In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog": a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue's founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue's first edition. At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the "Whole Earth Catalog" offered a vision for a new social order--one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like "Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia," and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator.

Amazon's Echo speakers have been gradually improving in quality, and it looks like Tidal wants to seize on that opportunity. The streaming service is now available on all Echo devices in the US through a dedicated Tidal skill. Link your account and you can play that Beyoncé or Jay-Z exclusive with a quick voice command. You can set it as your default music option if you'd like, but you can always add "on Tidal" to a command if the service remains secondary. The Tidal addition might not have people flocking en masse to Tidal, but it does flesh out the Echo's music options and give you another viable option if you're not terribly fond of Amazon Music or Spotify.

Artificial intelligence is fueling the next phase of misinformation. The new type of synthetic media known as deepfakes poses major challenges for newsrooms when it comes to verification. This content is indeed difficult to track: Can you tell which of the images below is a fake? We at The Wall Street Journal are taking this threat seriously and have launched an internal deepfakes task force led by the Ethics & Standards and the Research & Development teams. This group, the WSJ Media Forensics Committee, is comprised of video, photo, visuals, research, platform, and news editors who have been trained in deepfake detection.

The increasing concern with misinformation has stimulated research efforts on automatic fact checking. The recently-released FEVER dataset introduced a benchmark fact-verification task in which a system is asked to verify a claim using evidential sentences from Wikipedia documents. In this paper, we present a connected system consisting of three homogeneous neural semantic matching models that conduct document retrieval, sentence selection, and claim verification jointly for fact extraction and verification. For evidence retrieval (document retrieval and sentence selection), unlike traditional vector space IR models in which queries and sources are matched in some pre-designed term vector space, we develop neural models to perform deep semantic matching from raw textual input, assuming no intermediate term representation and no access to structured external knowledge bases. We also show that Pageview frequency can also help improve the performance of evidence retrieval results, that later can be matched by using our neural semantic matching network. For claim verification, unlike previous approaches that simply feed upstream retrieved evidence and the claim to a natural language inference (NLI) model, we further enhance the NLI model by providing it with internal semantic relatedness scores (hence integrating it with the evidence retrieval modules) and ontological WordNet features. Experiments on the FEVER dataset indicate that (1) our neural semantic matching method outperforms popular TF-IDF and encoder models, by significant margins on all evidence retrieval metrics, (2) the additional relatedness score and WordNet features improve the NLI model via better semantic awareness, and (3) by formalizing all three subtasks as a similar semantic matching problem and improving on all three stages, the complete model is able to achieve the state-of-the-art results on the FEVER test set.

An apparent problem with new software means that some iPhone X users are not able to activate Face ID on their handsets. The mysterious bug means that for to unlock their devices they have to enter their pass code manually. Frustrated Apple users are taking to Twitter and Reddit to complain about the problem which causes a'not available' message to show up on the screen. The issue has been linked to the latest iOS 12.1 version upgrade, according to reports from customers on social media. Frustrated Apple users are taking to Twitter and Reddit to complain about the mysterious bug that causes a'not available' message to show up on the screen, pictured Then press and hold the Power button until you see the Apple logo on-screen.

Apple has won an international award in recognition of its attempts to stop slavery and the work it has done to rid it from its supply chain. The Stop Slavery Award, which the Thomson Reuters Foundation said was in recognition of a "giant leap in the fight against slavery", comes after a concerted effort by Apple to ensure it is more transparent about its supply chain. Apple says it has worked hard to combat the kinds of abuse that happen in suppliers used by a wide variety of companies, such as workers who are forced into modern slavery by having their passports taken away or being saddled with huge debts they must work to pay off. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The mere existence of Amazon's Fire TV Recast is a testament to how popular cord-cutting has become. Over-the-air DVR was once the domain of geeks whose living rooms ran on Windows Media Center. But as more people have dropped cable TV, we've seen more user-friendly approaches from the likes of TiVo, Tablo, Plex, Channels, and AirTV. Those options presumably helped inspire the Fire TV Recast, a $230 box that records free broadcast TV channels from an antenna and streams the video to Amazon's popular Fire TV devices. The Fire TV Recast is the most mainstream attempt yet at over-the-air DVR, and it shows in Amazon's simple and polished software.

The Hover Camera Passport foldable drone made quite the impression when it first launched a little over two years ago, and then it received a major update in April last year, which added a smartphone-free mode that automatically tracks and records its owner. Save for the rumored Snap acquisition deal (which Zero Zero Robotics still denies today), we had barely heard from the drone maker since then, but today it's back with a surprise announcement: The launch of its second selfie drone, Hover 2. As you'd expect, the Hover 2 has inherited all the best bits of the Passport, especially its small foldable form factor, sturdy carbon fibre cage enclosure, Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (model not specified but it's "four times more powerful than" before), 4K 30fps video capture, face tracking and body tracking. The two drones look similar from afar, though the newer model benefits from more than double the original flight time, jumping from a mere 10 minutes to 19 minutes (but maximum flight time is 23 minutes; more on that later). This may explain the heavier weight of 490 grams or about 1.1 pounds -- almost twice as much as before. When switched on, you'll notice a new major feature on the Hover 2: Its swiveling "Optical Radar" that pops out of the top of the body.

Among creative applications for algorithms, writing lyrics and poetry has proved particularly challenging. The art of producing lyrics with a machine also differs greatly from other tasks in natural-language processing. The ultimate goal is to be creative rather than accurate, which can have a difficult-to-pin-down definition. That didn't stop two researchers at Google from trying to create an automated lyric-generation machine. They approached the task with two separate machine-learning models.

FOR the second straight year, Deloitte surveyed executives in the US knowledgeable about cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence,1 representing companies that are testing and implementing them today. We found that these early adopters2 remain bullish on cognitive technologies' value. As in last year's survey, the level of support for AI is truly extraordinary. These findings illustrate that cognitive technologies hold enticing promise, some of which is being fulfilled today. However, AI technologies may deliver their best returns when companies balance excitement over their potential with the ability to execute. A year later, and the thrill isn't gone. In Deloitte's 2017 cognitive survey, we were struck by early adopters' enthusiasm for cognitive technologies.4 That excitement owed much to the returns they said cognitive technologies were generating: 83 percent stated they were seeing either "moderate" or "substantial" benefits. Respondents also said they expected that cognitive technologies would change both their companies and their industries rapidly. In 2018, respondents remain enthusiastic about the value cognitive technologies bring. Their companies are investing in foundational cognitive capabilities, and using them with more skill. Thirty-seven percent of respondents say their companies have invested US$5 million or more in cognitive technologies. Another reason is that companies have more ways to acquire cognitive capabilities, and they are taking advantage.