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Other than maybe the NSA, nobody knows more about you than Google. It’s got a read on where you are, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking and watching and searching for and chatting with your friends about. Which means nobody should be better equipped to soundtrack every second of your life than Google Play Music. Starting today, the company’s taking full advantage of its smarts to deliver you the sounds you want, when you want them. All you have to do is press play.
Next time you open Google Play Music on any device, the first thing you’ll see is a list of playlists you might like, plus a short description for why the app made any given selection. If you’re at work, and it’s raining, maybe you get some ambient piano to help you focus the afternoon away. Just got home, pouring some wine? Sunset music. Friday night, you’re at a bar? EDM all night. It’s a bit like Google Now, the predictive feed of everything you probably want to know about right now, except fully focused on music. Think of it as a super-smart, hyper-personalized set of radio station presets. Just open the app, tap one, and go.
To do all this, the Play Music team is tapping into the full Google Data Machine for the first time. It’s choosing playlists by looking at the music you’ve listened to before, of course, but also your search history, your YouTube plays, even what’s in your email and calendar. It considers that data alongside things like time of day, location (a bar is different from a library is different from your office), the weather, and more. So you like classical at work, but you need a boost because it’s raining and you’ve been in meetings all day, plus it’s almost time to get to the gym? Play Music might show you Epic Movie Scores, followed by your favorite workout jams.
Google thinks that it has something like a complete picture of your life at all times. And it knows enough about music to know what you might want to hear as a result.
That contextual awareness for tunes has been the long-time goal of Elias Roman, the lead product manager for Google Play Music. He’s been working on it ever since his days at Songza, which Google acquired in 2014. And as Google has programmed more mood- and moment-based playlists, and added more diverse content like podcasts, Play Music been creeping toward smarter recommendations. But now, with the full power of Google’s data and algorithms finally at his back, Roman says that his goal is for you to hit the play button on the very first thing on your home screen, every single time.
Anything less means Google’s machine-learning tools need to get a little smarter, a little sharper. “We want it to feel as easy as radio,†he tells me, showing off the Instrumental Beatles Covers playlist that shows up at the top of his own feed. (Good music to work to, he says.) Of course, you can still manage your library, make your own playlists, or search for whatever you want to listen to, but Roman wants Google to do the work for you.
Music personalization is clearly the next task for every streaming service. But where Spotify’s trying to break down your music taste into its many component parts, then assemble playlists you’ll love, Google’s going one step further. It’s not just trying to say “here’s some music you’ll like,†but “here’s the song you need right now.†It’s a bold gambit: music taste can be finicky, and there’s nothing worse than when you press play and hear the exact wrong thing. Plus, you don’t always want the same things at the same time, right? Algorithms can’t account for mood. Though Roman says they can, at least sort of. Color me skeptical.
Roman is confident that because Google knows so much about your online life, Play Music can at least be right a lot more than it’s wrong. That could mean finally combining the simplicity and just-press-play nature of the radio with your own music taste. And doing it not once a week, or every morning, but every second of every day. Because everyone’s life could use an epic soundtrack.
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Bullying has already been on the rise, but since Tuesday, there’s been a surge in blatant racist bullying in schools. However you feel about the election, this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. If your child is experiencing racist bullying and you don’t know what to do, here’s where you can turn for help.
It seems Tuesday’s results gave many people permission to come out of the woodwork and express their most hateful, racist thoughts and opinions. This can be scary and, for children, it can also be academically damaging. If your child experiences any kind of racism, there are a few steps you can take to address it.
Obviously, you first want to bring any incidents to the school’s attention. Your child’s teacher may not even be aware of what’s going on, so call and schedule an appointment to discuss the issue. If the teacher is unhelpful or unsure of what to do, talk to a guidance counselor or principal, and if other parents have similar experiences, you may want to organize a parent-teacher conference.
This much is obvious, but it’s still your first course of action and an important one. Author and certified school social worker Signe Whitson puts it this way:
A parent’s best strategy for countering bullying is to reach out to as many people as necessary to make sure that the bullying comes to an end. If you have reached out to your child’s teacher and received a bland, disinterested, or downplayed response, do not be deterred. Continue to contact other school personnel — preferably according to a chain of command — to make sure that your voice (and more importantly, your child’s voice) is heard.
You also want to document any phone calls, meetings, or discussions. As Whitson suggests, write down your goals for the conversation and at the end of the meeting, write down any solutions you’ve agreed on. Then, ask the involved parties to sign. As Whitson points out, establishing a paper trail is less about trying to get the school in trouble and more about organizing the process, making it easier, and keeping everyone on the same page.
Of course, the problem is, not all schools, teachers, or administrators are responsive. They may downplay the problem or dismiss it altogether. If they’re not willing to help, though, you may have other resources.
First, if there’s been an act or threat of violence or someone has vandalized or destroyed your property, that’s not just bullying; it’s a crime. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the majority of hate crimes are underreported.
You should first file a report with your local police. Make sure the officer assigns a case number and take down any other relevant info, including the officer’s name. The Human Rights Campaign suggests asking the office to check the “hate/bias-motivation†or “hate crime/incident†box on the incident report.
The FBI also has a duty to investigate any “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.†You should file a report with your local office, and you can find FBI Field Offices in your state here.
If your child’s school refuses to address the bullying, you may want to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. Federal civil rights laws require any programs or activities that receive funds from the Department of Education to provide an environment free of discrimination, and that includes schools. They explain:
Programs or activities that receive ED funds must provide aids, benefits or services in a nondiscriminatory manner in an environment free from discriminatory harassment that limits educational opportunities. Such aids, benefits or services may include, but are not limited to, admissions, recruitment, financial aid, academic programs, student treatment and services, counseling and guidance, discipline, classroom assignment, grading, vocational education, recreation, physical education, athletics, and housing
You can file an online complaint to request the Department of Education to investigate any incidents.
Beyond reporting the incident, there’s also the matter of talking to your kid about racism. You want to make sure your child knows any bullying, teasing, or violence has nothing to do with them. Here’s what Adoptive Families suggests:
Ensure that your child knows that racial teasing is not just about her, but that it is a big problem in our world, and that even adults have a tough time handling this kind of behavior. After your child describes the incident and her feelings about it, demonstrate a problem-solving approach. This is a process that adults work though almost automatically, but that young children need to be taught.
They suggest you talk to your child and ask them to define the problem, then go through all the possible solutions and consequences.
Psychologist Dana S. Iyer warns against telling your child to just ignore the problem:
Racism doesn’t go away just because they look the other way. Such experiences are likely to lead kids to feel powerless, ignoring them may lead to more helplessness and avoidance…Bullies tend to pick on kids they perceive to be weaker or dislike and usually victimize their targets in groups when the target is alone or with kids they do not feel will retaliate.
Beyond that, you don’t want to downplay the issue. Iyer suggests teaching your child to be appropriately assertive and to talk about the problem with someone they trust.
Kids aren’t always forthcoming about their troubles, so you should be aware of signs that your child may be experiencing racism, even if he or she hasn’t brought it your attention. They might refuse to go to school or they might seem anxious or depressed. Psychology Today points to a few other signs that may be less obvious:
- Speaks negatively of ethnic/racial background, is disparaging of others of the same ethnicity, expresses desire to be a different ethnicity, i.e., expresses desire was white, had lighter skin
- Embarrassed to engage in cultural activities or activities that call attention to ethnicity
- Begins to perform poorly academically
This is not just a frustrating issue to deal with, it’s a scary one. Racism is a pervasive, troubling issue that we won’t solve with a single complaint or conversation, but there are resources out there, and when it’s time to use them, you want to where to turn.
Photo by Gratisography.
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The more features that fancy smartwatch on your wrist has, the worse its battery life will be. But what if instead of needing to be charged every night, your smartwatch harnessed and converted your own body heat into electricity to keep it running?
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Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl wants passengers to break the sound barrier. Since the demise of the supersonic Concorde passenger jet, commercial airlines haven’t offered a quicker alternative to fly from point A to point B.
The Boom team wants to resurrect the speed of the failed Concorde without the issues that eventually doomed the plane. The aircraft used an incredible amount of fuel, was extremely loud even before it hit the speed of sound and it was prohibitively expensive costing $10,400 (£8,292) for a single round-trip ticket between New York and London.
We chatted with Scholl about his company, the working prototype it’s building and how you’ll be able to fly from New York to London and back in the same day.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Tell me a little bit about Boom, about your plan for supersonic jets.
So the backdrop on this is 60 years after the dawn of the jet age we’re still living in the jet age. We haven’t improved travel for like half a century. It’s kind of embarrassing. Our phones are getting better, computers are getting better, and we’re about to get self-driving cars. Sure our airplanes have gotten safer and they’ve gotten more efficient, but they haven’t gotten any better at their basic job of making the world and easier place to access.
If you look back in history, we had supersonic travel with Concorde, yet we never took it mainstream. It was too expensive to be affordable to most people.
What we’re doing, in essence, is taking that last 50 years of fundamental progress with aerodynamics, materials and propulsion and building and aircraft that’s more efficient than Concorde so that supersonic travel can become routine for a lot more people.
I know one of the issues with Concorde was… It might as well have ran on coal. It was burning through so much fuel because it was supersonic flight. Will Boom use less fuel or use fuel more efficiently.
We’re using fuel way more efficiently. Concorde was the best technology of the 50’s and 60’s. The engines had afterburners on them which is literally like dumping raw fuel into jet exhaust to get a bit more thrust. The afterburners look cool, but they’re loud and they use 50 percent more fuel for 20 percent more thrust. Today we have a very different jet engine technology called turbofan, it’s what’s on every major commercial airliner today, it’s significantly more fuel efficient and also quieter.
It’s a similar story with aerodynamics and materials that are of a lighter weight. That all adds up to dramatically more fuel efficiency. On the other hand, once you make enough profit in fuel efficiency you can get the ticket prices down to the point where a lot more people can afford to fly. At Concorde there were only ever a dozen built planes. It was a finished product with no economy to scale. But when you make tickets more affordable then you get economy to scale and it’s a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious cycle.
You’re going to launch something in late 2017. What will that be?
They way we’re approaching this is that we’ve done the high level design for the first passenger aircraft. It’s a 45 seat airplane, that goes mach 2.2. It’s a 2.2 times the speed of sound that’s two and a half times faster than anything else out there today. But the first thing we’re actually building we call the XP1, the supersonic demonstrator. That’s what we’re officially unveiling on November 15. It’s a 1/3 scale version of the whole airplane that proves out all of the key technology to make this practical.
The full scale, taking passengers airplane, is a few more years out.
Tell me a bit about Richard Branson’s involvement.
The back story there is Richard has been passionate about improvements in air travel for decades. He tried to buy Concordes for Virgin I think on two or three separate occasions and couldn’t get those. Part of the motivation for Virgin Galactic is he wants to see higher speed point-to-point travel. So we were able to get in touch with him and his team and said, "hey, we have a way to do this. It’s not decades off, it’s zero breakthroughs away from being practical and it’s more efficient and economical than Concorde ever was." Of course he was very excited by that.
Where will the November 15 event be held?
At our hangar just south of Denver at Centennial Airport. My roots are Silicon Valley. But, Silicon Valley is not specifically the best place to build a new airplane company so we moved to Denver. We got a hangar with a long test runway and direct access to test airspace and that’s where we’re building and flying the first airplane.
In Denver, because of that test airspace, do you have access to the talent that’s going to help you bring this together or were you pulling a lot of people from Silicon Valley?
People have come from all around the country to be a part of this. That’s actually one of the things I’m most proud of. We’ve put together a really fantastic team that has the chops to go out and build this.
Our chief engineer, Joe Wilding is certified for multiple passenger aircraft with the FAA. Our head of propulsion owned the front half of the engine in the joint strike fighter, and that’s a supersonic engine design. Our ergonomists came from Gulf Stream where he owned their entire supersonic aero program. We just hired a systems guy from SpaceX who previously owned the entire second phase of the Falcon 9 and contributed to the key technology for making it possible to have the first stage of the rocket. I could keep going like this, it’s an all star team.
One of the great things about working on an ambitious mission is you can attract the best minds on the planet to come help you make it real. In a way that makes it a harder thing and actually easier.
When you first approached these people, did you have to talk them into joining Boom?
There was a critical moment early in formation of the company where we had half a dozen candidates for the first couple roles in the company. We flew them all out to Silicon Valley and some VC friends gave us some conference tables and a room for a couple days. We had in the room; the inventor of the first personal jet, the chief engineer from the Virgin Galactic Spaceship 1 and Spaceship 2, the chief engineer for Adam Aircraft, I could keep going. It was a really good room of people and we sat down and said, "let’s tear this apart and let’s figure out is this really possible."
The conclusion that we came to was what we’re talking about doing is feasible with technology that’s already been proven on other aircraft. There’s no, well we have to go get unobtanium or we have to get something out of the lab. What we’re basically doing is taking the best technology, the state of the art technology and bringing it to a new design that gives it a really different capability for travel. The comments during the session were things like, "airplane ideas from internet guys usually aren’t any good but this one actually makes sense."
So you brought the team together and hashed it out, make sure that it was a viable plan?
Yeah, we tore it apart. You could tell from sitting in a room with a bunch of really bright accomplished people who really, really knows their stuff who you want to work with. We hired two people out of that room, they became our chief engineer and our CPO.
Is there any concern about finding passengers who want this sort of service?
I haven’t meet a single passenger who wouldn’t like to get there in half the time. It’s a tremendous amount of passenger excitement for a better travel experience and more being there and less getting there.
To give you some concrete examples, this isn’t just about, "oh let me save an hour here or an hour there." This is about what you can do in a day. From New York to London is three hours and 15 minutes instead of seven. So if you’re on the first flight of the day you get to London in time to make a late afternoon meeting. You can go out to dinner, hit the pub and catch a return flight and be home in time to tuck your kids into bed. So we’re saving you at least an entire day. It’s saving you a night in a hotel. It’s saving you having to sleep on an airplane which sucks.
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Samsung has acquired Harman International Industries, an auto parts supplier best known by consumers for its Harman Kardon audio division. The $8 billion, all-cash deal is the largest in Samsung’s history, and an unusual move for a company that normally develops tech in-house. It instantly makes Samsung a much bigger player in the connected and autonomous vehicle industry dominated by Google, Apple and automakers like Tesla, GM and Volvo.
Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal says that Samsung’s displays, connectivity and processing tech is a good fit with his firm’s automotive products. "Samsung is an ideal partner for Harman and this transaction will provide tremendous benefits to our automotive customers," he said in a press release. Samsung Vice Chair Oh-Hyun Kwon added that Harman has an "unmatched automotive order pipeline" and a "strong foundation for Samsung to grow our automotive platform."
Samsung’s largest previous acquisition was a deal to buy AST for $840 million back in the ’90s. If you don’t remember AST, that’s because Samsung was forced to close the division shortly after purchasing it. That failure is the main reason Samsung decided to do its own research rather acquiring companies to gain new technology.
Samsung paid a 28 percent premium over Harman’s current share price, but Harman has a projected order backlog of $24 billion, according to the WSJ. While the California-based firm is known for audio products like Harman Kardon, JBL and dbx, about two-thirds of its sales come from the auto industry. The company builds infotainment, connected safety, security and telematics devices and services used in over 30 million vehicles built by BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen and other automakers.
Samsung reportedly put a task force together to figure out how to break into the automotive market and decided it would take too long to do it internally. It chose to go the acquisition route instead, and reportedly started talks with Harman in the summer. Samsung has cash reserves of around $70 billion and "expects to use cash on hand to fund the transaction." The deal should close in mid-2017.
Via: WSJ
Source: Samsung
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(Credit: Imperial College London/DNA Electronics)
A new HIV test is as simple as plugging a USB drive into a computer.
Scientists from London’s Imperial College and a private genomics analysis company created a device that uses pH to test for the HIV-1 virus and communicates the results to a USB stick. The test requires only a drop of blood and the researchers say that it is simple and cost-effective to manufacture, offering a low-cost option for the millions of HIV-positive individuals who must monitor the effectiveness of their treatment regimes.
The test uses a sensor to measure changes in acidity levels and a chip to communicate that information to the USB. When the sensor heats up blood containing the HIV virus hydrogen ions are produced, altering the acidity of the sample in a specific way. The sensor measures this change and passes it along. The whole process takes less than half an hour, and yields a success rate of 95 percent in the lab. The success rate when the test was actually applied on the stick was 88 percent. The device fits neatly atop the USB stick, requires no external power sources, and is easily disposable. The researchers published their results Thursday in Scientific Reports.
Antiretroviral drug therapies are largely successful in controlling HIV infections, but sometimes the virus will mutate, rendering the drugs ineffective. When this happens, patients and doctors need to know as soon as possible, both to preserve the patients’ health and prevent the spread of drug-resistant strains of the disease. For this reason, regular tests are recommended for patients with HIV.
Current HIV tests are either not reliable enough or difficult to perform, especially for patients in developing countries. Home test kits can produce results in about 20 minutes, but some tests have an error rate of almost 10 percent, requiring follow-up tests. Lab tests are more accurate, but are expensive to perform, require access to healthcare and take several days to return results. For those living in rural villages in poor areas, getting these kinds of tests is difficult.
The researchers say that more work needs to be done to prepare their device for field use, including making the device more accurate, but that it has the potential to be used to detect multiple viruses in addition to HIV.
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