Netizen

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Magic Leap: Magically Augmented Reality

I am impressed Google has been able to spot this company. Looks like Google has scouts that are constantly scouring through the tech startup landscape to try and find the next big things. What it can not do in-house, it hopes to invest in heavily. Good idea. Not even Google can do it all in-house. Google could kill Magic Leap if it acquired it, even Google could. And they are pretty good when it comes to innovation. They can claims to be the most innovative large company out there.

Magic Leap: Google bets big on augmented reality firm

Google is making a big bet on augmented reality, leading a $542 million investment in a shadowy startup called Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Florida. ..... The investment, one of the largest ever made by Google ..... Magic Leap - which superimposes animated digital imagery over what someone sees with the naked eye - ...... the little known company outlines an ambitious vision for displaying rich interactive graphics alongside what people see naturally, using what it calls a dynamic digitized lightfield signal. ..... "Magic Leap is an eclectic group of visionaries, rocket scientists, wizards, and gurus from the fields of film, robotics, visualization, software, computing, and user experience" ...... Magic Leap's chief executive, Rony Abovitz. "Magic Leap is going beyond the current perception of mobile computing, augmented reality, and virtual reality. We are transcending all three, and will revolutionize the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play."

Google Invests Heavily in Magic Leap’s Effort to Blend Illusion and Reality

hammerhead sharks will swim through your office, elephants will fit in the palm of your hand and dragons will fly among the birds...... landed Google as its biggest investor. ..... Valuing Magic Leap at about $2 billion, the $542 million cash infusion from Google and other investors immediately vaulted the shadowy start-up into the upper echelons of young technology companies....... Ma gic Leap’s soaring valuation is based on little more than an ambitious vision and some nascent code. Magic Leap, which is based far from Silicon Valley in the suburbs of Miami, has no revenue — and no products currently on the market....... Details about Magic Leap’s plans remain sketchy. ..... Seahorses float above children in a schoolroom. A yellow submarine hovers near an outdoor promenade. An astronaut walks through a train station. ....... an ambitious vision for displaying rich interactive graphics alongside what people see naturally, using what it calls a dynamic digitized lightfield signal. ...... “Magic Leap is going beyond the current perception of mobile computing, augmented reality and virtual reality” ..... “We are transcending all three, and will revolutionize the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play.” ........ augmented reality could become a new platform — one that he argued could outstrip mobile devices in popularity. He compared the potential advancements to the rise of cinema: a new way of seeing the world. In this case, the start-up’s technology allows highly realistic graphics to appear alongside real-life objects. ........ Magic Leap is better coordinated with how the human eye and brain process images, making the computer graphics feel, and move, more naturally. ......... the technology could be applied to an array of other applications, creating a real-life equivalent to the magical newspaper from the “Harry Potter” books. ....... “For a while, we thought it was technically impossible, and then financially impossible,” he said. “Now it’s technically and financially possible.” ......... With more than $60 billion in the bank, Google cannot seem to find enough ways to invest its money. Google Ventures, the company’s venture capital arm, has invested in diverse companies including Blue Bottle Coffee and Uber, the on-demand taxi service. ....... The tech giant has spent much of the last two years trying to gain entry to essentially everything with an Internet connection ....... Google and Facebook ....... “They’re willing to take risks on the belief that their business will not be around forever” ...... “an eclectic group of visionaries, rocket scientists, wizards and gurus from the fields of film, robotics, visualization, software, computing and user experience”

Magic Leap raises $542 million Series B to bring realistic augmented reality to life

It announced a $542 million Series B round today, raising its total funding to date to $592 million. ....... Magic Leap has yet to show the public a product. ..... Right now, most augmented reality involves a semi-transparent screen floating in your field of view. It doesn’t cover the entirety of what you can see, and it’s rare that it actually interacts with reality. ........ That kind of augmented reality takes some intense computing and advanced graphics. I have yet to see a headset and software demonstrated at that level from any company. ...... if it works, Magic Leap is coming for just about every industry ...... “[Magic Leap] will revolutionize the way people communicate, purchase, learn, share and play”

Google takes big leap of faith in next-gen augmented reality tech

"cinematic reality." ..... Such "reality" will supposedly produce a more realistic 3D experience than anything else created so far. The company is reportedly working on hardware and software that can deliver augmented reality, including adding computer-generated images as an overlay onto what people can already see. ...... An interesting thing to note is this funding is being led by Google and not Google Ventures or Google Capital. As such, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google, will join the board at Magic Leap. ...... an elephant hovering in someone's hands or a submarine that is floating around in a city. ....... "It's one of the few things I've ever experienced in my life where I came out and said, 'This changes everything. This is a marker of the future.' " ...... "The space program had Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, and we're in our Apollo phase," continued Abovitz. "We know that space travel is possible. We're in the middle of full-blown product development and commercialization."

Interstellar

Simulated gravitational lensing (black hole going past a background galaxy). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't see this kind of interstellar human travel in my lifetime. But a thousand years from now, all bets will be off. Maybe even sooner.

Wrinkles In Spacetime: The Warped Astrophysics Of Interstellar

black holes, as the name suggests, are murder on light ..... Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. “I thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,” von Tunzelmann says. ..... “Chris really wanted us to sell the idea that the black hole is spherical,” Franklin says. “I said, ‘You know, it's going to look like a disk.’ The only thing you can see is the way it warps starlight.” Then Franklin started reading about accretion disks, agglomerations of matter that orbit some black holes. Franklin figured that he could use this ring of orbiting detritus to define the sphere. ...... “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” ..... Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole's shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. ...... Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn't expect: a scientific discovery. ..... Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it. ...... haloed, spinning black hole and galaxy-spanning wormhole are not just metaphors

Inbox

Google continues to delight. But I don't see how this solves the problem for those who get too much email.

Inbox is a total reinvention of email from Google
Google debuts Inbox, a new way to stay on top of email
Google’s Inbox is A New Email App From The Gmail Team Designed Not To Be Gmail

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Inequality Deserves A Political Solution

Technology is not the villain. It is technology's job to enhance productivity, and it has. It is the job of politics to bring about a fairer distribution of that wealth. And it has not. Technology is neutral.

Technology and Inequality

in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. ...... The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent ..... “You have people begging in the street on University Avenue [Palo Alto’s main street],” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University, an education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon Valley. “It’s like what you see in India,” adds Wadhwa, who was born in Delhi. “Silicon Valley is a look at the future we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.” Many of those made rich by the recent technology boom, he adds, don’t seem to care about “the mess they’re creating.” ....... people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San Francisco. ...... inflation-adjusted wages for low- and middle-income workers have been flat or declining since the late 1970s in the United States, even as its economy has grown. ..... the richest 1 percent of the population had 34 percent of the accumulated wealth; the top 0.1 percent had some 15 percent. ..... the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of income growth from 2009 to 2012, if capital gains are included. ...... The top 10 percent now accounts for 48 percent of national income; the top 1 percent makes almost 20 percent and the top 0.1 makes nearly 9 percent. ..... Wage inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world” ..... About 70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners are corporate executives ..... “Above a certain level, it is very hard to find in the data any link between pay and performance.” ...... Privately held wealth in some European countries is now about 500 to 600 percent of annual national income, a level approaching that of the early 1900s. ...... Piketty describes it as the world of Jane Austen, in which people’s lives and fates are determined by their inheritance and not their talents or professional achievements. ...... Income inequality hinders economic opportunity and innovation. ...... the belief that technological progress will lead to “the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism” is, writes Piketty, “largely illusory.” ...... Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence. While Piketty warns against a return to a world where inherited wealth determines social and political fates, Brynjolfsson worries that a growing share of the workforce could be left behind even as digital technologies increase overall income. ......... Central to Brynjolfsson’s argument is the idea that innovation is rapidly accelerating as trends in computing and networking advance at an exponential rate. Largely as a result of these advances, productivity and GDP continue to increase. But while “the pie is increasing,” he says, not everyone is benefiting. ....... the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck, and dramatically increasing their rewards. ......... As machines increasingly substitute for labor and building a business becomes less capital-intensive—you don’t need a printing plant to produce an online news site, or large investments to create an app—the biggest economic winners will not be those owning conventional capital but, instead, those with the ideas behind innovative new products and successful business models. .......... the small elite that “innovate and create.” ...... demand for highly skilled workers rises, while workers with less education and expertise fall behind. .......... The gap between median earnings for people with a high school diploma and those with a college degree was $17,411 for men and $12,887 for women in 1979; by 2012 it had risen to $34,969 and $23,280. ...... Automation and digital technologies have reduced the need for many production, sales, administrative, and clerical jobs, while demand has increased for low-pay jobs that can’t be automated, such as those in cleaning services and restaurants. The result has been what Autor describes as a “barbell-shaped” job market, with strong demand at the high and low ends and a “hollowing out” of the middle. And despite the increase in demand for workers in service jobs, there is an ample supply of people who need the work and can do these tasks. Hence wages for these jobs dropped throughout much of the 2000s, further worsening income inequality. ....... productivity growth is not in fact accelerating, nor is such growth concentrated in computer-intensive sectors. ..... changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy, but the pace of that change is not necessarily increasing. He says that’s because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and such high-profile technologies as Google’s driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think. ....... “You would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life” ........ many tasks that people are particularly good at, such as recognizing objects and dealing with suddenly changing environments, will remain difficult or expensive to automate for decades to come. ...... the market for middle-skill jobs may be stabilizing and the earning disparity between low- and high-skill jobs leveling off, albeit “at a very high level.” What’s more, many middle-skill workers could flourish as they increasingly learn to use digital technologies in their jobs. ...... “We have a very skill-driven economy without a very skilled workforce,” Autor says. “If you have the high skills—and that’s a big if—you can make a fortune.” ....... “We used to be a classic middle-class economy. But that’s all gone. There’s no longer a middle class. The economy is bifurcated and there’s nothing in the middle.” ..... “It didn’t happen suddenly, but in 2014 everyone has woken up to it.” ..... Though California’s economy—the world’s eighth-largest—is strong in many sectors, the state has the highest poverty rate in the country ..... there has been no net increase in jobs in Silicon Valley since 1998; digital technologies inevitably mean you can generate billions of dollars from a low employment base. ........ “Piketty says the best predictor of access to universities is parents’ income,” says Miner. “In California, it’s the zip code.” ...... the income gaps between those with different levels of education “account for a good share of the inequality ....... “we know what the solution is. It’s equalizing access to high-quality education. The problem is that we just pay lip service to it.” ..... (Local governments, using property taxes, supply an average of 44 percent of the funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United States, helping to fuel the disparity in educational investments between poor and rich communities.) ...... “If you’re born into a poor neighborhood, you don’t have access to a high-quality preschool, a high-quality primary school, and a high-quality secondary school. And then you’re simply not in position to go to college.” .......... the tax cuts made by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s jump-started the growth of income inequality seen today in Britain and the United States. ...... increasingly progressive taxes, including a global wealth tax, could begin to close the economic gap. ........ The most obvious policy recommendations point to education, including, as social scientists are increasingly learning, pre-kindergarten and other early education programs. ....... differences in educational achievement are now associated more closely with family income than they are with factors that have been more important in the past, including race and ethnic background. And researchers have shown that those differences in achievement levels are already set by the time children enter kindergarten. ........ Inequality in education is not only hurting the chances of poor children to get ahead, says David Grusky. It is also affecting the supply of high-skill labor. By stifling opportunities for countless talented individuals, it artificially restricts the potential pool of those with technological expertise. ...... asking whether technology causes inequality is the wrong question. ...... it makes no sense to blame technology, just as it makes no sense to blame the rich. It is our institutions, including but not only our schools, that need to change. The reforms that experts recommend are numerous and varied, ranging from a higher minimum wage to stronger job protections to modifications of our tax policy. ...... we need improved corporate governance and oversight to more closely tie compensation to executive productivity...... an elite class of the super-rich can both warp our political process and erode our sense of fairness.

Phone Hacking

Phone pole with phone and mainly electric lines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The terrorism angle to this nuisance should get people's attention. But this is also a major way we are seeing world governance has not kept up with the internet. Technology is ahead of politics. Law enforcement is like computers not connected to the internet, existing in all their national silos.

Phone Hackers Dial and Redial to Steal Billions

Bob Foreman’s architecture firm ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But neither Mr. Foreman nor anyone else at his seven-person company was in the office at the time. ...... Hackers had broken into the phone network of the company, Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture, and routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives. ...... now that most corporate phone lines run over the Internet. .... affects mostly small businesses and cost victims $4.73 billion globally last year. ...... no regulations require carriers to reimburse customers for fraud the way credit card companies must ....... Hackers sign up to lease premium-rate phone numbers, often used for sexual-chat or psychic lines, from one of dozens of web-based services that charge dialers over $1 a minute and give the lessee a cut......... Hackers then break into a business’s phone system and make calls through it to their premium number, typically over a weekend, when nobody is there to notice. With high-speed computers, they can make hundreds of calls simultaneously, forwarding as many as 220 minutes’ worth of phone calls a minute to the pay line. The hacker gets a cut of the charges, typically delivered through a Western Union, MoneyGram or wire transfer. ....... Catching the criminals is difficult because the crime can cross as many as three jurisdictions. In 2011, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and police in the Philippines arrested four men who used the scheme to make $2 million in fraudulent calls; revenue was directed to a Saudi Arabian militant group that United States officials believe financed the 2008 Mumbai terrorist bombings. ......... “If you put a computer on the Internet, it immediately starts getting probed for a weak point.” ....... advise people to turn off call forwarding and set up strong passwords for their voice mail systems and for placing international calls....... “People don’t realize their phone is a six-figure liability waiting to happen”