In development: an online museum documenting Gulags. It’ll open next spring. “The system of concentration and labour camps was developed in the Soviet Union from 1919 and it was the most extensive under the rule of Joseph Stalin. The word Gulag began to be used in 1930. It is abbreviation of the Russian name of […]
From the South China Morning Post: China must unblock Google Scholar and keep the internet open for its researchers . “It is no secret that Beijing and Google are not the best of friends, which is why it has a diminished presence in China. Of course, it is not the only victim of the Great […]
Now available: a database of DNA sequences in GMOs. “The JRC has published a new database, JRC GMO-Amplicons, which contains more than 240,000 DNA sequences appearing in genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It will help to verify the presence of GMOs in food, feed and environment.”
Google has received a patent for removing biological tissue with a laser for the purposes of good, one assumes. Don’t be evil, or at least put the laser down first. “The patent was published yesterday. Google first applied for it in May 2014, long before establishing the umbrella company Alphabet, which includes the standalone life […]
TheNextWeb has a writeup on an interest app called WordsEye. Basically you describe the scene you want to create and it’s created. “The technology behind it works by speech tagging and analyzing the context of the words used. Statistical parsing is used to bring the sentences into a format the computer understands and uses to […]
Remember MP3.com back in the day? That was founded and run by Michael Robertson. Now, over a decade later, he’s got another music startup called OnRadio. “The service, introduced this week, indexes all the music playing on more than 100,000 online radio stations and allows users to search across that database and listen to any […]
From Business Pundit: Google’s Top Execs Are Always Visible But Almost Never Approachable. “If you work at Google headquarters or you just happen to be visiting, there is a very good chance you will bump into Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Google CEO Sundar Pichai. There is also a very good chance that without a […]
A new Chrome extension allows you to replace Facebook’s “Trending Topics” with the RSS feed of your choice. “The extension will automatically have replaced what’s trending on Facebook with headlines from the New York Times. If you scroll down (you may have to zoom out in Chrome first), you can change the source to the […]
From UberGizmo: How to use Google Now. “Google Now is a fully-featured digital personal assistant by Google. It can help in many of different ways, such as setting reminders, manage commute, help with shopping, answer common questions, and much more… However, all these features first require a setup, and a basic knowledge of the commands.”
Looks like Instagram is rolling out multi-account support. Yay! “The photo-sharing app Instagram has quietly begun rolling out multi-account support for the average user. While this will be most helpful to those that have accounts for their artwork, accounts for their personal matters, and accounts for their cats, you’ll see the benefit for work-use users […]
Facebook has announced four months of paid parental leave for all employees. “The policy, which provides four months of paid time off, will be provided to all new parents regardless of gender or location, starting Jan. 1. Employees may take leave at any point up to a year after the birth of their child, Lori […]
Speaking of images: earlier this year I mentioned Google’s Deep Dream, which applied AI to images to make them, well, trippy. Now there’s a Twitter bot which will “dream” your photo in the style of a great artist. “Deep Forger is a Twitter account which will generate a version of any picture fed to it […]