Image found:https://www.cnet.com/news/qualcomm-tv-sound-bar-prototype-aims-audio-straight-to-your-ears/

Qualcomm, a telecommunications company, is at the moment, trying to develop sound bars for television sets. However this is not any ordinary TV speaker, this sound bar is being built with the purpose of directing audio to the viewer no matter where they are positioned in a room. The specific technology that is helping Qualcomm accomplish their goal is called beamforming. Beamforming is a type of spatial filtering that allows sound to be sent or received in particular areas. With beamforming, the sound bar is able to focus the sound waves from the speaker to a specific sweet spot in the room for the listener. However, I would like to state that beamforming is not an extremely new technology. At the time beamforming is being used in many smart speakers, but it has never really been tested for the use in TV audio. However, there are many other possibilities that Qualcomm may be able to create due to their research on the tech.

Qualcomm focuses a majority of their efforts creating smartphone chips and this sound bar is just a large advertisement for their chips. This is due to the fact that their prototype sound bar is running on their technology that they use for their smartphone chips. Specifically the bar is running their Snapdragon 835. This will actually allow for high quality speakers sold at relatively cheap prices. Also, if their audio technology were to further evolve and can somehow be used in a smartphone as in the same extent as their prototype speaker, this could create a major advancement in smartphones that haven’t occurred too recently. I and others as well look forward to seeing Qualcomm’s prototype speaker become an actual product in the market.

Sources: https://www.cnet.com/news/qualcomm-tv-sound-bar-prototype-aims-audio-straight-to-your-ears/

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/qualcomm-mpeg-h-soundbar,news-26605.html

Click to access beamforming.pdf

Olympic athletes have to train for years to reach the level they are at. Advancements in sports and medicine has led to the development of technologies that help athletes reach their peak performance. In competitions where the difference between winning and losing is milliseconds, athletes and trainers will use anything to gain an edge. The 2018 Winter Olympics introduced the world to some of the latest sports and fitness technologies.

Though skiing is one of the most entertaining events in the Winter Olympics, it is also one of the most dangerous. Skiers risk head, neck, and back trauma every time they hit the slopes at high speeds. In order to reduce the risk of head trauma, the United States Skiing team started wearing the MIPS helmet. The Multi-Directional Impact Protection helmet aims to minimize spine and neck injuries by reducing the amount of rotational movement in an impact.

Even further measures are being taken to ensure the athletes safety. Vests with built in airbags have been developed to protect athletes in the event of a severe accident. The vest have built in sensors that detect when the user is losing his or her balance and deploy airbags. These types of technologies have proven to save lives.

While safety is naturally important for athletes, training is essential is if they want to remain in peak condition. The use of technology in training has assisted athletes to reach further than originally thought possible. This Olympics has showcased some of the latest developments in sports training. The Dutch speed skating team has implemented the use of SmartSuits to help refine the skaters technique and correct any mistakes. The suits are embedded with sensors that send real time information to the staff. The staff and trainers can then send information back to the skaters if they need to adjust or correct anything. Technology is developing so quickly; it is amazing how versatile and useful it can be in our lives. The technologies being used today by some of the top athletes are so advanced that it is hard to believe they actually exist.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309463

Elon Musk and his Space X team launched yet another rocket into space today. This time it was carrying a Tesla. Aboard Tintin A & B were two satellites that the company plans on using to deliver high speed internet. With all the “doomsday” talk about Net Neutrality being gone, it’s nice to see this glimmer of hope, literally, it’s supposedly going to say “hello world” by illuminating in the night sky during it’s launch. The satellites will fly in the low orbit of earth. SpaceX has big plans for the future, hoping to grow these two satellites to 10,000 in the coming years. This is an incredible feat for SpaceX, and marks incredible progress towards bringing the whole world online. Billions of people in this world still don’t have internet, the majority of these people live in underdeveloped countries, but as we discussed in class, even towns within the U.S. still don’t have internet access. Can you imagine the untapped potential that lies within these people? Or the amount of opportunities that are currently being withheld from them. Access to the internet is something we often take for granted. The internet can provide learning and networking opportunities that could revolutionize these communities. With SpaceX planning to launch a satellite internet company, I hope that they keep this service at a low cost, so that these areas without internet access, being that they are mostly underdeveloped, can actually afford access.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/22/technology/future/spacex-satellite-launch-february/index.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/meganhills1/2018/02/23/snapchat-stock-value/

A Kardashian has caused a lot of trouble for Snapchat, which has been under fire the past couple weeks over their most recent update. Kylie Jenner, who has not been present on social media for the past half of a year while pregnant with her first child, has been making her resurgence on social media sites. Snapchat has been consistently one of her most present sources for social media and promoting her makeup brand and overall persona, but the app has come under her criticism the past day.

After coming back on social media Jenner tweeted, “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.” remarking on the new update Snapchat made two weeks ago. The update came under a lot of fire as people found it was unorganized and confusing. There was even a petition with over 1 million signatures to get rid of the update, but Snapchat didn’t budge. Snapchat release statements asking its users to be patient and give the update a chance, however they couldn’t have imagined the effect Jenner’s tweet would have.

“With over 300,000 likes and nearly 64,000 comments on her tweet, Snap shares quickly nosedived and dropped to a low of 8% down before climbing back to 6% by the end of trading hours.”

Snapchat’s market value had decreased 1.3 billion dollars by the end of the day. While Jenner did tweet a defense later saying “still love you tho snap … my first love.” the social media app was unable to regain its losses.

This brings to question what the company needs to do to listen to their customers. Obviously a majority of their users have negative feelings about the app, but none of those had the effect that a major famous personality does. Despite the backlash, Snapchat is sticking by their update with their most recent statement “We hear you, and appreciate that you took the time to let us know how you feel. We completely understand the new Snapchat has felt uncomfortable for many.” They want their users to give the app a chance, but if they do not listen to what their users want, they are going to continue to lose their already drastically decreasing market value.

In modern society, we can do almost everything by our smart phones, watching videos, shopping and sending emails etc. When we do these kinds of things using our smartphone, we save our important personal information on our phone. As it mentioned in this article, mobile phones have increasingly become the repository for the details that drive our everyday lives. It is important to protect our personal information for everyone.

According to this article, Associate Professor Daphne Yao and Assistant Professor Gang Wang, both in the Department of Computer Science in Virginia Techs College of Engineering, found thousands of pairs of apps that could potentially leak sensitive phone or personal information and allow unauthorized apps to gain access to privileged data.

Fortunately, they developed a tool called DIALDroid to perform their massive inter-app security analysis. They said that this kind of task would have been considerably longer without DIALDroid. The team exploited the strengths of relational databases to complete the analysis, in combination with efficient static program analysis, workflow engineering and optimization, and the utilization of high performance computing. Relational database is a digital database based on the relational model of data and this model organizes data into one or more tables (or “relations”) of columns and rows, with a unique key identifying each row. As a results, they found thousands of pairs of apps that could potentially leak sensitive phone or personal information.

Reading this article, I thought that we must be careful when we download apps in our phone and I hope that useful technologies will be invented for our information safty.

Source:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170403151154.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_database

Technology plays a crucial role in the officiating of professional sporting events. Before the implementation of the 24 second shot clock in 1954, NBA basketball games were low scoring affairs where teams would make a shot, then hold onto the ball the rest of the game. One of the biggest innovations in the NFL, instant replay, evolved from the Replay System first used in 1986, allowing fans to see all angles of every play for the first time.

Not all sports leagues have been so eager to embrace technology. The English Premier League, as well as other European soccer leagues, continue to officiate matches the traditional way. Line judges and referees rely on their intuition to make calls, completely unassisted by replay systems or different camera angels. While other large European league have decided to test technologies like VAR and goal line cameras, the Premier League is hesitant to adopt these technologies.

Video Assistant Referee is a new technology that allows an assistant referee to review the head referee’s decision on any type of call using video footage. In soccer, the clock never stops and any time that is wasted on injury or substitution is added on at the end of each half as extra time. Many believe that the introduction of reviewable calls will destroy the fluidity of the game.

Controversies with VAR started earlier this month when a questionable decision was made in a Portuguese league match. VAR was set to review a missed offside call that led to a goal. Even though the player was offside, VAR could not disallow the call because the camera was obstructed by a supporters flag. Without VAR’s ruling, the ref could not overturn the call.

Criticisms of VAR have only grown since then, this week it was involved in another incident. In a FA cup round 5 matchup, Manchester United had a goal disallowed after Juan Mata was controversially called offside, despite the lines appearing to be crooked.

FIFA is set to decide next month whether they will support the VAR system. It is a big decision that will have a huge implication. The FIFA World Cup in Russia kicks off in 2018 and should FIFA decide to go forward with VAR, we will certainly see if it preforms without any further issues.

https://www.sport24.co.za/Soccer/EnglishPremiership/is-var-ready-for-premier-league-rollout-20180219

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/premier-league-clubs-var-deadline-12048614

Humans have been around for 200,000 years but very little advancement seemed to take place until the last 500 years or so. This idea statement struck me. Why is that the case? Did we overlook advancement that was more important than most would percieve?

While trying to find a clear answer to these questions, I stumbled upon a Forbes.com articles with two possible reasons.

The first explanation the provided makes a lot of sense.  The point that “Civilization had to wait for the end of an Ice Age” provides a lot of answers to these questions. That Ice Age lasted well over 150,000 years of human existence hindering the ability to start agricultural development. The start of agriculture and the ability to grow crops to sustain life gave time for other things. Now everyone did not have to worry about hunting all the time and could focus on other aspects, thus leading to the beginning of technological advancement. Freeman Dyson says the best technological advancement came out of agriculture; hay. He believes that single crop allowed civilization to expand out of the Mediterranean.

The second explanation this article describes is something more interesting. “A genetic mutation that took place 3000 years ago” offers another answer. Unlike animals, humans eventually developed this gene that made them unsatisfied with current situations. For a while human existence followed the same patterns, apparently until this mutation occurred.

This goal to make life better could account for the expedited advancement in the recent years of humans. Or it just took 200,000 years and some luck to finally see the technology we have…

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/02/22/modern-humans-emerged-200000-years-ago-why-was-technology-stagnant-until-the-last-10000/

I’m not sure about you guys, but if you asked me who the person in the photo above was, I would have no clue. Meet Jared Taylor, the head of American Renaissance, an organization that champions “racial difference.” Jared Taylor had his Twitter account suspended back in December for violating Twitter’s terms and policies of promoting violence. Taylor, however, denies these violations, and is suing Twitter for violating his first amendment of free speech. Seems a little crazy, right? If I had seen his tweets on twitter and found them offensive, I would have probably reported them too. This reminds me of a TED talk we watched in class by Margaret Gould Steward, where she talked about how people on Facebook were reporting photos they did not like of themselves that they were tagged in. As a result, Facebook implemented a system where the user could send a message to the other user asking them to remove the photo – it was shown that people did this less. That always puzzled me. I think that Facebook and Twitter are very separate social media platforms. In the case of Twitter, it is being argued that Twitter cannot ban people based on their personal or political opinions or viewpoints. It’s a little like Twitter is ignoring net neutrality and keeping its viewers from seeing content the corporation does not agree with (honestly, in this case I wouldn’t mind never having to see content about white supremacy, but thats just me), but does that make it right for Twitter to ban Jared Taylor based on his views? Going back to the Steward example, I personally think it would be more useful for something like what Facebook tried to implement to be implemented onto Twitter. On Facebook, we see what our friends post or see. However, on Twitter, we see everything everyone posts (unless their accounts are private), making it much easier to respond to tweets we do or do not like. I think it could be useful for Twitter to implement a tool that allows a user to ask another user to remove a tweet. Often, when I see somebody tweet an unpopular opinion, I will see other users respond with “delete this” as a tweet back. However, it may catch somebody’s attention more if he or she received a notification from twitter that indicates that a large volume of people have found a tweet offensive and would like the user to remove it. This way, maybe people wouldn’t feel their second amendment rights are being violated when their accounts are banned immediately by twitter, but have the choice to delete their offensive content.

Source link: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43154727

Just a couple weeks after launching his Falcon Heavy SpaceX rocket into space, Elon is onto his next milestone project already. Elon and his crew had recently gotten approval to start construction on a hyper loop between Washington D.C. and New York City. A hyper loop is a method of the transportation where a shuttle pod sits inside a tube and is able to move at extraordinary speeds due to decreased air resistance and friction. This proposed hyper loop from Washing D.C. to NYC would be able to propel people to the destination in just 29 minutes. The system is powered by electricity and electromagnetic levitation. The concept is similar to the Maglev, where a train is essentially moving along a cushion of air being held up and propelled forward by strong magnets. The hyper loop uses this method and the fact that it will be traveling in a tightly sealed tube underground to help minimize friction, the number 1 enemy for transportation at high speeds. There have been multiple routes that have been theorized with the use of a hyper loop. Musk and his team have taken the next step forward as to be the first to start implementation of this idea. A permit that was issued to Musk’s boring company from Washington DC’s Department of Transportation on Nov. 29th, allows them to start construction. Some say that the permit is like an athlete stretching before a race. Still, a massive amount of works needs to take place before this method of transportation becomes fully functional and efficient for everyday Americans to use. In my opinion, having just one hyper loop would not mean much. Having hyper loops the connect cities across the country, would be an enormous feat and revolution to the way people travel across the country and maybe even the world.

After being reminded of this problem in the line dance at THON this past weekend, I remembered the texting glitch that iPhones faced for a few months.  It all started with my friends posting captions on social media with an A and a question mark in a box appearing instead of the letter I.  This glitch immediately took over iPhones nationwide to a point where there seemed to be no fix.  Eventually, Apple fixed the problem and people could type the letter I normally.  Just when iPhone users thought this autocorrect problem was over, it started to glitch with the word “it” changing it to “I.T” and for some other phones “is” changed to “I.S”.  This glitch affected me for a long time.  I really thought it was just something I would have to live with for the rest of my iPhone lifetime.  However, I was wrong.  I’m not sure when my phone stopped autocorrecting the word “it”, but it is because of software updates that these little inconveniences vanish.

With new operating systems, comes corrections to past problems.  Apple releases updates in the hopes that they can give their users a better experience with their products.  Of course, they are not always successful and sometimes they face bugs like these autocorrect issues.  By correcting the “I” glitch, Apple faced the “it” and “is” glitch.  These side effects are things that are not always accounted for initially, so updates are continually rolled out.  That is why Apple is constantly making new IOS systems such as IOS 11.2 that corrected many major bugs.  These new IOS versions are systems that users must adapt to, but eventually they make for a better user experience.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/11/how-to-fix-i-autocorrect-bug-iphone-ios-11.html

https://ios.gadgethacks.com/news/iphones-are-autocorrecting-words-it-is-i-t-i-s-with-ios-keyboard-bug-0181381/