Technology
YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android smartphone.
VoiceSee's flagship beta application, Culinary Pal, is a cooking web navigation mobile app that will follow your voice commands to search for recipes and choose the one you want. Sadie, the voice of VoiceSee, will then read aloud the ingredients list followed by preparation and cooking or baking instructions. She will pause at your command so you can finish each task before listening to the next one.
The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative. Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access.
Pentamodes, proposed in 1995 by Graeme Milton and Andrej Cherkaev, have been purely theoretical but three-dimensional transformation acoustics ideas, for example inaudibility cloaks, acoustic prisms or new loudspeakers, could become reality in the near future.
The mechanical behavior of materials like water (or even gold) is expressed in terms of compression and shear parameters. For examples, water as an incompressible fluid that can barely be compressed in a cylinder is described through the compression parameter, but that it can be stirred in all directions using a spoon is expressed through the shear parameters.
I make the case for replacing business executives with robots.*† This is no smart-ass slur on the intellects of executives. A transformation of business soon will be upon us. In the transformed enterprises, robots will take on more and more business decisions. Humans will retain a smaller but still crucially important role.
The argument involves ‘real options’ and ‘agency theory.’ Explaining them is simple, though lengthy. So let’s get started, using an illustrative example:
An opportunity requires Rineu Corporation to invest $10,000 now, with an assured first-year cash flow of $6,000. The second-year cash flow is uncertain with a 50-50 chance of either a $15,000 gain or a $5,000 loss.
ST. HELENA, CA – It’s a fine Saturday, and the traffic lines up on Highway 29 as the day’s crop of tourists meander from vineyard to vineyard along the road that bisects Napa Valley.
By year’s end, 4.5 million people will have passed through, sampling vintages from the state that grows 92% of the nation’s grapes and supplies 60% of its wine. More than 200 million cases of California wine are sold within the United States each year; a further 250 million find their homes abroad. California is the world’s fourth largest wine exporter, after Italy, France, and Spain.
And Napa Valley is at the heart of it all.
Isn’t it nice when someone does your work for you? For some years now,
NIL Technololgy have been sending me science news emails as a form of advertising. Mostly these are to do with nanotechnology, but the most recent directed me to this:
Scientists propose a solution to a critical barrier to producing fusion
Wikipedia is crowdsourced knowledge and therefore discourages people from writing about themselves. As a result, 60 percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors, according to research published in Public Relations Journal.
Marcia W. DiStaso, Ph.D., assistant professor of public relations at Penn State University, surveyed 1,284 public relations people from the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA). Results of the survey indicate a gap exists between public relations companies and Wikipedia concerning the proper protocol for editing entries.
Noise levels, fine particulate matter that leads to smog and traffic volumes are a big concern to urban planners and residents now but they will be even bigger issues in the 'city of tomorrow'.
Three-dimensional tools will soon make it easier to simulate those issues: as the user virtually moves through his city, the corresponding data are displayed as green, yellow or red dots.
Want to get an autism diagnosis but are just too darn busy?
Researchers at Harvard Medical School are here to help. Yes, the process of diagnosing autism is complex and subjective but what about if qualified people are not there to help or you are in a rush?
Despite claims that there is not enough diversity in anonymous, voluntary efforts, it often comes down to choice. Women are not discriminated against on Wikipedia, though more men do it, and white people are not prevented from blogging just because more black people do it.
Black people, nee African-Americans in American sociology papers, are more likely to blog than their white and Hispanic counterparts, according to surveys analyzed by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley - one and a half times to nearly twice as much as whites.
