25 More Insanely Useful Websites You Might Need Someday

The internet is filled with websites. Billions of them. Some are useful, some, not so much. Some of the useful websites are quite popular, and rightly so—a tool like Canva is a life saver for easy web graphics. Then you have helpful tools like Down for Everyone or Just Me.

But there are many other useful websites beyond the ones you may know about. The fun is in discovering them. Fortunately, we went ahead and did the hard work for you.

1. Student.com

If you are looking for cheap accommodation as an international student, this website helps you search for a home near your college/university or a neighborhood of your preference. The site covers around 400 cities and their service is for free!

2. Inner Body

The interactive guide to human anatomy. It is an easy way to study the human anatomy classified precisely into different segments theoretically as well as visually. This is a useful website to teach students in school with interactive tools to view the various human internal systems in 2D as well as 3D.

3. KissPNG

This website provides free high definition images without the background. Search for more than one million PNG images absolutely free for your brochures, banners, websites, etc. The website provides unlimited downloads.

4. Pixlr

Edit pictures without Photoshop or any other high-end software. Pixlr is an easy to use software that doesn’t need installation and is absolutely free. You can edit your images in your browser or download the app on your phone to edit pictures without any complicated tools!

5. Pixabay

Shutterstock can be really expensive at times so here comes Pixabay to save your day. Million of royalty free images to download along with illustrations, videos, and vector graphics. All of it free! Suitable for beginner level graphic designers or non-designers who want to dabble in basic designing.

6. Privnote

Send a note that can self-destruct after it’s read. Emails sometimes cannot be private enough and sometimes you just forget to delete sensitive information. This is an easy to use website to make sure there is no data recovery of intensely sensitive notes.

7. Skyscanner

If you’re on a budget or if you’re trying to save money on your travels, this is the perfect site for you. This is a perfect website to find cheaper flights that even Google shows on its list. Apart from the flights it also shows cheaper hotels to stay in or a pocket-friendly car to hire.

8. Spotahome

Apartments or rooms for renting mid to long term. This site has people check for the properties personally, has a virtual video tour of the entire apartment as well as HD pictures of the properties. Currently, they are covering almost 30 cities in Europe. Suited best for students and backpackers in Europe.

9. Uniplaces

Another great website for students looking for affordable accommodations in Europe with a bigger list of cities and an even more helpful staff. The site is also affiliated with various colleges and universities in Europe to provide certain discounts to their students. They also provide free help for the first 7 days.

10. Bachelor Studies

This website finds a Bachelor’s Program or Degree for you according to your preference of the country, language, cost, part-time or full time and much more. It also gives a list of top destinations to study in your home country. It also enquires details about the course from your side if you create an account & add the universities in your interested list.

11. Computer Hope

Keyboard shortcuts can drastically increase your productivity. Computer Hope teaches the basic shortcut keys as well as lists the shortcuts for various software that are used by an average computer user.

12. Lucidchart

An easy to use website that converts your data into a neat diagram. A great way to make flowcharts, task flows, and even wireframes. You do not need to install any software, just get things done on the website along with collaborations with your team or colleagues using any device, across any platforms.

13. Swole

The automatic diet planner. Lets you plan your grocery list, your meals according to calories you need to consume and has a food bank that shows the detailed nutrition list of all kinds of food. Helps you keep a proper diet and divides it into different frequencies of meals according to your liking.

14. Mega

Dropbox and Google Drive limit your storage online after a mere 15 GBs. Mega gives you 50GB of free storage after you create an account. It is secure and runs on all the platforms.

15. Tinycards By Duolingo

Flashcards make learning easier, especially when it comes to languages. This fun website by Duolingo is a simpler version to remember words using flashcards and allows you to create your own deck on any topic of your choice with either text or pictures!

16. Diff Checker

A perfect way to find out if your document has been changed by someone else. It allows you to find the differences between two pieces of text and compare them. Just got an updated piece back from your editor? Use Diff Checker to find out exactly what your editor changed.

17. Dillinger

Dillinger is an online cloud-enabled HTML5 Markdown editor. It is mobile friendly and provides offline storage. Using Dillinger, you can export clean markdown to HTML, drag and drop images and more. Dillinger is perfect for bloggers and developers alike.

18. Fast

Be it a mobile hotspot, an airport Wi-Fi, mobile data or your office broadband. Check the current speed of your internet connection on this website that is minimal and to-the-point.

19. Dictation.io

Dictate your emails and documents in Google Chrome with any language you speak. Dictation.io accurately transcribes speech to text in real time. It allows you to add smileys, paragraphs and even punctuations using the voice commands!

20. FlightStats

Be it a globetrotter, student, businessman or just a concerned parent. This website allows you to track any flight all over the world from anywhere. Just enter the flight number and get the real-time location or status of the flight!

21. Every Time Zone

Calculating different time zones can be a headache most of the time. This site is a less confusing view of the world’s time zones with reference to yours.

22. PDF Escape

This PDF editor lets you easily edit a PDF or a PDF form online without using Adobe Acrobat or any other software. Did we mention that it’s free?

23. Infogram

This website not only allows you to create stunning infographics but also lets you create charts, reports, social media visuals and a custom dashboard to keep track of the inner as well as outer workings of your business.

24. Snopes

If you are the one looking for online deals to save money then this website is perfect for you. Snopes allows you to find out whether that email deal received is real or just another scam!

25. Slide.ly

A do-it-yourself tool to make your own promotional videos. It is the only digital video service that provides you with premium video footages, licensed music, and amazing copy to create instant promotional videos at affordable prices.

Be a Part of the Web Culture

These are just some websites on the web you can use to cover little needs here and there. The internet machine chugs on every day, so bookmark our previous collection of the most useful websites.

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MnasNet: Towards Automating the Design of Mobile Machine Learning Models

Posted by Mingxing Tan, Software Engineer, Google Brain Team

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in image classification, face recognition, object detection, and many other domains. Unfortunately, designing CNNs for mobile devices is challenging because mobile models need to be small and fast, yet still accurate. Although significant effort has been made to design and improve mobile models, such as MobileNet and MobileNetV2, manually creating efficient models remains challenging when there are so many possibilities to consider. Inspired by recent progress on AutoML neural architecture search, we wondered if the design of mobile CNN models could also benefit from an AutoML approach.

In “MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile”, we explore an automated neural architecture search approach for designing mobile models using reinforcement learning. To deal with mobile speed constraints, we explicitly incorporate the speed information into the main reward function of the search algorithm, so that the search can identify a model that achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed. In doing so, MnasNet is able to find models that run 1.5x faster than state-of-the-art hand-crafted MobileNetV2 and 2.4x faster than NASNet, while reaching the same ImageNet top 1 accuracy.

Unlike in previous architecture search approaches, where model speed is considered via another proxy (e.g., FLOPS), our approach directly measures model speed by executing the model on a particular platform, e.g., Pixel phones which were used in this research study. In this way, we can directly measure what is achievable in real-world practice, given that each type of mobile devices has its own software and hardware idiosyncrasies and may require different architectures for the best trade-offs between accuracy and speed.

The overall flow of our approach consists mainly of three components: a RNN-based controller for learning and sampling model architectures, a trainer that builds and trains models to obtain the accuracy, and an inference engine for measuring the model speed on real mobile phones using TensorFlow Lite. We formulate a multi-objective optimization problem that aims to achieve both high accuracy and high speed, and utilize a reinforcement learning algorithm with a customized reward function to find Pareto optimal solutions (e.g., models that have the highest accuracy without worsening speed).

Overall flow of our automated neural architecture search approach for Mobile.

In order to strike the right balance between search flexibility and search space size, we propose a novel factorized hierarchical search space, which factorizes a convolutional neural network into a sequence of blocks, and then uses a hierarchical search space to determine the layer architecture for each block. In this way, our approach allows different layers to use different operations and connections; Meanwhile, we force all layers in each block to share the same structure, thus significantly reducing the search space size by orders of magnitude compared to a flat per-layer search space.

Our MnasNet network, sampled from the novel factorized hierarchical search space,illustrating the layer diversity throughout the network architecture.

We tested the effectiveness of our approach on ImageNet classification and COCO object detection. Our experiments achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy under typical mobile speed constraints. In particular, the figure below shows the results on ImageNet.

ImageNet Accuracy and Inference Latency comparison. MnasNets are our models.

With the same accuracy, our MnasNet model runs 1.5x faster than the hand-crafted state-of-the-art MobileNetV2, and 2.4x faster than NASNet, which also used architecture search. After applying the squeeze-and-excitation optimization, our MnasNet+SE models achieve ResNet-50 level top-1 accuracy at 76.1%, with 19x fewer parameters and 10x fewer multiply-adds operations. On COCO object detection, our model family achieve both higher accuracy and higher speed over MobileNet, and achieves comparable accuracy to the SSD300 model with 35x less computation cost.

We are pleased to see that our automated approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple complex mobile vision tasks. In future, we plan to incorporate more operations and optimizations into our search space, and apply it to more mobile vision tasks such as semantic segmentation.

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the co-authors of the paper Bo Chen, Quoc V. Le, Ruoming Pang and Vijay Vasudevan. We’d also like to thank Andrew Howard, Barret Zoph, Dmitry Kalenichenko, Guiheng Zhou, Jeff Dean, Mark Sandler, Megan Kacholia, Sheng Li, Vishy Tirumalashetty, Wen Wang, Xiaoqiang Zheng and Yifeng Lu for their help, and the TensorFlow Lite and Google Brain teams.

Gmail for iOS and Android now lets you turn off conversation view

When Gmail launched with its threaded conversation view feature as the default and only option, some people sure didn’t like it and Google quickly allowed users to turn it off. On mobile, though, you were stuck with it. But here’s some good news for you conversation view haters: you can now turn it off on mobile, too.

The ability to turn off conversation view is now rolling out to all Gmail app users on iOS and Android. So if you want Gmail to simply show you all emails as they arrive, without grouping them to”make them easier to digest and follow,” you’re now free to do so.

If you’ve always just left conversation view on by default, maybe now is a good time to see if you like the old-school way of looking at your email better. I personally prefer conversation view since it helps me keep track of conversations (and I get too many emails already), but it’s pretty much a personal preference.

To make the change, simply tap on your account name in the Settings menu and look for the “conversation view” check box. That’s it. Peace restored.

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Do You Really Need Cyber Insurance? 4 Questions to Ask Before You Get It

A security breach is rarely something you are happy to discover, if ever. There’s the loss of and potential destruction of data. Then there’s the aftermath: changing passwords, trying to recover information, and uncovering the depths of the attack. Finally, there are the financial implications, too.

For regular consumers and businesses alike, cyber-crime is costly. But what if there was another way?

Cyber-crime insurance is a burgeoning industry that many businesses and other organizations are exploring. However, is cyber-crime insurance a worthwhile investment for home users? And if it is, what does it actually protect? Let’s take a look.

1. What Is Cyber Insurance?

It’s no secret that cybersecurity is a delicate balance between security researchers and malicious actors. It is a game of cat and mouse; a new threat hits our systems, researchers and antivirus firms patch the issue. A new security mitigation technique appears, and attackers set about finding vulnerabilities. One thing, however, is constant: the cost of a cyber-attack.

Be like Bob and #Update #Patch regularly ? #Infographic #InfoSec #Security #CyberSecurity #DataBreach #DataProtection #CyberAttack #CyberWar #Hacker #malware #Botnet #Ransomware #Technews #DarkNet #DarkWeb #DeepWeb #Cybercrime #cybersec #cyberinsurance #technology #Tech pic.twitter.com/F5la0bvgjI

— WMPDigitalPCSO (@WMPDigitalPCSO) July 27, 2018

Personal cyber-insurance helps mitigate the cost of security breaches such as ransomware extortion demands, data recovery, data destruction, online fraud, and identity theft. The overall cyber-insurance market is young and therefore difficult to accurately define. Policies for individuals focus on protecting against the financial burden of the myriad attacks lurking online. For instance:

• Health fraud: An individual has their identity stolen along with their social security number. The thief runs up enormous medical expenses using the stolen information, but the cyber-insurance policy covers the cost.
• Ransomware: Ransomware encrypts all of your files and demands a ransom to unlock them. A personal cyber-insurance policy could provide coverage.
• Data recovery: Malware deletes a series of files on your system, so you pay a data recovery specialist to attempt a recovery.
• Smart home hack: A hacker attacks smart home components, causing damage to the devices and the home itself.

Sounds over-the-top? Professional data recovery services can run from between $50 to $350 an hour depending on your location and severity of the issue. Smartphone data recovery can cost $200 or more depending on the device. And while the average ransomware payment demand has dropped from its 2016 high of over $1,000 per infection, the payment is still an enormous financial burden.

2. How Much Does Cyber Insurance Cost?

There are few things to consider before forking out for cyber-security insurance. Befitting the cyber-insurance market’s relative youth, there’s some skepticism regarding taking out an individual policy. As with most personal security, the answer lies in the cost of the policy. How much can you afford to part with to guarantee financial protection from an attack?

Like other forms of insurance, your policy costs vary depending on the coverage you desire. Though, unlike regular insurance, underwriters are still struggling with how to accurately model and forecast the myriad online risks.

“Typically in insurance, we use the past as prediction for the future, and in cyber that’s very difficult to do because no two incidents are alike,” said Lori Bailey, global head of cyber-risk for the Zurich Insurance Group.

The issue is further exacerbated by a lack of knowledge from both insurance providers, and those seeking cyber insurance. “All the major homeowner [insurers] are anxious to provide some sort of cyber offering,” says Tim Zeilman, a cyber-insurance specialist at Hartford Steam Boiler. “People seem to think that it is going to be a standard part of homeowner’s cover in the next five to 10 years.”

However, Hartford Steam Boiler offer one of the cheapest cyber insurance policies, starting from around $30 per year, while UK online insurance brokers PolicyBee offer cyber insurance policies starting from just £6.99 (roughly $9). The initial cost is low but to get complete coverage for repairing hardware, data recovery services, ransomware extortion pay-outs, and even legal fees, policy fees escalate quickly.

Cyber Insurance Policy Small Print

AIG’s Family CyberEdge policy costs $597 per year for $50,000 of coverage in key areas such as ransomware and extortion, data restoration, cyberbullying, and crisis management. The AIG policy sounds expensive until you look at what you get for your money.

For example, the cyberbullying cover includes a year of psychiatric services, as well as PR cover (if required), digital forensic analysis to uncover the bullies, plus cover for any lost salary if the individual loses their job during a 60-day period after the cyberbullying is reported. Victims can also apply for temporary relocation along with “temporary private tutoring” or an “increase in expense for school enrollment for you or a family member to relocate to an alternative but similar school.”

Other terms in the small print are less encouraging. AIG reserves the right to reject claims “resulting from an error in computer programming or error in instructions to a computer.” The onus, then, falls on the victims to ensure their system is completely up-to-date at all times as most system vulnerabilities come from a programming issue. Furthermore, how do completely unknown zero-day vulnerabilities fit within this description?

3. Do Individuals Need Cyber Security Insurance?

A cyber-attack is stressful for business and individuals alike. Want to know what makes it worse? Repeated breaches of the same system. Embarrassingly, the National Bank of Blacksburg fell victim to two separate spear-phishing email attacks over an eight-month period and lost over $2.4 million. Sounds bad, right? The National Bank of Blacksburg’s cyber insurance provider compounded the issue by refusing to pay out after the breach.

If that can happen to a bank worth billions of dollars, won’t individual customers suffer at the hands of the powerful insurance companies? Do individuals even need cybersecurity insurance to begin with?

Some think it depends on the net worth of the individual or the family considering the cybersecurity insurance. Individuals or families with a high-net-worth might find it beneficial to have an extensive policy to guard against all manner of online threats. Josephine Wolff, assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says “If you are a very high-net-worth individual, then it is possible that this would make sense. For other people, the costs [of a cyber-attack] are not so high.”

She continues: “It is very hard to put price tags on breaches, especially how they affect individuals. Most of the time the individuals are not on the hook—the charges are absorbed by banks, retailers or payment companies.”

But this ignores the sometimes devastating effect an attack has on an individual or family, or the positives that simply paying off a ransomware note or using professional data recovery services bring.

4. Is Cyber Insurance a Scam?

Critics of cyber insurance point out that policies may actually encourage attackers safe in the knowledge that someone else, other than the victim, will pick up the final bill. Or, hackers will target those with cyber insurance, driving up premiums for everyone. How about an increase in ransomware because attackers see more individuals paying out? Other critics believe personal cyber insurance sends the wrong message to individuals regarding system security; why take care when your policy pays for expensive professional data recovery?

At the end of the day, cybersecurity insurance depends on your network security. Most policies will refuse to pay out if there are significant issues in your network. The advice, as ever, is to:

• Update your system and its software, and keep it that way.
• Use strong single-use passwords on your accounts and computers.
• Purchase a VPN for use when connecting to internet sources out of your home network.
• Never leave devices unattended in public spaces.
• Purchase a premium antimalware suite, and keep that updated.

The cyber insurance market is already growing, and it won’t be long before your home insurance provider attempts to bundle it at your next renewal. Be prepared to consider all of the options.

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Google Classroom gets a redesign

It’s been a few years since Google first launched Classroom, its learning management system for teachers and students. Today, ahead of the start of the new year in many school districts, Google is launching a major redesign of Classroom that introduces a refreshed look and a number of new features for the teachers who use the service.

Classroom now, for example, features a new grading tool that works not just with Google Docs files but also Office files, PDFs, videos and other file types. And because students always make the same mistakes, teachers can now create a ‘comment bank’ so they can reuse commonly used feedback. Google says this is meant to ‘encourage thoughtful engagement.’

Teachers now also get access to a new site with training materials to bring them up to speed with how to best use its services.

The new Classroom now also features a new ‘Classwork’ page where teachers can organize their assignments and group them into modules and units. It’s now also easier for teachers to re-use previous classes and collaborate with others to design their classes. And because things can get noisy, Google is adding some digital wellbeing features for co-teachers to Classroom that allows them to turn off notifications for specific classes.

A Google spokesperson also told us that Classroom is getting extended support for Google Form quizzes (and the ability to put a quiz in locked mode to avoid distractions), as well as some new Chrome OS admin features to help manage devices.

And here is some good news for everybody, too: Google is making some changes to how Docs handles margins and indentations “to improve the overall writing experience, especially when making MLA style citations” (and here I thought I never had to think about MLA style again…). Soon, you’ll be able to use hanging indents and set specific indentations. This feature will launch in the fall.

 

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7 Nifty Android Apps That Make Great Use of Your Location

Palm-branded smartphones could return this year

Palm’s smartphone return appears to still be on track for 2018. Last year, an executive at TCL confirmed that the dearly departed mobile brand would be making a comeback as part of the smartphone conglomerate’s portfolio, and with a little under five months left in the year, the ‘PVG100′ has hit the FCC and WiFi alliance.

The handset was spotted by Android Police, but we don’t really have much more to go on than a name and a couple of WiFi bands. As the site notes, however, the absence of 5GHz support leads one to surmise that this won’t exactly be a barn-burning flagship. The handset also looks to be running Android 8.1 — not really a surprise, given that Android Pie is still limited to Pixel and a smattering of other devices.

We’ve reached out to TCL for more information, but I don’t anticipate hearing much until the phone is officially official. Meantime, I’d expect we’re looking at something similar to the company’s recent BlackBerry brand reboot. That is to say, some stylistic choices that evoke bygone products like the Treo or Pre, in hopes of triggering some smartphone nostalgia buried deep inside our lizard brains.

Like the KeyOne, however, the homage will only be skin deep. After all, can you really have a true Palm device without Palm OS webOS? Sadly, the latter is mostly found on LG TVs and refrigerators these days, but perhaps a stylish Android skin could help trigger some of those smartphone memories.

TCL’s owned the Palm name since 2014, and the relative success of the reborn BlackBerry line could be exactly the motivation the company needs to dust off the old brand.

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4 Practical Ways to Use Your Mac’s Image Capture App

macOS has some really great pre-installed apps, but not all of them are well-known. The Image Capture app is a case in point. If you’ve ignored it so far, it might be time to fix that and see how useful Image Capture can be.

Let’s explore four common tasks this modest app helps you perform.

1. Import or Delete Photos From External Devices

Yes, you can import photos from iOS devices, cameras, or SD cards to your Mac with iTunes or Photos. But if you’re having trouble with these apps or if you would prefer an app with a simpler interface, try Image Capture. It works with videos too.

After you plug the source device into your Mac and open the Image Capture app, you can:

Import Photos Directly to a Folder

First, use the Import To dropdown menu to specify the Finder folder where you want the imported photos to show up.

Next, decide if you want Image Capture to automatically delete photos from the connected device after import.

If yes, select the Delete after import checkbox in the sidebar. Is the checkbox missing? Click on the tiny icon at the bottom left of the app window to reveal it. (The icon resembles a square with an upward-pointing arrowhead within it.)

Now, if you want to import the entire camera roll from the connected device, click on the Import All button. Otherwise, select the thumbnails of the photos you want to grab and click on the Import button.

If you have trouble finding the photos you want, here’s a way to make your search easier: click on the List View icon to the right of the sidebar at the bottom of the app window. This view lets you sort photos using various criteria such as Kind, Date, File Size, Width, and Height.

Delete Selected Media in Bulk

Select the photos you want to delete from the external device and click on the Delete icon (circle with a slash through it). You’ll find it to the left of the Import To dropdown menu. When you see a prompt to confirm the deletion, click on the Delete button within it.

You can’t use this delete process if you have enabled iCloud Photo Library. You’ll have to use the Photos app only. With cloud sync enabled, the delete icon will appear grayed out or be missing altogether from the Image Capture app.

A Word About Image Formats

The images on your iPhone save in the new High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF). But when you view them in Image Capture, they’ll appear as JPEGs or PNGs and import as such.

Want to import the images in the original format? You’ll have to go to Settings > Photos > Transfer to Mac or PC on your iPhone and switch from the Automatic option to Keep Originals.

It’s best to test the import function with a dummy photo or two before you import photos (and videos) in bulk. This way you can be sure that what you’re seeing is exactly what you’re importing.

Also, once you get familiar with your Mac’s Automator app, you can weave the Image Capture plugin into an automation workflow. This will allow you to, say, automatically rename imported photos or back them up to a cloud service.

2. Create Contact Sheets

If you want to take a closer look at a few of the photos stored your device, displaying them together on a contact sheet is quite useful. You can generate one without leaving the Image Capture app. All you have to do is:

1. Select the photos you want to include in the contact sheet.
2. Click on MakePDF from the Import To dropdown menu.
3. Click on the Import button.

If you aren’t happy with the layout of the contact sheet, you can select a different preset from the Layout menu. Click on Layout > New Layout if you want to create a new customized layout.

To zone in on the details of individual photos using Preview, you can save the contact sheet as a regular PDF file.

More “Import To” Options

You might have noticed a Build Web Page option in the Import To dropdown menu while creating the contact sheet. You can use it to display selected photos as thumbnails on a webpage instead of a contact sheet. Clicking on a thumbnail toggles its full view.

The Photos, Preview, and Mail options in the dropdown menu are also pretty useful. Photos and Preview let you edit imported photos on the fly. And with Mail, you can attach selected photos to a new email directly.

3. Scan Documents

Scanning documents with the Image Capture app is usually a straightforward process. You don’t need the software that came with your scanner, as your Mac installs the latest scanner software automatically.

When you connect a scanner to your Mac, you should find it listed in the Devices section of the Image Capture app without any work on your part. But in some cases, you might have to set it up via System Preferences > Printers & Scanners. Once your scanner is up and running, it’s a matter of hitting the Scan button to scan your documents and images.

Want to change the image format or auto-select elements in the scanned image? You’ll need to access scan settings by clicking on the Show Details button to the left of the Scan button.

4. Assign New Default Apps for Connected Devices

If you’re tired of having the Photos app pop up every time you connect your iPhone, you can prevent the app from appearing in future. All it takes is setting the Connecting this [device] opens dropdown menu to No application.

That’s not all. You also get to match external devices with new default apps from this dropdown menu.

For example, if you want Image Capture to open automatically when you plug in your iPhone, select Image Capture from the menu options.

Do you want to import media automatically from an external device every time you connect it to your Mac? Select the AutoImporter from the dropdown menu in that case. You’ll find the imported images in a subfolder within your Pictures folder at /Users/[Your Username]/Pictures.

Of course, to assign an app default for a new device, you’ll have to plug the device into your Mac at least once.

A Simple and Useful Native Mac App

While Image Capture is not one of those must-have Mac apps, it’s useful in its own quiet way. Though you’ll probably only open it when you need it, you’ll be glad it’s there.

By the way, it’s not the only lesser-known tool worth a look. You might also want to explore these other in-built Mac tools for everyday tasks.

Image Credit: simpson33/Depositphotos

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Researchers teach an AI how to dribble

While this animated fellow looks like something out of NBA 2K18 its really an AI that’s learning how to dribble in real time. The AI starts out fumbling the ball a bit and by cycle 95 it is able to do some real Harlem Globetrotters stuff. In short, what you’re watching is a human-like avatar learning a very specialized human movement.

To do this researchers at Carnegie Mellon and DeepMotion, Inc. created a “physics-based, real-time method for controlling animated characters that can learn dribbling skills from experience.” The system, which uses “deep reinforcement learning,” can use motion capture date to learn basic movements.

“Once the skills are learned, new motions can be simulated much faster than real-time,” said CMU professor Jessica Hodgins.

Once the avatar learns a basic movement advanced movements come more easily including dribbling between the legs and crossovers.

From the release:

A physics-based method has the potential to create more realistic games, but getting the subtle details right is difficult. That’s especially so for dribbling a basketball because player contact with the ball is brief and finger position is critical. Some details, such as the way a ball may continue spinning briefly when it makes light contact with the player’s hands, are tough to reproduce. And once the ball is released, the player has to anticipate when and where the ball will return.

The program learned the skills in two stages — first it mastered locomotion and then learned how to control the arms and hands and, through them, the motion of the ball. This decoupled approach is sufficient for actions such as dribbling or perhaps juggling, where the interaction between the character and the object doesn’t have an effect on the character’s balance. Further work is required to address sports, such as soccer, where balance is tightly coupled with game maneuvers, Liu said.

The system could pave the way for smarter online avatars and even translate into physical interactions with the real world.

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West Virginia raises concern over smartphone voting for troops

Maybe a year and a half after Russian interference was believed to have a key impact on the election of a U.S. president isn’t the best time to be floating new voting technologies. Not if you’re looking to avoid some major skepticism, at least.

But West Virginia is going ahead with plans to allow some limited voting through a smartphone app called Voatz, nonetheless. The plan, spearheaded by West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, will utilize the Boston-based startup’s technology to allow troops stationed abroad to vote in the upcoming November midterm.

Both Voatz and Warner, naturally, tout the security of the app. Indentification requires a user to take a selfie, which is matched with a state I.D. using facial recognition. Ballots are then anonymous and recorded with blockchain tech.

Naturally, not everyone is thrilled about the idea.

“Mobile voting is a horrific idea,” the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Joseph Lorenzo Hall, told CNN. “It’s internet voting on people’s horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote.”

Not a fan, apparently.

The state has been testing the tech, and Warner says that paper will still be an option for those serving abroad, even as it offers access to smartphone voting. The lack of paper trail for electronic voting, however, is generally considered a bit of a nonstarter, and recent events will likely only make security experts more wary of adopting new tech.

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