Android P’s final beta preview is live

Good news for people who like near-final previews of mobile operating systems. Android just dropped Beta 4 for Android P, marking the last preview milestone before the full version launches. That means the still unnamed OS is just around the corner — promised to arrive at some point later this summer.

As the all of the above implies, this build should be pretty close to final, including all of the systems you’ll see in the shipping version. The release is primarily focused on developers, looking to make sure their apps are up to date with Android P when it ships.

That includes a number of the new OS features, which will impact usage across apps, including multi-camera support, display cutout, enhanced notifications and ImageDecoder. More details on all of that can be found here.

Of course, the build is open to anyone who signs up for the Android Beta Program, so long as you also have access to a Pixel device to test it on — there’s a sign up form here. Those who have been testing out earlier builds should be receiving Beta 4 as an automatic update at some point in the near future.

No specific date has been given for the final build — just that it’s “coming soon.” Ditto for the name — though there’s no shortage of dessert foods starting with “P.” These days, I’m leaning toward Pop Rocks. But then, I’m kind of always leaning toward Pop Rocks. Hey, anyone know where a guy can get some Pop Rocks in 2018?

Anyway, more info here. 

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Dropbox add-on makes it easier to manage Gmail attachments

When Dropbox announced it was integrating its storage product with GSuite in March, it was more of a heads up that the two companies were working together. Today at Google Next, Dropbox announced, a new add-on to manage Gmail attachments in Dropbox.

Ketan Nayak, a product manager at Dropbox says this is the first concrete piece to come out of that earlier announcement. “Back in March, we announced a broader partnership with Google to bring about integrations and product initiatives across a range of different Google Cloud products. And what we wanted to share with you today was that we’re bringing one of the first [pieces] in this product partnership, the Dropbox add-on for Gmail, to GA,” he said.

The partnership makes sense for the two companies as they share lots of overlapping users with more than 50 percent of Dropbox users also using G Suite. Being able to access Dropbox without leaving Gmail or other G Suite tool could potentially save users time and effort spent copying and pasting and switching programs.

Instead, there is a direct integration now that displays the attachments in a side panel after which you can save them if you so choose directly into your Dropbox, and the experience is the same in the mobile app or on the web, Nayak explained.

Dropbox displays the attachments in the email in a side panel for easy access. Photo: Dropbox

“We created this cross-browser, cross-platform solution that doesn’t exist today, especially on mobile, where a lot of our users live and work across these different tools. It’s been really hard for users to navigate in and out of different apps, and we really think of this add-on as a first step that enables users across our two platforms to start start working more seamlessly,” Nayek explained.

Indeed, other integrations between products are already in the works including one that will allow users to insert a link to a file stored in Dropbox in an email without leaving the program. “Users can share and generate links to Dropbox content while composing an email,” he said. While that particular functionality isn’t ready yet, the company was demonstrating it on stage at Google Next today and it should be available soon.

Kayak says, these announcements are really just a starting point of what they hope will be a much more comprehensive set of integrations between the two company’s products in the future.

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Android P’s final beta preview is live

Good news for people who like near-final previews of mobile operating systems. Android just dropped Beta 4 for Android P, marking the last preview milestone before the full version launches. That means the still unnamed OS is just around the corner — promised to arrive at some point later this summer.

As the all of the above implies, this build should be pretty close to final, including all of the systems you’ll see in the shipping version. The release is primarily focused on developers, looking to make sure their apps are up to date with Android P when it ships.

That includes a number of the new OS features, which will impact usage across apps, including multi-camera support, display cutout, enhanced notifications and ImageDecoder. More details on all of that can be found here.

Of course, the build is open to anyone who signs up for the Android Beta Program, so long as you also have access to a Pixel device to test it on — there’s a sign up form here. Those who have been testing out earlier builds should be receiving Beta 4 as an automatic update at some point in the near future.

No specific date has been given for the final build — just that it’s “coming soon.” Ditto for the name — though there’s no shortage of dessert foods starting with “P.” These days, I’m leaning toward Pop Rocks. But then, I’m kind of always leaning toward Pop Rocks. Hey, anyone know where a guy can get some Pop Rocks in 2018?

Anyway, more info here. 

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Outvote hopes to flip elections by getting Democrats to text their friends

Outvote, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote. The idea is to take advantage of people’s willingness to use social sharing to communicate about political issues, while also leveraging the simplicity that comes with tweeting or posting to Facebook and turning that into an actionable reminder that can actually drive people to the polls during critical times.

The startup was founded by Naseem Makiya, a Harvard-educated software engineer with a background in startups, including San Francisco-based Moovweb and Cambridge area’s DataCamp; along with Nadeem Mazen, an MIT grad and interactive designer who once worked with OK GO on one of its viral music videos, and who now owns the Cambridge-based creative agency Nimblebot.

Mazen, who has since moved into an advisory role with Outvote, also has more direct political experience, having run for public office himself. In fact, he learned first-hand how every vote counts, having won his Cambridge City Council position in 2013 by just six votes.

He also attributed his second election win to organizing low propensity, minority and younger voters — plus “really doing a lot of texting and a lot of outreach through my friend networks,” says Mazen.

When Mazen’s time in politics ended, he then helped others get elected using similar means. Later, he and Makiya brought together a group of Harvard and MIT folks to formalize a company around the technology they were using. This became Outvote.

While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations, like MoveOn, for example, involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends.

“The way campaigns are run right now is most of the budget is spent on ads that are really low ROI — they have some effect on persuasion, but less effect on actual voter turnout,” explains Makiya. “With this effort, we’re trying to bring politics back to more of word-of-mouth and conversations between friends,” he says.

The team began working on the technology for Outvote last summer, and officially founded the company early this year.

While individuals are the app’s end users, they’re brought into the app by a campaign.

Users give the app permission to upload their phone’s contacts, which Outvote matches up with registered voter databases. That way, you’ll only be texting those who can actually go vote in your district. When the matching completes, the app has scripts that allow users to just click to text your friends a message from your own phone number.

In other words, it’s no longer a political campaign or organization bugging people to go vote via text — it’s a friend. If your friends have a problem with the unsolicited text, they’ll have to tell you.

The app also uses some sort of basic modeling to figure out who best to text, based on things like past voter history, whether that person tends to vote in the primaries, if they’re a registered Democrat and so on.

Oh, yes, that’s right — this app is built for Democratic campaigns only.

Outvote makes no apologies about the fact that it is a tool designed to help Democrats win back seats across the U.S., both on local and national levels.

“We think it’s really critical that Democrats begin to invest in and promote technology. The right is doing a much better job of investing in some of the niche technology,” says Mazen. “And, obviously, groups like Cambridge Analytica and folks have been, I would say, underhanded, in their use of technology,” he adds. “We have to work twice as hard to be twice as resolute, as a result.”

The company says it has turned down right-leaning independents and Republican campaigns that wanted to use its technology, and is instead piloting with around 50 Democratic campaigns at present. Campaigns will be charged a low monthly fee for using Outvote that will vary depending on their size. However, many of the pilot customers are using Outvote for free at this time.

The goal is to make Outvote far more affordable than the existing mass-texting services that charge as much as 30 cents per person per month, which can cost campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars at scale. Outvote aims to be around 2 to 5 cents per text, it says.

For now, its focus is on raising awareness about the candidate and their issues, and getting people to the polls. It’s not offering the sort of “call your congressman”-style outreach efforts you’ll find in some other political apps.

Outvote is also partnered with The Movement Cooperative, Represent.Us, Flippable, the DNC, Vote.org and Swing Left, according to its website.

The startup is already reporting some early successes. When used last November, it found millennials contacted through Outvote were twice as likely to vote, while non-millennials were 50 percent more likely to vote. The company doesn’t have the data yet from how it’s been doing in the primaries, but says it’s been getting good feedback from the participating campaigns.

In addition to the Y Combinator backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding from 2enable Partners ahead of Demo Day.

Outvote’s app is available on both iOS and Android.

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Apple touts iPhone gaming performance in new ad

Many people have talked about the performances of the new MacBook Pro over the past few days. But Apple focuses on the A11 Bionic chip in its new TV ad.

Named ‘Unleash’, this ad shows a young man walking down the streets of a Chinese city filled with Mobike and Ofo bikes. He’s playing a game on his phone, receiving text messages and watching a live stream on YouTube Gaming.

The game quickly becomes bigger than his phone. He fights monsters and virtual characters in the real world. The tagline says “Unleash a more powerful you”.

If you opened up the App Store today, you may have seen a promotion for Vainglory in the Today tab. That’s because this ad is all about Vainglory, a multiplayer game that works more or less like League of Legends or Dota 2.

Apple has been updating its system-on-a-chip every year to make it more performant. For the first time, Apple designed its own GPU with the A11 Bionic.

This is one of Apple’s competitive advantage against generic Android manufacturers. The company now has a clear advantage when it comes to benchmarks and gaming performance.

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Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

Facebook avoided some of the toughest inquiries from reporters yesterday during a conference call about its efforts to fight election interference and fake news. The company did provide additional transparency on important topics by subjecting itself to intense questioning from a gaggle of its most vocal critics. A few bits of interesting news did emerge:

• Facebook’s fact-checking partnerships now extend to 17 countries, up from 14 last month.
• Top searches in its new political ads archive include California, Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Florida, Kavanaugh, North Carolina, and Trump; and its API for researchers will open in August
• To give political advertisers a quicker path through its new verification system, Facebook is considering a preliminary location check that would later expire unless they verify their physical mailing address.

Yet deeper questions went unanswered. Will it be transparent about downranking accounts that spread false news? Does it know if the midterm elections are already being attacked? Are politically divisive ads cheaper?

UNITED STATES – APRIL 11: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee in Rayburn Building on the protection of user data on April 11, 2018. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call) // Flickr CC Sean P. Anderson

Here’s a selection of the most important snippets from the call, followed by a discussion of how it evaded some critical topics.

Fresh facts and perspectives

On Facebook’s approach of downranking instead of deleting fake news:

Tessa Lyons, Product Manager for the News Feed: “If you are who you say you are and you’re not violating our Community Standards, we don’t believe we should stop you from posting on Facebook. This approach means that there will be information posted on Facebook that is false and that many people, myself included, find offensive . . . Just because something is allowed to be on Facebook doesn’t mean it should get distribution . . . We know people don’t want to see false information at the top of their News Feed and we believe we have a responsibility to prevent false information from getting broad distribution. This is why our efforts to fight disinformation are focused on reducing its spread. 

–When we take action to reduce the distribution of misinformation in News Feed, what we’re doing changing the signals and predictions that inform the relevance score for each piece of content. Now, what that means is that information, that content appears lower in everyone’s News Feed who might see it, and so fewer people will actually end up encountering it. 

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

–Now, the reason that we strike that balance is because we believe we are working to strike the balance between expression and the safety of our community.

–If a piece of content or an account violates our Community Standards, it’s removed; if a Page repeatedly violates those standards, the Page is removed. On the side of misinformation — not Community Standards — if an individual piece of content is rated false, its distribution is reduced; if a Page or domain repeatedly shares false information, the entire distribution of that Page or domain is reduced.”

On how Facebook disrupts misinformation operations targeting elections:

Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy: “For each investigation, we identify particular behaviors that are common across threat actors. And then we work with our product and engineering colleagues as well as everyone else on this call to automate detection of these behaviors and even modify our products to make those behaviors much more difficult. If manual investigations are like looking for a needle in a haystack, our automated work is like shrinking that haystack. It reduces the noise in the search environment which directly stops unsophisticated threats. And it also makes it easier for our manual investigators to corner the more sophisticated bad actors. 

In turn, those investigations keep turning up new behaviors which fuels our automated detection and product innovation. Our goal is to create this virtuous circle where we use manual investigations to disrupt sophisticated threats and continually improve our automation and products based on the insights from those investigations. Look for the needle and shrink the haystack.”

TechCrunch/Bryce Durbin

On reactions to political ads labeling, improving the labeling process, and the ads archive:

Rob Leathern, Product Manager for Ads: “On the revenue question, the political ads aren’t a large part of our business from a revenue perspective but we do think it’s very important to be giving people tools so they can understand how these ads are being used 

-I do think we have definitely seen some folks have some indigestion about the process of getting authorized. We obviously think it’s an important tradeoff and it’s the right tradeoff to make. We’re definitely exploring ways to reduce the time for them from starting the authorization process to being able to place an ad. We’re considering a preliminary location check that might expire after a certain amount of time, which would then become permanent once they verify their physical mailing address and receive the letter that we send to them.

–We’re actively exploring ways to streamline the authorization process and are clarifying our policy by providing examples on what ad copy would require authorization and a label and what would not.

–We also plan to add more information to the Info and Ads tab for Pages. Today you can see when the Page was created, previous Page names, but over time we hope to add more context for people there in addition to the ads that that Page may have run as well.”

Dodged questions

On transparency about downranking accounts

Facebook has been repeatedly asked to clarify the lines it draws around content moderation. It’s arrived at a controversial policy where content is allowed even if it spreads fake news, gets downranked in News Feed if fact checkers verify the information is false, and gets deleted if it incites violence or harasses other users. Repeat offenders in the second two categories can get their whole profile, Page, or Group downranked or deleted.

But that surfaces secondary questions about how transparent it is about these decisions and their impacts on the reach of false news. Hannah Kuchler of The Financial Times and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times pushed Facebook on this topic. Specifically, the latter asked “I was wondering if you have any intention going forward to be transparent about who is going — who is down-ranked and are you keeping track of the effect that down-ranking a Page or a person in the News Feed has and do you have those kinds of internal metrics? And then is that also something that you’ll eventually make public?”

Facebook has said that if a post is fact-checked as false, it’s downranked and loses 80% of its future views through News Feed. But that ignores the fact that it can take three days for fact checkers to get to some fake news stories, so they’ve likely already received the majority of their distribution. It’s yet to explain how a false rating from fact checkers reduces the story’s total views before and after the decision, or what the ongoing reach reduction is for accounts that are downranked as a whole for repeatedly sharing false rated news.

Lyons only answered regarding what happens to individual posts rather than providing the requested information about the impact on downranked accounts:

Lyons: “If you’re asking specifically will we be transparent about the impact of fact-checking on demotions, we are already transparent about the rating that fact-checkers provide . . . In terms of how we notify Pages when they share information that’s false, any time any Page or individual shares a link that has been rated false by fact-checkers, if we already have a false rating we warn them before they share, and if we get a false rating after they share, we send them a notification. We are constantly transparent, particularly with Page admins, but also with anybody who shares information about the way in which fact-checkers have evaluated their content.”

On whether politically divisive ads are cheaper and more effective

A persistent question about Facebook’s ads auction is if it preferences inflammatory political ads over neutral ones. The auction system is designed to prioritize more engaging ads because they’re less likely to push users off the social network than boring ads, thereby reducing future ad views. The concern is that Facebook may be incentivizing political candidates and bad actors trying to interfere with elections to polarize society by making ads that stoke divisions more efficient.

Deepa Seetharaman of the The Wall Street Journal surfaced this on the call saying “I’m talking to a lot of campaign strategists coming up to the 2018 election. One theme that I continuously hear is that the more incendiary ads, do better but the effective CPMs on those particular ads are lower than, I guess, neutral or more positive messaging. Is that a dynamic that you guys are comfortable with? And is there anything that you’re doing to kind of change the kind of ads that succeeds through the Facebook ad auction system?”

Facebook’s Leathern used a similar defense Facebook has relied on to challenge questions about whether Donald Trump got cheaper ad rates during the 2016 election, claiming it was too hard to assess that given all the factors that go into determining ad prices and reach. Meanwhile, he ignored whether, regardless of the data, Facebook wanted to make changes to ensure divisive ads didn’t get preference.

Leathern: “Look, I think that it’s difficult to take a very specific slice of a single ad and use it to draw a broad inference which is one of the reasons why we think it’s important in the spirit of the transparency here to continue to offer additional transparency and give academics, journalists, experts, the ability to analyze this data across a whole bunch of ads. That’s why we’re launching the API and we’re going to be starting to test it next month. We do believe it’s important to give people the ability to take a look at this data more broadly. That, I think, is the key here — the transparency and understanding of this when seen broadly will give us a fuller picture of what is going on.”

On if there’s evidence of midterm elections interference

Facebook failed to adequately protect the 2016 US presidential election from Russian interference. Since then it’s taken a lot of steps to try to safeguard its social network, from hiring more moderators to political advertiser verification systems to artificial intelligence for fighting fake news and the fake accounts that share it.

Internal debates about approaches to the issue and a reorganization of Facebook’s security teams contributed Facebook CSO Alex Stamos’ decision to leave the company next month. Yesterday, BuzzFeed’s Ryan Mac and Charlie Warzel published an internal memo by Stamos from March urging Facebook to change. “We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access . . . We need to listen to people (including internally) when they tell us a feature is creepy or point out a negative impact we are having in the world.” And today, Facebook’s Chief Legal Officer Colin Stretch announced his departure.

Facebook efforts to stop interference aren’t likely to have completely deterred those seeking to sway or discredit our elections, though. Evidence of Facebook-based attacks on the midterms could fuel calls for government regulation, investments in counter-cyberwarfare, and Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

David McCabe of Axios and Cecilia Kang of The New York Times pushed Facebook to be clear about whether it had already found evidence of interference into the midterms. But Facebook’s Gleicher refused to specify. While it’s reasonable that he didn’t want to jeopardize Facebook or Mueller’s investigation, it’s something that Facebook should at least ask the government if it can disclose.

Gleicher: “When we find things and as we find things — and we expect that we will — we’re going to notify law enforcement and we’re going to notify the public where we can . . . And one of the things we have to be really careful with here is that as we think about how we answer these questions, we need to be careful that we aren’t compromising investigations that we might be running or investigations the government might be running.”

The answers we need

So Facebook, what’s the impact of a false rating from fact checkers on a story’s total views before and after its checked? Will you reveal when whole accounts are downranked and what the impact is on their future reach? Do politically incendiary ads that further polarize society cost less and perform better than politically neutral ads, and if so, will Facebook do anything to change that? And does Facebook already have evidence that the Russians or anyone else are interfering with the U.S. midterm elections?

We’ll see if any of the analysts who get to ask questions on today’s Facebook earnings call will step up.

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Clean Up Bad iPhone Photos With These 5 Decluttering Apps

The Traeger Timberline 850 turns BBQ from art to science

This review took a lot of pork. Over the last few months, I’ve used the Traeger Timberline 850 several times a week. Cooking on this grill is easier than using an oven. With a little bit of planning, a person can simultaneously grill a flock of chickens, a couple of pork butts and a load of veggies and have them turn out perfectly. I did, and it was the best Mother’s Day ever.

First the good.

It’s simple: This grill can cook the perfect brisket every time. It doesn’t take any skill. Just follow the instructions, and in 12-14 hours, an award-winning brisket will melt in your mouth. And therein lies the rub. This grill turns barbecuing from an art to a science.

My completely unscientific ranking of all the food I cooked on this grill:

• Brisket: 10/10
• Pork butt: 10/10
• Pork belly: 10/10
• Short ribs: 10/10
• Country style ribs: 10/10
• Beer can chicken: 8/10
• Spatchcock chicken: 8/10
• Chicken wings: 8/10
• Roasted chicken: 7/10
• Hamburgers: 7/10
• Cookies: 7/10
• Flank steak: 6/10
• Thick, general cuts of beef: 5/10

[gallery ids="1680115,1680114,1680117,1680118,1680123,1680132,1680128,1680120,1680121,1680148"]

Everything from chicken to every cut of pork to every sort of vegetable comes out nearly perfectly. Just follow the instructions, set the temperature and walk away. As long as the pellet hopper has enough fuel, most food will be a blue ribbon contender.

I cooked everything I could on this grill. It excels at long and slow. Items like ribs and pork shoulders and brisket are perfect for this grill. Poultry turns out picture perfect. The indirect nature of the grill makes a perfect tray of veggies. But the grill isn’t ideal for everything. Items that need high, direct heat aren’t great on this Traeger grill. Steaks and hamburgers aren’t as good as what comes off other grills. That’s to expected though.

The grill uses little pellets of compressed wood as fuel. Loaded in a hopper on the side of the grill, they’re gravity-fed into an auger that methodically pulls the pellets to a small firebox on the bottom of the grill where they’re burned, providing the right temperature and amount of smoke. A control panel on the front of the hopper lets the user select the desired temperature in single digit increments from 165 to 500 degrees.

Once the appropriate temperature is selected, the grill’s computer makes the necessary adjustments. Want to crank the heat from 220 degrees to 500? It takes about 10 minutes and just a twist of a dial.

I found the built-in probe thermometer accurate. It registered within a degree of my Weber meat thermometer. More importantly during my time with the grill, the meat cooked on the grill was done when the thermometer said it was done.

The Timberline 850 is one of Traeger’s largest grills though it’s not evident from the outside. That’s part of the beauty. It’s compact but can hold a crazy amount of food thanks to three deep trays. For Mother’s Day I cooked six chickens on the bottom level, a pork belly on the middle level and veggies on top, and for a little bit, they all shared the grill. Other times, I cooked four pork butts and two racks of ribs, and there was still plenty of room left.

The grill’s vertical design allows it to hold a lot of food while minimizing hot spots. This design is what sets it apart from similar pellet grills. I didn’t experience a substantial difference in cooking ability on any of the levels.

This grill comes with wifi. Traeger calls it WiFire because that’s fun. It’s handy, and I use it a lot more than I expected. The app lets users see and adjust the temperature of the grill and monitor the temperature of the meat probe. The connection is rock-solid. Past experiences with wifi-enabled appliances set the expectation that I would have to continually re-connect the grill to my network. That’s not the case. The app has never lost connection to my network. I wish there were an Alexa app so I can talk to my grill.

And now the bad.

This grill is expensive. It’s $1700. That’s crazy. I own several Weber grills, and after 20 years of practice, I can cook a chicken better on a Weber than on this Traeger grill. But it took years to get there. The Traeger makes cooking a great chicken possible from the first time. What’s more, there are a handful of Traeger competitors that offer grills with similar features for often half the price: Green Mountain Grills, Camp Chef, Z Grills, Pit Boss. Google Pellet Grills.

Is this grill worth $1700 when compared to the others? No, I don’t think so though an argument could be made around its relativity small footprint compared to its capacity. A person can cook a lot on this thing, and it doesn’t take up more room than a standard gas grill. Still, unless you’re grilling for a family of 20 every Sunday, I would look at other modes while considering this one.

I had some issues with the Timberline 850.

Grease fires. I had two over the last few months. Both were my fault, but the grill suffered. One time I had a tray overloaded with oiled veggies. Some oil seeped behind the drip plate that guards the firebox and caused a fire out of my reach. The temperature blasted to over 700 degrees, tripping a sensor and shutting off the grill. But the fire raged on for a few minutes in the closed grill. Something similar happened when I had to cook 50 of those horrible frozen hamburger patties. Grease from one dripped down the back of the grill and started a fire. Same thing: the sensor tripped and the grill shut off. But look at the rear of the grill. The paint is peeling, and I fear the steel is damaged though it feels fine.

The grill shutoff twice in the middle of an 8-hour pork butt. I caught the first time within a few minutes; the second time it ruined my pork butt. The hopper is to blame.

The hopper in this model is poorly designed. In my mind, it’s reasonable to expect most of the hopper to empty itself without user intervention. That’s not the case. The auger easily grabs the pellets and pulls them in, but the hopper is too wide. This causes the pellets to sit on the side of the container where the auger can’t reach. By my estimate, nearly 1/4 of the pellets can sit on the sidelines, useless until the owner pushes them down into the path of the auger. To be clear if the hopper is more than half full, this is not an issue. It’s when the hopper is half exhausted that the owner needs to watch the levels.

This grill does a lot of things right. It cooks like a pro. The Timberline 850 makes you, the cook, look like a pit boss. I like it a lot. Getting over the initial price is hard. $1700 is a lot for a grill when similar grills can be had for less than half. Without a direct comparison, all I can say is the Traeger Timberline 850 is a rock solid barbecue grill with a few flaws. Its design lets it hold a lot of food without taking up a lot of deck space. It excels at low and slow cooking, and for my money, that’s the best way to cook.

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Machine Learning in Google BigQuery

Posted by Umar Syed and Sergei Vassilvitskii, Research Scientists, Google AI, NYC

Google BiqQuery allows interactive analysis of large datasets, making it easy for businesses to share meaningful insights and develop solutions based on customer analytics. However, many of the businesses that are using BigQuery aren’t using machine learning to help better understand the data they are generating. This is because data analysts, proficient in SQL, may not have the traditional data science background needed to apply machine learning techniques.

Today we’re announcing BigQuery ML, a capability inside BigQuery that allows data scientists and analysts to build and deploy machine learning models on massive structured or semi-structured datasets. BigQuery ML is a set of simple SQL language extensions which enables users to utilize popular ML capabilities, performing predictive analytics like forecasting sales and creating customer segmentations right at the source, where they already store their data. BigQuery ML additionally sets smart defaults automatically and takes care of data transformation, leading to a seamless and easy to use experience with great results.

When designing the BigQuery ML backend, the team was faced with a dilemma. Transferring large amounts of data from BigQuery servers to special-purpose servers running machine learning algorithms would be time-consuming and would incur an overhead in terms of security and privacy considerations. However, because the core components of gradient descent — an optimization method that is the workhorse of machine learning algorithms — can be implemented using common SQL operations^*, we were able to repurpose the existing BigQuery SQL processing engine for BigQuery ML.

Since the BigQuery engine is designed to efficiently scan large datasets rather than randomly draw small samples from them, BigQuery ML is based on the standard (batch) variant of gradient descent rather than the stochastic version. And while stochastic gradient descent is far more common in today’s large-scale machine learning systems, the batch variant has numerous practical advantages.

For example, in-database machine learning systems based on stochastic gradient descent process examples one by one, and can perform poorly when the data is suboptimally ordered. But BigQuery data is often distributed on disk so as to optimize the performance of regular SQL queries, and continually redistributing the data to support stochastic machine learning algorithms would be computationally expensive. In contrast, batch gradient descent is insensitive to the ordering and partitioning of data on disk, thereby completely circumventing this problem. Also, batch methods can be combined with line search techniques from the classical optimization literature, leading to a learning algorithm that is more stable and requires less fine tuning. Using line search with stochastic methods is far trickier. Our implementation also includes support for regularization and preconditioning. For more details, please see our paper.

We hope that you’ll find BigQuery ML useful for many predictive analytics tasks. To try it, visit the BigQuery console and follow the user guide. Creating a model is as simple as:

CREATE MODEL dataset.model_name
  OPTIONS(model_type=’linear_reg’, input_label_cols=[‘input_label’])
AS SELECT * FROM input_table; 

In the future, we plan to further integrate our gradient descent implementation with BigQuery infrastructure to realize more performance gains. We’re also going to explore other machine learning algorithms that can be easily and efficiently implemented for large-scale problems by leveraging the power of BigQuery.

Acknowledgements
BigQuery ML is the result of a large collaboration across many teams at Google. Key contributors and sponsors include Hossein Ahmadi, Corinna Cortes, Grzegorz Czajkowski, Mingge Deng, Amir Hormati, Abhishek Kashyap, Jing Jing Long, Dan McClary, Chris Meyers, Girishkumar Sabhnani, Vivek Sharma, Jordan Tigani, Chad Verbowski, Jiaxun Wu and Lisa Yin.

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* For example, a gradient vector can be computed using the SUM and GROUP BY operators, and the weights of a model can be updated using an INNER JOIN.^↩

Virtu teams up with Google to bring its end-to-end encryption service to Google Drive

Virtu, which is best known for its email encryption service for both enterprises and consumers, is announcing a partnership with Google today that will bring the company’s encryption technology to Google Drive.

Only a few years ago, the company was still bolting its solution on top of Gmail without Google’s blessing, but these days, Google is fully on board with Virtu’s plans.

Its new Data Protection for Google Drive extends its service for Gmail to Google’s online file storage service. It ensures that files are encrypted before upload, which ensures the files remain protected, even when they are shared outside of an organization. The customer remains in full control of the encryption keys, so Google, too, has no access to these files, and admins can set and manage access policies by document, folder and team drive.

Virtu’s service uses the Trusted Data Format, an open standard the company’s CTO Will Ackerly developed at the NSA.

While it started as a hack, Virtu is Google’s only data protection partner for G Suite today, and its CEO John Ackerly tells me the company now gets what he and his team are trying to achieve. Indeed, Virtu now has a team of engineers that works with Google. As John Ackerly also noted, GDPR and the renewed discussion around data privacy is helping it gain traction in many businesses, especially in Europe, where the company is opening new offices to support its customers there. In total, about 8,000 organization now use its services.

It’s worth noting that while Virtu is announcing this new Google partnership today, the company also supports email encryption in Microsoft’s Office 365 suite.

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Google Drive will hit a billion users this week

Google loves to talk about how it has seven products with more than a billion users. Those are its flagship search service, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Android and the Google Play Store. Indeed, Android actually has more than 2 billion users now. Later this week, we will be able to add an eighth service to this list: Google Drive, the company’s online file storage service that launched back in 2012.

The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco — though somehow it doesn’t want to commit to saying that Drive has already hit that billion user number, or when exactly it’ll do so. “Later this week,” is about as good as it gets right now, but if you want to buy some fireworks to celebrate, you probably still have a day or two to prepare.

It’s actually been a while since we last got any updated stats about Google Drive. At last year’s Google I/O conference in May, the company said that Drive now stored 2 trillion files and that it had over 800 million daily active users. At this year’s Google I/O, the company didn’t offer any updated numbers for Drive, likely because it was still waiting to cross the billion users number.

Over the course of the last year, Google launched a number of business-focused features for Drive, including Team Drives and Drive File Stream, as well as new machine learning-powered features for all users. The company also launched its new Drive-centric backup and sync tool for Mac and PC last summer.

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Google’s big redesign for Gmail is now generally available for enterprise G Suite customers

Google is running its playbook again of releasing big new products (or redesigns) to its average users and then moving what works over to its enterprise services, G Suite, today by making the Gmail redesign generally available to G Suite customers.

Gmail’s redesign launched for consumers in April earlier this year, including new features like self-destructing messages, email snoozing and other new features in addition to a little bit of a new look for the service that has more than 1 billion users. All those services are useful for consumers, but they might actually have more palatable use cases within larger companies that have to have constant communication with anywhere from a few to thousands of employees. Email hell is a common complaint for, well, basically every single user on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or anywhere else people can speak publicly to any kind of network, and any attempts to tackle that — that work, at least — could have pretty substantial ramifications.

Google is directly competing with other enterprise mail services, especially as it looks to make G Suite a go-to set of enterprise tools for larger companies. It’s a nice, consistent business that can grow methodically, which is a kind of revenue stream that Wall Street loves and can cover the potential trip-ups in other divisions. Google has also made a big push in its cloud efforts, especially on the server front with its competitors for Microsoft and Azure — which doesn’t make it that surprising that Google is announcing this at what is effectively its cloud conference, Google Cloud Next 2018 in San Francisco.

The new Gmail uses machine learning to find threat indicators across a huge bucket of messages to tackle some of the lowest-hanging fruit, like potential phishing attacks, that could compromise a company’s security and potentially cost millions of dollars. Google says those tools protect users from almost 10 million spam and malicious emails every minute, and the new update also gives G Suite users access to those security features, as well as offline access and the redesigned security warnings that Google included in its consumer-focused redesign.

Whether companies will adopt this redesign — or at least what rate they will — remains to be seen, as even small tweaks to any kind of software that has a massive amount of engagement can potentially interrupt the workflow of users. We’ve seen that happen before with Facebook users losing it over small changes to News Feed, and while enterprise Gmail is definitely a different category, Google has to take care to ensure that those small changes don’t interrupt the everyday use cases for enterprise users. If companies are going to pay Google for something like this, they have to get it right.

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Google is rolling out a version of Google Voice for enterprise G Suite customers

Google today said it will be rolling out an enterprise version of its Google Voice service for G Suite users, potentially tapping a new demand source for Google that could help attract a whole host of new users.

Google voice has been a long-enjoyed service for everyday consumers, and offers a lot of benefits beyond just having a normal phone number. The enterprise version of Google Voice appears to give companies a way to offer those kinds of tools, including AI-powered parts of it like voicemail transcription, that employees may be already using and potentially skirting the guidelines of a company. Administrators can provision and port phone numbers, get detailed reports and set up call routing functionality. They can also deploy phone numbers to departments or employees, giving them a sort of universal number that isn’t tied to a device — and making it easier to get in touch with someone where necessary.

All of this is an effort to spread adoption of G Suite among larger enterprises as it offers a nice consistent business for Google. While its advertising business continues to grow, the company is investing in cloud products as another revenue stream. That division offers a lot of overhead while Google figures out where the actual total market capture of its advertising is and starts to work on other projects like its hardware, Google Home, and others.

While Google didn’t explicitly talk about it ahead of the conference today, there’s another potential opportunity for something like this: call centers. An enterprise version of Google Voice could give companies a way to provision out certain phone numbers to employees to handle customer service requests and get a lot of information about those calls. Google yesterday announced that it was rolling out a more robust set of call center tools that lean on its expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and getting control of the actual numbers that those calls take in is one part of that equation.

There’s also a spam filtering feature, which will probably be useful in handling waves of robo-calls for various purposes. It’s another product that Google is porting over to its enterprise customers with a bit better controls for CTOs and CIOs after years of understanding how normal consumers are using it and having an opportunity to rigorously test parts of the product. That time also gives Google an opportunity to thoroughly research the gaps in the product that enterprise customers might need in order to sell them on the product.

Google Voice enterprise is going to be available as an early adopter product.

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10 Printable Handwriting Worksheets to Practice Cursive

Handwriting is becoming a lost art. Many schools in the United States don’t teach it anymore. And maybe you’ve noticed your handwriting getting sloppy over the years.

Kids aren’t the only ones who should learn and practice good handwriting—adults should too. Free handwriting worksheets could help you do just that.

Here are some awesome websites where you can download free worksheets for cursive handwriting practice.

1. WorksheetWorks.com

WorksheetWorks.com allows you to create a custom worksheet for cursive handwriting practice.

Customize your practice worksheet with the Handwriting Options and custom text will be rendered using traditional cursive lettering.

The website is in Public Beta Preview, so there may be some quirks and many parts are not available yet. You may notice some features and resources may move or be removed for a while.

They provide this service for free, but not all materials are available for free. They encourage you to sign up for an annual membership for $14.95. Membership supports the site and gives you access to all the materials on the site.

2. HandwritingPractice.net

HandwritingPractice.net provides many ways to customize cursive handwriting practice worksheets. You can create the letters from dots for tracing or make hollow, outlined letters to trace inside.

Add a title and the text you want for tracing and watch it appear on the worksheet. Change the letter style and size or the color of the text, lines, and arrows.

3. HandwritingWorksheets.com

Visit Handwritingworksheets.com to create custom, perfectly connected, cursive handwriting worksheets. No matter what you type, the cursive letters are correctly connected. Their program analyzes each letter you type and perfectly connects it to the previous letter. And each letter appears on the worksheet in real time.

You have control over your worksheet’s appearance. Customize the letter size and color, line color, and whether you want to show arrows on your letters or starting dots to show where to start.

Add a single word, a name and a sentence, several different words, or a paragraph to your worksheet. Then, send the worksheet to your printer, or print it to PDF.

4. Studenthandouts.com

If you’re looking for a quick solution for a cursive handwriting practice worksheet, Studenthandouts.com have a few ready-made ones available. They have a large list of worksheets you can print, some for practicing printed handwriting and some for cursive handwriting.

These worksheets cannot be customized.

You can print the PDF files in your browser or download them (right-click on the link and select the option to save it).

5. Softschools.com

SoftSchools.com offers many types of free worksheets, including math worksheets, math games, grammar quizzes, and handwriting worksheets.

The handwriting worksheets are not customizable. Scroll through the list and click the one you want. It displays in a box on the current tab where you can either download or print it.

6. Kidzone.ws

Kidzone.ws provides ready-to-use printable cursive handwriting practice worksheets. You can’t customize these worksheets, but they are organized in groups that are formed in a similar manner, like round letters, loopy letters, and lumpy letters.

If you’re teaching, use the worksheets in the order listed on the site. Each worksheet builds on the previous ones, which is important when learning cursive, so your students correctly learn to connect the cursive letters.

7. K12reader.com

The cursive practice worksheets at k12reader.com provide practice writing each cursive letter in capital and lowercase form multiple times on one line each. Then the letter is combined as letter pairs and as words.

You can download or print a worksheet for each letter in PDF format.

8. Education.com

The cursive handwriting practice worksheets on Education.com provide practice writing each letter of the alphabet in uppercase and lowercase and a sentence featuring the letter.

You can have your students apply their new cursive handwriting skills with their writing sentences worksheets.

9. Allkidsnetwork.com

Like k12reader.com and Education.com, Allkidsnetwork.com provides free cursive handwriting practice worksheets for each letter of the alphabet. But they also offer several that allow students to practice writing sentences using the cursive letters they learned.

You can preview, download, and print each worksheet.

10. CursiveLogic.com

CursiveLogic.com works differently than the other websites we’ve listed here. You sign up for free and receive cursive handwriting practice worksheets in your email inbox on a regular basis.

The CursiveLogic program teaches the essential structure of the cursive alphabet, rather than having students memorize the cursive alphabet. They teach similarly shaped letters together, having students connect the letters as they write them. Students never write letters on their own, disconnected from other letters. Letters are always written as a connected string.

Learn more about how the CursiveLogic teaching method works.

Don’t Let the Art of Handwriting Die Out

Handwriting is important and cursive handwriting should be taught to kids. It keeps them connected to family members, like parents and grandparents, through their notes, letters, and journals.

If you are looking for a more structured course, then Udemy offers a handwriting course called Improve Your Handwriting: Improve Your Life, which can be enrolled in for as little as $9.99 when it’s on sale.

Do you handwrite faster than you can type on your phone? You can handwrite notes on paper and then convert your handwriting to text using optical character recognition (OCR).

Handwriting training can improve your creativity and we’ve covered more fantastic resources for improving your handwriting. Shock a friend or family member and send them a handwritten letter!

Read the full article: 10 Printable Handwriting Worksheets to Practice Cursive

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