No Time to Die will be Daniel Craig’s final 007 film.
The 25th James Bond movie was supposed to premiere in April, but the release date kept being pushed back because of the novel coronavirus.
The film is now set to launch in April 2021, assuming the health crisis is under control by then.
A new rumor says that Apple and Netflix are involved in a bidding war for No Time to Die, which might bring the highly-anticipated James Bond movie to streaming services instead of theaters.
No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, was supposed to be one of this year’s biggest blockbusters. The film was supposed to premiere on April 10th, but then the novel coronavirus reached pandemic status, and the world shut down. Universal had to delay the release, pushing it back to November 20th, hoping that the health crisis would be solved by then. But it was clear a few months ago that the pandemic is here to stay.
Several studios postponed their biggest 2020 films, and No Time to Die was pushed back to April 2nd, 2021. Some films launched on streaming services instead of in theaters, but studios were unwilling to risk such a move with any of the blockbusters scheduled to debut in theaters this year. These films usually rake in hundreds of millions at the box office, with some of them often bringing in more than a billion dollars in ticket sales. The new James Bond movie is one such movie — well, any James Bond movie should draw huge crowds.
A new rumor now claims that Craig’s final James Bond flick might be heading to streaming before theaters. And Apple is supposedly in the running for getting the rights.
Researchers proved that an advanced coronavirus vaccine candidate respects the genetic instructions as intended, producing the desired response inside cells.
Scientists from Bristol University developed new technologies to inspect the quality of vaccines and found that the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine follows the programmed genetic instructions.
The independent research is reassuring, showing that the vaccine behaves consistently with the intended plan.
Several coronavirus vaccine trials will complete Phase 3 in the coming months, with one of the frontrunners expecting to seek emergency regulatory approval in late November. That’s assuming Phase 3 trials prove that the drugs are effective and safe. The vaccines will have to protect against infection with the novel pathogen without inducing severe adverse effects. The results for Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials showed that various drugs that are currently tested on volunteers were generally safe. Researchers reported minimal adverse incidents, and those were usually transitory. However, that’s not enough, and the FDA has strict safety requirements for following up with patients enrolled in Phase 3 trials. All volunteers will have to be monitored for two months after their second shot before a company can seek approvals. That’s actually the rule that makes it impossible for any vaccine maker to file paperwork before the presidential election.
That said, there has been an interesting development that warrants plenty of attention from the general public. An independent team of researchers proved that one of the most advanced vaccines works as intended. The conclusions are definitely reassuring, although they’re not enough to conclude the vaccine is safe for use. The researchers found that the drug respects the genetic instructions and behaves exactly as the designers want it to.
Huawei phones are still selling well in some parts of the world, but the Chinese technology giant on Friday reported earnings that nonetheless suggest a tough road ahead for the company.
Whereas the company, the biggest global tech company based in China, once talked in grand, sweeping terms about its ambitions and strategy, the mantra at Huawei is now simply "survival."
Huawei's struggle is a result of a Trump administration-led crackdown against the company.
It wasn't that long ago that Huawei's billionaire founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei was triumphantly insisting that the Trump administration's blacklist banning Huawei phones and other components of the company's business wouldn't hurt it in the long run. In fact, Zhengfei once insisted that it wouldn't matter if the company was kept on the blacklist indefinitely -- "They may as well keep us there forever, because we'll be fine without them," Zhengfei promised in an interview back in mid-November, a little more than a month before the coronavirus outbreak unfolded in China and brought its own set of problems.
Those were the days, back when Huawei was still promising ambitious growth and credibly throwing shade at rival phone makers Samsung and Apple. In early 2019, it got even more assertive, taking out prominent and full-page ad space in mainstream US publications ranging from The Washington Post to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, as well as Politico and The Los Angeles Times. The ads encouraged readers not to take for granted that “everything you hear” about the company is correct and that “We would like the US public to get to know us better.”
The US hit a new daily record for confirmed coronavirus cases at 77,640 on Thursday.
The previous record for one day of cases was 75,723, which was set at the end of July.
To date, more than 8.4 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19, while over 223,000 have died. Both numbers are expected to climb much higher in the weeks ahead.
The United States reached yet another horrific milestone on Thursday by recording 77,640 new coronavirus cases. That is a new record for cases in one day since the outbreak began back in March, based on data compiled by NBC News, and shows just how lax much of the country has become despite numerous warnings from health experts that the fall and winter would bring a new wave. The previous record was 75,723 cases on July 29th.
Ironically, the US broke this unenviable record on the same day that President Donald Trump appeared on stage with Joe Biden for the last presidential debate and said that the pandemic "will soon be gone." After bottoming out in early September, the daily case count has been on the rise. If there is any silver lining amid all of this tragedy, it's that the death rate is relatively stable, but hundreds of people are dying of COVID-19 every day.
Sonos makes the best wireless home speaker system on the market, and there's a great opportunity at Amazon to expand your current Sonos system or start a new one.
You can also of course set the two speakers up in the same room as a stereo pair, or add them as surround sound speakers to use with your Sonos soundbar.
There is now a ton of competition in the wireless home speaker market, including recent additions from high-profile companies like Bose, Apple, Amazon, and more. Try as they might, however, no other company can manage to touch Sonos when it comes to achieving the perfect blend of audio quality, versatility, and design. Whether you already have a Sonos system at home or you've been thinking about diving in, there's a great deal right now on Amazon that you should definitely consider taking advantage of.
At $179, the Sonos One SL is the most affordable Sonos speaker you can get right now. Don't let the affordable price tag fool you though, because this compact speaker is an absolute beast. A single Sonos One SL speaker is obviously never enough, because the who reason to go with Sonos is the awesome integration for multi-room systems. Or, you can also pick up two to use as a stereo pair on their own or coupled with a Sonos soundbar for surround sound.
However you intend to use them, there's only one place you should buy them from right now. Pick up aSonos One SL two-room set right now from Amazon and you'll get a $30 Amazon gift card for free! These speakers are already a terrific value at $179 each, so the free money really is a cherry on top. Definitely take advantage of this deal before it disappears.
Sonos One SL Two Room Set with Free $30 Amazon Gift Card - $358
Brilliant sound: Get rich, room-filling sound in 2 rooms with the all-new Sonos One SL, and control it with the Sonos app, Apple AirPlay 2, and more
For every room: The compact design fits just about any space; Put it on your kitchen countertop or tuck it away on your office bookshelf; It's humidity resistant so you can even put it in the bathroom
Apple Airplay 2: Stream sound directly from your iPhone or iPad and ask Siri to play Apple Music
Stereo sound with two Pair in the same room for stereo separation and more detailed sound; Use a pair as rear home theater surrounds with Playbar, Playbase, or Beam
Build your system: Easily connect Sonos speakers in different rooms over WiFi to create a home sound system that brings every room and everyone together
Easy to use: Setup takes minutes, and control is simple with the Sonos app and AirPlay2
Gift Card is affixed inside a specialty pop up card
A new study that analyzes the risk of coronavirus transmission on commercial airplane flights should offer a dose of good news to travelers eager to take to the skies again.
The US Department of Defense report finds that the risk of COVID-19 exposure during a flight is highly unlikely -- not impossible, but very rare.
This comes as, on the ground at least, the US continues to set new records in terms of daily coronavirus case numbers.
In recent days, the TSA reported having just screened a record number of passengers in the nation's airports -- 6.1 million, to be exact, for the week of October 12-18. That's the biggest stream of travelers who've flowed through TSA checkpoints around the country since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, which would seem to suggest that passengers are increasingly less fearful about the prospect of coronavirus transmission on a commercial airplane flight.
That stands in contrast to, well, how things are on the ground. The deeper we get into the final quarter of 2020, the worse the pandemic seems to get -- in fact, the US just surpassed 70,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, a record not seen since back in July. But back to the issue of air travel. Just how safe are airplanes, really, and is it even safe to travel right now?
You probably think of KitchenAid Professional Stand Mixers when you think of KitchenAid, but the brand also makes plenty of other great kitchen tools.
On Friday, for one day only, Amazon is hosting a big KitchenAid sale that slashes the prices of 10 different popular KitchenAid products.
The deals start at just $6.50, and you can even get the awesome KitchenAid can opener with more than 21,000 5-star reviews for as little as $8.39 depending on which color you choose.
When it comes to KitchenAid's various kitchen tools, there's no question that one in particular stands out from the rest. We're obviously talking about KitchenAid Professional Stand Mixers, which are by far the best and most popular stand mixers on the market. They're pricey, as we all know, but they're also amazing and they last a lifetime thanks to build quality that can't be matched. You can even save up to $100 on one right now if you head over to Amazon, where they're 20% off today.
Of course, stand mixers are not the only kitchen tools that KitchenAid makes, and Amazon is running a big one-day KitchenAid sale right now on some of the company's more attainable necessities.
Deals in this great sale start at just $6.50 for the KitchenAid Gourmet Cookie Lifter and there are 10 deals in total available in this sale. The most popular product is definitely the KitchenAid can opener for between $8.39 and $10.49 depending on which color you get.
PS5 custom faceplates have been rumored ever since the console's design was revealed, but one third-party company has actually started selling them.
PlateStation 5 sells PS5 faceplates in matte black, cherry red, chromatic, indigo blue, and jungle camo.
Each of the custom plates costs $39.99, and should arrive by the PS5's release date on November 12th.
When Sony first revealed the design of the PlayStation 5 back in June, there was some speculation that the massive white plates that covered the sides of the console would be replaceable. A PlayStation executive stoked those flames by revealing in a Q&A session on LinkedIn that the PS5 would be "customizable in ways previous gens weren’t." Our suspicions were finally confirmed when Sony shared an official PS5 teardown video a few weeks ago.
As we see in the video, the side panels of the PS5 can be removed without any tools. All you need to do is lift up on the plastic at the top of each panel and slide it off of the console. This will be necessary if you plan to add storage to your PS5, as the M.2 expansion slot for NVMe SSD drives sits beneath one of the panels. But it also opens the door to customizable faceplates, and one company has already started selling its own colorful plates.
There's no question that hackers are getting increasingly ambitious -- the average ransom demand increased from about $29,000 in 2018 to more than $302,000 in 2019. U.S. law doesn't prohibit paying ransom per se; but when victims pay monies to people or organizations who have been sanctioned by the U.S. government...they get into more trouble.
The BizOps Coalition hopes to bridge the gap between technology investments and business outcomes through an effort called the BizOps Manifesto. The BizOps movement has gained traction with leading organizations, helping them to better align IT with business outcomes. But more needs to be done. That led to the Manifesto's creation.
Red Hat, a major provider of open source solutions, has never had a comprehensive document guiding associate participation in open source projects, until now. Perhaps under the influence of its recent purchase by IBM, Red Hat recently announced the external publication of its open-source participation guidelines. The company released the guidelines on GitHub under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
For all the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our online shopping behavior in 2020, add to the list: holiday gift giving. As e-commerce retailers, we should prepare for a surge in online gift purchases and also an increase in gifts delivered directly to the recipient. Here are ten ideas that e-tailers can use to rethink the gift-giving experience this holiday season.
The U.S. government's policy to restrict federal agency exposure to products and services associated with Huawei Technologies and other China-based companies has gained the support of the U.S. information technology industry. However, a wide swath of U.S. companies, including those in the IT sector, registered significant concerns about federal regulations designed to control the employment of
E-commerce is not yet every rural community's Holy Grail for shopping. Many local rural retailers are strangers to e-commerce, and the home delivery routine for rural customers is often very different from the opportunities enjoyed by suburban and city consumers. If stores in rural America want to keep customers happy and healthy, transitioning to e-commerce is key.
The upcoming holiday season is looking much different than anyone would have suspected this time last year. Forget about the customary long lines to buy gifts for loved ones and friends this year -- if you can even find a store that is open. All of these changes make it critical for marketers to adapt in an effort to recover lost sales and attract new customers.
In case wringing your hands over the tax man weren’t enough, criminals are out there trying to swipe your hard-earned cash and personal information from right under your nose.
PARIS (AP) — Peppering the 8,000 pages of purported Central Intelligence Agency hacking data released Tuesday by WikiLeaks are reviews of some of the world's most popular anti-virus products.
Facebook’s and Twitter’s CEOs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, have voluntarily agreed to attend a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on November 17th. According to the committee’s announcement, the social media bigwigs will be there to testify on t...
The first two models from Apple’s iPhone 12 have started shipping, and of course the folks at iFixit are busy taking them apart. As of this writing the detailed teardown is still incomplete, but they’ve exposed enough of the details to get a good loo...
Travis Scott and his Cactus Jack brand have teamed up with everyone from Tesla to Fortnite to McDonalds, and today Sony announced he’s a “strategic creative partner” for PlayStation.What that means exactly is something we’ll have to wait to find out,...
Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the g...
Earlier this week the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached out and took a small bite from the asteroid Bennu. Now the team behind the spacecraft reports they may have been a little too successful. Their goal was to grab at least 60 grams of its surface mate...
A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren and Brian Schatz has called for an inspector general investigation into US Customs and Border Protection’s use of commercially-available location data to track American citiz...
Stitcher has revealed a new look for its podcast app, which boasts several useful features and upgrades. The service says the revamped web, iOS and Android app has better user control and navigation along with its more streamlined design.You'll be ab...
The iPhone 12 is officially available today and it’s got us thinking about chargers. In an effort to be more environmentally conscious, Apple removed the power adapter (and earphones) from the box of its latest smartphones. You’ll only get a Lightnin...
Scientists Capture World's First 3,200-Megapixel Photos Scientists at the Menlo Park, California-based SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have taken the world's first 3,200-megapixel digital photos, using an advanced imaging device that's built to explore the universe. CNET reports:
Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Critical For GPS, Seen In Distant Stars Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered that "gravitational redshift" exists in two stars orbiting each other in our galaxy about 29,000 light years (200,000 trillion miles) away from Earth. Gravitation
First 'Murder Hornet' Nest In US Is Found In Washington State An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Remember the "murder hornets"? You know, the terrifyingly large Asian giant hornets that are threatening to wipe out the North American bee population? Entomologists with the Washingto
A Massive Spam Attack Is Ruining Public 'Among Us' Games Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is aff
'youtube-dl' Downloading Software Removed From GitHub By RIAA Takedown Notice Jahta writes: The GitHub repository for the popular youtube-dl utility is offline after GitHub received a DMCA takedown notice from the RIAA. The notice claims that "The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the t
Garmin Introduces Esports Fitness Smartwatch For Streamers Garmin has launched the Instinct Esports Edition, a "rugged GPS smartwatch uniquely designed for esports athletes and enthusiasts to take their gaming performance to the next level." How is that possible, you ask? Gizmodo explains
The Technology That's Replacing the Green Screen An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), [Charmaine Chan] has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a
Patreon Is Banning QAnon, Joining Facebook, YouTube and Others Patreon is the latest tech company to take action on the QAnon conspiracy theory, announcing in a blog post Thursday morning that creators promoting the movement would be banned from the platform. Business Insider reports: Patreon
It could be the long-awaited turning point in the world of venture capital and beyond. Yale, whose $32 billion endowment has been led since 1985 by the legendary investor David Swensen, just let its 70 U.S. money managers across a variety of asset classes know that for the school, diversity has now moved front and center.
According to the WSJ, Swensen has told the firms that from here on out, they will be measured annually on their progress in increasing the diversity of their investment staff, from hiring to training to mentoring to their retention of women and minorities.
Those that show little improvement may see the prestigious university pull its money, Swensen tells the outlet.
It’s hard to overstate the move’s significance. Though Yale’s endowment saw atypically poor performance last year, Swensen, at 66, is among the most highly regarded money managers in the world, growing Yale’s endowment from $1 billion when he joined as a 31-year-old former grad student of the school, to the second-largest school endowment in the country after Harvard, which currently manages $40 billion.
Credited for developing the so-called Yale Model, which is short on public equities and long on commitments to venture shops, private equity funds, hedge funds, and international investments, Swensen has inspired legions of other endowment managers, many of whom worked for him previously, including the current endowment heads of Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania.
It isn’t a stretch to imagine these managers and many others will again follow Swensen’s decision, one that was inspired by the growing diversity with Yale itself. Should such metrics become standard, they could dramatically change the stubbornly intractable world of money management, which remains mostly white and mostly male.
Indeed, while the dearth of woman and minorities within the ranks of venture firms may not be news to readers, a 2019 study commissioned by the Knight Foundation and cited by the WSJ underscores how big an issue it remains across asset classes. According to its findings, women- and minority-owned firms held less than 1% of assets managed by mutual funds, hedge funds, private-equity funds and real-estate funds in 2017, even though their performance was on a par with such firms.
As for why Swensen didn’t write this letter much sooner to universe of fund managers backed by Yale, Swensen tells that WSJ that he has long talked about diversity with them but says he held off on asking for systematic changes owing to a belief, in part, that there were not enough diverse candidates entering into asset management.
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum this spring, he decided it was time to take the leap anyway.
As for that perceived pipeline concern, fund managers will have to figure it out. For his part, Swensen reportedly offered a suggestion to those same U.S. managers. He proposed that they forget the same resumes for which they’ve long looked and consider recruiting directly from college campuses.
Shortly after voting to move forward with a pair of subpoenas, the Senate Judiciary Committee has reached an agreement that will see the CEOs of two major social platforms testify voluntarily in November. The hearing will be the second major congressional appearance by tech CEOs arranged this month.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions at the hearing, set for November 17 — two weeks after election day. The Republican-led committee is chaired by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who set the agenda to include the “platforms’ censorship and suppression of New York Post articles.”
According to a new press release from the committee, lawmakers also plan to use the proceedings as a high-profile port-mortem on how Twitter and Facebook fared on and after election day — an issue that lawmakers on both sides will undoubtedly be happy to dig into.
Republicans are eager to press the tech CEOs on how their respective platforms handled a dubious story from the New York Post purporting to report on hacked materials from presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. They view the incident as evidence of their ongoing claims of anti-conservative political bias in platform policy decisions.
While Republicans on the Senate committee led the decision to pressure Zuckerberg and Dorsey into testifying, the committee’s Democrats, who sat out the vote on the subpoenas, will likely bring to the table their own questions about content moderation, as well.
In ye olden days of piracy, RIAA takedown notices were a common thing — I received a few myself. But that’s mostly fallen off as tracking pirates has gotten more difficult. But the RIAA can still issue nastygrams — to the creators of software that could potentially be used to violate copyright, like YouTube downloaders.
This is a different kind of takedown notice than the ones we all remember from the early 2000s, though. Those were the innumerable DMCA notices that said “your website is hosting such-and-such protected content, please take it down.” And they still exist, of course, but lots of that has become automated, with sites like YouTube removing infringing videos before they even go public.
What the RIAA has done here is demand that YouTube -DL be taken down because it violates Section 1201 of U.S. copyright law, which basically bans stuff that gets around DRM. “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
That’s so it’s illegal not just to distribute, say, a bootleg Blu-ray disc, but also to break its protections and duplicate it in the first place.
If you stretch that logic a bit, you end up including things like YouTube-DL, which is a command-line tool that takes in a YouTube URL and points the user to the raw video and audio, which of course have to be stored on a server somewhere. With the location of the file that would normally be streamed in the YouTube web player, the user can download a video for offline use or backup.
But what if someone were to use that tool to download the official music video for Taylor Swift’s “Shake it off”? Shock! Horror! Piracy! YouTube-DL enables this, so it must be taken down, they write.
As usual, it only takes a moment to arrive at analogous (or analog) situations that the RIAA has long given up on. For instance, wouldn’t using a screen and audio capture utility accomplish the same thing? What about a camcorder? Or for that matter, a cassette recorder? They’re all used to “circumvent” the DRM placed on Tay’s video by creating an offline copy without the rights-holder’s permission.
Naturally this takedown will do almost nothing to prevent the software, which was probably downloaded and forked thousands of times already, from being used or updated. There are also dozens of sites and apps that do this — and the RIAA by the logic in this letter may very well take action against them as well.
Of course, the RIAA is bound by duty to protect against infringement, and one can’t expect it to stand by idly as people scrape official YouTube accounts to get high-quality bootlegs of artists’ entire discographies. But going after the basic tools is like the old, ineffective “Home taping is killing the music industry” line. No one’s buying it. And if we’re going to talk about wholesale theft of artists, perhaps the RIAA should get its own house in order first — streaming services are paying out pennies with the Association’s blessing. (Go buy stuff on Bandcamp instead.)
Tools like YouTube-DL, like cassette tapes, cameras and hammers, are tech that can be used legally or illegally. Fair use doctrines allow tools like these for good-faith efforts like archiving content that might be lost because Google stops caring, or for people who for one reason or another want to have a local copy of some widely available, free piece of media for personal use.
YouTube and other platforms, likewise in good faith, do what they can to make obvious and large-scale infringement difficult. There’s no “download” button next to the latest Top 40 hit, but there are links to buy it, and if I used a copy — even one I’d bought — as background for my own video, I wouldn’t even be able to put it on YouTube in the first place.
Temporarily removing YouTube-DL’s code from GitHub is a short-sighted reaction to a problem that can’t possibly amount to more than a rounding error in the scheme of things. They probably lose more money to people sharing logins. It or something very much like it will be back soon, a little smarter and a little better, making the RIAA’s job that much harder, and the cycle will repeat.
Maybe the creators of Whack-a-Mole will sue the RIAA for infringement on their unique IP.
A California court weighs in as Prop. 22 looms, Google removes popular apps over data collection practices and the Senate subpoenas Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. This is your Daily Crunch for October 23, 2020.
The big story: Uber and Lyft defeated again in court
A California appeals court ruled that yes, a new state law applies to Uber and Lyft drivers, meaning that they must be classified as employees, rather than independent contractors. The judge ruled that contrary to the rideshare companies’ arguments, any financial harm does not “rise to the level of irreparable harm.”
However, the decision will not take effect for 30 days — suggesting that the real determining factor will be Proposition 22, a statewide ballot measure backed by Uber and Lyft that would keep drivers as contractors while guaranteeing things like minimum compensation and healthcare subsidies.
“This ruling makes it more urgent than ever for voters to stand with drivers and vote yes on Prop. 22,” a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Research papers come out far too rapidly for anyone to read them all, especially in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in but not limited to artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.
This week, a startup that’s using UAV drones for mapping forests, a look at how machine learning can map social media networks and predict Alzheimer’s, improving computer vision for space-based sensors and other news regarding recent technological advances.
Predicting Alzheimer’s through speech patterns
Machine learning tools are being used to aid diagnosis in many ways, since they’re sensitive to patterns that humans find difficult to detect. IBM researchers have potentially found such patterns in speech that are predictive of the speaker developing Alzheimer’s disease.
The system only needs a couple minutes of ordinary speech in a clinical setting. The team used a large set of data (the Framingham Heart Study) going back to 1948, allowing patterns of speech to be identified in people who would later develop Alzheimer’s. The accuracy rate is about 71% or 0.74 area under the curve for those of you more statistically informed. That’s far from a sure thing, but current basic tests are barely better than a coin flip in predicting the disease this far ahead of time.
This is very important because the earlier Alzheimer’s can be detected, the better it can be managed. There’s no cure, but there are promising treatments and practices that can delay or mitigate the worst symptoms. A non-invasive, quick test of well people like this one could be a powerful new screening tool and is also, of course, an excellent demonstration of the usefulness of this field of tech.
(Don’t read the paper expecting to find exact symptoms or anything like that — the array of speech features aren’t really the kind of thing you can look out for in everyday life.)
So-cell networks
Making sure your deep learning network generalizes to data outside its training environment is a key part of any serious ML research. But few attempt to set a model loose on data that’s completely foreign to it. Perhaps they should!
Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden took a model used to identify groups and connections in social media, and applied it (not unmodified, of course) to tissue scans. The tissue had been treated so that the resultant images produced thousands of tiny dots representing mRNA.
Normally the different groups of cells, representing types and areas of tissue, would need to be manually identified and labeled. But the graph neural network, created to identify social groups based on similarities like common interests in a virtual space, proved it could perform a similar task on cells. (See the image at top.)
“We’re using the latest AI methods — specifically, graph neural networks, developed to analyze social networks — and adapting them to understand biological patterns and successive variation in tissue samples. The cells are comparable to social groupings that can be defined according to the activities they share in their social networks,” said Uppsala’s Carolina Wählby.
It’s an interesting illustration not just of the flexibility of neural networks, but of how structures and architectures repeat at all scales and in all contexts. As without, so within, if you will.
Drones in nature
The vast forests of our national parks and timber farms have countless trees, but you can’t put “countless” on the paperwork. Someone has to make an actual estimate of how well various regions are growing, the density and types of trees, the range of disease or wildfire, and so on. This process is only partly automated, as aerial photography and scans only reveal so much, while on-the-ground observation is detailed but extremely slow and limited.
Treeswift aims to take a middle path by equipping drones with the sensors they need to both navigate and accurately measure the forest. By flying through much faster than a walking person, they can count trees, watch for problems and generally collect a ton of useful data. The company is still very early-stage, having spun out of the University of Pennsylvania and acquired an SBIR grant from the NSF.
“Companies are looking more and more to forest resources to combat climate change but you don’t have a supply of people who are growing to meet that need,” Steven Chen, co-founder and CEO of Treeswift and a doctoral student in Computer and Information Science (CIS) at Penn Engineering said in a Penn news story. “I want to help make each forester do what they do with greater efficiency. These robots will not replace human jobs. Instead, they’re providing new tools to the people who have the insight and the passion to manage our forests.”
Another area where drones are making lots of interesting moves is underwater. Oceangoing autonomous submersibles are helping map the sea floor, track ice shelves and follow whales. But they all have a bit of an Achilles’ heel in that they need to periodically be picked up, charged and their data retrieved.
Purdue engineering professor Nina Mahmoudian has created a docking system by which submersibles can easily and automatically connect for power and data exchange.
A yellow marine robot (left, underwater) finds its way to a mobile docking station to recharge and upload data before continuing a task. (Purdue University photo/Jared Pike)
The craft needs a special nosecone, which can find and plug into a station that establishes a safe connection. The station can be an autonomous watercraft itself, or a permanent feature somewhere — what matters is that the smaller craft can make a pit stop to recharge and debrief before moving on. If it’s lost (a real danger at sea), its data won’t be lost with it.
You can see the setup in action below:
https://youtu.be/kS0-qc_r0
Sound in theory
Drones may soon become fixtures of city life as well, though we’re probably some ways from the automated private helicopters some seem to think are just around the corner. But living under a drone highway means constant noise — so people are always looking for ways to reduce turbulence and resultant sound from wings and propellers.
It looks like it’s on fire, but that’s turbulence.
Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology found a new, more efficient way to simulate the airflow in these situations; fluid dynamics is essentially as complex as you make it, so the trick is to apply your computing power to the right parts of the problem. They were able to render only flow near the surface of the theoretical aircraft in high resolution, finding past a certain distance there was little point knowing exactly what was happening. Improvements to models of reality don’t always need to be better in every way — after all, the results are what matter.
Machine learning in space
Computer vision algorithms have come a long way, and as their efficiency improves they are beginning to be deployed at the edge rather than at data centers. In fact it’s become fairly common for camera-bearing objects like phones and IoT devices to do some local ML work on the image. But in space it’s another story.
Image Credits: Cosine
Performing ML work in space was until fairly recently simply too expensive power-wise to even consider. That’s power that could be used to capture another image, transmit the data to the surface, etc. HyperScout 2 is exploring the possibility of ML work in space, and its satellite has begun applying computer vision techniques immediately to the images it collects before sending them down. (“Here’s a cloud — here’s Portugal — here’s a volcano…”)
For now there’s little practical benefit, but object detection can be combined with other functions easily to create new use cases, from saving power when no objects of interest are present, to passing metadata to other tools that may work better if informed.
In with the old, out with the new
Machine learning models are great at making educated guesses, and in disciplines where there’s a large backlog of unsorted or poorly documented data, it can be very useful to let an AI make a first pass so that graduate students can use their time more productively. The Library of Congress is doing it with old newspapers, and now Carnegie Mellon University’s libraries are getting into the spirit.
CMU’s million-item photo archive is in the process of being digitized, but to make it useful to historians and curious browsers it needs to be organized and tagged — so computer vision algorithms are being put to work grouping similar images, identifying objects and locations, and doing other valuable basic cataloguing tasks.
“Even a partly successful project would greatly improve the collection metadata, and could provide a possible solution for metadata generation if the archives were ever funded to digitize the entire collection,” said CMU’s Matt Lincoln.
A very different project, yet one that seems somehow connected, is this work by a student at the Escola Politécnica da Universidade de Pernambuco in Brazil, who had the bright idea to try sprucing up some old maps with machine learning.
The tool they used takes old line-drawing maps and attempts to create a sort of satellite image based on them using a Generative Adversarial Network; GANs essentially attempt to trick themselves into creating content they can’t tell apart from the real thing.
Image Credits: Escola Politécnica da Universidade de Pernambuco
Well, the results aren’t what you might call completely convincing, but it’s still promising. Such maps are rarely accurate but that doesn’t mean they’re completely abstract — recreating them in the context of modern mapping techniques is a fun idea that might help these locations seem less distant.
Boston has been an exemplar of the trend, with early pandemic caution dissolving into rapid-fire dealmaking as summer rolled into fall.
We collated new data that underscores the trend, showing that Boston’s third quarter looks very solid compared to its peer groups, and leads greater New England’s share of American venture capital higher during the three-month period.
For our October look at Boston and its startup scene, let’s get into the data and then understand how a new cohort of founders is cropping up among the city’s educational network.
A strong Q3, a strong 2020
Boston’s third quarter was strong, effectively matching the capital raised in New York City during the three-month period. As we head into the fourth quarter, it appears that the silver medal in American startup ecosystems is up for grabs based on what happens in Q4.
Boston could start 2021 as the number-two place to raise venture capital in the country. Or New York City could pip it at the finish line. Let’s check the numbers.
According to PitchBook data shared with TechCrunch, the metro Boston area raised $4.34 billion in venture capital during the third quarter. New York City and its metro area managed $4.45 billion during the same time period, an effective tie. Los Angeles and its own metro area managed just $3.90 billion.
In 2020 the numbers tilt in Boston’s favor, with the city and surrounding area collecting $12.83 billion in venture capital. New York City came in second through Q3, with $12.30 billion in venture capital. Los Angeles was a distant third at $8.66 billion for the year through Q3.
“All that is left now is to offer a profound apology for disappointing you and, ultimately, for letting you down,” Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wrote, closing out an open letter posted to Medium. “We cannot thank you enough for being there with us, and for us, every step of the way.”
With that, the founding executives confirmed the rumors and put Quibi to bed, a little more than six months after launching the service.
Starting a business is an impossibly difficult task under nearly any conditions, but even in a world that’s littered with high-profile failures, the streaming service’s swan song was remarkable for both its dramatically brief lifespan and the amount of money the company managed to raise (and spend) during that time.
A month ahead of its commercial launch, Quibi announced that it had raised another $750 million. That second round of funding brought the yet-to-launch streaming service’s funding up to $1.75 billion — roughly the same as the gross domestic product of Belize, give or take $100 million.
“We concluded a very successful second raise which will provide Quibi with a strong cash runway,” CFO Ambereen Toubassy told the press at the time. “This round of $750 million gives us tremendous flexibility and the financial wherewithal to build content and technology that consumers embrace.”
Quibi’s second funding round brought the yet-to-launch streaming service’s funding up to $1.75 billion — roughly the same as the gross domestic product of Belize, give or take $100 million.
From a financial perspective, Quibi had reason to be hopeful. Its fundraising ambitions were matched only by the aggressiveness with which it planned to spend that money. At the beginning of the year, Whitman touted the company’s plans to spend up to $100,000 per minute of programming — $6 million per hour. The executive proudly contrasted the jaw-dropping sum to the estimated $500 to $5,000 an hour spent by YouTube creators.
For Whitman and Katzenberg — best known for their respective reigns at HP and Disney — money was key to success in an already crowded marketplace. Indeed, $1 billion was a drop in the bucket compared to the $17.3 billion Netflix was expected to spend on original content in 2020, but it was a start.
Following in the footsteps of Apple, who had also recently announced plans to spend $1 billion to launch its own fledgling streaming service, the company was enlisting A-List talent, from Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Ridley Scott to Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez and LeBron James. If your name carried any sort of clout in Hollywood boardrooms, Quibi would happily cut you a check, seemingly regardless of content specifics.
Quibi’s strategy primarily defined itself by its constraints. In hopes of attracting younger millennial and Gen Z viewers, the company’s content would be not just mobile-first, but mobile-only. There would be no smart TV app, no Chromecast or AirPlay compatibility. Pricing, while low compared to the competition, was similarly off-putting. After a 90-day free trial, $4.99 got you an ad-supported subscription. And boy howdy, were there ads. Ads upon ads. Ads all the way down. Paying another $3 a month would make them go away.
Technological constraints and Terms of Service fine print forbade screen shots — a fundamental understanding of how content goes viral in 2020 (though, to be fair, one shared with other competing streaming services). Amusingly, the inability to share content led to videos like this one of director Sam Raimi’s perplexingly earnest “The Golden Arm.”
It features a built-on laugh track from viewers as Emmy winner Rachel Brosnahan lies in a hospital bed after refusing to remove a golden prosthetic. It’s an allegory, surely, but not one intentionally played for laughs. Many of the videos that did ultimately make the rounds on social media were regarded as a curiosity — strange artifacts from a nascent streaming service that made little sense on paper.
Most notable of all, however, were the “quick bites” that gave the service its confusingly pronounced name. Each program would be served in 5-10 minute chunks. The list included films acquired by the service, sliced up into “chapters.” Notably, the service didn’t actually purchase the content outright; instead, rights were set to revert to their creators after seven years. Meanwhile, after two years, content partners were able to “reassemble” the chunks back into a movie for distribution.
OnePlus continues its twice-yearly smartphone cycle with today’s arrival of the 8T. The latest device isn’t a huge upgrade over April’s OnePlus 8, but continues the company’s longstanding tradition of offering some of the most solid Android handsets at a reasonable price point. The cost has edged up a bit in recent years, but $749 is still pretty good for what the 8T offers.
The big updates this time out are the 120Hz refresh rate for its 6.55-inch displayand super-fast charging via the Warp Charge 65. That should get the 4,450 mAh of battery capacity up to a full day’s charge in 15 minutes, with a full charge taking a little less than 40 minutes.
There are an abundance of cameras here — four in total. That includes a 48-megapixel main (with built in optical image stabilization), 16-megapixel ultra-wide angle and, more surprisingly, a macro and monochrome lens. The handset joins the even more affordable Nord, which is set to arrive in the U.S. in the near future at a sub-$500 price point.
OnePlus has been undergoing some corporate changes in recent weeks, as well. Co-founder Carl Pei recently announced he will be leaving the company. “These past years, OnePlus has been my singular focus, and everything else has had to take a backseat,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m looking forward to taking some time off to decompress and catch up with my family and friends,” he wrote. “And then follow my heart on to what’s next.”
The goal of this guide is to build a system capable of chatting like you, using your own WhatsApp and Telegram chats as an machine learning dataset. What we will do can be summarized in the following steps: Get your WhatsApp and Telegram data Parse it to build an ML-ready dataset Train a GPT-2 model Chat with the model So let’s start our adventure. Just a quick warning before we get started It’s always better not to run random scripts on personal information (like personal chat messages). I guarantee there’s no catch, but you can always check the native code that’s being used: messaging-chat-parser and pistoBot,…
Are women better astronauts than men? This question will become central to the selection of crews to the Moon, Mars, and beyond as we undertake the colonization of space. In the struggle for gender equality, women have already proven they are capable of doing anything — including conquering space, showing that not even the sky is the limit for their success. [Read: Meet Alyssa Carson, the 18-year-old training to become the first human on Mars] “The first all-women spacewalk at the International Space Station was carried out in October of 2019 and many other milestones have already been accomplished by…
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The search for dark matter – an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe – is at a crossroads. Although it was proposed nearly 70 years ago and has been searched for intensely – with large particle colliders, detectors deep underground, and even instruments in space – it is still nowhere to be found. But astronomers have promised to leave “no stone unturned” and have started to cast their net wider out into the galaxy. The idea is to extract information from astrophysical objects that may have witnessed chunks of it…
After a wide-ranging 16-month investigation, a congressional subcommittee examining dominance in the technology industry last week recommended more than two dozen updates to the U.S. antitrust system, including implementing nondiscrimination rules that would limit “preferential or discriminatory treatment” by dominant platforms. But such rules can be hard to enforce, experts said, and attempts by the European Union to spur competition with Google through measures of this sort have fallen short. “We’re thrilled with the report. We think now the question is, What are they going to do about it?” said Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a competing…
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A new AI model can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease more accurately than standard clinical techniques by analyzing how people describe a picture of a cookie theft, according to a new study. Researchers from IBM and Pfizer trained the model to detect signs of speech impairment in written descriptions of the image, which is frequently used to test for cognitive disorders. The transcriptions were taken from the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the health of more than 5,000 people and their families since 1948. The samples were collected before the participants began showing symptoms of Alzheimer‘s. The researchers then…
Earlier today, here on SHIFT, we looked at the results of a survey from UK consumer magazine Which?, which showed battery degradation in EVs is really nothing to worry about. There is an issue, though. It seems that battery degradation is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that the power packs will outlive the rest of the car. So what to do with all those surplus cells? Use them to power boats, of course! It was maritime week in the UK recently after all. [Read: What audience intelligence data tells us about the 2020 US presidential election] A…
For our October look at Boston and its startup scene, let’s get into the data and then understand how a new cohort of founders is cropping up among the city’s educational network.
