Author: kenmay

Microsoft built an AI-powered iOS app to help you learn Chinese

Language-learning apps are nothing new, with offerings from MIT and Duolingo ready to teach you a new way to communicate right on your phone. Now Microsoft is looking to teach you Chinese with a free new AI-powered iOS app. The idea here is to provide users with a way to practice the Chinese language in the absence of real-life communicative partners. “You think you know Chinese, but if you meet a Chinese person and you want to speak Chinese, there is no way you can do it if you have not practiced, ” said Microsoft’s Yan Xia in a blog post . “Our application addresses this issue by leveraging our speech and natural language processing technology.” There’s no word on plans to expand to other languages, but it’s not hard to see such an app helping you learn to converse in different tongues, too. The app uses various AI tools like deep neural networks that are able to figure out what you’re trying to say and then evaluate your pronunciation. The AI has been trained on data from native Chinese speakers as well as Microsoft’s text-to-speech technology. As you use the app, you’ll get scored on your speaking ability and highlighted words that you need to work on, plus sample audio to hear how the words are actually pronounced. So far, the app has separate systems for beginners and intermediate learners to better help you move forward from your level of expertise. “The app will work with you as a language learning partner, ” Xia said in the post. “It will chat with you and give you feedback based on what you are saying.” Source: Microsoft

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Microsoft built an AI-powered iOS app to help you learn Chinese

iOS jailbreak repositories close as user interest wanes

 A few years ago jailbreaking your iPhone was all the rage. The cat-and-mouse game of hackers versus Apple was great fun and some of the open source products available to jailbreakers – namely the Cydia alternative app store – added amazing features and customizability to the iPhone. Some devs even launched only on jailbroken phones, thumbing their noses at Apple’s walled… Read More

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iOS jailbreak repositories close as user interest wanes

Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME

Canonical’s video introduction to Ubuntu 17.10 If you’ve been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of “convergence”—a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too . The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases—you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure, there’s been a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood. But by and large, the Ubuntu’s Unity 7 desktop has been in maintenance mode for several years. Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME

IceCube detector uses entire Earth to measure interactions of neutrinos

Enlarge / The IceCube facility sits at the South Pole above an array of photodetectors, drawn into the image above. (credit: IceCube Collaboration, U. Wisconsin, NSF ) Neutrinos are one of the most plentiful particles out there, as trillions pass through you every second. But they’re incredibly hard to work with. They’re uncharged, so we can’t control their path or accelerate them. They’re also nearly massless and barely interact with other matter, so they’re hard to detect. All of this means that a lot of the predictions our physics theories make about neutrinos are hard to test. The IceCube detector , located at the South Pole, has now confirmed a part of the Standard Model of physics, which describes the properties of fundamental particles and their interactions. According to the Standard Model, neutrinos should become more likely to interact with other particles as their energy goes up. To test this, the IceCube team used neutrinos thousands of times more energetic than our best particle accelerators can make and used the entire planet as a target. Polar cube IceCube consists of hundreds of detectors buried in the ice under the South Pole. These detectors pick up particles that move through the ice. In some cases, IceCube sees a spray of particles and photons when something slams into one of the atoms in the ice. In other cases, particles simply nudge the atoms, liberating a few photons. There’s no neutrino source pointed at IceCube, though. Instead, it relies on natural sources of neutrinos. Some of these are produced far away in space, and travel great distances to Earth. Others are produced as cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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IceCube detector uses entire Earth to measure interactions of neutrinos

Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29, 000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

Lightning Can Trigger Nuclear Reactions, Creating Rare Atomic Isotopes

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Rare forms of atoms, like carbon-13, carbon-14, and nitrogen-15, have long been used to figure out the ages of ancient artifacts and probe the nuances of prehistoric food chains. The source of these rare isotopes? Complicated cascades of subatomic reactions in the atmosphere triggered by high-energy cosmic rays from outer space. Now, a team of scientists is adding one more isotope initiator to its list: lightning. Strong bolts of lightning can unleash the same flurry of nuclear reactions as cosmic rays, the researchers report in Nature. But, they add, the isotopes created by these storms likely constitute a small portion of all such atoms — so the new findings are unlikely to change the way other scientists use them for dating and geotracing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lightning Can Trigger Nuclear Reactions, Creating Rare Atomic Isotopes

Yesterday Americans Spent $5 Billion Online

An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money: Black Friday 2017 was all about digital sales. American shoppers spent a record $5 billion in 24 hours. That marks a 16.9% increase in dollars spent online compared with Black Friday 2016, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 80% of online spending at America’s 100 largest retail websites… Meanwhile, malls and big-box retailers were left only slightly emptier. Early estimates from ShopperTrak, a data analytics company that measures the number of shoppers at stores, said foot traffic “decreased less than one percent when compared to Black Friday 2016.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Yesterday Americans Spent $5 Billion Online

Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired

Wired’s senior staff writer David Pierce says Firefox Quantum “feels like a bunch of power users got together and built a browser that fixed all the little things that annoyed them about other browsers.” The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It’s a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It’s better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It’s my new go-to browser. The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows… I routinely find myself with 30 or 40 tabs open while I’m researching a story, and at that point Chrome effectively drags my computer into quicksand. So far, I haven’t been able to slow Firefox Quantum down at all, no matter how many tabs I use… [But] it’s the little things, the things you do with and around the web pages themselves, that make Firefox really work. For instance: If you’re looking at a page on your phone and want to load that same page on your laptop, you just tap “Send to Device, ” pick your laptop, and it opens and loads in the background as if it had always been there. You can save pages to a reading list, or to the great read-it-later service Pocket (which Mozilla owns), both with a single tap… Mozilla has a huge library of add-ons, and if you use the Foxified extension, you can even run Chrome extensions in Firefox. Best I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in Chrome that you can’t in Firefox. And Firefox does them all faster. I’ve noticed that when you open a new tab in Chrome’s mobile version, it forces you to also see news headlines that Google picked out for you. But how about Slashdot’s readers? Chrome, Firefox — or undecided? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired

All 24 suspects nabbed as part of phone scam ring have pled guilty, DOJ says

Enlarge (credit: Nevada Wier / Getty Images News ) Federal prosecutors said recently that the last of 24 US-based defendants have pleaded guilty as part of the takedown of a massive phone-based scam that spanned all the way to India. Miteshkumar Patel’s guilty plea, signed on November 13, marks the last of the 24 men, while 32 more suspects remain at large in India. Over a year ago, federal authorities announced that 56 people and six companies had been indicted on various fraud charges involving phone call scams purportedly coming from the Internal Revenue Service and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All 24 suspects nabbed as part of phone scam ring have pled guilty, DOJ says

A lost ‘Doctor Who’ episode featuring Tom Baker is finally here

Doctor Who fans have waited nearly four decades for today. Shada — an episode that began filming in 1979 with Tom Baker as the legendary Time Lord — is finally finished and available to download (a DVD will be released in the UK on December 4th, and in the US on January 9th). An animated segment and a new scene were produced to fill in the footage gaps, both of which feature Baker reprising his role as the Doctor. To add to the prestige, the episode was also written by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. As you can expect, Shada was an almost mythical entry in the series for fans. But it wasn’t the only “lost” episode. Last year, the BBC also released an animated version of The Power of the Daleks using audio from the original episode, after losing the source video. That recreation was produced by Charles Norton, who also spearheaded the animated segment in “Shada.” Via: Variety Source: iTunes

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A lost ‘Doctor Who’ episode featuring Tom Baker is finally here