Time To Move To Hong Kong: U.S. Internet Is Stupidly Slow, Report Finds On the eve of this traditional American holiday, we've got some news that may be obvious to those who've ventured to grandparents' and relatives' houses where the Internet is less-than-speedy: Download speeds in the U.S. suck, a new report confirms. Network diagnostics company Ookla on Tuesday released its most recent country-by-country Internet Service Provider (ISP) "Speed Test" results. According to Ookla's report, the U.S. ranks a mere 31st in the world when it comes to Internet download speeds -- behind much of Europe and Southeast Asia. (Story continues below chart.) Data via Ookla. According to Ookla, the dismal ranking isn't new. Ookla's numbers are relatively consistent with a report released in September 2011 by content delivery service Pando Networks, which ranked the U.S. 26th in the world in Internet download speeds. Interestingly, a more recent report, Akamai's July 2013 "State Of The Internet," ranked the U.S. at a more optimistic 9th place.
LG's HomeChat will let you text your appliances as if they were people LG HomeChat will allow users to issue commands and receive status updates from their smart appliances by texting them and using simple, conversational language Image Gallery (3 images) LG had plenty of eye-catching gadgets at this year's CES, from a massive 105-inch curved 4K display to the bendable G Flex mobile phone, but probably one of the most intriguing new innovations it revealed was the upcoming HomeChat service. Naturally, the service will only work with LG products, but the company seems intent on rolling it out to most of its major home appliances – refrigerators, robotic vacuum cleaners, ovens, washers, dryers, etc. – in the next year. When used in conjunction with the Smart Manager software for refrigerators, HomeChat users will be able to message their fridge from a grocery store to find out what they already have in stock, what they might need, and even if anything is about to expire. Source: LG About the Author Post a CommentRelated Articles
Singularity University plots hi-tech future for humans 2 December 2013Last updated at 19:17 ET By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter Are we moving to an era of highly intelligent robots? Rob Nail walks into the room looking like a Silicon Valley Doctor Who as played by David Tennant - tailored suit, 3D-printed trainers and the Californian twist on the sonic screwdriver, Google Glass. But despite spending most of his days predicting what the future will look like, he doesn't want to become a time lord. "I feel more like a robot," says the chief executive of the Singularity University (SU). He thinks that the gap between humans and robots is closing as biology and silicon increasingly collide. He reels off examples. Bionic eyes that combine a Google Glass device with a tiny electrode in the retina and will be available in the US for partially-sighted people in a few weeks' time. He describes apps for the next-generation Google Glass that will allow users to read the heat maps of people's faces to tell if someone is lying or not. Glowing plants
The Mom Song Commercial is Brilliant "Now he smells like a man and they treat him like one.". There in a nutshell you have everything you ever wanted to know about the appeal of the Old Spice products. Old Spice is manly and it makes women treat you like a man. A man, not a boy. Yes, dear reader, we're putting the scalpel on the newest goofy Old Spice commercial which has surreal, frumpy and constantly hovering mums lamenting -in song!- how their little boys have changed gears and are on the way to hell on a handbasket because they changed into Old Spice which draws feminine attention in a way not yet dreamed of. Affectionately referred to as "the mom song" the new Old Spice commercial is in my opinion doing everything it sets out to do (which makes it a success): namely drawing the attention span of young males into seeing an old standby with fresh eyes. As my perceptive reader who sent me the clip, Cacio, puts it: "Old spice was, quintessentially, grampa, certainly not something that could appeal to teens.
BitCoin meets Google Trends and Wikipedia: Quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the Internet era : Scientific Reports Dataset We analyze the dynamic properties of the BitCoin currency (as the most popular of the digital currencies) and the search queries on Google Trends and Wikipedia as proxies of investors' interest and attention. Time series for the BitCoin currency at the most liquid market (Mt. Number of ticks with a non-zero return per day is shown. Full size image (285 KB) Evolution of both pairs – Google Trends (weekly) and Wikipedia (daily) with corresponding BitCoin prices – is illustrated in Fig. 2. Weekly series for BitCoin and Google Trends are shown on the left and daily series for BitCoin and Wikipedia are shown on the right. Full size image (125 KB) Double logarithmic illustration of correlation between BitCoin prices and the searched term (Google Trend on the left and Wikipedia on the right) is shown. Full size image (114 KB) Stationarity & cointegration General results Impulse-response functions for the first logarithmic differences of BitCoin prices and Google Trends search queries.
Flickr Cofounders Launch Slack, An Email Killer Email glut is a big problem for individuals and companies. A recent Symantec Intelligence Report estimates that about two-thirds of all email sent these days is spam. The Radicati Group reckons that 144 billion emails are sent per day, and that’s ignoring mobile users. Slack, a tool for office collaboration and communication, created by a team of cofounders who designed the web photo-sharing site Flickr, launches today in a preview release. It's meant to reduce or eliminate workplace email, and to compete with services like Yammer and Campfire. Even if spam filters are getting pretty good at catching the unwanted message, there’s a sense in which all email is basically spam, suggests Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield. Then again, they should know better by now, having helped create what is meant to be an email killer. Slack also integrates various external services, bringing all communications into one interface. This is a larger point than you might initially realize.
Photons Seen Without Being Destroyed For First Time Ever If you want to see a packet of light called a photon, you have to destroy it. Any device that picks up on the presence of light has to absorb its energy, and with it, the photons. At least, that was what scientists thought until now. At the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, researchers found a way to detect single, visible-light photons without "touching" them and losing the photons themselves. The work, detailed in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Science Express, has important implications for quantum computing devices and communications. "We could build gates between photons and atoms," Stephan Ritter, physicist and co-author of the study, told LiveScience. Others have detected photons without destroying them, the most notable being Serge Haroche at the Collège de France in Paris, who won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for the achievement. Seeing photons They then fired laser pulses that, on average, had less than a single photon in them. Photon qubits
Dolphin translator chirps out first word Dolphins are believed to be one of the most intelligent animal species on the planet -- although precisely how intelligent is difficult to gauge. That may be about to change. Scientists at the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) who have been developing a dolphin translator may have succeeded in getting their software to work. In August 2013, WDP director Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean with a pod of dolphins she has been tracking for 25 years, wearing a prototype of a dolphin translator called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Thad Starner, when one of the dolphin's whistles was translated as the word "sargassum" -- a type of seaweed. Humans have for some time been communicating with dolphins on a rudimentary level. The whistle picked up by CHAT, translated into human speech, was not a whistle from the dolphins' natural repertoire. Of course, this one instance may not necessarily be significant.