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Dec 29, 2021

Apple Pays Its Engineers $180,000 Bonuses to Stop Them From Joining Meta

Posted by in category: futurism

Meta has reportedly poached about 100 engineers from Apple.

Apple is giving its top engineers in the hardware as well as software divisions out-of-cycle bonuses in a bid to stop them from jumping ship to Meta. These bonuses are largely in the form of restricted stock units valued in the range of $50,000 to $180,000, Bloomberg reported.

Earlier in October, we reported that Meta, then Facebook, was planning to hire 10,000 engineers to build Zuckerberg’s version of the metaverse. In the little time that has passed since the company rebranded itself and even opened up its Horizon Worlds for users. But what is not in the public domain is that Meta has poached about 100 engineers from Apple during the period, according to Bloomberg’s report.

Continue reading “Apple Pays Its Engineers $180,000 Bonuses to Stop Them From Joining Meta” »

Dec 29, 2021

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny

Posted by in category: futurism

SKYNET BABY STEPS.


Amazon has fixed its voice assistant so that it will not suggest the dangerous “challenge” again.

Dec 29, 2021

Red Creeping Thyme: The Beautiful Pink Lawn You Never Have to Mow, Water or Weed

Posted by in category: food

Lawns are becoming less and less popular these days. Besides being high-maintenance, they are terrible for the environment. The mono-crop grasses require lots of watering, fertilizing and “herbiciding.” With mounting water shortages around the world, should we really be dumping clean water on non-edible grass?

Naturally, people are looking for alternatives. Some are planting edible gardens, some are planting prairie grasses and flowers for pollinators, and some are planting eco-friendly clover lawns, for a look and feel more similar to a regular lawn.

And now we’ve found another alternative — creeping red thyme. Like clover, the fast-growing cover crop can take over your whole lawn like a carpet.

Dec 29, 2021

How James Webb’s Deployments MUST Work

Posted by in category: space travel

Claim your SPECIAL OFFER for MagellanTV here: https://try.magellantv.com/launchpadastronomy. Start your free trial TODAY so you can watch ‘Planet Hunting with the James Webb Space Telescope’ and the rest of MagellanTV’s science collection: https://www.magellantv.com/video/planet-hunting-with-the-jam…-telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope launched, but now its deployments must work. Even though the launch was successful, the hardest part is yet to come. We’ll take a look at each of the deployment steps and understand why Webb has to be so complex to accomplish its mission.

Continue reading “How James Webb’s Deployments MUST Work” »

Dec 29, 2021

NUS engineers develop soft, flexible robotic fingers with delicate grip

Posted by in categories: food, robotics/AI

The reconfigurable hybrid robotic gripper can pick and place a wide range of delicate food items.

Dec 29, 2021

Low-code and no-code platforms move beyond the shiny-tools stage

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, government

Earlier this month, Airtable announced it’s now worth $11 billion after its latest funding round. The company’s “code-for-everyone-else approach allows professionals who aren’t fluent in coding languages such as Java or Python, and don’t have their desk buried deep within the stack, to play a part in rethinking and remaking the consumer and client digital experience,” reports Riley de León of CNBC. “The low-code movement has attracted an even higher level of attention as a result of the pandemic, during which organizations from hospitals to government entities and corporations have had to develop online offerings at a faster pace than ever expected and for new use cases.”

This movement is part of an increasing democratization of programming — borne of extreme necessity. At a time when digital transformation is everywhere, “relying on IT departments and professional programmers is unsustainable,” an O’Reilly report states. “We need to enable people who aren’t programmers to develop the software they need. We need to enable people to solve their own computational problems.”

Dec 29, 2021

Why space tourism is not just fun for rich people, with Sam Coniglio

Posted by in category: space

Why space tourism is not just fun for rich people.

Mon, Jan 3, 2022 at 12 PM PST.


Interested.

Dec 29, 2021

New Headache For US Military? China Says Its Tiny Satellite Can Capture ‘Crystal Clear’ Images Of American Cities

Posted by in categories: military, space

The Chinese inroads into space have got strategic circles abuzz with discussions about a possible revival of a Cold War-type competition between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union.

China has yet again made headlines with a move that goes beyond just sending missions to the Moon or Mars. It has claimed to have launched a satellite that could take high-resolution photos of American cities from space, which can capture even details of a vehicle’s number plate.

According to experts, a Chinese satellite captured photographs of a vast region around a US city in just 42 seconds, crisp enough to recognize a military vehicle on the street and tell what type of weapon it might be carrying.

Dec 29, 2021

Perovskite solar cell retains 99% of initial efficiency after 1450 hours of operation

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

With an efficiency of 20.9%, the tested cell does not yet fully exploit the potential.

Dec 29, 2021

Simple, accurate, and efficient: Improving the way computers recognize hand gestures

Posted by in categories: information science, mobile phones, robotics/AI, wearables

In the 2002 science fiction blockbuster film “Minority Report,” Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton uses his hands, sheathed in special gloves, to interface with his wall-sized transparent computer screen. The computer recognizes his gestures to enlarge, zoom in, and swipe away. Although this futuristic vision for computer-human interaction is now 20 years old, today’s humans still interface with computers by using a mouse, keyboard, remote control, or small touch screen. However, much effort has been devoted by researchers to unlock more natural forms of communication without requiring contact between the user and the device. Voice commands are a prominent example that have found their way into modern smartphones and virtual assistants, letting us interact and control devices through speech.

Hand gestures constitute another important mode of human communication that could be adopted for human-computer interactions. Recent progress in camera systems, image analysis and machine learning have made optical-based gesture recognition a more attractive option in most contexts than approaches relying on wearable sensors or data gloves, as used by Anderton in “Minority Report.” However, current methods are hindered by a variety of limitations, including high computational complexity, low speed, poor accuracy, or a low number of recognizable gestures. To tackle these issues, a team led by Zhiyi Yu of Sun Yat-sen University, China, recently developed a new hand gesture recognition algorithm that strikes a good balance between complexity, accuracy, and applicability.