iOS: Some people become karaoke gods the minute they pick up a microphone, leaving us mere mortals to wonder how they managed to summon Freddie Mercury from an astral plane. Others…need a little practice. While there isn’t one app that will make you the next American Idol overnight, Tone (iOS, free) is a great app for practicing basic note recognition and tricky intervals.
Tone is almost silly in its simplicity. Load it up, admire the pretty sine wave on its main screen, and tap the play icon. Turn your sound on (or crank it up, as the app advises) and tap the check mark to get started.
To begin, tone plays a note. You try to guess the note’s name from an unchanging list of options. Tone plays more notes. You keep guessing.
You score points every time you correctly pick the note being played. Once you hit mistake number three, it’s game over, and back you go to the main menu. (Though Tone does encourage you to brag about any high scores you achieve by giving you an easy way to post your progress to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.)
If you want to adjust the game’s parameters, the settings menu in the upper-right corner of its main screen lets you pick between note names and solfège (think “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” and the endless examples that follow). You can also elect to display a virtual piano on the guessing screen instead of just note names, which is super-useful for visualizing intervals.
You can customize which notes Tone uses in its tests—notes that come from a “Base 5″ category, the major scale, the minor scale, the full Chromatic scale, or a custom set of notes you select. You can pick from low, medium, or high octaves for the sounds Tone emits and, if you really want to challenge yourself, you can adjust the amount of time you’re allowed to think about your selection before you make it.
I also love that you can set the app to “practice mode,” which trades gameplay for teaching. You’ll get a reference pitch and an unlimited amount of time to figure out what note you just heard—no pressure.
Though I consider myself a pretty decent singer with intermediate-level interval skills—thanks, Forever Plaid—Tone is definitely one of my favorite iOS apps to play with if I have a little time to kill (and my EarPods handy).
Boeing Loses $20 Billion in Contracts After President Trump Violates Iran Deal
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Photo: Endless whining (Getty)
President Trump announced yesterday that he was unilaterally pulling the U.S. out of the so-called Iran Deal, an international agreement that lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for the cessation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But now that the sanctions are being reinstated, some American companies stand to lose a lot of money. Boeing alone is losing about $20 billion in contracts.
After the Iran Deal was finalized in the summer of 2015, American companies like Boeing were allowed to do business with Iran again. Boeing made a deal with Iran Air to deliver 80 aircraft for about $17 billion, and another deal with Aseman Airlines for 30 planes worth about $3 billion. Iran’s fleet of passenger aircraft are some of the oldest in the world, thanks largely to tough sanctions. And it looks like it might stay that way.
“We will consult with the U.S. Government on next steps. As we have throughout this process, we’ll continue to follow the U.S. Government’s lead,” Gordon Johndroe, VP of Boeing’s Government Operations Communications, told the Washington Post in a statement.
The American defense industry has been doing pretty well overall under President Trump, so it makes sense that Boeing wouldn’t be too angry with the American regime for violating the Iran Deal. But still, $20 billion is $20 billion.
Airbus is also expected to lose a large contract it has with Iran Air for 100 planes worth about $19 billion. Airbus, unlike Boeing, had already delivered a few planes to Iran before President Trump’s announcement yesterday. Together, American-based Boeing and French-based Airbus control virtually the entire commercial airline manufacturing industry around the world. And despite being based in France, Airbus will be bound by U.S. sanctions against Iran because it has facilities in the U.S.
The Iran Deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), wasn’t just an agreement between the U.S. and Iran. The U.K., France, Germany, Russia, and China were all part of negotiating the delicate deal in 2015. And most of the signatories are disappointed that the U.S. has decided to break the deal for no good reason whatsoever.
The U.K., France, and Germany issued a rare joint statement expressing displeasure with America’s violation of the deal.
“It is with regret and concern that we, the leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, take note of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States of America from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” the statement said. “Together, we emphasize our continuing commitment to the JCPOA. This agreement remains important for our shared security.”
“We recall that the JCPOA was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council in resolution 2231,” the statement continued. “This resolution remains the binding international legal framework for the resolution of the dispute about the Iranian nuclear program. We urge all sides to remain committed to its full implementation and to act in a spirit of responsibility.”
The U.S. government plans to give a 3-6 month window for companies that are currently doing business with Iran to pull out of their deals.
“To implement the President’s direction, the Departments of State and of the Treasury will take steps necessary to establish a 90-day and a 180-day wind-down period for activities involving Iran that were consistent with the U.S. sanctions relief provided for under the JCPOA,” the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement yesterday.
The reimposition of sanctions was a huge win for Iran’s most anti-American hardliners, providing an opportunity to say that nobody should trust any deal made with America. The Iranian government reacted to President Trump’s announcement yesterday with anger towards the U.S., but said that the deal might be able to remain intact with the remaining countries.
“From now on, this is an agreement between Iran and five countries […] we have to wait and see how others react,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said on TV yesterday. “If we come to the conclusion that with cooperation with the five countries we can keep what we wanted despite Israeli and American efforts, [it] can survive.”
The Iranian government’s optimism in keeping the deal with other countries is an effort to isolate the U.S. on the world stage, but the fact that so many European companies have operations in the U.S. will likely complicate that particular strategy. Huge corporations like France’s Airbus must abide by sanctions imposed against Iran by the U.S. even if France wants to keep the deal.
If Europe and Iran give up on the deal the most likely outcome is the resumption of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and a more dangerous world for us all. Thanks, Mr. President.
Days, Weeks, Years? Scientists Say Hawaii’s Erupting Volcano Has No End In Sight
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Scientists say the lava from Kilauea’s new eruption may continue to flow for months or even years.
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Scientists say the lava from Kilauea’s new eruption may continue to flow for months or even years.
AP
The eruption at Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano continues. The lava has now destroyed at least 35 structures and covered the equivalent of more than 75 football fields.
Scientists have been tracking this event since it started last week – but there are still big unanswered questions, the biggest of which is when this will end.
For more than 30 years, the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island has been erupting. Lava levels in the Pu’u ‘O’o crater and the volcano’s summit rose in recent weeks, says Wendy Stovall, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. They were “inflating like a balloon, because magma was getting backed up from below,” she says.
Then last week, the magma at Pu’u ‘O’o plummeted. “The whole bottom of the crater floor dropped out and the magma completely drained away from that system,” says Stovall.
Scientists don’t know what started this latest event but there are two possibilities, says Stovall: “Either there’s an increase in magma supply, or something blocked the system, something blocked the pathway out of the system.”
In other words — suddenly more molten rock shot up from deep inside the Earth, or there was a clog. Whatever the cause, the pressurized magma has to go somewhere. It turned away from the crater, heading underground, flowing into spaces between the rocks along what’s known as the volcano’s East Rift Zone.
That set off a series of earthquakes, including a 6.9-magnitude temblor that hit on Friday and could be felt across the island. Stovall said that by tracking the earthquakes and deformations in the ground, they could see the direction the magma was heading.
“Honestly it was pretty frightening to see where the magma was going,” says Stovall. That’s because it was headed towards a lush residential area — Leilani Estates, where more than 1,700 people were ordered to evacuate. Video on social media shows lava gushing out, destroying homes and causing havoc.
Here’s why the lava rips apart the ground, according to Denison University volcanologist Erik Klemetti: “It’s like a leaky pipe or a burst pipe, where the magma is moving down the conduit system and it just reaches a point where the pressure builds enough that you start cracking the surface above.”
There are now at least 12 of these fissures in the ground as of Tuesday in and around Leilani Estates, according to Hawaii’s civil defense.
Scientists are tracking earthquakes and the composition of gas coming out of the cracks in the ground, which hints at whether the eruption will intensify. But what will happen longer term is much more difficult to predict, says Bill Chadwick, a volcanologist at NOAA.
“We can’t really peer through the ground and see it exactly in all its details and intricacies,” Chadwick says. Scientists can’t predict when this eruption will end. “It could last days, weeks, years. All that’s possible. It’s hard to say unfortunately.”
This makes it unique from other natural hazards like hurricanes or tornadoes, where there is a clear end point, Stovall says.
“Volcanoes will build up pressure, and then they’ll release that pressure in eruption, and then they’ll pause,” says Stovall. “And then they’ll build up pressure again and release the pressure in another eruption and then they’ll pause again.”
Stovall adds: “As long as there’s magma supplying the system we’re expecting more of the same to happen.”
The uncertainty makes it extremely difficult for the residents of Leilani Estates to know what their future holds, which worries Klemetti.
“When a house today might look like it’s perfectly safe, it might get taken out by a lava flow five years from now if the eruption keeps on going,” he says.
At the same time, it provides what Stovall calls a once-in-a-lifetime research opportunity for scientists. “The things that we will learn in the wake of this eruption will change the way we see volcanoes for the future.”
Scientists are trying to gather as much data as possible, and she says that the information they obtain has the potential change their understanding of how this volcano functions.
And better understanding how it functions, Stovall says, could help keep neighboring communities safe in the future.
Emails take too long. Well, at least according to Google, which is why on Tuesday at Google I/O, the company announced a new Gmail feature called Smart Compose. The feature allows for artificial intelligence to auto-fill information in the emails you compose in an effort to cut down on the time spent typing up mindless messages. If typing emails is truly one of the bane’s of your day-to-day existence, this feature is here to alleviate that stress.
Smart Compose builds on the Smart Reply feature that Google added to Gmail’s mobile app last year, which would offer three context-appropriate responses to emails. Smart Compose takes that to another level by potentially allowing one to write full emails and thoughts right alongside AI-assisted phrasing instead of just deferring to single choices being offered up.
To use Smart Compose, you’ll simply hit the tab button to add the auto-fill text to your message, which appears automatically as you type.
The feature is scheduled to roll out in the next few weeks, but at least some users can try it now. Just click “Try the new Gmail” under settings, if you haven’t already. Then click Settings, and under General, select “experimental access,” which will enable Smart Compose. (This feature wasn’t currently available in our Gmail, so we haven’t had the chance to test it out yet.)
Personally much of the hassle I experience with emails doesn’t start with composition but rather the internal debate over whether to respond to certain emails or even whether to open them at all. Does Smart Compose help with the existential dread of answering an email at 8:53pm on a Tuesday night or wonder how fast is too fast to reply to an email over the weekend? Perhaps by next Google I/O, its AI will be able to address that problem.
The LAPD Uses Palantir Tech to Predict and Surveil ‘Probable Offenders’
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Analysts with the Los Angeles Police Department are reportedly using Palantir software to direct officers to surveil “probable offenders” throughout the city, many of whom are not criminal suspects but have been spotlighted by the company’s predictive technology, according to LAPD documents.
In Justice Today reviewed internal LAPD documents from October 2017 that point to a persistent surveillance campaign compelling analysts to maintain rotating lists of targets selected by agency data-mining techniques and predictive policing tech pioneered by Palantir. The documents were obtained through a public records request filed by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which provides them to In Justice Today.
The In Justice Today report points to what the LAPD calls Chronic Offender Bulletins. Essentially, these bulletins are profiles, partially generated by Palantir software, for individuals who have had some contact with the LAPD. Violent crimes, gun crimes, suspected gang affiliation, and other designations increase a person’s Chronic Offender Score. A high score alone is not enough to justify detainment, but officers are given one-page summaries of a person’s arrest history, notable physical features (referred to as “physical oddities”), cars they own, and a list of where they’ve been stopped by police.
The LAPD used Chronic Offender Bulletins before Palantir’s involvement, but the report notes that the process is both increasingly automated by its software and per-infraction penalties are more severe. A spokesperson for Palantir disagreed with this characterization, telling In Justice Today that the CBO creation is “a human-driven process,” although Palantir software is used in the creation of CBOs, the spokesperson said.
As the report notes, a feedback loop emerges: the LAPD targets those with high scores for increased surveillance, but each stop by police further increases their score. Troublingly, analysts are directed to create a minimum of 12 Chronic Offender Bulletins, with five to 10 “back ups” to be switched in as people are arrested. To be removed from the list, an individual has to go two years without contact—a near impossibility if officers are being compelled to make constant contact with them. The LAPD tracks the number of high scoring “offenders” arrested, and officers are expected to report on COB arrests at weekly meetings, In Justice Today found.
The LAPD did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
AI can help a billion people, but Microsoft can’t do it alone
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“It cracks me up when I meet someone who says, ‘Hey, I don’t think I have people with disabilities in my company.’ And that’s when I know they’ve got people there that are not speaking up.”
I’m sitting with Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer. We’ve bogarted a few chairs in a hallway at the Washington State Conference Center in Seattle, where the company is holding its annual Build developer conference. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf, speaks with a crisp English accent. Though she never signs when addressing me, she has brought a sign language interpreter to clarify the questions I’m asking, in case lip reading ever falls short. Together, we are among the few women I’ve seen at this tech convention.
None of this would normally be relevant — not our genders nor Lay-Flurrie’s deafness — except in this case it is. For Microsoft, a giant in an industry not known for its inclusiveness, people with disabilities represent the next chapter in a quest to achieve equality.
Less than three hours earlier, Satya Nadella closed Build’s day-one keynote not with coding demos but some remarks about humanity. The company plans to use artificial intelligence to help people with disabilities, he said, and will be investing $25 million in grants over five years. Throughout the keynote, closed captioning ran across the big screens in the auditorium.
This wasn’t just a gesture of goodwill — it’s also good business. More than 1 billion people, or roughly 15 percent of the world’s population, have a disability, according to the World Bank, encompassing what has to be one of the world’s largest underserved markets. Disability is an umbrella term that includes lifelong impairments and temporary illnesses, including both physical ailments and mental health disorders. Some people are born with disabilities; many more acquire them later, often in old age.
“Disability is thus not just a health problem,” the World Health Organization concludes in its definition of the term. “It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.”
The stakes are high indeed. According to a report from the US Department of Labor last summer, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 10.5 percent in 2016, compared with 4.6 percent for people without disabilities. Only one in 10 people with disabilities have access to assistive products, according to WHO.
Microsoft’s Seeing AI app for iOS uses computer vision to do things like see currency, read handwriting and speak text.
Microsoft, too, has been busy. Last summer the company introduced the Seeing AI app for iOS, which uses computer vision to read handwriting, identify currency, speak text and even suss out the emotion in people’s facial cues. Soon the OS will get a better-organized Ease of Access settings, with the ability to navigate menus using Narrator. Separately, Microsoft is testing eye control for users with limited mobility.
The benefits of AI go beyond accuracy and speed too: It’s also cheap. Both Seeing AI and Microsoft’s Translator app are free to download. And while it might be a stretch to envision a world where AI replaces Seeing Eye dogs, these tools might flip that 1-in-10 ratio of those who are without access to assistive tools.
Microsoft Accessibility team member Anne Taylor
All told, the company has several ways of sourcing feedback from the community it’s trying to reach. There are Microsoft employees with disabilities, user forums, focus groups and the fantastically acronymed Disability Answer Desk (DAD!), which doubles as a dedicated technical-support line and a way for Microsoft to collect common complaints. And yet Lay-Flurrie insists that “no one would ever say we have enough feedback from people with disabilities.” In part, that’s because the ease with which someone can rate or review a product is itself a measure of how elegantly designed it is. “We desperately want more. We’re trying to make it easy and streamlined for people to give us feedback.”
But according to Lay-Flurrie, who has been with Microsoft in various roles since 2005, the company first had to rethink its own office culture. “Not just me, but a lot of people have helped to drive it over the time,” she said. “We’ve been doing this stuff internally for quite some years. Getting our house in order and really working on that. And we’ve got a lot more to do.”
If it seems that change has been coming faster lately, though, that’s because it has. Lay-Flurrie says that when she entered the workforce some 20 years ago, closed captioning was in use, but had yet to fulfill its promise. “I had somebody tell me that closed captioning was going to be a reality,” she recalls. “Twenty years later, there’s really not been much tangible progress to consumer-based products. AI has completely jumped that in the space of the last 18 months. Twenty-two years, I’ve been dogfooding this product to the point where it’s accurate enough I can use it.”
For Lay-Flurrie, that means few, if any, inaccurate captions. “For someone who relies on captions, someone who’s deaf, that inaccuracy means it’s not usable.”
Even by the metric of accuracy, there’s still work to do. “We are so not done,” Lay-Flurrie added. “Not every video has captions. And not every website is successful, not every product — you can’t walk into a supermarket right now and have a fully inclusive experience.” Indeed, even lower-tech solutions can be hard to find in some parts of the world. Just last month, The New York Timesreported that more than a billion people who need eyeglasses don’t have them. Why should we expect AI or even closed captioning to become ubiquitous anytime soon?
Then there are other problems that remain entirely unsolved. For Lay-Flurrie, the holy grail is converting sign language to text. She also sees an opportunity for AI to assist people struggling with mental health problems like anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps AI could track when you need drugs, she says, or recognize when you’re heart rate is up or when you’re flushed. “It knows the right things and the steps to take when for whatever reason you’re not able to.”
It’s a compelling idea — now someone needs to build it. “We haven’t done a ton yet. I’ve got nothing to crow about,” Lay-Flurrie said. “It’s more a massive opportunity for AI, because there’s so much knowledge.” But it likely won’t be Microsoft executing on the PTSD idea. “We know we’re at the tip of the iceberg,” she added. “It really is democratizing, seeing where else we can drive impact more broadly. And the best and easiest way to do that is to empower others. Empower the developer crowd.” Specifically, the AI for Accessibility program calls for a mix of grants, seed investments and expert advice, when it makes sense.
Microsoft has also been working with some of the same titans it normally calls its competitors, including Apple, Google and Engadget’s parent company, Oath, among others. Accessibility advocates from these firms share best practices and frequently end up sitting next to each other on industry panels. “What grounds us is things like the unemployment rate,” Lay-Flurrie said. “You can’t have an unemployment rate that’s double and then think this is a really big compete space. There’s so much to do. Too much to do for one company alone.”
Surely, Microsoft will continue its efforts after this five-year program ends. $25 million isn’t even a lot of money by the company’s standards. Other than a commitment to accessibility, though, does Lay-Flurrie know what’s next? “Oh no,” she said. “The world was moving this way five years ago, but I don’t think any of us anticipated quite the acceleration that we’d be in at this point.”
At this point, Lay-Flurrie is reminded of something Nadella said in his keynote: the world is becoming a computer. Technology will just be that ubiquitous. “The one vision that keeps me grounded, that I think is going to be incredible, is if you imagine a table full of kids with multiple different disabilities,” she said, “and instead of having to leave the classroom or use very big or bulky or specialized equipment, they’re using the same equipment as anyone else, but in their own way. It’s just mapping the technology to the individual as opposed to the other way around.”
Google Lens will be available in stock camera apps
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AOL
Google has been busy updating Lens, its AI-powered image recognition tool, over the past year. It can recognize dog and cat breeds, is available on iOS, and on non-Pixel Android phones. Now, at I/O, Google is rolling out the latest Lens update: It will now be integrated directly into the stock camera app. It’ll start with the Pixel, but will also roll out to other Android phones like the recently announced LG G7.
The company is also rolling out several new features to Lens: smart text selection, style match, and real-time results. With smart text selection, you can do things like copy-and-paste text from the real world directly into your phone, and even quickly finding the meaning of words from a document. In a demo on stage, for example, Google showed how you could quickly tap around words on a menu, and Lens will tell you what exactly that food is, complete with visual guide and an ingredient list. Which is especially useful if the menu is in a foreign language you don’t quite understand.
Developing…
Click here to catch up on the latest news from Google I/O 2018!
