Amazon's new Echo Show 10 (third-generation), the first Alexa device with a motorized swiveling display, is now available for preorder for delivery starting on February 25. The new model, which was announced in September 2020, retails for $249.99 and is available in two colors: charcoal and glacier white. With the Echo Show 10, you can stream your favorite shows, follow along with recipes, call your friends and family, and more. The main draw for the Echo Show 10 is its smart motion. The touch-enabled display and embedded camera rotates atop a round base, which allows the built-in smart technology to keep the camera and screen in your line of sight automatically.

A renowned photographer has captured the highest resolution shots of snowflakes ever using a homemade prototype described as one part microscope and one part camera. Nathan Myhrvold, an American scientist, inventor, photographer and ex-chief technology officer of Microsoft, took 18 months to build the 100 megapixel camera capable of capturing a snowflake's microscopic detail. Using the camera, which he describes as the'highest resolution snowflake camera in the world', he took 100 frames of each snowflake in quick succession then stacked them for the whole image to be in focus. The results show the lush variety of snowflakes measuring only a few tens of millimetres in diameter, captured when Myhrvold was in Alaska and Canada. Pictured, stellar dendrite captured in Yellowknife, Canada.

Google's latest Chromecast streaming media dongle is a bit different. With a full interface and a remote, the new Chromecast with Google TV costs £59.99 and sits above the basic £30 Chromecast. You can still Google Cast to the new device, but the new flat plastic dongle is more than just a simple receiver, running the full Android TV software similar to the Nvidia Shield or smart TVs from Sony and others. Once plugged in, the new Chromecast is set up using the Google Home app on an Android, iPhone or iPad in about five minutes. Scan the QR code on your TV, log in with the required Google account, and choose some apps to install.

The larynx is critical for two broad functions: one life-sustaining, aiding in respiration and preventing the aspiration of food into the lungs; and the other life-enhancing, contributing to phonation, an essential component of communication. There was a time when the latter was largely ignored by researchers. However, in recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the voice by investigators from a diverse range of disciplines. In his new book, This Is the Voice , journalist John Colapinto creates a compelling narrative surrounding this vast and complex topic and investigates what makes the voice uniquely human. Colapinto creatively describes the structure of the book as “a little like the vocal signal itself.” He starts at the beginning of a human life, examining how the voice is first exhibited in the cry of a newborn baby and then, remarkably rapidly, shaped into speech, eventually allowing communication partners to engage in conversation. The scope of the book then “radiates outward like a soundwave” to explore how the voice functions in society, including as a prominent marker of status and class, as an indicator of gender and racial identity, and sometimes as a signal of sexual orientation. It also addresses the distinctive voices of religious leaders and those involved in mass broadcast and finally the voices of political leaders who have shaped our society. Cola pinto concludes, appropriately, by recognizing that even though the complex biological processes associated with aging do not spare the voice, they also impart a wisdom that can only be achieved with life experience. The voice is a vital part of the uniquely human attribute known as speech, and while the focus of the book is not necessarily on language, Colapinto does consider voice and speech in the broader context of communication. He argues that the voice was selectively advantageous in evolutionary history and emphasizes the role the voice played in creating language in humans. Here, Colapinto draws on the pioneering work of Philip Lieberman, whose theory asserts that “Language, far from being a purely mental phenomenon, is a physical act whose first stirrings can be traced back, hundreds of millions of years, to the oldest, air-breathing vertebrate (the lung-fish), as voice.” Colapinto goes on to provide compelling evidence that in our early hominin history, a series of advantageous genetic mutations changed the respiratory and vocal apparatuses and basal ganglia to give rise to speech and prime the brain for language. “Just as every human speaker emits vocal signals whose shape, rhythm, and tune offer strong clues about their geographic origins, socioeconomic background, and education level, all of us, as listeners, parse other people's pronunciation for such clues and draw instant inferences, often quite inaccurate, about the speaker,” observes Colapinto. In one notable example, he describes how simple alterations in vowel and consonant pronunciations as well as prosody cause us to rapidly stigmatize speakers from the south as “backwards, undereducated,” northerners as “elitist,” and Californians as “hopeless flakes.” The voice can also express emotion and produce song, thus illuminating the inner self. Colapinto explores the emotional power of song and how the singer, with delicate control of the vocal instrument, can bring immense pleasure to the listener. While discussing the voice of American operatic soprano Renée Fleming, Colapinto muses: “How she shapes that sound into something we deem ‘beautiful,’ so that each note hangs for a moment in the air, as present as an abstract Brancusi sculpture—shaped and shimmering in space, textured, polished, and conforming to all the criteria of proportion and harmony that Plato said embody perfection in the arts—well, that's another question entirely.” Colapinto begins his book by detailing his personal experience with a voice injury, stating: “I took for granted the sounds that emerged from between my lips.” As a voice scientist and rehabilitation expert, I regularly hear this same sentiment from my clients. As the book concluded, I was surprised to learn that after years of living with a voice injury, he ultimately decided against pursuing surgical vocal fold treatment. I was ultimately satisfied, however, that he had found peace and genuine appreciation for his unique voice.

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. Late comedy legend Jerry Stiller divvied up his roughly $5 million estate among his family, including kids Ben and Amy -- and also generously left funds to several New York organizations and former employees, The Post has learned. The actor, who died in May at 92, designated money for his longtime personal assistant and his since-deceased housekeeper, according to his will, dated March 2010 and filed in Manhattan Surrogate's court in September. The document notes that the $150,000 left to his assistant was "in recognition of her exceptional services toward enhancing the professional careers of myself and my wife for many years."

Fox News Flash top entertainment and celebrity headlines are here. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment. Cloris Leachman, known for her decades-long career in film, television and beyond, has died at the age of 94. She died on Wednesday of natural causes, her rep told Fox News. Leachman was a history-making actress, having racked up more Emmy award wins than any other performer in the business with eight awards for primetime programming and an additional Daytime Emmy for appearing in "ABC Afterschool Specials."

With the emergence of personality computing as a new research field related to artificial intelligence and personality psychology, we have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of personality-aware recommendation systems. Unlike conventional recommendation systems, these new systems solve traditional problems such as the cold start and data sparsity problems. This survey aims to study and systematically classify personality-aware recommendation systems. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first that focuses on personality-aware recommendation systems. We explore the different design choices of personality-aware recommendation systems, by comparing their personality modeling methods, as well as their recommendation techniques. Furthermore, we present the commonly used datasets and point out some of the challenges of personality-aware recommendation systems.

While we're still waiting on Netflix's Pacific Rim anime series, the streaming service has announced that it's also working on anime versions of Tomb Raider and Skull Island. Netflix is working with Legendary Television on all of those upcoming shows, and it follows a slew of anime announcements, including a Cyberpunk 2077 series, and a Resident Evil CG show (if you can call that anime). Gotta keep the weeb contingent happy, right? Netflix says the Tomb Raider series will follow the events of Square Enix's recent reboot trilogy, which leaves the door wide open for stories following a young Lara Croft. It'll be executive produced by Tasha Huo, who also worked on The Witcher: Blood Origin and Red Sonja.

One of the latest collaborations between artificial intelligence and humans is further evidence of how machines and humans can create better results when working together. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now on the job to combat the spread of misinformation on the internet and social platforms thanks to the efforts of start-ups such as Logically. While AI is able to analyze the enormous amounts of info generated daily on a scale that's impossible for humans, ultimately, humans need to be part of the process of fact-checking to ensure credibility. As Lyric Jain, founder and CEO of Logically, said, toxic news travels faster than the truth. Our world desperately needs a way to discern truth from fiction in our news and public, political and economic discussions, and artificial intelligence will help us do that.

Recent advances in deep learning techniques have enabled machines to generate cohesive open-ended text when prompted with a sequence of words as context. While these models now empower many downstream applications from conversation bots to automatic storytelling, they have been shown to generate texts that exhibit social biases. To systematically study and benchmark social biases in open-ended language generation, we introduce the Bias in Open-Ended Language Generation Dataset (BOLD), a large-scale dataset that consists of 23,679 English text generation prompts for bias benchmarking across five domains: profession, gender, race, religion, and political ideology. We also propose new automated metrics for toxicity, psycholinguistic norms, and text gender polarity to measure social biases in open-ended text generation from multiple angles. An examination of text generated from three popular language models reveals that the majority of these models exhibit a larger social bias than human-written Wikipedia text across all domains. With these results we highlight the need to benchmark biases in open-ended language generation and caution users of language generation models on downstream tasks to be cognizant of these embedded prejudices.