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Microsoft has installed a six-story interactive Windows Phone structure in New York City’s Herald Square as a promotional stunt to increase awareness of its struggling smartphone platform.
A few folks sent over this report of efforts by some researchers at UCLA to create an algorithm that can accurately take data on existing gang-related crimes, and use it to predict what gangs were involved in new crimes. It certainly has that “minority report — pre-crime” feel to it, though I can certainly see where it could be useful. What concerns me, though, is that systems like this are only as accurate as the data they use. And, as has been reported elsewhere, one of the unintended consequences of such computer analysis of crime data is that it drives police departments to falsify or change crime reports in order to make their own numbers look better. So it makes you wonder how accurate those reports will be if the incentives to fudge the actual crime data continue to be in place.
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With the rapid adoption of all types of smartphones across the world, mobile dating has become a growing trend among single people and typically preferred over traditional online dating sites.
Possibly fueled by the same geeky instinct that pushes our kind to build SD card readers for ancient game consoles and port Doom to just about everything, YouTube user Napabar recently bridged the 27 year gap between the Macintosh 512k and the iPhone 4S. That’s right, Siri and the Fat Mac are talking. Sort of. Most of the heavy lifting is being done by a pair of intermediary machines, an iMac that’s been configured to run an AppleScript upon receipt of a Siri dictated email, and a bridge computer that passes on the resulting text file to the Mac 512K’s floppy drive. Result? Dictate an email to Siri, get a text file with its contents on the Mac 512k. Old and new technology, talking like old pen-pals. And to think, all it took was two middlemen.
Siri talks to Mac 512k, plays telephone with intermediary computers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Much-rumored but hidden mode allows the capture of panoramic images by snapping multiple photos.