California has been in a drought for almost five years now, making water an extraordinarily precious resource--one that Californian residents and governments are eager to protect. On Wednesday, California suspended its mandatory drought restrictions, saying that the state is turning over responsibility of the water restrictions to individual communities, letting them set their own restrictions based on their water budgets, with the state only stepping in if the budgets are unrealistically optimistic. But how can a community keep track of its water budget? IBM's Watson program has already beaten Jeopardy!, invented its own recipes, assisted in treating patients with chronic conditions, and is currently used by over 80,000 developers. Now, in partnership with environmental analytics company OmniEarth, Watson will help save the existence of humans on Earth--or at least in California.

Today marks one year since the Air Force's X-37B secret robotic space plane last launched into space, as Spaceflight Now notes. It is still there, doing the secret things a robot space plane does. Things like test a new ion engine and maybe track other space stations. It's spent 15 months and longer in orbit before, doing secret space stuff, so we can expect it to spend some more time there doing secret space things secretly. Because this is the world we live in, now.

From New York National Guard: "A bomb disposal robot, piloted from a distance, examines a downed drone with explosive material tethered to it during training." Looks like that bomb was ... frozen in its tracks. Look, I'm not going to beat the lede from the New York National Guard, so here it is in full: The remote-controlled robot bumped across the divots of the grassy field until it reached the downed toy drone. Its camera gazed up and down as it examined the explosive device nearby, in a Taylor Swift lunch box tethered to the drone. The drone, the robot, the lunch box, and the explosive device were part of an exercise called Raven's Challenge.

Dimensionality reduction techniques play an essential role in data analytics, signal processing and machine learning. Dimensionality reduction is usually performed in a preprocessing stage that is separate from subsequent data analysis, such as clustering or classification. Finding reduced-dimension representations that are well-suited for the intended task is more appealing. This paper proposes a joint factor analysis and latent clustering framework, which aims at learning cluster-aware low-dimensional representations of matrix and tensor data. The proposed approach leverages matrix and tensor factorization models that produce essentially unique latent representations of the data to unravel latent cluster structure -- which is otherwise obscured because of the freedom to apply an oblique transformation in latent space. At the same time, latent cluster structure is used as prior information to enhance the performance of factorization. Specific contributions include several custom-built problem formulations, corresponding algorithms, and discussion of associated convergence properties. Besides extensive simulations, real-world datasets such as Reuters document data and MNIST image data are also employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Transition Between The Current Market And Where The Market Is Going 1.3.3

FILE - In this April 14, 2016 file photo, a drone operated captures videos and still images of an apartment building in Philadelphia. A panel of privacy experts and technology companies organized by the Obama administration has issued guidelines for using drones without being overly intrusive. The suggestions are voluntary, but some business interests involved in the debate hope the guidelines head off tougher regulations that they fear could smother the drone industry in its infancy.

From movie shoots to search-and-rescue operations to your neighborhood park, drones are everywhere. This week, the Federal Aviation Administration released data revealing the exact whereabouts of the country's registered drones. Among the findings: Los Angeles County is the drone capital of America, with 12,250 registered drones. In second place is Arizona's Maricopa County, home to a number of Phoenix-based aerial photography companies. Looking at the data from a per capita perspective, Hinsdale County, Colorado wins out, with 5.2 drones for every 1,000 people.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

IBM's Watson is pitching in to tackle California's drought. The supercomputer, which may be best known for destroying human opponents in games like Jeopardy and Go, has been enlisted by environmental consulting firm OmniEarth to track water use across California. OmniEarth announced the partnership on Friday. But for over a month, the company has been tapping into Watson's computing power to scan satellite and aerial images of California's lush valleys and barren deserts to figure out how Californians are using their dwindling water reserves. Even without OmniEarth or Watson's help, Californians are working to track and cut down their water consumption.

In the past few weeks, you may have noticed a mysterious message popping up on your iPhone after hours of non-use. A seemingly new prompt requires users to enter a passcode to access their phone, even though they have Touch ID enabled – but only if it hasn't been unlocked using its passcode in six days, and the Touch ID hasn't been used within the last eight hours. Though Apple has said the feature was added with the release of iOS 9, users have just now begun to see it, causing many to speculate about its connection to the firm's recent tensions with the FBI. A seemingly new prompt requires users to enter a passcode to access their phone, even though they have Touch ID enabled – but only if it hasn't been unlocked using its passcode in six days, and the Touch ID hasn't been used within the last eight hours According to the iOS Security Guide published earlier this month, there are a number of situations in which you may have to use your passcode to unlock your iPhone or iPad even if Touch ID is enabled. According to Macworld, the message reads'The passcode has not been used to unlock the device in the last six days and Touch ID has not unlocked the device in the last eight hours.'