I love everything about virtual reality, and its potential to change how we connect. I believe money shouldn’t be an object – everyone should have access to the tech. Apparently, Google shares my sentiments: they’ve designed a working VR headset which you can build with twenty bucks and a pizza box.
This is not your typical electron microscope snowflake photo, usually delicate and beautiful. It’s a capped column snowflake zoomed in 50,000 times. Those intriguing and sightly gross flabby little hair thingies on both ends of the flake are rime ice.
POV footage shows it’s a helluva drop so yeah, it’s scary. People will pretty much plummet straight down a 168-foot 7-inch tall slide—which makes it the world’s tallest water slide —at thigh burning speeds to blast over a massive hill to ride another “mini” 50 feet slide. It doesn’t get any sicker than this.
As it turns out, there are a lot of people who want LeVar Burton teaching kids how to read. The Reading Rainbow remake has just become the most popular Kickstarter project, ever — it broke the record with over 91,600 backers on June 30th. That puts…
The newly unveiled Android Wear smartwatches have scored their first two apps: Wear Calc and Wear Compass, both of which can be grabbed from the Google Play Store. While both are simple offerings, they kick off what will be a slew of wearables-centric apps. The two apps are exactly what they sound like: a digital compass app and a calculator … Continue reading
Inventor Gianluca Gamba has a new way to make your candlelight dinners classy: the Pelty, a wireless speaker fitted into a tower-shaped candle holder. Positioned below the speaker is a tea light candle, which powers the Bluetooth speaker with its heat output. The idea behind the candle was a simple one — the inventor found traditional portable Bluetooth speakers to … Continue reading
While voice recognition software is nothing new, Apple was the first to introduce an integrated solution for smartphones starting with the iPhone 4S in the form of Siri. However despite it being demonstrated with such aplomb, the end result did not live up to the expectations of many its users. What was particularly frustrating was Siri’s inability to understand the user, at least compared to the alternatives like Google Now which did a much better job.
However according to the folks at Wired, it seems that Apple could soon be improving on that by replacing the company responsible for Siri’s technology, Nuance, with technology that they have built themselves. According to the people that they spoke to, Wired found that Apple had been steadily hiring voice recognition and speech experts, who will presumably be working on Apple’s own in-house voice recognition technology which could eventually replace Nuance.
According to Abdel-rahman Mohamed, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto who claims that Apple had approached him with a job offer, “Apple is not hiring only in the managerial level, but hiring also people on the team-leading level and the researcher level. They’re building a very strong team for speech recognition research.”
The technology that they could be replacing Nuance with is called neural networks. This technology has been employed by both Microsoft and Google in their own software, like Skype and Android Voice Search, resulting in much more accurate and speedy results, at least compared to Siri. Of course it remains to be seen if this is something that Apple will do but what do you guys think?
Apple Could Turn To Neural Network Technology For Siri , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
The Moto X+1 is a handset that is supposed to be the successor to the Moto X from back in 2013. Unfortunately not much is known about the device for now, save for some potential customization options like the ability to choose a leather backplate in addition to wood and your normal assortment of colors.
However thanks to a listing by Brazilian retailer, Livraria Logos, they have uploaded the specs of the upcoming handset. Now you’re probably thinking that they’re using placeholder specs and you might be right, however the retailer was also the one responsible for revealing the Moto E’s specs a couple of days ahead of the official announcement, so perhaps there could be some truth to their claims.
In any case according to their claims, the Moto X+1 will sport a 5.2-inch display with a Full HD resolution. For those hoping that it would be a QHD display, sorry to disappoint! The handset will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.26GHz. Once again we’re not sure why they didn’t go with the 801 or 805, but perhaps it could be to help keep costs down.
The Moto X+1 will also sport 2GB of RAM, a 12MP rear-facing camera, a 5MP front-facing camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, 3G/4G connectivity, 32GB of onboard storage that can be expanded via microSD, and a 2,900mAh with Android 4.4.4 KitKat running the show. Take it with a grain of salt for now, but what do you guys make of these specs?
Possible Moto X+1 Specs Revealed By Brazilian Retailer , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Sony typically releases flagship phones twice a year. One would be launched at the start of year, either at CES or MWC, and the second one would be announced in the later part of the year. We saw this happen last year with the Sony Xperia Z which was followed by the Sony Xperia Z1. Earlier this year Sony announced the Xperia Z2, and according to the rumors, Sony could already be working on the Xperia Z3.
That being said, thanks to a leaked photo out of China obtained by the folks at Xperia Blog, we might have our very first sighting of the Sony Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact. The photo above isn’t exactly very clear or sharp, but it definitely shows two Sony devices pictured side-by-side. The Xperia Z3 is presumably the larger model in white, while the Xperia Z3 Compact is the smaller black model to the right.
Unfortunately the specs of either device remain a mystery for now as well, so it is unclear as to what we might be able to expect from either handset. There is also no word on when either device will be officially announced, but with the next major event being IFA which is taking place in September in Berlin, perhaps we will learn more about either device then. In the meantime we’ll be keeping our eyes and ears peeled for more information.
Alleged Sony Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact Front Panels Surface , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Many self-styled libertarians have been celebrating the rise of Uber. Their story is that Uber is a dynamic start-up that has managed to disrupt the moribund cab industry. The company now has a market capitalization of $17 billion.
While Uber’s market value probably depends mostly on its ability to evade the regulations that are imposed on its competitors, the company has succeeded in transforming the industry. At the least we are likely to see a modernized regulatory structure that doesn’t saddle cabs with needless regulations and fees.
Unfortunately, the taxi industry is not the only sector of the U.S. economy that can use modernization. The pharmaceutical industry makes the taxi industry look like cutting-edge social media. The government-imposed barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical industry don’t just raise prices by 20 or 30 percent, as may be the case with taxi fares; they raise prices by a factor or 10, 20, or even 100 (that would be 10,000 percent).
The basic story is that the industry relies on government-granted patent monopolies that give them the exclusive right to sell a drug. As a result, when they have a patent monopoly on a drug that can substantially extend life or improve its quality, drug companies can charge tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fact that the drug might be relatively cheap to produce is beside the point.
These exorbitant prices then create huge problems of affordability. Should insurers be forced to pay for these incredibly expensive drugs? How about government programs like Medicare and Medicaid? Should everyone be able to get these drugs, even older people who may not have long to live in any case? And of course these prices are completely out of reach for people in the developing world.
As every econ 101 student knows, the huge gap between the selling price and production costs gives pharmaceutical companies an enormous incentive to push their drugs even in cases where they may not be appropriate. A week rarely goes by when we don’t read about a company pushing “off-label” uses of its drug, meaning uses for which it has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
In addition, as standard economic theory predicts, drug companies routinely exaggerate the effectiveness of their drugs and conceal evidence that it is less effective than advertised, or in some cases even harmful. And of course drug companies routinely make large campaign contributions to politicians to get government programs to buy their drugs, more generous patent protection, or other profit-enhancing favors.
Given the enormous power of the pharmaceutical industry and the obscure nature of many of the issues involved, we could see drug prices continue to soar indefinitely, as the pharmaceutical industry takes an ever larger share of the family and government budget. But recent events in India offer hope.
Last year India’s Supreme Court rejected Novartis’ patent on the cancer drug Gleevec, which sells for $80,000 a year in the United States. A high-quality Indian generic version sells for $1,000. The Indian court ruled that Gleevec didn’t qualify for a patent because it was a combination drug, which used pre-existing chemicals rather than developing a new molecule. Last week India’s patent office argued in the similar vein in rejecting a patent for Abraxane, another cancer drug.
If India persists in making patents difficult to obtain it will threaten the U.S. drug industry’s business model. It will not be possible to sell drugs in the United States for $100,000 if the same drugs are available in India for $1,000, or even less. Either the Indian drugs will come here or the people will go there. Such enormous price differentials are not sustainable.
The industry will be screaming about its need to recover its research costs. It has a point, like the taxi industry, but a very limited one. Patents are an antiquated and inefficient mechanism for financing research. It would make much more sense to have direct public funding. This would not only allow new drugs to be sold as generics from day one, it would also mean that all research findings would be available to other researchers, as well as doctors and patients, from the moment the research has been completed.
Those who think the government couldn’t possibly be an efficient funder of research must not have heard of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which gets $30 billion a year from the government. Its research has produced a vast amount of major scientific breakthroughs. Its funding enjoys wide support across the political spectrum.
While most of NIH’s funding goes for basic scientific research, there is no reason that the funding could not be doubled or tripled with the explicit purpose of replacing the funding currently supported by patent monopolies. This additional funding would go for the development and testing of new drugs, bringing them through the FDA approval process.
There are many important issues that would have to be worked out in constructing a new mechanism for financing drug research. In normal times it is difficult to imagine Congress or the president ever heading down this path. But if the Indian drug industry makes the patent system unviable, we may finally adopt a 21st century system for financing the development of new drugs.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
