A newer, tinier iPad is said to be on the way
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A newer, tinier iPad is said to be on the way
Rumor has it Apple is getting ready to unveil a new iPad that’s smaller and cheaper than existing models.
Peter Burrows from Bloomberg reported this, citing anonymous sources.
Peter Burrows: It’s essentially a smaller iPad. It will have a screen of between 7 and 8 inches compared to 9.7 inches, which really makes it a much smaller device, something that would probably be better for reading an ebook in bed, and a lot more portable. Similar to the Kindle from Amazon.
Moe: Why is Apple doing this?
Burrows: Steve Jobs never wanted to do a smaller tablet. He thought they were too small, that we would need sharper fingertips to be able to use a touchscreen and accurately hit all the things that you do now with your larger iPad. But, we’ve got Google coming out with its own 7-inch tablet. Microsoft is coming out with its own tablet, so the feeling out there is that this is a great way for Apple to snuff out challenges from these other significant rivals.
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Researchers at Google X, the company’s research wing, built an artificial brain made up of 16,000 connected processors. Then they set it up to watch YouTube. And what do you think happened? It became a big fan of cat videos.
Andrew Ng is a computer science professor at Stanford and works with Google.
Andrew Ng: So we had the machine watch YouTube video for like a week, and after that week, we probed it to find out what it had learned. we found that it had learned to detect common objects, or what appeared common on YouTube, so we were surprised that it actually developed a neuron that could detect cats.
Moe: Did it know what a cat was going into this?
Ng: No, it didn’t, and that was maybe the coolest part of this. In traditional AI, if you wanted to learn a cat detector, you would have to take thousands of pictures of cats and show them to the machine, and it’s a lot of work to get all those pictures. What we did was use what’s called unlabeled data. That means we just show random videos and not tell it in advance what anything is, so it did not know that there were going to be cats or anything else in these videos. And, it kind of discovered the concept of cats by itself.
Moe: And how surprising was this? If I’m working with computer, I would be alarmed.
Ng: Yeah. I have to admit. I was surprised, too. The thing is, the world has so many different objects, and the models we simulated, even though it was big, realistically it was simulating a very small brain. I was pretty surprised and delighted that even the pretty small brain was simulating somehow had enough capacity or had enough smarts to discover a few interesting things by itself.
The research could be significant in voice and image recognition software as well as translation services.
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According to a recent study, Facebook is a cruel place to be. The website MyMemory.com surveyed 1,500 women who use Facebook and found that one in four has intentionally posted unflattering photos of their female Facebook friends.
And why? Most of the time it’s because they’re not getting along with the friend, who I suppose is no longer a friend, really. Another reason given was revenge, you post an ugly picture of someone who posted an ugly picture of you.
You can remove your name from the tagging of a picture in Facebook but only the person who posted the picture can take it down.
My advice: uh, be nice to everyone? Don’t talk to anyone? Become a vampire so you don’t show up in pictures? I’m just trying to come up with a positive spin on this one. Can’t quite do it.
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