Smartwatches: What are Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft Up To?

"The wrist is interesting," said Apple chief executive Tim Cook at the All Things Digital D11 conference in May 2013, when being quizzed about his company's potential plans for wearable technology in the years to come.

"For something to work here you have to convince people it's so incredible, that they want to wear it... If we had a room full of 10 to 20-year-olds and we said, 'Everyone stand up that has a watch,' I'm not sure anybody would stand up."

Nevertheless, Apple is one of the technology giants at the centre of growing speculation about smartwatches. Along with Samsung – whose Galaxy Gear is expected to be unveiled later this week – Google and Microsoft, the wrist is proving interesting for anyone who's anyone in the smartphone world.

Research firm Canalys recently claimed that 500,000 smartwatches will be sold this year, but then 5m in 2014 thanks to the entry of Apple, Samsung, Google and other technology firms into the market, alongside traditional watch-makers.

Rival IDC even thinks that demand for wearables (including watches) could slow down tablet sales over the coming years, reducing its forecasts accordingly. So what do we know – or, to be more accurate, what's been rumoured – about the plans of the big tech firms?

by Stuart Dredge, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Voucher Codes Pro

Is the Uncanny Valley Real?

 Mick Walters opens a door in his lab and points his computer’s camera towards the small, blurry, tan-coloured object he has just revealed. "This is Kaspar Two," he says. As the Skype connection catches up, an image of a robot in a baseball hat, a blue button-down shirt and striped socks appears. Kaspar Two is a robot child. He's not even on, just sitting slumped over. Even though the image is somewhat fuzzy, Kaspar Two is able to give me that feeling, that nagging sense of unease. "I must admit," says Walters, "when I first actually built Kaspar, I did think he was a bit uncanny."

Kaspar has been created at University of Hertfordshire, UK to help children with autism understand how to read emotions and engage with other people, but it falls into what's often called “the uncanny valley”. From humanoid robot heads to super-realistic prosthetic hands, the uncanny valley is where robots that give us the creeps live. It is the range between obvious cartoons and discernibly real people, where things look almost lifelike, and yet not quite believable. Peering into the uncanny valley is an uncomfortable experience. Its residents, like Kaspar, have a way of eliciting feelings of disgust, fear or dread.

For almost 30 years, the concept of the uncanny valley has acted as a golden rule for roboticists and animators. From Pixar to puppets, creating characters that are too lifelike was thought to be the kiss of death for any project. But now the concept itself is coming under scrutiny like never before. What exactly we are feeling and why we feel this way are questions that have finally found their way under the microscope. And some researchers are asking whether the uncanny valley exists at all. (...)

The first time many people encountered the concept of the uncanny valley was in 2001 with the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Today, it is known as one of the first photorealistic computer animated films, but at the time not everyone was impressed. The groundbreaking graphics made many movie-goers uncomfortable, and the film flopped, losing Columbia Pictures $52 million. The faces were too human, too close to real life. "At first it's fun to watch the characters," film critic Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone. "But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements."

A link between what is almost human and what is creepy was proposed long before Final Fantasy, however. The phrase “uncanny valley” is widely accepted to have originated in 1970, with the publication of an academic paper by roboticist Masahiro Mori in an obscure journal called Energy. Mori's original paper was in Japanese. Contrary to popular belief, his original title “Bukimi No Tani” only roughly translates into the phrase it has made famous. A more accurate translation is “valley of eeriness”.

This matters because it demonstrates the problem with the uncanny valley: it is an inherently woolly idea. When researchers try to study the phenomenon, they often have a hard time pinning down what an uncanny response actually looks like. The main graph in Mori’s paper has been mistranslated many times, leaving many people unsure what he really meant. Mori used the Japanese word “shinwakan” on the y-axis, a word that has no direct translation into English. The most common interpretation is “likeability”, but not all translators agree about that. Other suggestions include “familiarity”, “affinity”, and “comfort level”.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the concept’s history, though, isn't the translation troubles, nor the debate over what is being represented on his graph, but how long it took for that debate to arise. Mori's paper didn't include any measurements. It was more an essay than a study. Yet, despite broad dissemination, the uncanny valley avoided scientific scrutiny until the early 2000's, when graphics and animatronics like Final Fantasy started giving people the creeps. As scientists started to explore Mori’s graph, they began to ask whether real data would reveal the same pattern.

by Rose Eveleth, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

Sundays

They are still in bed, windows open to the morning coolness. Her face has no make-up, her skin no shine. She has a cheap look in the morning, young, without resources. I imagine they wake at the same instant, like actors, like the cat in the cafe which opened its eyes to find me staring through the flat glass. Her breath is bad. My images are repeating themselves—there's nothing I can do. They crowd in on me. They come again and again, I cannot struggle free. Besides, there is no place to go, they would follow me into dreams.

“Bonjour,” she says. She kisses his stiffened prick.

“He never smiles,” she says, looking it in the eye.

“Sometimes,” Dean murmurs. Her mouth feels warm. I try to find darkness, a void, but they are too luminous, the white sky behind them, their bodies open and fresh. They are too innocent. They're like my own children, and they illustrate an affection which has little reason to, which in fact does not exist except that she—at the very bottom it is her only real distinction—she knows how to make things come true. Her mouth moves in long, sweet reaches. Dean can feel himself beginning to tumble, to come apart, and I am like a saxophone player in a marching band—in love with a movie queen. Soft-eyed, lost, I am tramping wretchedly back and forth at halftime. My thoughts are flailing. The batons flash in mid-air. The whole stadium is filled. I am marching, turning, marking time while she slowly circles the field in a newconvertible. I am a clerk in her father's brokerage. I'm the young waiter who sends bouquets of flowers. I am a foreigner who answers the telephone wondering who can be calling, and it is the police. I cannot understand at first. They have to repeat it several times. There is an instant when my heart turns to lead: an accident. A motorcar...

“It's a Citroën,” Dean says. A motorbike is crushed beneath it. They pass slowly. Now they can see the feet of someone laid out near the trees. On the pavement are dark runs of blood.

“They're always in accidents,” he says. “I don't understand it.”

“They're very fast,” she tells him.

“Citroëns? They're not so fast.”

“Oh, yes.”

“How do you know? You don't even drive.”

“They always pass us,” she says.

I know this road well. It leads to les Settons, the lake where they go to swim. Anne-Marie stands in the shallow water. She has earrings on and a necklace. She bends her knees to immerse herself and then swims like a cat, her neck stiff, her head up. After a moment she stands up again.

“You must teach me,” she says to Dean.

He tries to show her the deadman's float. Breathe out through your mouth, he tells her. No. She doesn't like to wet her hair.

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“Come on,” he tells her. “You can't learn unless you do.”

She shrugs. A little puff of contempt—she doesn't care. Dean stands waist-deep in the water, waiting. She doesn't move. She is sullen as a young thief.

“Take your earrings off,” he says gently.

She removes them.

“Now do what I say. Don't be afraid. Put your face in the water.”

She doesn't move.

“Do you want to learn or don't you?”

“No,” she says.

by James Salter, Paris Review |  Read more:

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Jarek Puczel
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Nike Flyknit Blue Lunar Men’s Chukka Sneakers @ oki-ni
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I Forgot My Phone

Last weekend, I was watching television with a few friends, browsing the week’s most popular YouTube videos, when a piece in the comedy section called “I Forgot My Phone” caught my eye. As I was about to click play, however, a friend warned, “Oh, don’t watch that. I saw it yesterday, and it’s really sad.”

The two-minute video, which has been viewed more than 15 million times, begins with a couple in bed. The woman, played by the comedian and actress Charlene deGuzman, stares silently while her boyfriend pays no mind and checks his smartphone.

The subsequent scenes follow Ms. deGuzman through a day that is downright dystopian: people ignore her as they stare at their phones during lunch, at a concert, while bowling and at a birthday party. (Even the birthday boy is recording the party on his phone.) The clip ends with Ms. deGuzman back in bed with her boyfriend at the end of the day; he is still using his phone.

Ms. deGuzman’s video makes for some discomfiting viewing. It’s a direct hit on our smartphone-obsessed culture, needling us about our addiction to that little screen and suggesting that maybe life is just better led when it is lived rather than viewed. While the clip has funny scenes — a man proposing on a beach while trying to record the special moment on his phone — it is mostly … sad. (...)

In the late 1950s, televisions started to move into the kitchen from the living room, often wheeled up to the dinner table to join the family for supper. And then, TV at the dinner table suddenly became bad manners. Back to the living room the TV went.

“It never really caught on in most U.S. homes,” said Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communication and author of the book, “Make Room for TV.” “At one point, a company even tried to invent a contraption called the TV Stove, which was both a TV and a stove,” she said.

So are smartphones having their TV-in-the-kitchen moment?

by Nick Bilton, NY Times |  Read more:

Video: Charlene deGuzman

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Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Breakwater, San Sebastian (detail), 1918.
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Nine Questions About Syria

The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.

If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.

Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.

1. What is Syria?

Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million. Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.

Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children.

2. Why are people in Syria killing each other?

The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children, dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.

Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.

by Max Fisher, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Gene Thorp, Washington Post

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Jackson Browne/David Lindley

Academy Fight Song

This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.

The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.

It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.

When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, always, that it is so very beautiful.

And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen.

Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.

College and Mammon Both

Go back to the beginning, back to the days when people first understood a character-building college diploma to be the ticket to middle-class success. We would forge a model republic of citizen-students, who would redeem the merit badges of academic achievement for spots in the upper reaches of corporate capitalism. The totems of the modern American striver were to be the University Credential and the Corner Office, and prosperity would reward the ablest.

And so the story remains today, despite everything that has happened in the realms of the corporation and the university. We might worry from time to time about the liberal professors who infest the academy, but school is still where you go to “write your destiny,” to use President Obama’s 2010 description of education generally. Go to college, or else your destiny will be written by someone else. The bachelor’s degree that universities issue is a “credential” that’s “a prerequisite for 21st century jobs,” says the White House website. Obama himself equates education with upward mobility—more schooling equals more success—as well as with national greatness. “The kinds of opportunities that are open to you will be determined by how far you go in school,” he declared a few years ago.

In other words, the farther you go in school, the farther you’ll go in life. And at a time when other countries are competing with us like never before, when students around the world are working harder than ever, and doing better than ever, your success in school will also help determine America’s success in the twenty-first century.

This is commonplace and unremarkable to the point of being utterly hackneyed. Everyone says this. It is obvious. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who has refashioned himself into the Lord Protector of Learning in recent years, says the same thing, constantly: you’d better have the schooling and the skills that the entrepreneurial class demands if you want to make even a minimal living. The higher education mantra is possibly the greatest cliché in American public life.

And so the dreams proliferate. Education is the competitive advantage that might save our skins as we compete more and more directly with China and Vietnam and the Philippines, the journalists say. Education is what explains income inequality, chime the economists, and more education is what will roll it back. In fact, education is just about the only way we can justify being paid for our work at all; it is the only quantifiable input that makes us valuable or gives us “skills.”

Quantifiable, yes, but only vaguely. No one really knows the particular contents of the education that is supposed to save us. It is, again, a dream, a secret formula, a black box into which we pour money and out of which comes uplift or enrichment or wish-fulfillment. How a college education manages to do these marvelous things—Is it calculus? Is it classics?—is a subject of hot controversy. All we know for sure is that people who go to college are affluent; it follows naturally that if you send more people to college, you will have yourself a more affluent country.

by Thomas Frank, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image:Spencer Walts

Pros and Cons

The handball courts loom high over the dirt running path in Forest Park. The last time anyone painted the twenty-foot-high wooden boards they were a soft canary yellow; today they're a sun-bleached gray. In lush green surroundings, the handball courts are a stern sight, rising from the lawn like industrial ruins.

The players, when they start to arrive around noon by foot or bicycle, show up with a racquetball and a pair of gloves. Rarely do they schedule games ahead of time.

"Somebody turned over a rock," a man calls out by way of greeting as the courts fill up on a recent Monday afternoon.

The casual, pick-up-game style of play doesn't tend to work for Jerry Raymond Jones, known better as Junior. He paces impatiently on the baseline, a cell phone to his ear, trying to get a friend to the courts for a game of singles.

The sun is high, and there's a group of players sitting in the shade; none is interested in going toe-to-toe with the sinewy Jones.

"I don't fuck with Junior," one chuckles.

"I ain't gonna play you no singles," another snorts. "You think I'm crazy?"

Jones, a fair, boyish-looking 29-year-old with a boxer's nose, grins immodestly. "I'm a flat-wall player, for real," he says. "But I'm good at this, too."

Jones learned flat-wall (single-wall handball) in a place where there is an abundance of them: prison. Handball is one of the few sports that are allowed and encouraged in many federal and state penitentiaries where bats and racquets are out of the question.

According to Forest Park Handball Club president R.P. Murphy, Jones is one of the best in the core group of about 100 who come out regularly.

"He's a fantastic young player," says Murphy. "When they are locked up like that, they really get a chance to really develop their game."

Regulars here estimate that about half of the players come to Forest Park after they learned the game in prison. Though the handballers often don't know each other's last name (in the case of doubles there's a racial prefix, "White Don" and "Black Don," for example), the jailhouse stories tend to trickle out during sideline conversations.

"I thought it was just a prison game," says Ram Burrows, who was released in 2009 for a drug sentence. "Then I came out and met these guys who've been playing since the '60s."

As Jones demonstrates his serve against the court's high wall, it's not difficult to picture him behind the concrete barriers at Greenville Federal Correctional Institution in Illinois.

"This really changed my life, for real," he says.

The fact that Illinois and Missouri's prisons have become a farm team of sorts for Forest Park only explains part of the reason why the crowd here — sometimes 30 or 40 deep, drinking beers, smoking, shelling peanuts between games — stands out compared to the preppy joggers trotting past. Beyond the former inmates, the courts have always attracted an eclectic mix: restaurateurs, doctors, lawyers, Imo's delivery drivers, construction workers, entrepreneurs, prison guards and the unemployed. Forest Park even (very occasionally) lures the man some consider the greatest handballer to ever live, St. Louis' own David Chapman. And no matter what their background, handballers universally describe the game the exact same way:

"It's an addiction," says Terry Huelsman, the owner of the Break Billiards in Cahokia, Illinois. "It's a poor man's country club."

But among so much openness and camaraderie, the players also keep secrets. This is a place where the men (there is currently only one regular female player) go to lose themselves. The things they keep private vary from tales of failed business ventures to chemical dependencies to violent crime.

Three decades ago the handball community in Forest Park was forever changed when one of its own was gunned down as he left the courts. Today the man's killer is a frequent visitor to the Forest Park courts, though he hides his identity from the handball players who continue to tell the story of the 1979 murder in almost mythic terms. But more on that later.

"Most of the people there are looking for an escape. There's a lot of damaged people out there," confirms Rick Nelson, a retired insurance broker and Forest Park regular of eight years. "It's really hard to think about something else when you're whacking a blue ball against the wall."

by Jessica Lussenhop, Riverfront Times |  Read more:

Image:Jennifer Silverberg

Kangaroos propel themselves with powerful hind legs. Australia, December 1926. Photograph by Wide World Photos Inc.
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Kishin Shinoyama - Sans Titre, 1968.
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Why Pianos and Monkeys Can Never Really Play the Blues

One of the last things you’d expect to see at a physics conference is a physicist on stage, in a dapper hat, pounding out a few riffs of the blues on a keyboard. But that’s exactly what University of Illinois professor J. Murray Gibson did at the recent March meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore. Gibson has been doing these wildly popular demonstrations for years to illustrate the intimate connection between music, math, and physics.

While there is a long tradition of research on the science of acoustics and a noted connection between music and math in the brain, science and math have also influenced the evolution of musical styles themselves. For thousands of years, Western music was dominated by the diatonic Pythagorean scale, which is built on an interval (the difference in pitch between two different notes) known as a perfect fifth: where the higher note vibrates at exactly 50 percent higher frequency than the lower note. Anyone who’s seen The Sound of Music probably gets the idea of the perfect fifth, and can likely sing along with Julie Andrews: “Do, a deer, a female deer….” If you start on one note and keep going up by perfect fifths from one note to the next, you trace out a musical scale, the alphabet for the language of music. While a musical scale built like that includes a lot of ratios of whole numbers (like 3:2, the perfect fifth itself), it has a fatal flaw: It can’t duplicate another keystone of music, the octave, where one note is exactly double the frequency of the lower note. Contrary to Andrews’ lyrics, the scale doesn’t really bring us back to “Do.”

To bring the fifth and the octave together in the diatonic Pythagrean scale, various versions of the same interval were forced to be different lengths in different parts of the scale—one was so badly out of tune it was called the “wolf fifth” and composers avoided using it entirely. This meant that a piece of music composed in the key of E sounded fine on a harpsichord tuned to the key of E but dreadful on one in D. It also made it difficult to change keys within a single composition; you can’t really re-tune a piano mid-performance. Johann Sebastian Bach, among others, chafed at such constraints.

Thus was born the “well-tempered” scales, in which each appearance of an interval was tweaked so that it was not far off from the ideal length or from other versions of the same interval, so composers and performers could easily switch between keys. Bach used this scale to compose some of the most beautiful fugues and cantatas in Western music. This approach eventually led to the equal temperament scale, the one widely used today, in which every interval but the octave is slightly off from a perfect ratio of whole numbers, but intervals are entirely consistent and each step in the scale is exactly the same size.

In the 20th century, musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and ragtime composer Scott Joplin wanted to incorporate certain African influences into their music—namely, the so-called “blue notes.” But no such keys existed on the piano; when in the key of C, one major blue note falls somewhere between E-flat and E. So blues pianists started crushing the two notes together at the same time. It’s an example of “art building on artifacts,” according to Gibson. That distinctive bluesy sound is the result of trying to “recreate missing notes on the modern equal temperament scale”: In more traditional scales, the interval called a third represents a frequency ratio of 5/4; and indeed in the key of C, a true third lies between E-flat and E.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Nautilus |  Read more:

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Paul Klee, Tomcat’s Turf, 1919.
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Lucy Dominga by Brian Matthew
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Of Monsters and Men