Everything You Should Know About the Amazon Echo Spot

Amazon’s Echo line of connected speakers continues to grow. So far in 2017, we’ve seen the introduction of the second-generation Echo, Echo Plus, the style-conscious Echo Look, and top-of-the-line Echo Show. And Amazon isn’t done just yet for the year. The Echo Spot is the latest unique device to feature the Alexa voice assistant. Introducing Echo Spot - Black Introducing Echo Spot - Black Echo Spot is designed to fit anywhere in your home. Use 2nd generation far-field voice recognition to watch video flash briefings, see music lyrics, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, browse and listen to Audible audiobooks,...

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Get Call of Duty: WWII For Less Than Black Friday’s Price

You know what’s awesome? Missing a Black Friday deal only to have the item come up cheaper just a few days later. That’s exactly what’s happening right now with the latest Call of Duty game on Amazon! Call of Duty: WWII Call of Duty: WWII - PlayStation 4 Standard Edition Call of Duty: WWII - PlayStation 4 Standard Edition Call of Duty returns to its roots with Call of Duty: WWII-a breathtaking experience that redefines World War II for a new gaming generation Buy Now At Amazon $37.99 On Black Friday, a few different retailers had Call of Duty: WWII for...

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BlackBerry will pay Nokia $137 million over a contract dispute

 It’s been a while since Nokia and BlackBerry were bitter smartphone rivals, but there’s plenty of bad blood left between the two companies. This morning, BlackBerry threw in towel on battle, agreeing to pay Nokia $137 million to the Finnish company. The award stems from a 2016 dispute over patent licensing contract. The details of the contract aren’t clear, but the… Read More

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Apple’s hand is down and its $1 trillion dream now rests with consumers

 As we head into the end of 2017, it’s pretty safe to say that Apple’s fate — barring any major issue with its phones — is now in the hands of its consumers. With the iPhone X now in stores (if you catch them at the right time), Apple has now laid down its hand and waits to see where consumer demand lands. Read More

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Periscope expands virtual tipping via Super Hearts beyond the U.S.

 Twitter’s big push to draw in more live video stars to its Periscope streaming service is now expanding beyond the U.S. The company announced today the Periscope Super Broadcaster program, which allows video stars to earn revenue from their streams through a virtual tipping mechanism, is now available in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. Other countries will be added to the program soon,… Read More
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18 Creative Photography Ideas for Beginners to Improve Their Skills

As a beginning photographer, it can be hard to come up with photography ideas. What should you take pictures of? It seems like such a simple question, but figuring out where to point your camera or smartphone can be surprisingly difficult. These 18 photography ideas for beginners will have you snapping away in no time. From toys to animals to the night sky, cool photography ideas abound. All you need to do is start snapping! 1. A Rubik’s Cube Let’s start with something simple. Many of us have a Rubik’s cube lying around somewhere, probably in your basement or attic...

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Periscope expands virtual tipping via Super Hearts beyond the U.S.

 Twitter’s big push to draw in more live video stars to its Periscope streaming service is now expanding beyond the U.S. The company announced today the Periscope Super Broadcaster program, which allows video stars to earn revenue from their streams through a virtual tipping mechanism, is now available in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. Other countries will be added to the program soon,… Read More

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Tinder tests a new feature that uses A.I. to suggest who to ‘Super Like’

 If you’ve ever quickly swiped through Tinder, you know that sometimes your fingers can get away from you – and, all of a sudden, you’ve Super Liked someone without meaning to. Oops! Tinder today is addressing that problem with a new feature now testing in select markets that will make Super Liking a more intentional experience. Called “Super Likable,” the feature… Read More
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Tinder tests a new feature that uses A.I. to suggest who to ‘Super Like’

 If you’ve ever quickly swiped through Tinder, you know that sometimes your fingers can get away from you – and, all of a sudden, you’ve Super Liked someone without meaning to. Oops! Tinder today is addressing that problem with a new feature now testing in select markets that will make Super Liking a more intentional experience. Called “Super Likable,” the feature… Read More

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Is Face ID on the iPhone X Any Good?

Gone is the home button. Gone is the fingerprint scanner. It’s time to make way for Face ID, Apple’s new method of identifying and authorizing users using facial recognition. There was a lot of concern that Apple’s Touch ID replacement would be flaky, slow, and less preferable to the at-times inconsistent fingerprint scanner. It’s likely Face ID will soon replace all instances of Touch ID, on all iPhones. So is it any good? Yes, It’s Brilliant You can stop worrying now, because Face ID is a great example of Apple’s tendency to wait for a technology to mature before implementing...

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7 Reasons Why VPNs Might Die Out by 2020

You’ve signed up to a VPN, and you’re happy with the privacy it brings to your online activities. Maybe you use for safety on public Wi-Fi, or to beat region-blocking restrictions on your favorite streaming sites. But what if we told you that the VPN (at least in its current form) is in danger of dying out? You might be doubtful, so here are seven problems with VPNs that need fixing, sooner rather than later. 1. The NSA Can Break VPN Encryption Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth: the NSA has the technology to break your VPN’s encryption. The overwhelming...

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How to Edit and Organize Your Images With the New macOS Photos

Apple’s Photos app has undergone a serious overhaul in the past few versions of macOS. The latest version has some solid editing capabilities — enough that it makes a great replacement for Picasa. If you haven’t looked at Photos in a while (and I certainly wouldn’t blame you), it’s time to get reacquainted. Adding Photos Getting your photos into the app couldn’t be easier. Go to File > Import to select a folder and bring in photos. Or connect a camera or your phone to import images directly from the device. Both of these options let you review the photos...

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10 Christmas Party Games You Must Play This Holiday

The holidays are upon us once again, and that means festive cheer for everyone. From family dinners to parties and gatherings with friends and even coworkers, there are a lot of activities to do during the holiday season. One of the best ways to celebrate is with a social gathering, and this means busting out some lighthearted games. Whether you’re planning an office party (more great non-festive games) for your crew or just attending one, these fun games are sure to please all! 1. Cards Against Humanity Holiday Packs If you’ve ever gone to a party, then you’ve probably played...

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Waze Now Offers Hands-Free Navigation for Drivers

Waze has added three oft-requested features to its Android and iOS apps. This includes adding a mode optimized for motorcyclists, adding support for high-occupancy vehicle lanes, and introducing hands-free navigation for drivers. This is reason enough to give Waze another try. While many of us use Google Maps to get from A-B, there is another alternative in the form of Waze. For the uninitiated, Waze offers realtime navigation with extra layers of information, and it’s a fantastic resource. And now, thanks to a new update, Waze is more useful than ever. These Three New Features Improve Waze The first new...

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Create the unholy DIY union of Alexa and Furby this weekend

 As we approach the End Times there will be great signs and portents. They say the dead will rise and walk the earth. Great fire will come from the sky and burn the wicked and the good alike. A Furby will speak in the voice of Alexa. The Turtle of the Universe will cough up her young to pass judgement on our collective consciousness. At least one of those things has just come true. In this… Read More

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How to Delete Your Google Chrome History

Do you wish you could wipe your Google Chrome search history and start with a clean slate? Luckily, it’s both possible and easy to do! There are a few benefits to deleting your search history. First and foremost is privacy. Of course, Google will still have all your search history on file, but it’ll stop prying family members from seeing what you have been looking at. Second, it’ll stop your browser from autocompleting websites you’ve previously visited and search terms you’ve previously looked for. If you’ve recently changed employer or moved to a new city, it might be useful. So,...

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Free Games for PS Plus & Xbox Live in December 2017

It’s time for the final free games of 2017 for PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold subscribers. 2017 has been a great year for games, and December will bring a few more freebies to close out the year! PlayStation Plus First up, on PS4, you can grab Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition. This is a remaster of the second game in the action-adventure Darksiders series, where you play as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The other PS4 title is Kung Fu Panda: Showdown of Legendary Legends. It’s basically a cheap movie tie-in clone of Super Smash Bros. It’s...

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Pinterest business lead Tim Kendall is leaving the company

 Pinterest president Tim Kendall, who has since joining in 2012 overseen the growth of the startup’s advertising business and launch of a wide array of ad products, is leaving the company at the end of the year. Kendall oversaw the company’s business operations for the past five years as it sought to grow from a niche advertising product in experimental budgets to something worth… Read More
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Twitter Lite with lower data usage becomes available in 24 new countries

 Twitter is rolling out its “Lite” version, after a successful trial in the Philippines. The Android app will become available in two dozen countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. Not too different from Facebook Lite, Twitter has also built a version of its app that’s optimized for developing countries. Twitter Lite minimizes data usage,… Read More
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Google Home learns how to multitask

 Google’s smart speaker got a little smarter this week, with the addition of a multitasking feature. The new capability makes it possible for the device to accomplish two different missions at the same time. It was rolled out with little fanfare and first noted by CNET. We’ve since confirmed the addition with Google. It’s a bit surprising that the company rolled it out to… Read More

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Google Home learns how to multitask

 Google’s smart speaker got a little smarter this week, with the addition of a multitasking feature. The new capability make it possible for the device to accomplish two different missions at the same time. It was rolled out with little fanfare and first noted by CNET. We’ve since confirmed the addition with Google. It’s a bit surprising that the company rolled it out to… Read More
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Understanding Bias in Peer Review

Posted by Andrew Tomkins, Director of Engineering and William D. Heavlin, Statistician, Google Research

In the 1600’s, a series of practices came into being known collectively as the “scientific method.” These practices encoded verifiable experimentation as a path to establishing scientific fact. Scientific literature arose as a mechanism to validate and disseminate findings, and standards of scientific peer review developed as a means to control the quality of entrants into this literature. Over the course of development of peer review, one key structural question remains unresolved to the current day: should the reviewers of a piece of scientific work be made aware of the identify of the authors? Those in favor argue that such additional knowledge may allow the reviewer to set the work in perspective and evaluate it more completely. Those opposed argue instead that the reviewer may form an opinion based on past performance rather than the merit of the work at hand.

Existing academic literature on this subject describes specific forms of bias that may arise when reviewers are aware of the authors. In 1968, Merton proposed the Matthew effect, whereby credit goes to the best established researchers. More recently, Knobloch-Westerwick et al. proposed a Matilda effect, whereby papers from male-first authors were considered to have greater scientific merit that those from female-first authors. But with the exception of one classical study performed by Rebecca Blank in 1991 at the American Economic Review, there have been few controlled experimental studies of such effects on reviews of academic papers.

Last year we had the opportunity to explore this question experimentally, resulting in “Reviewer bias in single- versus double-blind peer review,” a paper that just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Working with Professor Min Zhang of Tsinghua University, we performed an experiment during the peer review process of the 10th ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM 2017) to compare the behavior of reviewers under single-blind and double-blind review. Our experiment ran as follows:

1. We invited a number of experts to join the conference Program Committee (PC).
2. We randomly split these PC members into a single-blind cadre and a double-blind cadre.
3. We asked all PC members to “bid” for papers they were qualified to review, but only the single-blind cadre had access to the names and institutions of the paper authors.
4. Based on the resulting bids, we then allocated two single-blind and two double-blind PC members to each paper.
5. Each PC member read his or her assigned papers and entered reviews, again with only single-blind PC members able to see the authors and institutions.

At this point, we closed our experiment and performed the remainder of the conference reviewing process under the single-blind model. As a result, we were able to assess the difference in bidding and reviewing behavior of single-blind and double-blind PC members on the same papers. We discovered a number of surprises.

Our first finding shows that compared to their double-blind counterparts, single-blind PC members tend to enter higher scores for papers from top institutions (the finding holds for both universities and companies) and for papers written by well-known authors. This suggests that a paper authored by an up-and-coming researcher might be reviewed more negatively (by a single-blind PC member) than exactly the same paper written by an established star of the field.

Digging a little deeper, we show some additional findings related to the “bidding process,” in which PC members indicate which papers they would like to review. We found that single-blind PC members (a) bid for about 22% fewer papers than their double-blind counterparts, and (b) bid preferentially for papers from top schools and companies. Finding (a) is especially intriguing; with no author information reviewers have less information, arguably making the job of weighing the merit of each paper more difficult. Yet, the double-blind reviewers bid for more work, not less, than their single-blind counterparts. This suggests that double-blind reviewers become more engaged in the review process. Finding (b) is less surprising, but nonetheless enlightening: In the presence of author names and institution, this information is incorporated into the reviewers’ bids. All else being equal, the odds that single-blind reviewers bid on papers from top institutions is about 15 percent above parity.

We also studied whether the actual or perceived gender of authors influenced the behavior of single-blind versus double-blind reviewers. Here the results are a little more nuanced. Compared to double-blind reviewers, we saw about a 22% decrease in the odds that a single-blind reviewer would give a female-authored paper a favorable review, but due to the smaller count of female-authored papers this result was not statistically significant. In an extended version of our paper, we consider our study as well as a range of other studies in the literature and perform a “meta-analysis” of all these results. From this larger pool of observations, the combined results do show a significant finding for the gender effect.

To conclude, we see that the practice of double-blind reviewing yields a denser landscape of bids, which may result in a better allocation of papers to qualified reviewers. We also see that reviewers who see author and institution information tend to bid more for papers from top institutions, and are more likely to vote to accept papers from top institutions or famous authors than their double-blind counterparts. This offers some evidence to suggest that a particular piece of work might be accepted under single-blind review if the authors are famous or come from top institutions, but rejected otherwise. Of course, the situation remains complex: double-blind review imposes an administrative burden on conference organizers, reduces the opportunity to detect several varieties of conflict of interest, and may in some cases be difficult to implement due to the existence of pre-prints or long-running research agendas that are well-known to experts in the field. Nonetheless, we recommend that journal editors and conference chairs carefully consider the merits of double-blind review.

Please take a look at our full paper for more details of our study.

6 Reasons Why You Should NOT Buy a Bluetooth Keyboard

A Bluetooth keyboard offers a winning combination of portability and cross-device compatibility — but they’re not perfect for everyone. While there are Bluetooth keyboards out there worth buying, you should be aware that they come with trade-offs. For example, gamers, coders, and writers should use wired keyboards, which tend to offer better reliability, functionality, and security. Should you get one? Here are six reasons why you may want to rethink the Bluetooth keyboard. 1. Durable Keyboards Have Better Value The keyboard remains one of the few computer components that never goes obsolete. With PS2-to-USB adapters, many mechanical keyboards from thirty years ago remain useful today. And why would...

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How to Build a Great Media Center PC

This guide will take you through the various available options for a home media center (also known as Home Theatre Personal Computers or HTPCs). More and more people are changing to the cord cutting lifestyle, eschewing traditional television networks for streaming services and alternative methods of viewing live television.This guide is available to download as a free PDF. Download How to Build a Great Media Center PC now. Feel free to copy and share this with your friends and family. From simple, pre-made solutions through to home built dedicated media machines and the software required for them, this guide should...

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Google Cloud brings in former Intel exec Diane Bryant as COO

 There are now two Dianes running the show at Google Cloud. The company announced that Diane Bryant has been hired as the COO of the division. She joins Diane Greene, who came on board as Senior VP of Google Cloud in November 2015. Greene appeared to be excited about the prospect of her joining the team. “I can’t think of a person with more relevant experience and talents. She is… Read More
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