitled `Super Diffusion of Excited Carriers in Semiconductors’. Co-authors comprise of former postdoc Ebrahim Najafi of Caltech, who is said to be the main author of the paper and a former graduate student, Vsevolod Ivanov. The research has been supported by the National Science foundation, together with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Gordon and Betty Moor Foundation as well as the Caltech-Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology – GIST, program.

Laying the Groundwork for Longer Battery Life

Batteries with Long Life – Interact with Technology

Some of the common complaints regarding cell phone or the laptop are regarding the battery life which tends to turn off when needed the most. We are inclined to rely on technology which is an integral part of our life and find it difficult to do anything without it.

 We would find it extremely difficult to cope up with our life even for a short period of time without our cell phone which tends to connect us with the external world. The faculty from Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering have discovered this topic in a latest invited article in Nature Energy – `Perspective’. Batteries having long life and tend to charge instantly could change how we interact with our technology.

Anne Steven Assistant Professor Ekaterina Pomerantseva together with Distinguished University and Charles T. as well as Ruth M. Bach Chair Professor Yury Gogotsi suggested that the next generation batteries have been developed by combining different two-dimensional 2D materials in heterostructured electrodes and would immensely enhance battery life and charge storage potentials, thus changing the technology setting. The term `2D’ materials is utilised in describing materials which tend to be developed in single layer, like a sheet of paper which is only one or many atoms thick.

2D Heterostuctured Electrodes

These exceptional materials have started portraying amazing potentials for different properties which could be applied to a wide selection of applications. The most frequently known 2D materials are said to be graphene together with various graphene modification, transition metal dischalcogenides – TMDCs, transition metal oxides –TMOs together with transition metal carbide/nitrides – MXenes.

Individually, these material families tend to display definite benefits for energy storage applications though simultaneously tend to have some shortcomings. Pomerantseva had commented that they suggest that in order to eradicate the shortcomings while maintaining most of the benefits of these opposing 2D materials is in creating what is known as 2D heterostructed electrodes composed of interchanging layers of various 2D materials which tend to portray various functionalities.

The single layer structure of 2D materials is for the most part valuable for the purpose of energy storage properties since these thin materials tend to have a great surface range that enables quick diffusion of ions from an electrolyte, which is a liquid utilised in transporting ions between two electrodes. This quick movement of ions on the surface permits a battery to charge immediately. Besides this the 2D material also makes provision for a denser packing of ions between the layers that leads to the battery stocking the charge for a longer period.

Contrary Chemical Reaction

Though there is an opportunity that the solvent utilised in the electrolyte tends to have the possibility of causing a contrary chemical reaction with the electrode in the battery resulting in reduced battery performance, the ability of 2D materials for enhanced battery performance tends to outweigh the potential challenges.

In order to build these 2D heterostructures a parallel orientation or interface of layers of various 2D materials is essential. Gogotsi has informed that the interface of materials in this way tends to optimize their unique properties. For instance, on combining various layers of TTMO together with graphene, a high capacity of oxide as well as high electronic conductivity of carbon could be attained in the resulting 2D heterostructure which could lead to a battery having high energy together with high power.

There is a possibility of modifying the 2D heterostructures still further by integrating different types of inorganic ions, organic molecules and also polymers, which are known as species between the layers. This integration of these interlayer species could lead to various developments in electrochemical properties. The interlayer species could extend the interlayer spacing enabling additional electrochemically cycling ions in being incorporated between the layers which could lead to a higher capacity which in turn could lead to energy density of the batteries.

Insertion/Extraction

Moreover due to the interactions between the layers as well as the interlayer species, the structural stability of the electrodes through multiple cycles of ions is said to go through insertions and extraction which can be enhanced. Should the interlayer species be charged, their presence between the layers could disturb the diffusion of electrochemically cycled ion inclusive of the acceleration of the diffusion that tends to lead to batteries with better power.

Utilising 2D heterostructured electrodes with suitably selected interlayer species seem to have abundant promise in developing a battery which would not only charge quickly but also hold an individual charge for a longer period and will also tend to last longer over several charge and discharge cycles.

 Pomerantseva had informed that if such a battery is utilised in powering a car, it would be capable of greater driving range before the need of a re-charge, and the re-charge process would take a short duration of time. Moreover the owner of the car would possibly desire to buy a new car well before the light indicating that the battery required to be replaced is illuminated.

L2 vs. L3 cache: What’s the Difference?

The cache is a special buffer memory that is located between the memory and the processor.

So that the processor does not have to get every program command from the slow memory individually, a whole command block or data block is loaded into the cache. The probability that the subsequent program instructions are in the cache is relatively high. Only when all program instructions have been executed or a jump command to a jump address outside the cache, the processor must access the memory again. Therefore, the cache should be as large as possible so that the processor can run the program instructions one after the other without waiting.

Typically, processors work with multi-level caches that are different in size and fast. The closer the cache is to the computing core, the faster it works.

Inclusive cache and exclusive cache

With the multicore processors the terms inclusive and exclusive cache came up. Inclusive cache means that data in the L1 cache is also present in the L2 and L3 cache. This makes data consistency between the cores more secure. Compared to the exclusive cache, some storage capacity is given away because the data is redundant in the caches of several CPU cores.

Exclusive cache means that the cache is available to a processor core exclusively, that is, for it alone. It does not have to share the cache with another core. A disadvantage of this is that several processor cores can then exchange data with one another only by way of a detour.

L1 cache / first-level cache

As a rule, the L1 cache is not particularly large. For reasons of space it moves in the order of 16 to 64 kByte. Usually, the memory area for commands and data is separated from each other. The importance of the L1 cache increases with the higher CPU speed.

In the L1 cache, the most frequently used commands and data are buffered so that as few accesses as possible to the slow memory are required. This cache avoids delays in the data transfer and helps to optimally utilize the CPU.

L2 cache / second-level cache

In the L2 cache, the data of the working memory (RAM) is buffered.

The processor manufacturers supply the different market segments with specially modified processors via the size of the L2 cache. The choice between a processor with more clock speed or a larger L2 cache can be answered in a simplified manner as follows: With a higher clock, individual programs, especially with high arithmetic requirements, run faster. As soon as several programs run at the same time, a larger cache is an advantage. Typically, normal desktop computers with a processor that has a large cache are better served than with a processor that has a high clock rate.

When the memory controller was shifted from the chipset into the processor and the processor was able to access memory much faster, the importance of the L2 cache decreased. While the size of the L2 cache has decreased, the L3 cache has been properly upgraded.

L3 cache / third-level cache

As a rule, multicore processors use an integrated L3 cache. With the L3 cache, the Cache Koheranz protocol of Multicore processors can work much faster. This protocol compares the caches of all cores to maintain data consistency. The L3 cache thus has less functions of a cache, but is intended to simplify and speed up the cache coherency protocol and the data exchange between the cores.

As modern processors now contain several data cores - so-called cores - the manufacturers have already donated a third cache, the L3 cache, to these multi-core processors. All processor cores work together, which is particularly beneficial in parallel processing. This allows data shared by different CPU cores to be retrieved from the fast L3 cache. Without it, these data would always come from the slow main memory. In addition, the L3 cache also facilitates data management with multiple CPU cores and caches (data coherency).

Google Leak Reveals Pixel 2 'Shape Change'

Google Pixel 2: Code names indicate pixel successors and a new Nexus

Google, the internet giant is working on pixel 2. Now for the first time the codenames of the new Google smartphones have been revealed. So the pixel 2 internally to the name "Walleye" and the pixel XL 2 to the name "Muskie". A third device with the code name "Taimen" provides for speculation. Does Google plan a new Nexus smartphone?Will Google work on three new smartphones for the year 2017? According to media reports, the company is developing the Google Pixel and the Google Pixel XL as codename "Walleye" and "Muskie". "Walleye" is the smaller Google pixel 2, "Muskie" is the Pixel XL 2, reports the usually well-informed US blog Android Police. A reference to "Walleye" has already been discovered in the Android source code.
According to the web page "Droid Life", "Taimen" is said to be another new Google smartphone, which will show a larger screen than Pixel XL 2 to the informer of the website. Possibly, the display will measure six inches in the diagonal. According to Droid Life, "Taimen" is not likely to be marketed under the "Google Pixel" brand. So far the information here is very daring.

This is what the code names mean

What do the code names "Walleye", "Muskie" and "Taimen" mean? Traditionally, Google is designing new devices internally for fish and / or fish species, which was earlier in the Nexus smartphones. So the Nexus 6 was called "Shamu" because of its size. A homage to the killer whale from the SeaWorld shows.

The Nexus 5X was developed under the codename "Bullhead", the English term for catwels. The first pixel devices internally on Google called "Sailfish" (fanfish) and "Marlin" (spearfish). "Walleye" and "Muskie" are also fish species. "Walleye" is the English name for glass eye bass. Taimen, on the other hand, is a very large species of salmon.

Google Pixel 2 - Release, price and rumors

Google will unveil 2017 presumably successor for its pixel smartphones. In the net, first rumors circulate to a supposed Google pixel 2. The summarize of what Mono-live.com knew so far about the new Google smartphones.

In 2016 Google introduced its Nexus series and replaced the device family with the new product range Google Pixel. With the five-inch Google pixel and the 5.5-inch Google Pixel XL, the manufacturer launched two smartphones under the new name on the market. Both devices, however, did not differ from the size.

This year, Google will probably present successors for the pixel devices. In the following you will learn what Mono-live.com knew about the Google Pixel 2 and the Pixel XL 2.

Release: When will the new Google smartphones appear?

There is not yet a release date for Google Pixel 2 and Pixel XL 2. The first pixel smartphones appeared on 4 October 2016. It is therefore to be expected that Google will bring the successors in October 2017 on the market.

Price: How expensive are the new pixel smartphones

Also unclear is how expensive the new Google smartphones will be. Both the Google pixel and the pixel XL were anything but favorable. The prices began at 759 and 899 euros respectively. Currently there are rumors that Google will release a more affordable pixel model this year. However, this remains to be seen.

Harvard Scientists Use Simple Materials to Create Semi Soft Robots

Biologically Inspired Soft Robots

George Whitesides towards the start of the decade had assisted in rewriting the rules of what a machine could be with the improvement of biologically inspired soft robots and is now ready to rewrite it once again with the support of some plastic drinking straws. Whitesides together with Alex Nemiroski a former postdoctoral fellow in Harvard lab of Whitesides had been encouraged by arthropod insects and spiders and have developed a kind of semi-soft robot which is capable of standing and walking.

 The team has also developed a robotic water strider with the skill of pushing itself along the liquid surface. The robots have been defined in a recent paper published in the journal Soft Robotics. The new robots unlike the earlier generations of soft robots that could stand and walk uncomfortably by filling air chambers in their bodies are designed to be extremely quicker.

The researchers are expecting that the robots would finally be utilised in search operations, even though practical applications seems to be far away, in an event of natural calamities or in conflict zones. The Woodford L and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard, Whitesides stated that if one looks around the world, there are plenty of things like spiders and insects that are very agile.

Flexible Organisms on Planet

They can move rapidly, climb on various items and are capable of doing things which huge hard robot are unable to do due to their weight and form factor. They are among the most flexible organisms on the planet and the question was how we can build something like that.

The answer from Nemiroski was that it came in the form of one’s average drinking straw. He informed that it had all began from an observation which George had made that polypropylene tubes have an excellent strength-to-weight ratio. This gave rise to developing something which has more structural support than virtuously soft robots tend to have.

 That has been the building block and then they got inspiration from arthropods to figure out how to make a joint and how to use the tubes as an exoskeleton. After that there was a question of how far one’s imagination can go and once you have a Lego brick, what type of castle can one build with it. He added that what they built was a surprisingly simple joint.

Whitesides, with Nemiroski had started by cutting a notch in the straws enabling them to bend. The scientists then inserted short lengths of tubing which on inflation forced the joints to spread. A rubber tendon linked on either side then caused the joint to retract when the tubing flattened.

Microcontroller Run By Arduino

The team equipped with the simple concept, built a one-legged robot capable of crawling and moved up in intricacy as they added a second and later a third leg enabling the robot to stand on its own. Nemiroski stated that with every new level of system complexity they would have to go back to the original joint, making modifications in building it to be capable of exerting more force or to be capable of supporting the weight of larger robots.

Eventually when they graduated to six- or eight- legged arthrobots, enabling them to walk, became a challenge from the point of view of programming. For instance it was viewed at the way ants and spiders sequence the motion of their limbs and then attempted to figure out if the aspects of these motions were applicable to what they were doing or if the need for developing their own kind of walking tailored to these specific kinds of joints.

 Though Nemiroski together with his colleagues accomplished in directing simple robots by hand, by utilising syringes, they resorted to computers in controlling the sequencing of their limbs since the designs amplified by way of complexity. He informed that they had put together a microcontroller run by Arduino which tends to utilise valve together with a central compressor that enabled them the freedom to evolve their gait swiftly.

Motion of Joint – Binary – Simplicity of Valving System

Although Nemiroski along with his colleagues had been skilful in reproducing the distinctive `triangle’ gait of ants utilising their six-legged robot, imitating a spider-like gait, proved to be far riskier. He added that a spider has the tendency of modulating the speed which it extends and contracts its joints to carefully time which limbs are moving forward and backward at any point.

Nemiroski further added that however in our case, the motion of the joint is binary owing to the simplicity of our valving system. You either switch the valve to the pressure source to inflate the balloon in the joint and extend the limb or switch the valve to atmosphere in order to deflate the joint and thus retract the limb. In the case of the eight-legged robot, the gait compatible had to be developed with binary motion of the joints.

Though it was not a brand new gait but they could not accurately duplicate how a spider tends to move for this robot. Nemiroski stated that developing a scheme which can modify the swiftness of actuation of legs would be a useful objective for future exploration and would need programmable control over the flow rate supplied to each joint.

Academic Prototypes

Whitesides is of the belief that the techniques utilised in their development especially the use of daily off-the-shelf stuff can point the way toward future innovation, though it would take years before the robots make their way in the real world applications.

He stated that he does not see any reason to reinvent wheels and if one looks at drinking straws, they can make them all, effectively at zero cost together with great strength and so why not use them? They are academic prototypes and hence they tend to be very light weight though it would be quite easy to imagine building these with a lightweight operational polymer which could hold a considerable weight.

Nemiroski added that what is really attractive here is the simplicity and this is something George had been championing for some time and something which he grew to appreciate deeply while in his lab.

Flawed Fish Jaws Shed Light on Hearing Loss in Humans

Genetic Mutation – Malformation of Jaw

As per USC research in Scientific reports, the same genetic tweak which tends to cause malformed jaws in the case of fish could be responsible for some issues in hearing in humans which seems to have some evolutionary origins. Scientists are of the belief that the arrangements which seem to support the jaws of primeval ancestral fish gave rise to three tiny bones towards the middle ear of humans as well as other mammals which transmit sound vibrations where the bones are known as malleus, incus and stapes.

 In zebra fish, a genetic mutation could result in malformation of the jaw and hence USC researchers speculated if an equivalent genetic change could activate hearing defects in mice and humans. To comprehend the query, Camilla Teng, USC PhD student coordinated along with the other colleagues in the USC Stem Cell laboratories of Gage Crump, Rob Maxson, and Neil Segil and with clinical experts in radiology, audiology and genetics at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

They researched on two genes JAG1 and NOTCH2 which were mutated in most patients with Alagille syndrome - AGS which a genetic condition causing several symptoms in various parts of the body inclusive of the liver.

Hearing Loss – Deficits in Sensory Cells of Inner Ear

A person with Alagille syndrome tends to have less than normal number or small bile ducts in the liver which is the organ in the abdomen between the chest and hips that makes blood proteins, bile storing energy and nutrients, combats infection as well as eliminates harmful chemicals from the blood.At least in half of the patients, the syndrome tends to affect hearing loss besides liver, eye, heart and skeletal defects.

Though some of this could be hearing loss due to deficits in the sensory cells of the inner ear, the researchers have been speculating on the conductive hearing loss that involves essential components of the middle ear like the vibrating bones.

With the introduction of mutations in mice, the researchers observed flaws in the incus as well as the stapes bones together with corresponding hearing loss. Thereafter they attended Alagille Alliance meetings in 2011 and 2014 performing hearing tests later on 44 human patients affected with Alagille syndrome to determine if their hearing loss had been conductive, sensor in neural or mixed.

Conductive Hearing Loss

As predicted by their discoveries in zebra-fish and mice, they observed conductive hearing loss had been the most common type which had affected almost one third of all ears. The CT scans of 5 AGS patients showed a more considerable complex picture, an unexpected variety of basi cflaws in the middle ear having variable effects on hearing.

One out of the five patients had a stapes flaw precisely related with conductive hearing loss.Teng commented that their study emphasized a generally unnoticed phenotype of Alagille Syndromes.

According to Teng, the study provided some insight on generally overlooked issue arising among individuals with Alagille syndrome. She stated that if patients tend to be conscious of possible conductive hearing loss earlier in life, they can seek medical aidin time for abetter quality of life.

Peering Into Fish Brains to See How They Work

Transparent Fish – Work in the Dark

The main focus in the research of the latest group at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience is transparent fish and the capability to work in the dark. One of the important challenges faced by neuroscientists wanting to comprehend how the brain works is essentially reckoning out how the brain is wired together and how neurons tend to interact.

NTNU neuroscientists and Nobel laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser resolved this issue by studying how to record from individual neurons in the rat brain when the rats tend to move freely in space. They utilised the recording in order to make the findings that had attained them the Nobel Prize.

They were in a position to understand that certain neurons in the entorhinal cortex fired in a manner that created a grid pattern which could be utilised in navigating like an internal GPS. Emre Yaksi, the latest teamhead of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience utilised a diverse approach to the issue of viewing what tends to go on within the brain.

Rather than studying rats or mice, Yakshi resorted to around 90 various types of genetically modified zebra-fish which he could breed in creating various fish with preferredphysiognomies.

Comprehending Universal Circuit Architectures in Brain

Young larval zebra-fish are said to be totally transparent and hence Yakshi needed only a systematic optical microscope to view what tends to occur inside their heads. Some of the fishes of Yakshi seem to have a genetic modification which makes their neurons light up while they direct signal to another neuron and he has informed that this is what tends to make circuits and connections visible to researchers.

He commented that they are interested in comprehending the universal circuit architectures in the brain which can perform interesting computation. Though fish are quite different from humans, their brains tend to have identical structures and in the end fish also have to find food, they also have to find a mate, they have to avoid dangers and they build brain circuits which can generate all these behaviours just the way humans tend to do.

When Yaksi had come to Kavli Institute in early 2015 together with a team of researchers they had a 900 kg anti-vibration table which was the size of a billiards table. The table had been big and heavy and was needed in the laboratory to reduce vibration when they had to use the highly sensitive optical microscopes to peer into the brains of the zebra-fish.

Zebra-Fish Genetically Adapted

The larval fish tend to be quite small that a slight vibration from cars or trucks passing by the streets could make the microscopes bounce away from their miniature brain targets. Zebra-fish brains are quite small, around 10,000 to 20,000 neurons which is a figure dwarfed by the human brain that tends to have an estimated neurons of 80 billion.

However the measurement that Yaksi together with his colleagues tend to make marks in huge quantities of data. According to him, a 30 minute of recording could generate data which tends to take about a week to process the same. It was for this purpose, the research group of Yaksiis a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, physicists and life scientists who seemed to be trained to develop and utilise computational tools in analysing these huge datasets.

Since few of the zebra-fish tend to be genetically adapted in order that their neurons light up with a fluorescent protein when the neurons are active, Yaksi and his colleagues tend to work frequently in low light or darkness. This is particularly obvious when he takes visitors in the subdued darkness of the laboratory where several of the fanciest microscopes are confined in boxes open towards the front, developed to restrict the amount of external light.

Research – Causes of Seizures/How Seizures Prevented

Yaksi had informed that other zebra-fish are genetically modified to shine a blue light in their brain which tends to activate certain neurons enabling the researchers to plan connections between neuron. Major part of the study being done by the group of Yaksiis basic research with findings which tend to improve our understanding of the brain computation though does not specifically have any instant clinical implications.

However, Nathalie Jurisch-Yaksi, wife and colleague of Yaksi is working with medical doctors in order to develop genetically modified zebra-fish which could be helpful in shedding light on brain disease like epilepsy.According to Yaksi, most of the people in his lab are doing basis research attempting to ask how does the brain works, how is it connected, how is it built.

 Nonetheless, Nathalie is working at NTNU with medical doctors and they are trying to reach out to clinicians. For instance he stated that if a brain disorder like epilepsy tends to have a genetic component, that same genetic mutation could be developed in the transgenic group of zebra-fish facility in order that the team could research on the causes of seizures in a diseased brain and how the seizures can be prevented.

Kavli Institute – Excellent Science Environment

The Kavli Institute had been on an institute-wider retreat, when he had come to Trondheim for interview for the position, so Yaksi had the opportunity of meeting not just group leaders but also technicians, master’s students, PhD candidates and everyone. He informed that what was most impressive besides the excellent science environment was that people had been happy and satisfied with what was being done and it was a good atmosphere.

 Though the science had been the most serious part of his decision to move to Trondheim, he informed that he was excited to be a part of the Kavli Institute since he and his wife desired to live in a smaller town as well as close to nature.

He had stated that Trondheim seems to be a unique place and one can do really good science and yet be close to nature, which was a big thing for him and his wife. Going to London or another big city was never an option and they did not desire to deal with big city life. He also informed that when May-Britt Moser had asked him at the time of his interview on what he knew regarding Scandinavia. His reply had been that he did not know much though he had added that he and his wife loved being outdoors.

Plastic 12-Bit RFID Tag and Read-Out System With Screen-Printed Antenna

Quad Industries, Agfa, Imec and TNO made an announcement recently that they established and verified a plastic 12-bit RFID tag and read-out systems with security that is screen printed. For the first time, the system combines a screen-printed antenna and a printed user interface that is based on touch, which allows the reader to operate on curved surfaces. The demonstrator has developed for applications pertaining to badge security, but also shows scope for many other applications as well such as smart packages, games that require interaction and wearables.

Compared to silicon (Si)-based identification devices, RFID tags that are made of plastic electronics have more advantages. They can be attached to curved packaging, effortlessly incorporated in everyday objects and its manufacturing is low-cost. The usual application consists of identification of items, smart food packaging, protecting the brand and badge security. A dedicated RFID reader is needed to scan the RFID tag which is usually in two centimetres of the tag. The antenna in the tag as well as the reader should both be flexible, utilising the advantages of plastic electronics to the fullest. Screen-printed antennas have been applied effectively on the top of an RFID tag but inflexible PCB-based antennas are generally used by the read-out systems. This is primarily because of the fact that the printed antenna has a poor resistance and Q-factor.

For the first time, industries like Imec, Quad Industries and Agfa have combined a screen-printed antenna in both of the items, the RFID tag as well as the read-out system. This allows the application of both these devices on a diverse range of surfaces. Quad Industries have screen-printed antennas using printing inks from Agfa.

This new technology has been demonstrated in an application pertaining to badge security. The access badge integrates the printed antenna, which is size of a credit-card, with a plastic 12-bit RFID chip, placed on plastic substrate that’s flexible. Imec’s metal-oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) technology has been used to manufacture the RFID tag. Large-area manufacturing processes are used by this technology that makes large-scale production at a low cost possible.

The read-out system includes uniquely printed functionality at diverse levels. To begin with, an RFID read-out antenna is made by screen-printing on a plastic film, making room for best possible integration on flat, curved or 3-D shaped reading surfaces. Also, a fully printed touch screen interface with numerical keypad has been placed between the cover lens and the display, which allows any user without a badge to enter the building by punching in a numerical code. Highly transparent screen-printed inks have been used to print these printed touch screen.

There are recently developed Ag inks which are nanoparticle based that makes lower resistances over conventional Ag-flake based inks achievable which in turn enables integrating new functionalities directly by screen printing. In addition to this, the antenna is printed at the same level as the printed touch screen which results in direct, more economical combination of the printed antenna and the customized touch screen in the device that’s the reader.

This technology allows for economical screen-printing manufacturing, is effortlessly customizable and eco-friendly and allows direct chip integration on many substrates which includes plastics, paper, etc. This technology also sees a promising use in smart packaging, smart PCB and smart gaming.

Sensor Solution: Sensor Boutique for Early Adopters

It is known that a very individual fraction of infrared light is absorbed by every chemical substance. This absorption can be used for recognising substances with the help of optical methods, which is almost like the concept of a human fingerprint.

To elaborate this concept, when the infrared radiation, that falls within a certain range of wavelength, are absorbed by molecules, they are animated to a higher level of vibration, in which they rotate and vibrate in a typical and distinctive pattern or rather in a “fingerprint” pattern. These patterns can be used for identifying specific chemical species. Such kind of a method is used, let’s say, for example, in the chemical industry but also has its uses in the health sector or in criminal investigation. A company often needs an individually tailored sensor solution if it plans a new project.

EU-funded pilot line called MIRPHAB (Mid InfraRedPhotonics devices fABrication for chemical sensing and spectroscopic applications) support companies that in search for a suitable system and help in the development of sensor technology and measurement technology in mid-infrared (MIR). Participating in this project is the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF.

Pilot line for ideal spectroscopy solutions

A company has very individual needs if it is looking for a sensor solution, for example, if it has to identify a particular substance in a production process. This begins with the substances that have to be recorded to the number of sensors required up to the speed of the process of production.Considering most of the cases, a custom-made solution that suits all does not suffice and various suppliers are required for the purpose of developing the optimal individual solution.Here is where MIRPHAB comes into picture and proves to be very useful.

Leading European research institutes and companies belonging to the MIR environment have collaborated to provide customers with a custom-made and best suited offers made from a single source. Parties that are interested can get in touch with a central contact person, who can then make a compilation of the best solutions possible from the MIRPHAB members component portfolio as per the modular principle.

EU funding has supported MIRPHAB in the development of the individual MIR sensor solution within the framework, in order to fortify the European industry in the long run and increase in its leading position in chemical analysis and sensor technology. This considerably lessens the investment costs and as a result also reduces the entry point for companies in the MIR area.

Companies that have previously faced high costs and development efforts are now looking at a high-quality MIR sensor solution as an object of interest due to its combination with the virtual infrastructure which is a development caused by MIRPHAB.Also, MIRPHAB provides companies access to the latest and modern technologies, enabling them with an added advantage as an early adopter compared to the competition.

Custom-madesource forMIR lasers

The Freiburg-basedFraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF along with the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS situated in Dresden, is providing a central component of the MIRPHAB sensor solution. The Fraunhofer IAF is presenting the new technology of quantum cascade lasers that emanate laser light in the range of MIR. In this type of laser, the range of the wavelength of the emitted light is spectrally extensive and can be adapted as per requirement during manufacturing. To select a particular wavelength within the broad spectral range, an optical diffraction grating has to be used to choose and then coupled back into the laser chip. The wavelength can be adjusted constantly by turning the grating. This grating is created at the Fraunhofer IPMS in a scaled-down form in so-called Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System or MEMS technology.Thus it is then possible to oscillate the grating up to one kilohertz of frequency. This further enables the tuning of the laser source’s wavelength up to a thousand times per second over a large range of spectrum.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT in Aachen also has involvement in MIRPHAB in order to make the manufacturing of lasers and ratings more proficient and to enhance them for pilot series fabrication.With the help of its proficiency, it changes the production of the quickly adaptable MIR laser into industrially applicable manufacturing processes.

Process exploration in actuality

Currently, there are many applications in the field of spectroscopy that are still in the category of visible or near the range of infrared and use comparatively feeble light sources. MIRPHAB provides solutions has the concept of infrared semiconductor lasers as a foundation. These have comparatively higher intensity of light thus allowing the scope for completely new applications. This results in a recording of up to 1,000 spectra per second with the help of the MIR laser source which, as an example, provides for the real time programmed monitoring and control of biotechnological processes and chemical reactions. Thus, MIRPHAB’s contribution is considered to be important and vital to the factory of the future.

Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Make More Human Decisions?

About 88 million pages of original and authentic handwritten documents belonging to the past three-and-a-half centuries, line the tiled halls of a simple 16th-century trading house located right in the middle of Seville, Spain. These are stored here, incompletely transliterated, where some of them are almost indecipherable. A few of them were carried back on armadas from the Americas while a few have undergone scanning and digitisation.

These documents contain the answers and the context for the innumerable questions pertaining to the Conquistadors, the European history, the New World contact and colonialism, politics, law, economics and ancestry. However, it is unfortunate that hardly some of these carefully kept pages were ever read or interpreted since they were written and brought to Seville centuries before and it is highly unlikely that most of them never will be.

All hope is not lost as a researcher from the Stevens Institute of Technology is trying to get computers to read these documents, before we are out of time, while the documents are still readable. A Stevens computer science professor, Fernando Perez-Cruz asks “What if there was a machine, or a software, that could transcribe all of the documents?”.

Perez-Cruz, who’s expertise lies in the research area of machine learning also says “What if there was a way to teach another machine to combine into groups those 88 million pages and convert them into searchable text categorised into topics? Then we can start understanding the themes in those documents and then will be aware where to look in this storehouse of documents for our answers”. Thus Perez-Cruz is working on both factors of this two-fold approach which, if right, could then be applicable to many other new age and futuristic data analysis queries such as independent transport and analysis of medical data.

Pricing on Amazon, medical study, text reading machines

Perez-Cruz, who is a veteran of Amazon, Bell Labs, Princeton University and University Carlos III of Madrid, has had a very interesting career dealing with scientific challenges.In 2016, he joined Stevens and contributed to the growing asset of the computer science department of the university. Stevens aims at making this a strong research department which in turn is drawing more talent and resources. Perez-Cruz is using this to his advantage in his work. Currently, at Stevens, he is working to develop something called as ‘interpretable machine learning’ which is a systematized intelligence that humans can still work on.

As far as the problem of the historical document analysis is concerned, Perez-Cruz is in the hopes that he will be able to develop improved character-recognition engines. With the help of short excerpts of documents written in varied styles, which have been earlier transliterated by experts, he aims to teach software to identify both the forms of characters and often correlated associations between letters and words, thus constructing a growing recognition engine over time that is absolutely precise. The only question remains, he says, is that how much data or how much handwriting that is transcribed, is sufficient to do this well. The work on this concept is still developing.

Perez-Cruz states that he believes even though it is a technical challenge, it may still be achievable. He is even more fascinated about the next part which is organisation of large quantities of transcribed matter into topics that can be used in a glance. He says that the machine should be able to give us information right away from these three-and-a-half centuries of data when transcribed and should itself learn from the locations of the words and sentences. This is, what he calls, topic modelling.

A key link: Systematically grouping large data into easily accessible topics

After sufficient data has been entered into the algorithm, it begins to spot the most vital identifying and organizing forms and designs in the data. Very often, it so happens that various cues from the human researchers are vital and are searched for.Perez-Cruz notes that eventually, we might discover that there are, let’s say, a few hundred topics or descriptions that run through the whole of this archive and then all of a sudden there may be 88-million-document problems that have been scaled-down to 200 or 300 ideas.

If algorithms can consolidate 88 million pages of text into a few hundred lots, a huge progress in systematisation and efficiency can be achieved by historians and researchers who need to make choices about which particular document, theme or time periods are to be searched, reviewed and analysed in the formerly unmanageable archive. The same concept could be used to find styles, themes and concealed meaning in other vast unread databases.

He concludes saying that one begins with a huge quantity of unorganised data and in order to understand what material does that data contain and how it can be used, a kind of a structure needs to be brought to that data. Once the data is comprehended, one can begin to read it in a particular way, understand better what questions are to be asked pertaining to that information and make better conclusions.

Students Present Solar Car for 5 Occupants

Stella Vie – `Car of the Future’

The Students at Eindhoven University of TechnologyTU/ehave presented a solar car for 5 occupants known as Stella Vie.The team has been considering this car as a source to secure its third world title at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge in Australia (8-16 October) where it expects to highlight the prospective of solar powered family cars.

The new solar powered family car that had been unveiled recently is said to be the successor of Stella Lux and the Stella will be entered in the Bridgestone World Solar challenge in Australia later this year according to the announcement on the website of the university by TU Eindhoven solar team.

The most amazing fact regarding this car is that for the first time, it has been equipped to carry five occupants, instead of four and seems to be much more efficient than all the solar cars before it. The car has the potential of a range of around 1,000 kilometres on a summer’s day in Netherlands with few solar panels on its roof. As per the students, Stella Vie, a reference to daily family life is said to be `the car of the future’. Being powered by the sun, it has the tendency of reaching a speed of around 130 kilometres per hour.
 

Smart Navigation System

  The car comprises of new, smart technology such as parking navigation system which tends to take account of the position of the sun while parking.The car’s smart navigation system also tends to utilise the updated V2X technology to caution the driver regarding the upcoming traffic condition, enabling a safe and a much more efficient voyage.

 In order to save energy still further, Stella Vie tends to gently shove the user to drive efficiently as possible by giving refined feedback via a built-in lighting system that is inclined to caution the driver by turning red if they seem to brake too fast or speed up too violently.

From Eindhoven University of Technology, the team comprising of 23 students would be defending its world title in this forthcoming bi-annual, solar-powered car competition which tends to run 3,000 kilometres through the wilderness of Australia.The Eindhoven team had won the title in 2013 in the Cruiser Class with the Stella. The team would be competing in the Cruiser Class, for practical cars, where judging would be based on technical innovation, battery consumption together with the number of occupancy on board.
 

Solar Team Eindhoven – Contribution to Clean World

  Teams from Delft as well as Twente have been competing in the Challenger Class in the contest for the quickest solo occupant car. The Solar Team at Eindhoven have already portrayed to the world that there is a possibility of constructing an energy competent family car.

The team have designed Stella Vie to slowdown an impeccable steadiness between aerodynamic and aesthetic design and is createdto be more efficient than its forerunner, the Stella Lux.The Vie tends to increase the aero- dynamicity of its earlier siblings by 9%.

The Solar Team Eindhoven tends to make its contribution to a clean world and the main focus is to create a solar car which will be ready for the market in the future. One can imagine a world where cars would no longer require fossil fuels, a world where cars tend to be energy positive.

Selfies: Selfie-Presentation in Everyday Life

Study – First Significant Experimental Research on Selfie

 
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have scrutinized through 2.5 million selfie post on Instagram, to comprehend the photographic spectacle better and how people tend to form their personalities online and to determine what types of identity statement people tend to make on taking and sharing selfies. When it comes to Selfies, appearance tends to be almost everything.

Almost 52% of all selfies tend to fall in the category of appearance, with images of people portraying their make-up, clothes, lips etc. Images regarding looks seems to be twice more well-known than the other 14 categories altogether. After the appearance category, social selfies with friends, loved ones as well as pets were most common to 14%.

The ethnicity images at 13%, travel – 7% and health and fitness to 5%. It was observed by the researchers that the prevalence of ethnicity selfies is an indication that people seem to be proud of their background and also found that several selfies were solo picture instead of taken with a group. The data had been collected in the summer of 2015.the Georgia Tech team are of the belief that the study is the first significant experimental research on selfies.
 

Selfie – An Identity Performance

 
Generally, on Instagram, an overpowering 57% of selfies had been posted by 18-35 year old multitude which according to the researchers is not too surprising taking into account the demographic of the social media platform.

Selfies posted by the under-18 age group was about 30% while the older group of 35+ shared them less often around 13%. Appearance on the other hand was most popular among the crowd of all age groups. Julia Deeb-Swihart, lead author stated that selfies are an identity performance which means that users tend to carefully craft the way they may tend to appear online, which is an extension of that.

 Deep-Swihart had stated that `just like on other social media channels, people are inclined to project an identity promoting their wealth, health together with physical attractiveness, with selfies we decide how to present ourselves to the audience and the audiences tends to decide how it identifies you.

 

Type of Blending of Online/Offline Selves

  This work is stuck in the theory offered by Erving Goffman in `The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. The attires we tend to choose to wear together with the social roles we are inclined to play, are all intended to control the version of ourselves we prefer our peers to view.

Deeb-Swihart had commented that `selfies are a type of blending of our online and offline selves and is a way to prove what is true in your life or at least what one would want people to believe is true’. The data had been accumulated by the researchers by searching for `#selfie’, then utilised computer vision to confirm that the pictures really included faces.

 Almost half of them did not seem to have and they found plenty of spam with blank images or text. The accounts had been utilising the hashtag in order to show up in additional searches for the purpose of obtaining more followers.

Space Robot Technology Helps Self-Driving Cars and Drones on Earth

Support Robots to Navigate Independently
 
The significance of making units of self-driving cars together with grocery delivery through drone could be revealed through an improbable source – autonomous space robots.

An assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Marco Pavone has been creating technologies to assist robots in adjusting to unknown as well as altering environments. Pavone had been working in robotics at Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA before coming to Stanford and had maintained relationships with NASA centres together with collaboration with the other departments at Stanford. He views his work in space and Earth technologies as complementary.

 He commented that in a sense, some robotics techniques which tend to have been designed for autonomous cars could be very useful for spacecraft control. Similarly the algorithms which he and his students devised to assist robots make decisions and assessments on their own with a span of a second could help in space exploration as well as they could improve on driving cars and drone from the Earth.

One of the projects of Pavone tends to centre on supporting robots to navigate independently in bringing space debris out of orbit, delivering tools to astronauts and grasp spinning, speeding objects out of the vacuum of space.
 
Gecko-Inspired Adhesives
 
There is no boundary for error while grabbing objects in space. Pavone informed that in space when you approach an object, if you are not very careful in grasping it at the time it is contacted, the object would float away from you. Bumping an object in space would make recovering it very difficult.

Pavone had teamed up with Mark Cutkosky, a professor of mechanical engineering, who had spent the last decade perfecting gecko-inspired adhesives, in order to resolve the grasping issue.

 The gecko grippers support a gentle approach as well as a simple touch in order to `grasp’ an object, enabling easy capture and release of spinning, unwieldy space debris. However the delicate navigations needed for grasping in space is not an easy job. Pavone had stated that one have to operate in close proximity to other objects, spacecraft or debris or any object one might have in space that needs advanced decision making potentials.

 Pavone together with his co-workers developed systems which enabled space robot to independently respond to such flexible situations and competently grab space objects with their gecko-strippers.
 
Perception-Aware Planning
 
The subsequent robot could move as well as grab in real time, updating its decisions at a rate of several thousand times a second. This kind of decision-making technology is said to be beneficial in solving navigation issue with drones that are Earth-bound.

 A graduate student Benoit Landry had stated that for these types of vehicles, navigating at high speed in proximity to buildings, people together with the other flying objects seems difficult to perform. He focused that there seems to be a delicate interplay between making decisions and environmental perception. He added that in this perceptive, several aspects of decision making for independent spacecraft tend to be directly significant to drone control.

Landry together with Pavone have been working on `perception-aware planning’ that enables drones to consider fast routes as well as to `see’ their surroundings besides improved estimate on where they are. The work is presently being extended towards handling of interactions with the humans, a main section to organize autonomous system like the drones and self-driving cars.

 

Reduced Gravity Atmospheres
 
Landry had also mentioned that the background of Pavone at NASA had been a good complement to the academic work. When a robot is said to land on a small solar system body type an asteroid, added challenges tend to come up.

 These atmospheres seem to have total different gravity than the Earth. Pavone had stated that if one were to drop an object from waist-height, the same would take a couple of minute to settle to the ground. Ben Hockman, a graduate student in the lab of Pavone, had worked on a cubic robot known as Hedgehog, in order to deal with low-gravity atmospheres such as asteroids.

 The robot passed through uneven, rugged and low-gravity territories by hopping rather than driving like the traditional rovers. Ultimately, Pavone and Hockman desired Hedgehog to be capable of navigating and carrying out tasks without being obviously told how to perform it by a human located millions of miles away. Hockman had mentioned that the prevailing Hedgehog robot is said to be designed for reduced gravity atmospheres though it could be adjusted for Earth.

It would not hop quite that far since we tend to have more gravity though it could be utilised to cross more rugged territories where wheeled robots are unable to go. Hockman viewed the research that he had been doing with Pavone as core scientific exploration adding that science attempts to answer the difficult questions we don’t know the answers to and exploration seeks to find whole new questions we don’t even know yet how to ask.

Sony Unveils New 'Spider-man' Game at E3 Expo

Sony’s Updated Game - `Spider-Man’

An updated game `Spider-man, for PlayStation video console, had been unveiled by Sony, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3, in Los Angeles recently. It is said that Spider-man is likely to be released in 2018 and is being established by Insomniac games, which is the group dealing with the contribution of PlayStation like `Resistance’ and `Ratchet & Clank.

The president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, Shawn Layden, at the time of unveiling the `Spider-man’ game, had commented that the future is here and it is now with PlayStation 4 Pro and PS VR. Virtual reality – VR is rapidly gaining new battleground in the gaming scenario wherein developers are in search of winning over fans with immersive headsets and accessories.

Sony Corp had mentioned that last week it had sold over one million units of its virtual reality headset all over the world and was enhancing production. Besides this at the E3, Sony had also announced that the cult game `Shadow of the Colossus’ would be getting a high-definition remake for PlayStation 4. This game as well as the next `God of War’ edition are likely to be released next year. Though since Spider-Man 2 the Spidey game has not be mostly good, we seem to live in hope.

 

Reclaiming Earlier Glory

 
The reason of Spider-Man 2 is the standard of Spidey game which came down to the feeling of sandbox. The new game after an original story, not a tie-in film, tends to look fixed in reclaiming some of the earlier glory. Though there had not been any strong announcement, it surely seems like it was utilising the Spider Man 2 model.

Perhaps the biggest E3 2017 news, so far is the launch of the Xbox One X and after several months of speculation, the `Project Scorpio’ game console was unveiled by Microsoft. One of the most striking features of the Xbox One X is its design.

A dreadful amount of hardware has been crowded into what is claimed to be the smallest Xbox by Microsoft. Microsoft’s answer to the PS4 Pro is the new high-end console which will be hitting the shelves on 7 November which will be costing £449.99. At its global E3 showcase, Sony may not have exposed a brand new console though there had been no lack of best-seller game being provided. Ubisoft contributions covered varieties from action shooters like `Far Cry 5’ to sports, piracy, dance, together with space money and virtual reality.

 

Prime Announcement – New Game - `Far Cry’ Series

 
However, the prime announcement had been the new game in the tremendously prevalent `Far Cry’ series. The future edition of the first-person shooter action-adventure is said to be the 11th instalment in the award-winning series which is scheduled for a release on 27 February 2018.

Assassin’s Creed’ franchise, the next game in the long-running is called `Assassin’s Creed: Origins’ and is said to be one of the most expected games of the year. Assassin’s Creed is considered to be a franchise centred on exploit-adventure video game series designed by Ubisoft. Plenty of rumours have been circulated and speculated with regards to `Assassin’s Creed” Origins’ much ahead of E3 2017 and the new video game has been heading for Egypt taking the story back to an ancient world. On October 27, versions of Origins custom-made for playing on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Windows-powered personal computers will be released.

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.