Innholdsfortegnelse for #269 i Techlife News

OMG! Did you hear about the artificial intelligence program that Microsoft designed to chat like a teenage girl? It was totally yanked offline in less than a day, after it began spouting racist, sexist and otherwise offensive remarks. Microsoft said it was all the fault of some really mean people, who launched a “coordinated effort” to make the chatbot known as Tay “respond in inappropriate ways.”To which one artificial intelligence expert responded: Duh! Well, he didn’t really say that. But computer scientist Kris Hammond did say, “I can’t believe they didn’t see this coming.” Microsoft said its researchers created Tay as an experiment to learn more about computers and human conversation. On its website, the company said the program was targeted to an audience of 18 to 24-year-olds and was…

WHY BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS SUCH AN EXCITING FUTURE Battery technology... it’s an extremely dry subject, and yet, it is also an extremely important one in terms of how we lead our lives. We are all so used to complaining about the battery lives of our phones, or our inability to find a certain type of battery that we need in the local store, that we can end up forgetting the sheer wonders of batteries, and how far they have advanced in a relatively short time. If you disagree, allow us to be your guide to the amazing future of battery technology! THE GREAT EXPECTATIONS FOR BATTERIES Batteries have long been the source of great wonder - as well as consternation - among human beings. They’re far from something that you…

Chinese tech giant Huawei wants Americans to start thinking of it as a stylish smartphone brand. Huawei Technologies Ltd., which pulled out of the U.S. market for network switching gear four years ago due to security fears, became the No. 3 global smartphone seller last year and passed Apple in China. This year, it launched a new flagship smartphone, the P9, and is positioning it to compete with Apple and Samsung. “China has yet to create a high-end consumer brand. We want to take that goal onto our shoulders,” Eric Xu, one of Huawei’s three rotating co-CEOs, told industry analysts at a meeting in April. To do that, Huawei must succeed in the United States the second- largest market for handsets after China, accounting for one-sixth of global sales, according…

Since its inception in 2015, Apple Music has gone from strength to strength. Despite tough competition from the likes of Spotify, Google and Tidal, Apple has managed to grow to over 13 million paying subscribers in little over a year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite achieving its growth organically, Apple is now preparing a $500 million takeover bid for Jay-Z’s streaming service TIDAL. Launching in Scandinavia as WiMP, Tidal was bought by ‘Crazy in Love’ hitmaker Jay Z for $54 million last March, who offered to put the musicians at the forefront of the streaming service. A public launch featuring the likes of Madonna, Drake, Rihanna, Beyonce and Daft Punk had everybody talking, and music icons each signed a ‘declaration of support’ and offering exclusive music,…

At what was once a remote desert outpost with spotty cell service and little infrastructure other than the shell of a quarter-billion-dollar futuristic hangar, Christine Anderson has watched the transformation of Spaceport America from her office window. The hangar sits just to the south, its patina metal paneling and glass walls rising from the valley floor. It’s Anderson’s favorite view. “I always get inspired,” she said of being at the spaceport. “It sounds so trite, ‘the dawn of the new space age,’ but you know it really is. I think it’s just going to be amazing what we in our lifetime get to see happening in this industry.” Even though commercial flights at Spaceport America have yet to begin, Anderson - executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority -…

Carmakers are finding the Paris auto show , held in a city whose mayor wants to ban diesels to reduce pollution, to be a fine place to show off new zero-emission electric vehicles. Most prominently, Volkswagen will unveil a small electric car as part of its pivot from diesel to more electric models as it struggles to recover from its scandal of rigging more than 11 million cars to evade diesel emissions tests. And Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz will unveil a luxury electric SUV aimed at warding off competition from, among others, all-electric upstart Tesla. Showing electric cars will help avoid a faux pas in a city where the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has campaigned against pollution from conventional autos. The Sunday before the show opened, she held a second “Day Without…

A new study paints a picture of an Earth that is warmer than it has been in about 120,000 years, and is locked into eventually hitting its hottest mark in more than 2 million years. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder , now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. Snyder’s temperature reconstruction, published Monday in the journal Nature , doesn’t estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years. Snyder based her reconstruction on 61 different sea surface temperature proxies from across the globe, such as ratios between magnesium and calcium, species makeup and acidity. But the…

The first consumer-ready Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset was delivered to a real person over the weekend, and reviewers got their first taste. The initial feedback: It’s a beautiful, wonderful device that immerses you, yet it still has a ways to go. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey hand-delivered the first Rift to software developer Ross Martin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Saturday, kicking off a new era in virtual reality by putting the most powerful VR device yet into a consumer’s hands. Martin, who had never tried VR before, spent a few hours on the Rift Monday morning. He watched a short movie, played a game and explored a virtual environment that included an up-close encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I couldn’t stop saying, ‘Wow,’” Martin, a 33-year-old Web developer, said in an…

Messy party photos, offensive tweets, pepper spraying student protesters ... sometimes, you just want a do-over when it comes to your online presence. And for a hefty price tag, you can. The University of California, Davis is under fire for contracting consultants for at least $175,000 to clean up its online reputation after a November 2011 incident in which campus police pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters, according to a report in the Sacramento Bee. If that PR campaign worked at all, it’s now backfired. Here’s how this sort of reputation scrubbing is supposed to help - and some ways in which it might have the opposite effect. CALL THE PROS Services such as Reputationdefender.com and Naymz.com offer to clean up your name, or, as the latter advertises, achieve your “professional and personal…

On a recent Thursday, the staff at Sunny Vista Living Center in Colorado Springs bustled in the kitchen. The phone rang with a last minute order as Chris Willard tended to a large pot of Thai-style soup with fresh ginger, vegetables and thin-sliced beef. It was a special meal for a woman of Asian descent who didn’t like any of the dozen choices on the menu. “You have to be creative,” said Willard, a chef with an easy smile and a long mustache, who is the nursing home’s food service director. Earlier that day, he had received a thumbs-up for his gluten-free pancakes. Sunny Vista is part of a slow but growing trend among the nation’s 15,600 nursing homes to abandon rigid menus and strict meal times in favor of…

The creators of“The Sims”are opening up gender customization options for the first time in the long-running history of the popular life simulation video game. “The Sims”publisher Electronic Arts and developer Maxis said a free update available Thursday for“The Sims 4”will remove gender boundaries and allow players to create virtual townsfolk - or Sims, as they’re known - with any type of physique, walk style or voice they choose. “The Sims 4”and earlier installments of the 16-year-old series previously restricted specific clothing, hair styles and other aesthetic options to either male or female characters. EA and Maxis said over 700 pieces of content previously available to only male or female Sims will now be accessible regardless of gender in “The Sims 4”and its various expansion packs. The studio said in a…

Jessie Levine smiles and shakes her head when she hears the outgoing voicemail message on her iPhone. “I sound young! And fast!” she marvels. “That person never, ever expected to talk like this.” The message was recorded before Levine was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, in early 2015, and before the progressive motor neuron disease caused her speech to become slow and slurred. But as her ability to talk deteriorates, she’s exploring a new way to restore her voice via speech synthesis, or the artificial production of human speech. The technology has been around for decades, but as devices shrink in size, efforts to customize them are expanding. Multiple companies and research groups are using speech synthesis engines to create voices from spoken samples, usually thousands of recorded…

Paper? Pencils? Laptops? Robots? Teachers are increasingly relying on crowdfunding efforts to stock their classrooms with both the mundane and sometimes big-ticket items. Contributions to education campaigns have climbed on GoFundMe and DonorsChoose, collectively, from just more than $31.2 million in 2010 to nearly $140 million in 2015, the do-it-yourself fundraising sites report. Both sites are on pace to eclipse that in 2016. GoFundMe has collected $58 million in just the last 12 months, and DonorsChoose saw more than 50,000 campaigns live on the site for the first time this back-to-school season. In her first year as an elementary school teacher in Kingman, Arizona, Shannon Raftery raised $340 through crowdfunding to supplement the money she took out of each paycheck to pay for classroom supplies. Now in Philadelphia, she’s looking…

All those cars on California’s famously gridlocked highways could be doing more than just using energy - they could be producing it. The California Energy Commission is investing $2 million to study whether piezoelectric crystals can be used to produce electricity from the mechanical energy created by vehicles driving on roads. The commission is in the process of choosing a company or university to take on small-scale field tests. It will study how the small crystals, which generate energy when compressed, could produce electricity for the grid if installed under asphalt. Scientists already know the technology works, but the state needs to figure out whether it can produce high returns without costing too much. Similar projects in other parts of the world have been discontinued. “It’s not hard to see…

The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit accusing a high-flying Silicon Valley software company of systematically discriminating against Asian job applicants over the last five years. Palantir Technologies was co-founded by prominent tech financier Peter Thiel with backing from an investment arm of the CIA. The Palo Alto, California, company makes data analytics software used by the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies, along with banks, insurance companies and other private clients. The lawsuit claims Palantir routinely eliminated Asian job candidates during the resume-screening and telephone-interview stages of the company’s hiring process. The claims are based on a statistical analysis conducted by federal officials responsible for making sure government contractors comply with anti-discrimination rules. Palantir denied the allegations, saying the government’s analysis is flawed.…

The government hack of an iPhone used by a San Bernardino killer serves as a reminder that phones and other electronic devices aren’t impenetrable vaults. While most people aren’t targets of the NSA, FBI or a foreign government, hackers are looking to steal the financial and personal information of ordinary people. Your phone stores more than just selfies. Your email account on the phone, for instance, is a gateway to resetting banking and other sensitive passwords. Like washing your hands and brushing your teeth, a little “cyber hygiene” can go a long way toward preventing disaster. LOCK YOUR PHONE WITH A PASSCODE Failing to do so is like leaving your front door unlocked. A four-digit passcode - and an accompanying self-destruct feature that might wipe a phone’s data after too…

What kind of year has 2016 been for Apple? Frankly, it isn’t easy to say. Come the end of each year, it’s usually easy to point out Apple’s various highlights regarding both hardware and software; however, 2016 has been an up-and-down year for Apple. While the Cupertino company has made genuine breakthroughs and some tantalizing announcements, it has also faced various challenges, with some dispirited press reactions and even political disputes all playing a part. HOW 2016 HAS DIFFERED FROM 2015 Think back to 2015, and you will recall Apple unveiling various products that seemed to indicate major, game-changing shifts for the company. Think of the super-thin 12-inch MacBook, the super-big 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the “future of television” in the form of the fourth generation Apple TV, and the pressure-sensitive…

Picture an 18-wheel truck barreling down the highway with 80,000 pounds of cargo and no one but a robot at the wheel. To many, that might seem a frightening idea, even at a time when a few dozen of Google’s driverless cars are cruising city streets in California, Texas, Washington and Arizona. But Anthony Levandowski, a robot-loving engineer who helped steer Google’s self-driving technology, is convinced autonomous big rigs will be the next big thing on the road to a safer transportation system. Levandowski left Google earlier this year to pursue his vision at Otto, a San Francisco startup the he co-founded with two other former Google employees, Lior Ron and Don Burnette, and another robotics expert, Claire Delaunay. Otto is aiming to equip trucks with software, sensors, lasers and…

Astronomers thought they had a handle on how the universe ticks, but the cosmos may be toying with them. A team of astronomers has calculated that the universe seems to be expanding faster than what scientists previously figured. If the new research is right, then science’s basic understanding of what’s been happening to the universe in the past 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang could be just a bit off kilter. “This is really an end-to-end test the universe gives us; it’s sort of our final exam,” said Nobel laureate and study lead author Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute . “We get a D-plus probably because things don’t match up.” Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance of 2,400 stars to calculate the…

The idea of taking apart a rat’s heart and transforming it into a tissue-engineered stingray first came to Kevin Kit Parker during a trip to the New England Aquarium with his daughter. Four years later, a robotic ray that swims toward light has made the cover of Science Magazine and is pushing the limits of what’s possible in the design of machines powered by living cells. A research team based at Harvard University’s Disease Biophysics Group, which Parker directs, created the translucent, penny-sized ray with a gold skeleton and silicone fins layered with the heart muscle cells of a rat. It’s remote-controlled, guided by a blinking blue flashlight. Each burst of blue sets off a cascade of signals through the cells, which have been genetically-engineered to respond to light. The…

Notices that personal information might have been compromised will be sent to hunting and fishing license holders in Idaho and Oregon following the breach of a vendor’s computer system. They likely will be sent in Washington state, too. Officials in Idaho and Oregon said Dallas-based Active Network will mail the notices to people in their states following the computer hack last week that shut down online license sales. Washington officials said they’re in contact with the company and expect similar letters to be sent in their state, but that hadn’t been finalized Friday. Officials say the number of records exposed could be in the millions. Online license sales have been halted in all three states until the extent of the hack is fully understood. “They’ve only been able to confirm…

Airline pilots and air traffic controllers are on schedule to switch to text communications at most of the nation’s busiest airports by the end of the year, a milestone that holds the potential to reduce delays, prevent errors and save billions of dollars in fuel cost, says the Federal Aviation Administration. Controllers and pilots will still use their radios for quick exchanges like clearance for takeoff and in emergencies and situations where time is critical. But the nation’s air traffic system is gradually shifting to text messages for a majority of flying instructions. That’s a big advantage, say government and industry officials, because up until now longer and more complicated instructions like a route change for pilots of planes waiting to take off are communicated verbally, with each word laboriously…