Month: May 2016

http://www.xda-developers.com/google-keyboard-5-0-update-brings-one-handed-mode-adjustable-height-key-borders-and-more/

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment

Google Keyboard 5.0 Update Brings One-Handed Mode, Adjustable Height, Key Borders, and More

Google Keyboard was somewhat of a red-headed stepchild when it was first released almost 3 years ago. It had swipe gestures and autocompletion, but both features were immature compared to the technology offered by Swype and Swiftkey.

Thankfully, Google has not abandoned the project and has instead slowly been adding additional features to bring its feature set on par with most of its competitors. Swiping and auto-completion accuracy has also seen massive improvements over the years as Google has learned from its millions of users how best to predict what you’re trying to type. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen any major updates roll out to Google Keyboard, until today that is. Google Keyboard v5.0 is now gradually rolling out to users with possibility the biggest feature-set update we’ve ever seen before. Here’s what’s new:

Major Changes:

  • One-handed mode (right or left justified)
  • Adjustable Keyboard Height
  • Toggle to show borders around keys
  • Toggle to allow for long-press to access symbols
  • New gestures: delete words and cursor control

Minor Changes:

  • New numpad/emoji button locations around the spacebar
  • Opt-in to share keyboard snippets with Google to improve Google Keyboard for everyone
  • All Holo themes have been removed
  • New first-time user set-up screen
  • Removed dynamic floating preview toggle
  • Toggle to allow for insertion of a period + space by the double tapping space-bar

A text-based changelog doesn’t really show just how huge this update really is, so we’ve downloaded the update and taken it for a spin. First up, Google has finally answered the woes muttered by people tired of having to stretch their hands to reach all parts of the keyboard by introducing one-handed mode. You have the ability to toggle between right-handed and left-handed mode, depending on which side of the screen you hold the device more often. The keyboard then shifts slightly to the right or left depending on your setting. Want to switch to the other side or blow the keyboard back into its full size? No problem, just press the arrow key or the expansion key to perform either action. Finally, if you long-press on the comma key, you can quickly enable one-handed mode without having to dive into the keyboard settings. Thanks, Google!

 

Next up, Google has finally added the ability for you to adjust the keyboard height natively within the keyboard settings. No more DPI-changing or Xposed modules. And they didn’t butcher the implementation by giving you a preset selection of heights to pick from – instead you can adjust the height using a slider bar.

Screenshot_20160502-130115

Notice something new about the screenshot on the right (besides the obvious height adjustment)? Yeah, you can now enable borders around your keys as well as expose the symbols behind the bottom two rows of letters with some new settings in this update. Minimalists might hate having this feature, but for so many people it’s nice to have clearly defined borders for when they’re trying to type while looking at their screen from an angle. In addition, the ability to quickly access commonly-used symbols via a long-press should improve your typing speed as you no longer need to switch to the full symbol layout.

Screenshot_20160502-130714

And to further improve your typing speed, Google has added some additional gestures that you can use to better correct any mistakes you’ve made while typing. You can now delete words by sliding left from the delete key, a gesture many Swype users are familiar with. Furthermore, you can now control the keyboard cursor by in the direction of your choice across the space bar. Again, this feature isn’t unique to Google Keyboard, but it’s definitely a welcome addition and it may solidify your decision to migrate to Google’s offering.

Screenshot_20160502-125827

Finally, Google is looking for YOUR help in improving the typing experience for all users of Google Keyboard. You can now opt-in to share anonymized snippets of what and how you type (only within Google apps, though, they won’t be snooping in to your private forum messages on XDA!) in order to help Google improve its typing and language recognition capabilities. You will be prompted to opt-in whenever you open the keyboard up for the first time after receiving the update.

Looking to download the update? You can find it over on APKMirror. Do note that this is only for ARM64 at the moment and that it will NOT install on the Android N Developer Previews just yet.

http://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-discovered-the-first-ever-comet-without-a-tail

~ brucelandonblog ~ Leave a comment
Astronomers have discovered the first ever comet without a tail

And that’s not even the weirdest thing about it.

A strange, rocky comet with no tail has been spotted zipping into our inner Solar System, and it’s so unique, it’s got scientists ready to rewrite the definition of what these ubiquitous cosmic bodies should look like.

According to a new report, the comet is carrying up to 1 million times less water than any other comet ever recorded, and it’s made up of solid rock, like an asteroid, rather than ice, like a typical comet. So basically what we have here is a cross between an asteroid and a comet, and astronomers are flipping out

“This is super exciting, because it could be a piece of what formed Earth,” one of the team, Olivier Hainaut from the European Southern Observatory, told Maddie Stone from Gizmodo.

The tailless comet appears to have emerged from the Oort cloud – a vast, hypothetical bubble that encases the entire Solar System, and plays host to countless icy comets on its farthest edges.

The orbits of these Oort cloud comets brings them into the inner Solar System once every 200 to several thousands of years, and as they draw nearer to the Sun, their icy coating is stripped away, vapourising behind them like a tail.

But the thing about this new comet, called C/2014 S3, is that there’s not enough ice on it to create a tail.

And even stranger, its spectrum – the pattern of light reflected off its surface – reveals that its rocky exterior hasn’t been baked by the Sun like all known asteroids with orbits that take them between Mars and Jupiter.

So this thing appears to be a hybrid of an icy comet and a rocky asteroid, but it’s unlike any comet or asteroid ever seen.

“If you’d shown me the spectrum, I would have just said this is another stupid asteroid,” Hainaut told Stone. “If you showed me the orbit, I’d say yeah, it’s a standard long-period comet. But you don’t at all expect to find a rocky asteroid on an Oort cloud orbit. That’s wrong.”

The comet was first spotted in 2014, by astronomers using the PANSTARSS-S1 telescope in Hawaii.

After two years of observations and analysis, Hainaut and his team suspect that it was formed somewhere near Earth about 4 billion years ago, got bumped into the outer edges of the Solar System by a random collision, and spent most of its lifetime in the ‘deep-freeze’ of the Oort cloud. And now it’s made its way back home for the first time.

All that time spent in the frigid conditions of the Oort cloud seems to have done something for the tailless comet, which the team is calling a Manx comet, after the tailless manx cat. The deep-freeze appears to have protected it against the crazy heat of the Sun.

“We already knew of many asteroids, but they have all been baked by billions of years near the Sun,” said one of the team, Karen Meech, in a press statement. “This one is the first uncooked asteroid we could observe: it has been preserved in the best freezer there is.”

(Note that even the researchers themselves don’t know whether to call this an asteroid or a comet.)

Christina Beck reports for Christian Science Monitor that the trajectory of comet C/2014 S3 is similar to other comets in the Oort cloud – referred to as long-period comets, because they have such lengthy orbits. Its orbit is estimated to be about 860 years long, which means we’re not going to be seeing it again for some time.

It’s now up to astronomers to try and identify more ‘hybrid’ comets like this to test their models, and figure out if they could actually be remnants of the materials that first formed Earth, and if they are, that could tell us a whole lot about our planet’s early years.

“We’ve found the first rocky comet, and we are looking for others,” says Hainaut. “Depending how many we find, we will know whether the giant planets danced across the Solar System when they were young, or if they grew up quietly without moving much.”

The report has been published in Science Advances.

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http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/01/apple-shares-new-shot-on-iphone-ad-for-mothers-day/

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Apple shares new ‘Shot on iPhone’ ad for Mother’s Day

Apple today uploaded its latest ad to YouTube. The ad returns to the company’s popular “Shot oniPhone” campaign and focuses on Mother’s Day, which is one week away from today. The touchingvideo comes in at 30-seconds long and follows two new iPhone 6s ads from last week, one thathighlighted the device’s 4K camera and one that showed off Touch ID.

In today’s new video, simply called “Mother’s Day,” a handful ofimages and videos are shown that represent motherhood. Scenesrange from the initial birth of a child to grown children and theirmothers. Each image and video is credited with the photographer’sname below it.

Celebrating motherhood through the lens of iPhone usersaround the world.

Apple has been cranking out advertisements at a fast pace recently.Prior to the two new ads last week, the company shared a pair ofvideos highlighting its Earth Day and renewable energy efforts, whileit previously shared a series of Apple Watch ads starring Nick Jonasand other celebrities.

Apple initially rebooted its successful Shot on iPhone campaign in February with all new images fromthe iPhone 6s. The Shot on iPhone campaign took home one of the top prizes at the Cannes GrandPrix festival, as well.

You can view Apple’s Mother’s Day Shot on iPhone video below:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/deep-neural-networks-that-identify-shapes-nearly-as-well-as-humans

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Deep neural networks that identify shapes nearly as well as humans

You’re in your self-driving car, with heavy rain and poor visibility. All of a sudden, a blurred shape appears on the road. What should the car do?
April 29, 2016

Self-driving car vs. pedestrians (credit: Google)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are capable of learning to identify shapes, so “we’re on the right track in developing machines with a visual system and vocabulary as flexible and versatile as ours,” say KU Leuven researchers.

“For the first time, a dramatic increase in performance has been observed on object and scene categorization tasks, quickly reaching performance levels rivaling humans,” they note in an open-access paper in PLOS Computational Biology.

Categorization accuracy for models created by three DNNs (CaffeNet, VGG-19, and GoggLeNet) for three types of images (color, grayscaled, silhouette). For each type, mean human performance is indicated by a gray horizontal line, with the gray surrounding band depicting 95% confidence intervals. Error bars (vertical black lines) depict 95% confidence intervals. (credit: J. Kubilius et al./PLoS Comput Biol)

The researchers found that when trained for generic object recognition from natural photographs, several different DNNs developed visual representations that relate closely to human perceptual shape judgments, even though they were never explicitly trained for shape processing.

However, “We’re not there just yet,” say the researchers. “Even if machines will at some point be equipped with a visual system as powerful as ours, self-driving cars would still make occasional mistakes —- although, unlike human drivers, they wouldn’t be distracted because they’re tired or busy texting. However, even in those rare instances when self-driving cars would err, their decisions would be at least as reasonable as ours.”

Abstract of Deep Neural Networks as a Computational Model for Human Shape Sensitivity

Theories of object recognition agree that shape is of primordial importance, but there is no consensus about how shape might be represented, and so far attempts to implement a model of shape perception that would work with realistic stimuli have largely failed. Recent studies suggest that state-of-the-art convolutional ‘deep’ neural networks (DNNs) capture important aspects of human object perception. We hypothesized that these successes might be partially related to a human-like representation of object shape. Here we demonstrate that sensitivity for shape features, characteristic to human and primate vision, emerges in DNNs when trained for generic object recognition from natural photographs. We show that these models explain human shape judgments for several benchmark behavioral and neural stimulus sets on which earlier models mostly failed. In particular, although never explicitly trained for such stimuli, DNNs develop acute sensitivity to minute variations in shape and to non-accidental properties that have long been implicated to form the basis for object recognition. Even more strikingly, when tested with a challenging stimulus set in which shape and category membership are dissociated, the most complex model architectures capture human shape sensitivity as well as some aspects of the category structure that emerges from human judgments. As a whole, these results indicate that convolutional neural networks not only learn physically correct representations of object categories but also develop perceptually accurate representational spaces of shapes. An even more complete model of human object representations might be in sight by training deep architectures for multiple tasks, which is so characteristic in human development.

references:

Topics: AI/Robotics | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/01/watch-your-biological-clock-vital-health-tips

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Sleep-wake cycle: why it’s vital to watch your biological clock

Disruption of your natural circadian rhythms can cause health problems, so here are some tips for staying on schedule

Breakfast in the morning, work during the day, relaxation in the eveningfollowed by bedtime. The waking hours have a certain rhythm, and the24-hour cycle of the Earth’s rotation has resulted in a human sleepingpattern that largely takes place at night for about seven or eight hours ofcontinuous shut-eye.

Several studies have found that disturbing this ancient sleep-wake cycle canmake people more prone to illnesses such as diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinaldisorders and heart disease. Now, a study on nearly 300 pensioners at 24 GPpractices in England has found that the best time to have a flu jab is probably inthe morning, as this is the time when the immune systems of older people arebetter able to produce virus-fighting antibodies.

Scientists believe that up to 2,400 lives might be saved if all winter flu jabs weregiven to older patients before noon, as this is the time when their immunedefences are at their best. It is further evidence that timing can be critical – evenvital – for certain activities. So what else do we know about the “biological clock”that appears to control our circadian rhythm? Here are a few questions that can beanswered.

What is the biological clock and why do our bodies follow a circadian rhythm?
Scientists are now pretty sure that there are two kinds of clock at work in thebody. The central “master” clock of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a collection ofabout 20,000 oscillating nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the brain, isintricately linked with daylight from the optic nerve of the eye. This internal clocksignals when it is time to be awake or asleep, and is linked with hormone levelsand body temperature, which correspondingly fluctuate over a circadian period of“about a day”.

However, more recently scientists have discovered that other tissues in the bodyhave their own peripheral clocks that are influenced by other environmentalfactors. Eating, for instance, can reset the peripheral clock of the gastrointestinaltract.

Does disturbing the circadian rhythm cause health problems?
There is clear evidence to suggest that it does. Shift workers who work at night,for instance, are known to be at higher risk of cardiovascular disease. One studyfound they were 40% more likely to suffer from this illness compared with non-shift workers.

One suggestion is that altering the body’s sleep-wake cycle causes an uncouplingof the central body clock of the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the peripheral clocksin the rest of the body, caused for instance by eating at inappropriate times overthe 24-hour cycle. And as the pensioners’ study showed, sleep can also influencethe activity levels of the immune defences.

So what is the best time to eat to stay healthy?
Studies on mice have clearly shown that allowing them to eat only when they arenaturally awake, which is at night because they are nocturnal, results in fewermetabolic defects. They are healthier and less obese than mice allowed to eat allday and night long. Similarly, a study by Frank Scheer at Harvard Medical Schoolon 420 dieters in Spain found that those who ate their main meal before 3pm lostmore weight than those who ate later. The message appears simple: make lunchyour biggest meal of the day.

When is the best time to sleep in order to be alert and creative?
This depends on the individual. Some people are night owls, some are morninglarks. Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, a sleep researcher at Columbia University in New York,says that even sleeping in one eight-hour stint might not be right for everyone.

 “As a night owl, my own optimal time for writing or thinking creatively is fromabout 10pm to 2am. Because I have young kids who wake up early in themorning, I have switched to a bimodal or segmented sleep pattern,” she says. “Igo to sleep with my kids at 8pm or so, wake up at 10pm-ish and work for a fewhours, go back to sleep and wake up with the kids in the morning. There is someevidence this was not an unusual sleep pattern in pre-industrial society.”

In today’s 24/7 culture, is there a best time to engage with social networks?
Sleep refreshes the mind as well as the body and a study of 509m tweets sent overtwo years by 2.4 million Twitter users found that the most cheerful and upbeattweets are posted between 8am and 9am. The afternoon dip in concentrationmeans that between 3pm and 6pm people are more likely to retweet otherpeople’s tweets than create their own. The most emotional time for Twitter isbetween 10pm and 11pm when users were “alert and engaged, but also moreagitated”, researchers found.

http://canadajournal.net/health/researchers-discover-gene-helps-determine-old-look-46859-2016/

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Researchers Discover the Gene that Helps Determine How Old You Look

The key to looking youthful could be down to one’s genes, new study suggests.

Scientists have unlocked part of the secret to youthful looks by identifying a gene variation which is linked to how old people are perceived to be.

Researchers from the Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam in The Netherlands identify the culprit as certain varieties of the MC1R gene. But the newly discovered genetic varieties do not cause wrinkles or liver spots on the skin.

However, it makes people look older in some undefined way which is not yet understood by researchers. Among the possibilities that scientists are considering is the gene affects facial structure such as lip height, and deeper crease between the nose and corners of the mouth.

Manfred Kayser, study co-author, stresses that the MC1R gene is linked with how old a person looks, not how old the person really is. He says that is more important because “there is a link between how old you look and how healthy you are.”

The study, published in Current Biology, involves David Gunn, a scientist from Unilever, a company that manufactures personal-care products. The scientists asked teams of people to estimate the age of 2,700 elderly Dutch. For those whom people consider looking older than their real age, the researchers looked for DNA common among them. After identifying the gene, the team repeated the experiment with 600 additional older Dutch and 1,200 British seniors.

MC1R is the gene linked with red hair and freckles and is involved in DNA repair in the skin which could add years to the face.

However, Anne Chang of Stanford University Medical School notes that the study excludes the impact of smoking and body-mass index. Gunn adds that genetics account for only half of aging as he points to sun exposure and poor dental health as also contributing factors which make people look older.

Agencies/Canadajournal