With an Android search update, you can tell your phone to 'call Mom'

One of Siri's cleverer tricks is its support for terms of endearment -- you can tell an iPhone to "call Mom" rather than saying your mother's name every time. Today, that handy shortcut is reaching Android through a Google search update.

You can now rely on shorthand when using the search app to call or text family members. If you haven't already established the appropriate relationship in your contacts, Android will ask you to clear things up. The feature is already live, so you can test it out right away -- we're sure your folks would be glad to hear from you.

Glyph: Watching Videos Directly With Your Brain.

Forget about the big screen, the small screen and even the second screen.
A headset due to be released this year promises to beam movies, video games or even video calls directly into your eyeballs.
Yes. The Glyph headset, from Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Avegant, will create visuals that don't need a screen -- just your retinas and your brain.
If that conjures up exciting images of living like "Star Trek's" Geordi La Forge or Cyclops from "The X Men," you're not alone.
A Kickstarter campaign was launched last month and set out to raise $250,000 to bankroll the project. It blew past that mark with ease and, with half a month left, was on the verge of breaking the $1 million mark Wednesday.
"We knew we had something really cool and that we'd do well on Kickstarter, but nobody thought we'd hit our goal in less than four hours," said Edward Tang, Avegant's CEO. "It's like ordering flowers for your girlfriend and they show up with a whole truck full of flowers."
The technology that powers the Glyph centers around a set of 2 million microscopic mirrors -- 1 million per eye -- that reflect visuals, including 3-D, into the user's eye.
Unlike some entries into the emerging wearable tech field, the Glyph won't be limited to a set of specially designed apps. Tang said the headset, which donors can receive for a $499 "donation" to the campaign, is designed to plug into just about anything you own that has a screen -- be it a smartphone, laptop, television or gaming console.
Users would play the video content on their mobile or entertainment device but watch it on the Glyph instead of their device's screen. The Glyph has a battery life of about three hours, Tang said.
"I think Google Glass is really interesting ... (but) I think it's a couple years away," he said. "If you ask people what they're doing with their devices today, they're streaming Netflix, they're playing video games and they're listening to music. We created a device that really focused on those aspects."The startup also wanted to avoid the "Glasshole" effect. Google promises Glass will be stylish when it's released to the public, but the look of early test versions has been distracting to some and downright jarring to others.
Glyph, on the other hand, looks like a pair of headphones sitting on the user's head when not in use. In fact, it doubles as a pair of high-end headphones with noise canceling that compares with some of the leading brands on the market, according to Avegant. To add visuals, the user flips down the band over their head, making it an eyepiece.
The company has opened the headset to outside developers, who they hope will find unexpected uses for its features, which include head-tracking technology.
"By giving developers this brand new tool box, they start to think of amazing applications that we couldn't in our wildest dreams come up with," Tang said.
But, wait. Mom always said not to sit too close to the TV set. And we all know that bleary-eyed feeling we get from staring at a smartphone or tablet for too long. Won't this be worse?
Quite the opposite, Tang said.
He said eye fatigue comes from staring at the artificial, pixelated light from our screens. Remove the screen, remove the problem.
"We agree with the moms of the world," he said. "What we're doing is mimicking the actual light around you ... . It's the kind of light that your eyes have been conditioned to see, have evolved to see."
It's all so magically futuristic sounding. Which raises an obvious question: Is Glyph all hype?
Folks who have taken an early look don't think so. At January's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Glyph was one of 40 products chosen for the Editor's Choice Award. More than 3,200 exhibitors attended the show"What I could tell was that the projected image, just like my last time with Avegant's virtual retinal display tech, was exceedingly bright and vivid, lacking any sense of pixelation," CNET's Scott Stein wrote from CES. "A deep-sea 3-D movie looked like it was projected in a tiny little movie theater in front of my eyes."
David Pierce wrote for The Verge: " 'Life of Pi' displayed perfectly in 3-D without any tweaking, and I played 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' right off a PlayStation 3. All you need to do is to tune the glasses ? you focus each eye individually, then set the two eyeholes the right distance apart so they create a single picture. From then on, content just works."

Amazon's Drone Delivery System; Will it Work?

Imaginations everywhere have been stoked since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced his company plans to start offering 30-minute deliveries via drone-like "octocopters."
What's not fascinating about a near future in which fleets of whirring sky robots can drop our every impulse buy on our doorstep faster than we can get Chinese delivered? (You know, aside from accidental strayings into restricted air space or the rise of the machines.)
But when Bezos took to "60 Minutes" on Sunday to introduce the world to Amazon Prime Air, his idea prompted more questions than it provided answers.
So how close are we, really, to door-to-door drones becoming a reality? And how would they work?
We reached out to Amazon, where official details are still scarce, and chatted with drone expert Missy Cummings, an associate professor at MIT and one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots. Here's some of what we've been able to piece together on a project that Amazon says is, at the very least, a couple of years away from takeoff.
Could drones really be delivering packages by 2015?
That's what Bezos said is the best possible scenario. But Cummings, a longtime advocate for the commercial use of drones, thinks that's optimistic.
The Federal Aviation Administration needs to sign off on Amazon's flight plans, and Cummings says the agency hasn't been quick to move on the domestic use of drones.
"I think they (Amazon) are stepping out in a typically naive way, (but) maybe they have some secret insight to the FAA that I don't have," she said.
Cummings predicts the company will get approval to start Prime Air in other countries before the United States, but she says that having a retail and technology giant like Amazon pushing for it could speed things up for everyone."I don't want anybody to think this is right around the corner," Bezos warned during the "60 Minutes" interview.
How will I know if I'm eligible for a drone visit?
Bezos said the octocopters will have a 10-mile radius. So, it's likely that folks in big cities near Amazon distribution sites would be a lot more likely to qualify than those in more remote areas.
He says they'll initially carry items up to five pounds, which is roughly 86% of all deliveries Amazon makes.
The best Twitter jokes about Amazon's drones
But for even that 10-mile range to work, Amazon better be onto something about battery life that the rest of us don't know. Cummings said drones the size of the octocopters have a battery life of about 30 minutes, and the weight of their cargo could make that even shorter.
What will keep people from shooting them down?
OK, it's perhaps a little off-topic. But every single conversation we've had about the Amazon drones has, at some point, ended up focused on the innate human desire to knock stuff out of the sky, preferably with a loud bang.
Cummings joked about producing a reality show in which marksmen from different states compete to see how many octocopter targets they can bag. At least, we're pretty sure it was a joke.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Amazon doesn't directly address its drones becoming high-tech clay pigeons in a statement about safety."The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety. Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards," the statement reads.
But Cummings says it's a real issue.
"It's not just people who hate drones," she said. "It's people who want those packages."
She speculated the drones will need to fly at an altitude of at least 300 feet for as long as possible to avoid attracting pot shots from target shooters or thieves. She also envisions safe "drop spots," at least at first, instead of delivery to any address within range.
"There are lots of details that need to be worked out, but nothing that is technologically overwhelming," she said.
Will the drones work when the weather is bad?
Amazon's official statement doesn't address this obvious question. But Cummings says that to make the drones reliable in most weather conditions, Amazon would need to improve on currently available technology.
"They can fly in some precipitation, but certainly not heavy precipitation," she said. "Sleet or snow ... would obscure some of the sensors. It's hard to make it a really solid business if the weather holds you back. They're going to have to work on that."
What could come next?
Amazon isn't the only company at least toying with the idea of using unmanned aerial vehicles for commercial purposes. Domino's posted video of the "DomiCopter" delivering two pizzas in the United Kingdom earlier this year. In June, the Burrito Bomber, the creation of a couple of engineers from Yelp, demoed its ability to fly that tasty treat to your doorstep as well.

WARNING ISSUED OVER WINDOWS XP BUG

Microsoft has issued a warning about a bug in older version of Windows that could let attackers take over a computer.

The vulnerability in Windows XP and Server 2003 is being actively exploited by cyber-thieves, it said.

It has taken the unusual step of issuing a temporary workaround that closes the loophole.

However, it acknowledged that applying this fix could break some Windows functions that people regularly use.

Security firm FireEye has been credited with finding the bug that lets an attacker piggyback on a known flaw in some older versions of Adobe Reader. Via the Adobe bug, the FireEye researchers found evidence that attackers were able to "escalate" the access they were granted to the system to eventually allow them to install their own code.

Microsoft said it was aware of "limited, targeted" attacks using the combined bug to attack PCs.

It issued advice to customers saying they should turn off some services to stop the attack working. It warned that turning off the vulnerable service could shut down some widely used networking functions including the ability to access a machine over the net or use a PC to work remotely over a virtual private network (VPN).

A comprehensive fix for the loophole is now being worked on by Microsoft and it said it hoped to include this in a future security update.

Although Windows XP has been superseded by versions 7 and 8 of Microsoft's flagship operating system, the older software is still widely used. Market research figures suggests about one-third of PCs still run XP.

People who have upgraded to the latest version of Adobe Reader will not be vulnerable to the combined attack, said FireEye.

COMPUTER USES IMAGES TO TEACH ITSELF COMMON SENSE

A computer program is trying to learn common sense by analysing images 24hours a day

The aim is to see if computers can learn, in the same way a human would, what links images, to help them better understand the visual world.

The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) program is being run at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.

The work is being funded by the US Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and Google.

Since July, the NEIL program has looked at three million images. As a result it has managed to identify 1,500 objects in half a million images and 1,200 scenes in hundreds of thousands of images as well as making 2,500 associations.

The team working on the project hopes that NEIL will learn relationships between different items without being taught.

Computer programs can already identify and label objects using computer vision, which models what humans can see using hardware and software, but the researchers hope that NEIL can bring extra analysis to the data.










"Images are the best way to learn visual properties," said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute.

"[They] also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with NEIL, we hope that computers will do so as well."

Examples of the links that NEIL has made include the facts that cars are found on roads and that ducks can resemble geese.

The program can also make mistakes, say the research team. It may think that the search term "pink" relates to the pop star rather than the colour because an image search would be more likely to return this result.

To prevent errors like this, humans will still need to be part of the program's learning process, according to Abhinav Shrivastava, a PhD student working on the project.

"People don't always know how or what to teach computers," he said. "But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong."

Another reason for NEIL to run is to create the world's largest visual knowledge database where objects, scenes, actions, attributes and contextual relationships can be labelled and catalogued.

"What we have learned in the last five to 10 years of computer vision research is that the more data you have, the better computer vision becomes," Mr Gupta said.

The program requires a vast amount of computer power to operate and is being run on two clusters of computers that include 200 processing cores.

The team plans to let NEIL run indefinitely

The Best Watch Ever.

The Addidas Smart Run, it's basicaly the Next Best Thing if you're tech inclined or even if you jog or run a little it's the device for you.

It has the whole package; a GPS tracker(it probably measures distance by measuring heart rate), bluetooth and a host of other sensors for conectivity to any external device you might have in mind, so it differs from your average smartwatch.

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Trio of young coders build health-care website in days

From CNN How hard is it to create a website to help people get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act? For three 20-year-old programmers in San Francisco, it took about three days' worth of work. Spurred by the problems that have surrounded the rollout of the official HeathCare.gov site, the trio created an alternative, Health Sherpa, quickly and cheaply. At first glance, it looks like a triumph of tech-startup nimbleness over government inefficiency. George Kalogeropoulos, who created the site along with Ning Liang and Michael Wasser, said all three of them had tried using the government website to get insurance. "We were surprised to see that it was actually fairly difficult to use HealthCare.gov to find and understand our options," he told CNN. "Given that the data was publicly available, we thought that it made a lot of sense to take the data that was on there and just make it easy to search through and view available plans." The result is a bare-bones site that lets users enter their zip code, plus details about their family and income, to find suggested plans in their area. "The Health Sherpa is a free guide that makes it easier to find and sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. We only use carefully vetted, publicly available data," the site reads. "The Health Sherpa is not affiliated with any lobby, trade group or government agency and has no political agenda." Tech experts enlisted to help fix Obamacare website The Sherpa are an ethnic group in Nepal, some of whom have long served as guides for people climbing Mount Everest and other mountains in the Himalayas. The name has come to be used generically for any kind of guide or mentor. Of course, it's not fair to compare the creation of Health Sherpa to the rollout of the more complicated government ACA site, which everyone from President Obama on down has acknowledged as a horribly botched affair.