Monthly Archives: March 2014

THL T200 Cyborg Hands-On Demo, Scratch Test, Unboxing, Sample Camera Shots, Exclusive Launch Promo Details

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Just a few additional information about THL T200 Cyborg Octa Core 6-inch Full HD Android flagship smartphone that I introduced to you a few days ago.

I got everything on video, TP Friends. I hope you can check out the clip below and share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. I think it's very comprehensive as Mr. Adrian Lim really touched on everything you need to know about THL T200 Cyborg.

Here are several shots that I took under various lighting conditions using THL T200 Cyborg's main camera. Just click on the photos for a larger view. Note: You can use the handset's interpolated 18 MegaPixel camera - available in the settings - but quoting Mr. Adrian Lim, "We are not advertising that. We are sticking to the 13 MegaPixel camera in our collaterals because that's what the hardware really is. Nonetheless, you may use the interpolated resolution if you wish so."

The retail package, which costs Php 14,999, includes the THL T200 Cyborg unit itself, the two-prong charger, microUSB to USB connector cable, earphones, quick start guide, and two 2,500 mAh Li-Ion battery packs.

The earphones have silicon earbuds to keep ambient noise out when you're listening to music and microphone that you can use when you make calls.

On a full charge, the 2,500 mAh Li-Ion battery pack delivers around 12 hours of mixed usage including playing non-specs intensive games, taking photos, recording videos, listening to music, and watching video clips.

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THL T200 Cyborg Hands-On Demo, Scratch Test, Unboxing, Sample Camera Shots, Exclusive Launch Promo Details

good Judy Bireley And Her Labrador Sandy Beaches – A great Story About A Rescued Labrador full – Video

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New In Ground Swimming Pool Travertine – West Palm Beach, Florida (561) 203-0270 – Video

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New In Ground Swimming Pool Travertine - West Palm Beach, Florida (561) 203-0270 - Video

On 25th Exxon Valdez Anniversary, Oil Still Clings to Beaches

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Jane J. Lee

Twenty-five years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill set off one of the most devastating environmental disasters in U.S. history, scientists say that a surprising amount of oil still clings to boulder-strewn beaches in the Gulf of Alaska.

And that oil could stick around for decades to come.

Monday marks the 25th anniversary of the spill, when a tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound (map). The accident wiped out herring and salmon runs. And some of the affected wildlife, like sea otters and pink salmon, are still recovering.

The latest findings on lingering oil came last month, when scientists announced that spilled oil in the Gulf of Alaska still has most of the same chemical compounds as oil sampled 11 days after the accident. (See "Exxon Valdez Anniversary: 20 Years Later, Oil Remains.")

The scientists presented evidence of a lingering, foamy, mousse-like emulsion at a major ocean science conference in Hawaii.

The oil's presence in areas that were cleaned right after the spill points to a need to monitor certain environments long after the visible effects disappear, the researchers say.

It's Like Mayonnaise

There are two main reasons why there's still oil on some of the beaches of the Kenai Fjords and Katmai National Parks and Preserves in the Gulf of Alaska, explains Gail Irvine, a marine ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and lead researcher on the study.

When the oil first spilled from the tanker, it mixed with the seawater and formed an emulsion that turned it into a goopy compound, she says.

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On 25th Exxon Valdez Anniversary, Oil Still Clings to Beaches

Oil washes up on Galveston tourist beaches

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GALVESTON - Oil washed up on tourist beaches in Galveston Monday, two days after the collision of a barge and a tanker spilled an estimated 168,000 gallons of oil into the Houston Ship Channel, an official said.

The oil on Galveston beaches was in the form of tar balls, relatively easy to clean up, primarily on the east end of Galveston Island, said Charlie Kelly, Galveston's emergency management coordinator.

Meanwhile, authorities prepared to send a test vessel into the channel to see if it could navigate the waterway without encountering oil. If so, the channel could reopoen to at least some traffic later Monday, officials said.

The ferry between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula, closed since the spill, was expected to reopen by 6:15 p.m. Monday, officials said. For now, services will be limited to between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

A total of 81 vessels waited Monday to move through the channel as authorities continued efforts to contain and recover oil.

As of 6 a.m. Monday, the command said in a statement, 43 outbound vessels and 38 inbound vessels were waiting for the channel to be reopened.

On Sunday, salvage vessels finished pumping about 750,000 gallons of heavy marine fuel oil from a partially sunken barge that leaked thousands of gallons of thick, oozing sludge into Galveston Bay after a collision with a tanker.

Oil from the damaged barge spread as far 12 miles into Galveston Bay as wind and choppy water made containing the spill impossible, U.S. Coast Guard officials said.

Vessels spent the day skimming oil, and 69,000 feet of containment boom had been used to limit the oil's spread.

But changing current, winds and weather conditions forced officials to extend containment and recovery plans further into the Gulf of Mexico and south along Galveston Island.

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Oil washes up on Galveston tourist beaches

Beaches to Avoid This Month if You're Older Than 24

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If you're hoping for a quiet, family-friendly beach vacation this spring, Panama City Beach, Fla. should definitely not be on your list.

That's because the beach town -- that turns into a spring break mecca each March -- topped Facebook's list of most popular beach destinations for 18-24 year olds.

Also at the top of the list: Santa Monica Beach, Calif. and South Beach. Fla.

Facebook compiled the rankings by volume and increase in Facebook beach check-ins during the month of March compared to February for people 18-24.

READ: 13 Super Luxe Stays in the Caribbean

So which other beach destination should travelers looking for debauchery check out? Beaches 4-10 on the most popular list are:

4. Gulf Shores Beach, Ala.

5. Port Aransas, Texas

6. Main Beach (Santa Cruz), Calif.

7. Venice Beach, Calif.

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Beaches to Avoid This Month if You're Older Than 24

Astronomy Forecast- Near Earth Asteroid,Spring Equinox,Supermassive Black Hole, and The Moon – Video

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Astronomy Forecast- Near Earth Asteroid,Spring Equinox,Supermassive Black Hole, and The Moon
March 20, 2014 2004 YC 0.1054 AU 41.0 LD Size 20-45m Close Approach 12:08 p.m. UT 19 Fireball/Meteor Sightings for March 19 20, 2014 Thank you for watching!!!

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Astronomy Forecast- Near Earth Asteroid,Spring Equinox,Supermassive Black Hole, and The Moon - Video

Counting Moon Craters: Amateurs, Scientists Do Equally Well

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Trained volunteers with no astronomy experience can pick out craters on the moon as accurately as researchers with five to 50 years' experience, a new study reports.

The finding is a boon for CosmoQuest, an organization that has amateurs identify craters on several celestial objects, including the moon, and do other types of astronomy data crunching. This work is then used in scientific studies, and in some cases has been published. The work of individual volunteers is repeated several times to ensure accuracy.

"What we can say is that a very large group of volunteers was able to chart these features on the moon just as well as professional researchers," Stuart Robbins, a research scientist at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said in a statement.

"More importantly, we now have evidence that we can use the power of crowdsourcing to gather more reliable data from the moon than we ever thought was possible before," added Robbins, who led the new study.

The study compared the performance of thousands of CosmoQuest volunteers against that of eight scientists, using pictures taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The participants were asked to identify craters at least 18 pixels across in the pictures (about 35 feet, or 11 meters, in diameter).

The area for the images under study was about 1.4 square miles (3.6 square kilometers) on the moon the equivalent of 1,000 football fields, researchers said.

While individual volunteers and scientists saw vastly different numbers of craters in the study area, averages for the two groups were similar statistically. Study team members said the results were "reassuring" for CosmoQuest, which has crater-mapping projects for the moon, Mercury and the protoplanet Vesta.

"Put simply, the sky is large, and astronomers need all the help the public can offer," said co-author Pamela Gay, who runs CosmoQuest out of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Studying craters allows scientists to better understand how the early solar system came together. By seeing the frequency and age of craters, scientists can then estimate when bombardment of the moon, Earth and other bodies in the solar system was at its most intense.

The new study was published March 4 in the journal Icarus.

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Counting Moon Craters: Amateurs, Scientists Do Equally Well

Cosmologists Cast Doubt on Inflation Evidence

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Some physicists still have questions on the true origin of the BICEP2 findings

It was just a week ago that the news blew through the scientific world like a storm: researchers from the BICEP2 project at the South Pole Telescope had detected unambiguous evidence of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the residual rippling of space and time created by the sudden inflation of the Universe less than a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. With whispers of Nobel nominations quickly rising in the science news wings, the teams findings were hailed as the best direct evidence yet of cosmic inflation, possibly even supporting the existence of a multitude of other universes besides our own.

That is, if they really do indicate what they appear to. Some theorists are advising that we put the champagne back in the fridge at least for now.

Theoretical physicists and cosmologistsJames Dent, Lawrence Krauss, and Harsh Mathurhave submitted a brief paper (arXiv:1403.5166[astro-ph.CO]) stating that, while groundbreaking, the BICEP2 Collaboration findings have yet to rule out all possible non-inflation sources of the observed B-mode polarization patterns and the surprisingly large value of r, the ratio of power in tensor modes to scalar density perturbations.

However, while there is little doubt that inflation at the Grand Unified Scale is the best motivated source of such primordial waves, it is important to demonstrate that other possible sources cannot account for the current BICEP2 data before definitely claiming Inflation has been proved.

Dent, Krauss, and Mathur (arXiv:1403.5166[astro-ph.CO])

The history of the universe starting the with the Big Bang. Image credit: grandunificationtheory.com

Inflation may very well be the cause and Dent and company state right off the bat that there is little doubt that inflation at the Grand Unified Scale is the best motivated source of such primordial waves but theres also a possibility, however remote, that some other, later cosmic event is responsible for at least some if not all of the BICEP2 measurements. (Hence the name of the paper: Killing the Straw Man: Does BICEP Prove Inflation?)

Not intending to entirely rain out the celebration, Dent, Krauss, and Mathur do laud the BICEP2 findings as invaluable to physics, stating that theywill be very important for constraining physics beyond the standard model, whether or not inflation is responsible for the entire BICEP2 signal, even though existing data from cosmology is strongly suggestive that it does.

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Cosmologists Cast Doubt on Inflation Evidence

Artificial Intelligence and the Google Factor in Providing Smarter Advertising

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Artificial intelligence is something that we have yet to see in the world of digital advertising. While big data sets the fundamental stages for it, Google may be the factor in AI becoming a part of our lives through search and advertising. This evolution starts with their recent acquisition of a company in the U.K. that has the capability of using artificial intelligence on a basis close to the vision of a HAL 9000.

How will artificial intelligence help companies that want to have a smarter way of targeting customers? Before it begins, it's going to help Google first as part of their usual plan of spreading the wealth.

Google and DeepMind

DeepMind is the U.K. company that Google decided to acquire based on the former's artificial intelligence technology that's yet to be deployed in anything useful. The idea is to eventually employ it into Google's search engines so search can become much more intuitive and help us find things before we even know we want it.

If that sounds familiar, it's because big data is already doing that to some extent. Even though it takes what's already known and assembles it into a bigger picture, it's not really good at being intuitive. Artificial intelligence as it stands now comes closer to a real brain and not only figures out what we want, it also goes figures out variables that makes it feel like it's reading our minds.

While that might sound eerie, it works based on a new concept of artificial intelligence DeepMind reportedly uses. It combines data that's already known with unknowns so it's literally forced into thinking for itself and coming up with its own conclusions. Yes, you could say it's a forced free will in some respects.

This may pose its own problems once AI becomes like we've seen in futuristic sci-fi movies. In the immediate term, it's something that advertisers could potentially salivate over. This same AI technology can easily be applied to shopping experiences online that are unlike anything seen before.

Will Google Become a Shopping Leader?

According to the report on the acquisition of DeepMind, it's possible Google will employ the technology into their Google Shopping pages. In another year or two, it means you may be seeing products that are perfect for your lifestyle and more accurate than big data ever accomplished.

How many times have you seen products accumulated from big data that were just slightly off from what you really wanted? Artificial intelligence will give the impression it's reading your mind as part of that intuitive targeting method. Shopping for the holidays may already be done based on the more intelligent portrait of what you really want or need.

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Artificial Intelligence and the Google Factor in Providing Smarter Advertising

Artificial Intelligence on Mobile Phone Makes Us Look Forever Young

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Amsterdam, The Netherlands (PRWEB) March 24, 2014

Today, a new photo app for Android is released: Impala. The app recognizes scenes as food or architecture as soon as the camera is pointed. Scene recognition is realized by artificial intelligence running on the users phone, even before the picture is actually taken.

Based on what the smart photo camera "sees," photographic filters are automatically applied. The selected filters are optimized for popular scenes commonly photographed. For instance, when pointing the camera at people, a filter drawing anti-wrinkle hydrating masks over the faces of your friends is applied.

Furthermore, as soon as the camera detects you are about to take a picture of a handful of blueberries or a cinnamon scone, for example, it automatically applies a filter best fit for enhancing food colors. While taking photos of buildings or monuments, a filter best suited for outdoor scenes is applied. The altered lighting gives the images an edgier look.

Computer vision and machine learning applications like these demand compute power and memory, says Andrew Bagdanov, research fellow at the Universita Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. It is a challenge to get such applications to work on todays mobile devices.

A private beta version of the app was presented at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona last month. "Conventions like MWC are massive technology overloads," says Edgar Cervantes, journalist at Phandroid / Neverstill Media. "Its easy to miss smaller things when you have devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5 being announced, but this Impala app is quite the hidden treasure."

The Impala app uses artificial intelligence to recognize the contents of images and videos. Besides food, persons and architecture, the software recognizes sunsets, beaches, mountains, and so on. In addition to the camera functionality, the app also has a sorting functionality. For most smartphone users, the photo section is somewhat of a mess. Once the Impala app is installed, however, it automatically starts sorting all images on the phone into themed folders.

To achieve the real time performance, Euvision Technologies is one of the first companies in the world to utilize the Qualcomm Multicore Asynchronous Runtime Environment (MARE) software library. Qualcomm MARE is a new developer programming library and API being developed by Qualcomm Research, a unit of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., to enable Android native code developers to harness the benefits of multicore CPUs on modern smartphones & tablets.

The new Impala for Android application highlights how quickly and easily mobile developers can now harness the multicore performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors when developing in native code and using Qualcomm MARE," says Samir Kumar, director of Business Development and Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Near real time and completely on device visual scene classification opens the door for a slew of rich contextual mobile imaging experiences that enables developers to create applications, helping make the Digital 6th Sense a reality.

That said, another advantage of the technology is that it can prevent recording or viewing of unwanted scenes, such as classified military objects, on a mobile phone. As a technology demonstrator, the artificial intelligence component of the app has been trained to recognize hands. In the options section of the app, recording or displaying pictures of hands can be blocked.

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Artificial Intelligence on Mobile Phone Makes Us Look Forever Young

Zuckerberg, Musk and Kutcher Invest In Artificial Intelligence Firm

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Business Artificial Intelligence

Billionaire tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, along with actor Ashton Kutcher, have joined forces to make a $40 million investment in the artificial intelligence firm Vicarious FPC.

The firm hopes to build a system capable of replicating the functions of the neocortex of the human brain, the part that controls body movement, vision, understands language and does math, The Wall Street Journal reports. One day, the company hopes to build a computer that thinks like a person, Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix says. except it doesnt have to eat or sleep.

Musk, the investor behind the electric car company Tesla, is no stranger to forward-looking investments. In addition to his work to mainstream the electric car, Musk is behind the company SpaceX, which is developing quickly reusable rocket technology that Musk says could be used to colonize other planets. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that his Vicarious investment reflects a personal interest and not a move on behalf of the social network he built, but the artificial intelligence technology companies like Vicarious are developing could be instrumental in turning Facebooks massive amount of user-generated data into usable information. Though not as well-known a tech entrepreneur, Kutcher has literally played one in the movies (Steve Jobs).

Creating artificial intelligence machines with human-like capabilities is likely decades away, at least, but that hasnt stopped investors from putting their money in companies that could one day take big data analysis to a level as yet unseen. Just last month Google spent $400 million buying the artificial intelligence firm Deep Mind.

[WSJ]

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Zuckerberg, Musk and Kutcher Invest In Artificial Intelligence Firm