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Posts Tagged ‘Conclusions’

Neofonie announces WePad 11.6-inch Android slate

Neofonie announces WePad 11.6-inch Android slate originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PlayStation Move controller lag detected, analyzed
When Sony unveiled its PlayStation Move (nee Arc) controller at the GDC last week, it came along with some impressive promises: it would only cost developers 2MB of system memory (out of 256MB on offer) and it would respond to user inputs within a single frame of animation. Our own experiences with the thing felt a bit more laggy, and now Eurogamer is echoing those impressions and putting a bit of science behind them courtesy of a 60fps Kodak Zi6 camcorder. By filming the controllers and their on-screen representation, the site’s tireless statisticians calculated an actual lag (including that of the display) of 113ms — closer to 10 6.78 frames if a game is running at 60fps. Naturally much of this is thanks to the rendering of the result and not just the Move, but according to a 2008 GamaSutra test we found (linked as “More Coverage” below), the controller lag from the standard PS3 controller varies widely from game to game, with GTA IV measured at 166ms — almost 50 percent higher than seen by the Move. So, while we can’t draw too many conclusions about this single-game test from GDC, we can give a little advice: get back to beating up some underworldian goons as Kratos and don’t worry about it.

PlayStation Move controller lag detected, analyzed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hands-on with TAT’s dual-screen phone concept and augmented reality app

What, you thought Home was the only project in the pipeline for these guys? The mobile UI experts at Sweden’s TAT are in the house at MWC this week showing off a couple other nifty developments that are keeping them busy these days: a dual-screen UI concept utilizing TI’s next-gen hardware, and an app that makes good on a concept it had demoed before. First up, they’ve been using a TI Blaze to demonstrate their vision of a phone with two displays, likely in a slider configuration (in fact, they showed a Droid to represent how they think the form factor could work) with a screen where you’d normally expect they physical QWERTY keyboard to be. It’s slick and wicked smooth on the brutally powerful OMAP4 core, but realistically, this is something unusual enough so that we’d need to play with a unit for a good, long while before drawing any usability conclusions. TAT believes we could see devices with this kind of setup by years’ end, but we don’t know what carriers, manufacturer, or time frames would be involved at this point.

Next up, Recognizr is the realization of the Augmented ID concept it showed off last year that lets you tag your face (it sounds weird, but it’s quite literally true) with icons representing services that you use, each of which exposes information about you that you want others to know; then, other users with the system can put you in their viewfinder and see the same icons. It’s not flawless — in fact, TAT readily admits that they probably need better camera tech before it can be commercialized, and they had quite a few issues during our demo time — but it’s a clever concept that’s better watched on video than explained, which is convenient considering that we’ve got videos of both of these goodies in action after the break. Check ‘em out, won’t you?

Continue reading Hands-on with TAT’s dual-screen phone concept and augmented reality app

Hands-on with TAT’s dual-screen phone concept and augmented reality app originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Love is About Communication, Why is Facebook Holding Back?

Facebook this weekend published a special Valentine’s day study about romantic relationships and happiness. The company’s Data Team sliced and diced the language used in millions of peoples’ status messages, then looked at how they varied depending on the relationship status the people listed themselves with.

Conclusions? Married people are the happiest, people in Open Relationships are the least happy. Men are less happy than women in an open relationship (believe it or not) and more happy in marriage. These findings are interesting, but what they really indicate is that there may be a modern-day Farmers’ Almanac for understanding our lives hidden behind the company’s doors. Facebook needs to set that data free or at least do more with it.

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The Data Team’s conclusions were written up by intern Lisa Zhang, whose relationship status isn’t public on the site. Zhang explained the methodology like this:

We already have methodology for measuring the happiness of Facebook users: by considering how many positive words people use in their status updates (see the USA Gross National Happiness Index). This method allows us to see whether a person’s Facebook relationship status affects how positive and negative they are. We examined the use of positive and negative words in the status updates of all English speakers over the course of one week in January. To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

One of the most significant findings reported is about people who listed themselves as in an Open Relationship, meaning typically that they are committed to one person but have sex with multiple people. Those people tend to be less positive than anyone else, less positive even than widowed people!

This is truly remarkable, if you think about it. For what tiny percentage of human history has it been a common practice to publicly declare your relationship Open in such a way? It’s a pretty new thing! How’s it working out for people? Apparently not so well!

That could be good information to know before making certain decisions (”if I knew then what I know now…”). Of course, how does having children affect happiness in married people? How happy do people in heterosexual vs same-sex Open Relationships tend to be? Do women who are engaged to men with feminist or liberal-sympathetic interests (Fan pages) express less negativity than other engaged women or is that just a facade that in reality means nothing?

There are lots of questions raised by this data, and it’s just one of an infinite combination of data points that Facebook could analyze.

It’s probable that some of this data includes important observations about the human condition. Information that could help people make better-informed decisions than ever before in human history; informed not only by our own experience, and the experiences of the people we observe in our immediate lives, but by the experiences of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Other Examples of Important Advice

Remember the Farmers’ Almanac? It’s a book that’s been published annually since 1818, filled with advice about cooking, gardening, humor and weather predictions. The mysterious Farmers’ Almanac team (there’s only been 7 editors in the publication’s history) refuses to disclose its methods for weather prediction, but claims to have a 80 to 85% accuracy rate over its history.

Similarly, Facebook data might not be able to tell us with 100% accuracy whether people who move from Michigan to California, or who marry young, or who stop playing football and start playing basketball tend to be more happy or less happy than before – but that data could come a whole lot closer to telling us than anything we’ve had before has.

Of course we’re all special snowflakes, with infinite complications, and free will is important – but doesn’t it seem that there’s an incredible opportunity for world-wide self awareness hiding inside this social network where we’re typing our relationship status, our location and our interests into fields in a form?

Of course Facebook uses that data to target advertising. Why will the company tell an advertiser that I’m part of a group of college educated, white, married men, over 30 years old and living in the state of Oregon but it won’t tell me that among people in those circumstances I have a particularly geographically limited set of friends and should probably get out more if I want to really understand the world? Now that would be valuable information!

Hunch, the startup lead by Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, makes that kind of data a big part of its social decision making service. The site provides a way for you to walk through various things you should consider in making decisions like what kind of car you should buy next or where you might like to go on vacation. It also asks you questions about yourself along the way.

Among 10k people Hunch asked “do you like Cilantro?” the ones that said they did were far more likely to prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate. People who said they didn’t like cilantro are much more likely to prefer milk chocolate. (Probably because people who don’t like cilantro don’t know what’s good in life.) A Hunch study last week of people who own different breeds of dogs found that German Shepherd fans tend to rely more on intuition than common sense and Pug fans particularly enjoyed the movie The Shawshank Redemption.

How about Facebook coughs up the goods on the far greater supply of user data than any other site in the world has?

Unfortunately, Facebook is going in just the opposite direction. The company’s Data Team puts out some lightweight analysis like these Valentine’s Day conclusions about once a month. When software engineer Pete Warden tried last week to offer up user data he’d collected from 250 million Facebook users to the Academic community for study (see The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul) the company contacted him and told him to put a hold on the release while privacy concerns were evaluated. Last week the company took down Lexicon, its public tool for comparing how often different words were being used across the streams of Facebook users.

Come on, Facebook! Set the data free. It’s not about cilantro and chocolate, that’s just the fun stuff. There are important observations about humanity hiding in that data. Check out, for example, Hunch’s observations of hundreds of people who said they don’t believe Barack Obama was born in the US and what else they have in common.

If you don’t feel like you can set it free, then at least do something more serious with it. The Farmers’ Almanac is a mysterious organization, maybe some more mystery would be ok if it came along with a whole lot of Facebook data.

This is a historically unique opportunity and one that I hope Facebook will take ahold of soon. Think of all the heartbreak the company could help prevent if only people knew their odds of being happy in an Open Relationship, among the countless other decisions we make that would be well informed by analysis of aggregate user data.

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AT&T selects LTE equipment suppliers, ‘commercial deployment’ planned for 2011
Aw, snap. We knew good and well that the iPhone’s exclusive home in America (cue groans) was planning to hopscotch right around HSPA+ and move straight to LTE, but it’s always good to see a little confirmation from the carrier, you know? AT&T has today confessed to selecting its two LTE suppliers (Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson), and better still, that it will begin its LTE rollout in 2011. As expected, field trials are slated to get going later this year, and for those of you concerned about the outfit’s (admittedly lacking) 3G network, we’re hearing positive things on that front as well. Purportedly, 3G equipment delivered to AT&T by the suppliers starting this year will be “easily convertible to LTE,” and Ma Bell has assured us that it “plans to make the nation’s fastest 3G network even faster in advance of LTE networks and devices scaling.” Shame that whole “plans” thing can change without notice, but we won’t jump to any conclusions just yet.

AT&T selects LTE equipment suppliers, ‘commercial deployment’ planned for 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photo Booth And Canons With Cheap Lenses Dominate Tumblr
The Tumblr staff has done an interesting little breakdown of the metadata on Tumblr blog photos. I’m sure you guys have seen Flickr’s equally-interesting Camera Finder page, which is used as a sort of talking point by Apple fans due to the iPhone dominance; this was a similar examination, though with seriously different results. Tumblr’s analysis also takes a look at the lenses being used by the Canon users, a metric more interesting to gearheads than tech buffs.

This kind of information is a dream come true for people who like to transmute raw data into conclusions. They call themselves analysts, but it’s more alchemical than analytical, isn’t it? At any rate, the data are interesting to anyone interested in photography or blogging, so take a look.

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A Map To Better Understand The Cloud Ecosystem…And The Hype

Trying to understand the basics of cloud computing is one matter but getting a grasp on the technologies across the different platforms is another issue entirely.

To try and simplify things just a bit, Appirio is offering a map that shows the cloud ecosystem. The map breaks out 70 different layers of technology across applications, platforms and infrastructure. The map is pretty sophisticated with the ability to drill down to undertand the underlying technologies.

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Appirio is in the business of helping companies get into the cloud computing world so it is no surprise that the map has its own viewpoints on matters of the cloud.

From the Appirio blog:

“It (the map) distinguishes between offerings that are true cloud offerings vs. those that are “hosted” (single tenant / multi-instance) vs. those that are on-premise “private cloud”….not really a cloud at all.

Not really a cloud at all? Hmmm. There may be some who disagree with this view on cloud computing. Here’s the take from Gartner’s Tom Bittman:

That aside, the map will be pretty helpful to almost everyone with an interest in the cloud computing world. Here are a few of Appirio’s conclusions:

You Want Hype, We Have Hype: Man, It’s almost reminiscent of the podcasting hype a few years ago. Look at the map and you see that almost every tech company you can find has some take on the cloud. Cloud computing is at the top of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. And, of course, we have Larry Ellison, who is having a blast poking fun at the world of cloud computing. Hmm….when the clouds clear, what companies in the ecosystem will turn to vapor?

The More You Share, The Better You Will Be: The name of the game is multi-tenancy. “This results in more than just economies of scale: multi-tenancy enables agility and innovation since there’s only one code base to work off of, and customer behavior can be observed realtime.”

It’s Really Not That Clear At All: The lines are blurring out there. It’s difficult to tell what’s a cloud service and what is not. IBM, for instance, looks like it cuts across the spectrum. Where does it fit?

Kudos to Appirio. This is the kind of clarification that we need to get a better grasp on cloud computing and what it all means.

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Scientific societies warn Senate: climate change is real

Next week, the Environment and Public Works committee is scheduled to begin debate on the Senate’s version of a bill intended to begin limiting US greenhouse gas emissions, with a vote scheduled for early November. In advance of that hearing, a collection of 18 US scientific organizations has sent an open letter to members of the Senate, reminding them that climate change is a real phenomenon, and the best available evidence indicates it’s being driven by human activities. The unusually blunt language is coupled with an offer: the US scientific community stands ready to provide assistance to anyone who is looking for further information in advance of taking legislative action.

The organizations that have signed the letter cover a wide range of interests and expertise, from the Crop Science Society of America to the American Statistical Society and the American Geophysical Union. The letter starts by saying that the group hopes to remind the Senators of the current consensus of the scientific community, then gets right down to business. “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver,” the letter reads. “These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence, and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.”

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