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Skip to main content Search This Blog Subscribe Subscribe to this blog Subscribe to ! Posts The Moleskin+ is Bringing Journals Into the Digital Age Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps December 11, 2018 Though they remain one of the few companies with a household name for a paper product, Moleskine has taken major steps towards advancing into the digital age. Since [2016], Moleskine has been unveiling what it calls its Smart Writing Set, a series of digitized forms of its classic lineup that enables digital recording and file transferring while preserving the feel and function of handwritten notes. The centerpiece of this is the Pen+ Ellipse, a combination pen and page scanner that records a person's writing in real-time. Cooler still, the Pen+ Ellipse, in conjunction with the grid-design paper it requires, can record handwriting with such fluidity that it can also play back the recordings of you writing your notes, in case you need to retrace a line of thought. The device can also transcribe your handwriting into text instantly, and allows for exporting of all notes in various formats - PDF, image, text - to nearly every available storage format in use. This is of course only on… 10 comments Keep reading Is Social Media Causing Depression? Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps November 19, 2018 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have just published findings the December Journal of Socal and Clinical Psychology that establishes one of the first causal links between social media usage and depression. In particular, they found that reductions in time spent looking at "photos of friends and old high school acquaintances" lowered rates of depression and loneliness in a sample of 143 people. The people were divided into two groups, one who had their use of the apps Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook limited to only 10 minutes each a day, and a group allowed unlimited access to the same apps. What's significant about this is that Penn's study is among the first to establish social media as a direct cause of depression. It is also worth nothing that "neither of the [test] groups showed improvements in social support, self-esteem, or autonomy and self-acceptance" by reducing their social media intake. Yet both groups reported a decrease in their… 3 comments Keep reading Samsung's New Phone is Kinda Really Awesome Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps November 15, 2018 Last week, Samsung developers at the 2018 Developer Conference in San Francisco unveiled one of their newest smartphone designs: the Infinity Flex. The phone features a flex-screen technology, along with a polymer coating that Samsung newly invented to allow for contortions without sacrificing toughness. The Verge is already comparing the Flex's design to various science-fiction phone displays, and in fact noted a dramatic similarity to Westworld's standard Delos tablets. But most intriguing of course are the potential real-life applications that Samsung hopes their technology will provide. The Infinity's design allows for what Samsung has termed their "Multi-Active Window," allowing users to run three apps simultaneously. Now, the Infinity Flex is not without some caveats, most notably its expected price. Multiple sources have reported that estimates for the Flex are ranging at around $1,700 and higher. That's a number large enough that, even if these predic… 3 comments Keep reading Movie Studios are Using AI to Determine What Movies You Like Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps November 08, 2018 While the development of humor in A.I. is still a bit of a ways off , major companies across various industries are already taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence to refine their own business practices. Fox 20th Century is the first major movie studio to employ an A.I. to serve as an “experimental movie attendance prediction and recommendation system,” a program they've codenamed Merlin. Merlin is a result of a partnership between 20th Century Fox and Google, who contributed their open-source AI framework TensorFlow, and is intended for two purposes. One, to analyze existing movie trailers and collate the frequency of visual touchstones that appear with attendance numbers. This serves to predict audience makeup and determine a film's financial success. The second is for Merlin to create movie trailers on its own. While Fox is the first major film studio to be undertaking an endeavor such as this, they are wasting no time; hiring IBM to produce the first movie trailer entir… 2 comments Keep reading Is Technology on the Way Towards Solving Immortality? Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps November 01, 2018 From the digitally-preserved consciousnesses of William Gibson's Neuromancer to the modular "decks" of Altered Carbon , the notion of technology promising humans immortality has long been contemplated. But up until recently, most real-world developments in this field have stalled for reasons both ethical and intellectual. However, that may change thanks to developments in aging treatments courtesy of SENS, or the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Established in 2002, SENS seeks to address the question of eternal youth through a combination of biomedical gerontology and regenerative medicine. Previous attempts at addressing this issue have largely been focused on treating aging as a curable disease, researching differences in species' lifespans to find missing links for longevity, and attempting to manipulate the life-extending effects of periodical famine for aging prevention. Perhaps obviously, these efforts have not worked. As opposed to the previous… 1 comment Keep reading The CEO of Apple Claims "Our Own Information is Being Used Against Us" Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps October 30, 2018 In a speech given before members of the European Union on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook declared that modern technology companies have created a "data-industrial complex," whereby major corporations - and even governments - can easily farm the personal information of millions of users and manipulate it for their own gain. Cook went on to call for the passage of federal regulations over tech companies and their data mining practices, a decision which has been described as "a complete 180" from the stance that tech companies had held as recently as a year ago. Cook went on to effectively attack other tech giants in all but name. He took time during his speech to proclaim Apple's commitment to safeguarding users' personal data, and provided a none-too-subtle accusation against Apple's competitors', namely Facebook and Google, who have both experienced major security breaches in the last year. This is, of course, also despite Apple's own patchy trac… 1 comment Keep reading Which Jobs Will Automation Take Over, Exactly? Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps October 23, 2018 While nearly everyone seems to agree that advancements in automation are going to lead to some jobs being eliminated, surprisingly few professionals agree on just what jobs -- and how many of them -- are expected to phase out. For instance, researchers for The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an economic conglomerate of 36 countries (including the U.S.), recently published two separate findings: one, a prediction that 57% of jobs will be automated in the next few decades; the other a prediction of only 14%. One of the issues in measuring automation's impact is that the promise and potential of new technology is never guaranteed. Even the most polished, forward-thinking tech is only as good as what it ends up being used for, and the functional, accessible element of human necessity remains unpredictable. Perhaps one senior economic of the OECD, Glenda Quintini, described the issue best as "a question of implementing, the cost of labor versus techn… 3 comments Keep reading Mor...