As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
BBC News switches users to new site
The desktop version of the BBC News website will be switched off on Monday and all visitors will be directed to a newer “responsive” design.
This Lego Remake Of 'The Matrix' Lobby Scene Changes The Entire Trilogy
The lobby shootout scene in “The Matrix” is one of the most iconic sequences in the Wachowskis’ 1999 film. There are endless guns, one-armed handstands and Trinity crawling up walls like a boss. YouTube user Snooperking decided to create a shot-for-shot Lego remake of the entire scene, and the results are nothing short of awesome.
Snooperking, who also did a Lego remake of the “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” trailer last November, said on Reddit that the entire “Matrix” project took about 160 hours total over three months. He also made two behind-the-scenes videos, revealing that one six-second shot took him “over an hour and a half to film and [edit in] Photoshop.”
The Lego remake is spot-on, but Snooperking throws in a huge surprise at the end. We’ll just say that it changes everything about “The Matrix” franchise (for the better?). Watch Neo and Trinity shoot up the lobby Lego-style above and the original scene below.
Big Dating: It's a (Data) Science
A generation ago, most young men would have considered happy hour at the Chainsaw Sisters Saloon a target-rich environment. The drinks were cheap and the place was packed. Most importantly, while the odds of “getting lucky” were low, they were nonzero. So even if she said, “You’re more likely to get struck by lightning than to go home with me,” he could answer, “Awesome! You’re saying I have a chance to go home with you?”
Millennials empirically know that bar crawling is for recreation — not for archaic, time-wasting, low-percentage mating rituals. If you want to meet someone, there are any number of big dating sites and apps available.
The Space Is Crowded
For romance, the major big dating players include Match.com, Chemistry.com and eHarmony — all promise long-lasting relationships. Niche sites like OurTime.com (for serious daters over 50), ChristianMingle.com (for Christians seeking singles with similar values), BlackPeopleMeet.com (for African American people to connect) and JDate.com (for Jewish singles) offer eponymous consumer value propositions.
In the mobile first arena, Tinder is the undisputed leader. No other app comes close to its market share, but there are plenty of other offerings. Hinge, OKCupid and Zoosk are all players, and niche apps such as JSwipe (Jewish Tinder), Happn (location-based dating), Bumble (women have to be the ones who initiate the conversation) and The League (“curated” members have to be selected to join) have all found an audience.
The Numbers Are Compelling
According to an infographic entitled Big Data Seeks Online Love by the Berkeley School of Information, one in 10 Americans has used a dating site or mobile app, and 23 percent have met a spouse or long-term partner through these sites. In fact, 11 percent of American couples who have been together for 10 years or less met online.
The matching has improved. In 2005, 47% of people agreed that online dating allows you to find a better match; in 2013, that number went up to 53%. Is online dating a good way to meet people? Forty-four percent said yes in 2005, while 59% said yes in 2013.
Does Data Science + Big Data = Love?
Not according to experts cited in a recent article entitled Critics Challenge The ‘Science’ Behind Online Dating by Kristen V. Brown. She reports:
“There is no evidence that dating sites do anything much more than increase the pool of potential partners,” said Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies relationships. Or, as Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld put it, “The algorithms for matching at dating sites are mostly smoke and mirrors.” — San Francisco Chronicle
Thinking Things Are Not Reliably Predictable
I have heard many different data scientists describe their strategic approaches to big dating algorithms. Thod Nguyen, CTO of eHarmony, describes its approach as a compatibility matching system consisting of a “very sophisticated three tier process.” A compatibility matching model identifies potential matches based on a proprietary 29-dimensional array. eHarmony’s affinity matching model predicts the probability of communication between two people, and finally, the match distribution model helps ensure that eHarmony delivers “the right matches to the right user at the right time and to deliver as many matches as possible across our entire active network.”
While this sounds interesting and may actually work as a matching strategy, the inherent problem is bi-directionality. When Amazon recommends a camera for you, the camera has no say in the matter. This is not true with human beings. Someone may be your perfect match, but there are any number of reasons the feeling might not be mutual.
That said, there is an axiom working in favor of all big dating algorithms: boys and girls are genetically predisposed to be attracted to one another and attempt to reproduce (otherwise none of us would be here).
Some Number of Nos Equal a Yes
The problem at the Chainsaw Sisters Saloon was not the very low odds; it was the extended investment of time required to achieve success. If you had a one-in-100 chance (1/100) to take someone home, you’d need 100 trips to the bar, on average, to accomplish your mission. This adds a bit of a twist to big data’s role in big dating. Sure, you can answer the 150 questions on Match.com and hope to be matched to your soul mate, or you can just play the numbers.
Data Science + Big Data = Exponential Increase in Deal Flow
Tinder saves time. It offers an exponential increase in opportunities over bar crawling. Even so, motivated programmers have created dozens of Tinderbots to increase their efficacy. Some Tinderbots use game theory and others use brute force, but my favorite uses data science to achieve its goal.
Eigenface example
Source: Justin Long’s blog post, Automating Tinder with Eigenfaces
Using Data Science to Date the Perfect Model
On his blog, crockpotveggies.com, Justin Long provides the code for “Tinderbox,” a Tinderbot that taps into Tinder’s APIs and uses Eigenfaces to build an invariant model of the face you’re most likely to “swipe right.” You can think of it as your “perfect model.” A model with all of the characteristics you love most. He also uses Stanford NLP to help the bot analyze the sentiment of chat responses. After about 60 manual swipes, the program has learned enough to start making choices for you — at a speed you could not possibly replicate. Read his blog post — it will make you smile. If you have the time (and inclination), go ahead and build a Tinderbox for yourself. You may never visit the Chainsaw Sisters Saloon again.
I’m the Managing Director of the Digital Media Group at Landmark|ShellyPalmer, a tech-focused investment banking and advisory firm specializing in M&A, financings, and strategic partnerships. You may also know me as Fox 5 New York’s on-air tech expert. Follow me @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com for more info.
7 Data-Driven Ways to Improve the User Experience
With four math and computer science degrees from MIT, including a PhD, under his belt, Chief Technology Officer of KAYAK, Giorgos Zacharia is a leading expert at applying the hot topics of data, analytics and machine learning to the real world of travel. As one of the world’s top travel sites, KAYAK‘s objective is to build the best app for the user to search and find the travel product that they’re looking for and then manage that travel even after the booking experience.
Giorgos Zacharia, Chief Technology Officer — KAYAK
In the name of building a better user experience by learning from data, Giorgos spends most of his day working with the product people, the mobile team and the UI development team performing experiments, monitoring the performance and brainstorming on how to improve the user experience. Giorgos has said that user experience even trumps monetization, “At the end of the day KAYAK choses the best user experience that has the highest monetization for our partners and for us.”
With the two key priorities of speed and personalization, KAYAK is a prime example of using data, analytics, machine learning and predictive analysis to provide timely, relevant, personalized and valuable information for users that keeps them coming back for more.
7 Ways to leverage data for a better user experience
1. Put machine learning into action
Machine learning plays an important role in the work and the data science at KAYAK. Giorgos describes machine learning, the computer learning patterns from data, as basically computational statistics: “You can have a statistician have hypotheses and test them one at a time, or you can have a computer testing millions of hypotheses in very little time and tell you which pattern has the most predictive value.”
Practical applications for leveraging machine learning at KAYAK include learning how to better query their partners to find users the most competitive flight prices or how to better personalize when they present it to users by learning their preferences and showing them the hotels they are most likely to book higher than three or four pages after the first page of results.
Giorgos says, “We aggregate the information and try to present it in the most usable way. User experience counts for almost every decision that we make at KAYAK, so we try to show our users the most comprehensive results as possible for their travel search query in the most usable way, whether that’s a mobile device or desktop.”
TRAVEL TIP! Save $$$ on booking hotels:
$ Book, cancel, rebook: Because most hotel rates are actually fully refundable if you cancel them, if you see a price that you like go ahead and book it and then if it’s cheaper you can cancel and rebook.
$ Register for private rates: A lot of KAYAK’s partners are increasingly adding private rates, and KAYAK is using these rates for their registered users.
2. Optimization matters – The role of KAYAK and their mission is to produce the most competency and accurate data. If they don’t, they lose credibility and the user won’t come back. They also want to present results as fast as possible. For example, it makes no sense to have a very complex set of results that might be saving the user a couple of dollars when we know we can get the traveler there with a better flight. “We capture every single click that happens from KAYAK and every single tap that happens in our mobile apps. We see what gets used in what sequence and optimize it over time to save the user time,” says Giorgos.
“These optimizations matter because you don’t want to make the user wait unnecessarily for a result that they will never book. On the hotel side, we don’t want to be querying our partners for every single query and make the user wait for 30- 40 seconds depending on the slowest system that we actually have to query. So we have a predictive cache mechanism that anticipates what our users are likely to search every day. We proactively query all our partners, gather that data locally and send those results as fast as possible from our own cache,” explains Giorgos.
By maintaining in constant direct contact with the customer and by constantly monitoring the usage of the website and pruning all the features that are not valuable ensures that there is that optimization, keeping them focused on customer experience innovation.
3. Personalize for the user – Aside from the ongoing challenge of performance and always striving to make the system faster, another challenge KAYAK is focused on is personalization. According to Giorgos, “If we know the user prefers non-stop flights for shorter flights from Boston to New York, we don’t need to preselect the one stop and two stop flights for the user, especially if they are only modifying the dates. We know the context of that search. If the user has shown preference to particular brands or types of hotels, it’s important that we actually personalize for that user, so personalization in the way that we chose to present the results matters both on mobile and desktop, so that is also an ongoing focus.” Similarly, the results they show to the stranded traveler may be different than the aspirational searches. Speed and personalization never end; it is ongoing work that KAYAK is always focused on.
4. User experience rules – Any idea they have at KAYAK, from minor things like changing the color or size of the platform, or deciding how much information will show in the results page versus when the user clicks to see the different data, to a major website re-design – it is all done through the lens of the user experience and the presentation of the data matters.
TRAVEL TIP! Save $$$ on booking flights:
$ Be flexible: If you can depart a day earlier or later or you are willing to use any airport you can save significantly on the ticket price.
$ Monitor prices: KAYAK provides tools like price alerts, where if you are flexible on the time of year you want to fly to a specific tourist destination for example, you can have KAYAK monitor the prices for you.
$ Book early: Look early and when you see a price that you are willing to pay, then you should book it, don’t wait.
KAYAK measures the user engagement with each part of the website – how fast they can find what they are looking for. Secondary to user experience is how much money they make. “At the end of the day, we chose the best user experience that has the highest monetization for our partners and for us,” says Giorgos.
5. Use predictive analytics to ensure accuracy - KAYAK relies on predictive analytics for personalization, price forecasting, hacker fares and building new products. One product is a flight price predictor where they give users a forecast of whether the cheapest price that they see on their flight results page is likely to go up or down in the next seven days. They also give the user a confidence metric based on how accurate their machine learning has been in making a call in similar patterns.
In observing the data they can see how in some cases the user can save money or even travel time by combining non-aligning airlines, so they show the users this result that they call “hacker fares”. It requires two separate bookings but it can save the user significant money or time or both. KAYAK also actually removes results that they think are no longer available and when the user clicks through to end up on a partner’s website, they rely on predictive analytics for personalization.
6. Capture the right data and measure it correctly – “The big challenge is to capture the right data and make sure you actually measure it correctly,” advises Giorgos who says that they have spent a lot of time at KAYAK optimizing their platform to actually do the right types of segmentation and give them statistically reliable data. “Occasionally we might do an experiment that doesn’t capture the right type of data, so it requires constant attention and diligence in asking the right questions when you see data that doesn’t make any sense,” he shares.
7. Build for mobile first – Aside from searches for same day or next day flights which signals a travel problem where users are stranded and they need a car or hotel right away, the mobile patterns are actually identical to the desktop which means that people are using it as a desktop replacement. With more than half of their users on mobile devices, KAYAK strives to make sure that in that small screen they provide as much functionality as possible.
“Our design is already mobile first, so we have the mobile design team coming up with the next iteration of the redesign of KAYAK and then the desktop expands for the whole of KAYAK. We make sure that increasingly our desktop experience is touch optimized, so mobile is truly driving the identity of KAYAK on all the devices,” says Giorgos. The transition to a multi-device world, as users start their searches on mobile and then end up booking on a desktop or the other way around is what keeps this CTO up at night: “We need to make sure that we support that use case as well as possible, but I don’t think we have cracked it well yet and I don’t think anybody else has either.”
You can watch the full interview with Giorgos Zacharia here. Please join me and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as we host CXOTalk - connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.
Spies in the Sky — Is Your Privacy at Risk?
Imagine yourself and your companion basking in the sun at the local park, sipping on chilled fume blanc and nibbling petit fours when you hear a whirring sound approaching. Looking up you see a miniature version of an alien spaceship slowly cruise then hover about 50 feet above your picnic. It pauses, then flies back from whence it came.
“What in the world was that? A UFO?” asks your companion.
“That was a UAV — Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — a drone.” You turn to your companion, cocking an eyebrow. “Didn’t you say your Dad bought one recently?”
Sound far-fetched? Not even. The uproar over the prying eyes in the skies has been sparking legal debate over the past year, and is reaching a fever pitch. Just recently sunbathers and picnickers at a public park in Tiburon, Calif. called for a ban on drone use. The drone, as reported by the Pacific Sun, “Loudly moved several feet above the fields and walking path. It hovered for minutes over three women at the water fountain.”
Are the three women victims of an illegal invasion of privacy? That all depends on where you are. And by whose rules you abide.
In general, the three women could take the drone operator to court if they could prove that their “reasonable expectation of privacy” had been violated. If the drone operator were saving images for his own use without permission, they would have a stronger case. If the drone operator were selling the pictures, the FAA would be able to impose fines.
As of today (and it could change tomorrow), commercial drone use — that is, using drones for profit — is prohibited by the FAA. But the distinction between what constitutes “private” or “hobby” drone usage and “commercial” usage has many scratching their heads. Techdirt writes: “Lots of people are pointing out that the FAA’s claims are likely to ground the high profile plans by Amazon to deliver packages by drone, but it’s some of the other things that are on the prohibited list that strike me as even more ridiculous.”
One rule in particular has prompted some scathing criticism. According to the FAA, it’s okay to use a drone in your garden to determine which areas need watering, but it’s not okay to do the same on a commercial farm. As one comment to the Techdirt article asks: “Who plants enough crops that they need a drone to be able to tell what sections need more water, but aren’t involved in a ‘commercial farming operation?”
Landscape and nature photography, where allowed, is permissible by the FAA so long as the photographs can be viewed by the public at no charge. Despite the FAA guideline, several national parks have outlawed drone use, for both personal and commercial use, but not without objection. Artist Jim Bowers, who has been photographing park lands from the air, said “I’m creating artwork and trying to document the beauty and majesty of that nature for people around the world who might not ever get to see it,” said Bowers. “They’re obviously using this rule to keep us grounded.”
When it comes to photographing real estate from the air for the purposes of buying or selling a property, the FAA says no. In some cases photographing real estate from the air can constitute an invasion of privacy. For example, last June Business Insider reported an incident where a woman was in various stages of undress when a drone appeared outside her 26nd floor Seattle apartment window. Upon investigation, it turned out that the building was being photographed by a commercial real estate agency. No charges were filed.
Emerging state regulations governing drone use, which can vary dramatically from state-to-state, further muddy the waters. According to The Washington Post, Oregon, Idaho and Tennessee make it illegal to fly a drone over private property without the express written consent of the property owner. In contrast, Texas allows drones for “scholarly research” and for photography of people on public property with the “consent of the individual who… lawfully occupies the real property captured in the image.” In Nevada and Mississippi drone operators are only bound by FAA regulations, though a recreational flight over Area 51 is probably not a good idea.
It’s not uncommon for federal laws to be in conflict with state laws (e.g. marijuana laws) so it behooves both hobbyists and commercial drone operators to be familiar with the regulations in the area where they intend to fly. According to the FAA-sponsored site, Know Before You Fly, “The use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for commercial or business purposes is authorized on a case-by-case basis. You may not fly your UAS for commercial purpose without the express permission from the FAA. You should check with the FAA for further determination as to what constitutes a commercial or business use of small UAS.” Recreational use of drones does not require FAA clearance, however local laws may prohibit even recreational use.
There may come a time when you’ll be able to hang out with a companion in a public park, order a burrito from Burrito Bomber on your smartphone and have it delivered by drone. Of course if everybody in the park orders burritos at the same time, there may be a bit of aerial chaos. Suffice to say the devil is in the details. But whether you’re a drone operator, a citizen with privacy concerns or both, it may be a while before clear, consistent, enforceable laws governing drone use are on the books.
Twitter Faces Gender Bias Lawsuit
Another Silicon Valley tech giant faces accusations of gender bias.
A former female software engineer at Twitter is suing the microblogging service for allegedly using a secretive promotion process that favors men.
SPARK And Google Created An App That Highlights The History Women Made Right Beneath Your Feet
With some help from Google, a group of women are changing history by spotlighting herstory.
The SPARK Movement has partnered with Google to create a smartphone app called “Women On The Map” that alerts users when they’re near places where women made history. SPARK, which stands for Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge, is an organization that encourages healthy sexuality and promotes gender equality in all areas.
The idea for the app first started a year ago when SPARK noticed there were very few women featured in “Google Doodles,” the design featured on Google’s homepage during certain holidays. So they did their own research and found that only 17 percent of Google Doodles between 2010 and 2013 featured women. The non-profit decided to try to change those numbers. “We like Google Doodles a lot, but we couldn’t help but notice that, like a lot of other places where we learn history, they felt a little…male. And white,” a SPARK blog reads.
As it turns out, Google had already initiated a plan to diversify Google Doodles, but the two groups discussed a more general concern for the disregard of women’s contributions throughout history. Thus “Women On The Map” was created using Google’s existing “Field Trip” mapping app, which alerts users about information related to the locations they are near.
The app was created collaboratively with Google, SPARK and the SPARKteam, which includes young women between the ages of eight and 22. The girls researched the women they wanted people to learn about which included the stories of 119 women from 28 countries with more than 60 percent being women of color, Executive Director of SPARK Dana Edell told The Huffington Post.
“The purpose of Women On The Map is to show the world that there were (and are) so many women whose accomplishments have been seemingly invisible to us,” Ajaita Saini, a member of the SPARKteam told The Huffington Post. “We need girls to know that they can be whatever they want, and their contributions are as equal as if a guy did it instead. Likewise, we need guys to know that not everything done in the past was the work of men.”
The Women On The Map app will alert users to a major historical event that occurred at that location and the important roles women played in it. To use the app, iPhone users need to download the Field Trip app and can find the Spark: Women On The Map installment in the “Historic Places & Events” tab.
“This project allows us to bring women — and especially women of color — to the forefront of history, where their achievements can be recognized more widely,” SPARK’s website reads.
The app highlights the achievements of a long list of women such as Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first Japanese-American female lawyer to practice law in Hawaii, and Christine Jorgensen, the first person to undergo a sex change operation in the U.S. While the app also includes more recognizable figures like Rosa Parks, the goal of the app is to shine a light on women we don’t always hear about in history class.
“Working with SPARK is hugely exciting for us because both companies were working towards the same thing — raising awareness about the history around us through storytelling and community engagement,” Yennie Solheim, Senior Marketing Lead at Niantic Lab (the Google start-up that created Field Trip), told The Huffington Post.
“The whole point of this app collaboration is to inspire girls (and boys too actually), to be what they want, and acknowledge that girls do make a significant impact on the world,” Saini said. “We’re giving kids new and different role models, so they can say to themselves ‘Yes. I can be like HER.’”
Taylor Swift Reportedly Bought A Porn Site Domain So You Couldn't
We know the dot-coms and the dot-nets of the World Wide Web, but starting on June 1, anyone will be able to purchase domains ending in .sucks, .adult and even .porn, to name just some of the 547 options.
But not everyone, like Taylor Swift, for instance, wants his or her name or brand attached to a domain with a porn-related suffix.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit group behind this expansion of generic top-level domains, or gTLDs, is allowing public figures and companies to get ahead of the game and buy out any domains before the rest of us can.
CNN spoke with Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry, which manages the .porn and .adult domains. Lawley said Swift’s team has already purchased TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult (smart move). The Huffington Post has reached out to Swift’s reps for confirmation of the domain purchases.
Microsoft has also bought Office.porn and Office.adult, according to Lawley.
But another company, Vox Populi Registry, operates the .sucks domains, AdWeek reported. Some of those domains will cost up to $2,500 to buy out. Get ready for the Internet to explode when trolls try to tarnish the names of your favorite celebrities and sports teams with a .sucks website.
Let’s just hope Swift gets on that suffix too, because we know the haters gonna hate, hate, hate. But as she would say:
For more, head to CNN.
These Brilliant Innovations Are Bringing Clean Water To People Worldwide
A little thinking outside the box can go a long way in helping bring clean H2O to those who need it most.
About 89 percent of the globe had access to improved sources of drinking water in 2012 — up significantly from 76 percent in 1990, according to a report released last year by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Although there’s still significant progress to be had (roughly 748 million people still lack access, the United Nations notes), inventive thinking is in part to credit for helping more communities connect to the crucial resource.
In honor of World Water Day on Sunday, here are a few recent innovative solutions that have brought safe drinking water to more people around the globe.
This Billboard Makes Drinking Water Out Of Thin Air — (Almost) Like Magic
A billboard in Lima, Peru, took a new approach to an old problem.
Ad agency Mayo DraftFCB partnered with the University of Engineering and Technology of Peru in 2013 to create a billboard that captured air humidity and turned it into potable drinking water. The innovation helped area residents make ends meet in a country that gets less than two inches of rain a year, according to a video produced by the school.
The state of water insecurity led to many Peruvians having to rely on unsafe drinking water from polluted wells. But, according to one local resident, the billboard could serve as a viable problem-solver.
“They could put this in different places if possible in each village, in each town,” Francisco Quilca told the university.
The Drinkable Book Filters Contaminated H2O While Educating People On Unsafe Water
The Drinkable Book is as clever as its name.
Functioning similarly to a coffee filter, pages in the book — created by nonprofit WaterIsLife last year — filters polluted and unsafe drinking water, and costs just pennies to produce.
As the video above notes, people in many underserved regions of the world don’t realize contaminated water can be harmful to ingest. This Drinkable Book not only acts as a filtering system — killing diseases like cholera and E. coli — but its pages feature content that educates people on drinking water safety.
WATERisLIFE partnered with researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia to create the book.
This Map Proves Clean Water Solutions Are Happening All Around The World
UNICEF created an interactive map that pinpoints where innovative clean water projects are taking place around the globe.
In Chad, for example, the organization has supported solar-powered water pumps that have helped bring clean water to underserved communities while also fighting off disease. Since the pumps have been installed, cholera cases in the country have dropped dramatically, according to UNICEF.
In Liberia — a country still overcoming the recent Ebola outbreak — the humanitarian organization has played a vital role in ensuring sick patients get enough water to survive.
“For each Ebola patient to be fully cared for, we need at least 150 liters of water,” Michael Forson, water and sanitation specialist for UNICEF, said in a video produced by the organization. “That is 10 times what a normal Liberian gets as of now.”
In a new treatment center, UNICEF provides water that’s used in a variety of ways — for cleaning clothes, for drinking and disinfecting the facility — to help patients overcome the illness.
The Omniprocessor Turns Human Waste Into Water.
Bill Gates isn’t afraid to lay it all on the line if it means promoting a good cause.
In January, the billionaire philanthropist drank water that was once human feces from the Omniprocessor — a machine built by Seattle engineering firm Janicki Bioenergy — to prove science can be a great ally in improving clean water access around the world.
The machine uses a steam engine to burn waste, producing water and electricity.
“The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle,” Gates wrote in a blog post. “And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
As bringing Western toilets to underserved communities can be expensive, Gates believes forward-thinking projects like the Omniprocessor can play a role in connecting more people with drinking water.
Cow Poop Can Also Play A Role Making Clean Water A Reality.
Bill Gates isn’t the only one who gets the benefits of waste.
After developing for about 10 years, engineers at Michigan State University (MSU) created the McLanahan Nutrient Separation System — a technology that extracts nutrients and pollutants from cow waste to produce water clean enough for the cows to drink. The system could help farmers’ manage waste produced on their land, as well as lessen their livestock’s environmental impact.
“Here in Michigan, we have a tendency to take water for granted,” MSU’s Steve Safferman said in a statement. “But out west, for example, where drought remains an issue, the accessibility of clean water could make the difference between a farm remaining viable or going out of business.”
The system uses air stripping, ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis to remove pollutants from the manure and produce clean water.
An Inventive Water Purifier Brought Clean Water Relief To Haitians In Need.
School children drink clean water from a fountain provided by Rotary International at an elementary school in Les Cayes, Haiti. (Photo by Alyce Henson/Rotary International/Getty Images)
Graduate students from Seattle University developed a water purification system that’s improving lives thousands of miles away.
Plumbers Without Borders — an organization that allows volunteer plumbers the opportunity to help with international clean water and sanitation efforts — utilized the students’ creation to further its mission in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
In the two years following the quake, the organization helped install 15 of the purifiers, which can produce 10,000 gallons of clean water every day. Fred Schilling of Plumbers Without Borders told The Huffington Post that the purifiers have been like “winning the lottery” to Haitians who’ve benefitted.
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The Water Crisis Creates A Gender Rights Problem. Here's Who's Solving It
Globally, women and girls in developing countries spend an estimated 200 million hours every single day just collecting water in areas where potable water isn’t available locally.
It’s an arduous task that leads to debilitating injuries, yet the chore falls on the heads of women and children in 76 percent of households surveyed, according to UNICEF.
The errand not only causes physical pain, but also cuts into opportunities to learn and work.
With increasing advancements, women can spend less time gathering water and more time getting an education, earning money and more. Here’s who’s helping solve the problem.
Increasing Water Access Gives Women More Time to Go to School
Though it’s backbreaking work that often requires meandering through dimly lit areas, girls are twice as likely as boys to be tasked with fetching water in homes in developing countries where children are responsible for the chore, according to UNICEF. Shouldering this time-consuming effort leads girls to come late to school, or to miss out on classes entirely.
Who’s helping: Girls’ enrollment rates have been shown to improve by more than 15 percent when they are provided with clean water and a toilet facility, according to UNICEF. The Water Project works to give girls in sub-Saharan Africa the freedom to go to school by working with local communities on constructing an optimal water source, whether it be a well or a surface dam, that suits their specific needs. Find out more about the Water Project and how you can get involved here.
Increasing Water Access Gives Women More Time to Spend with Family
Fetching water is such a lengthy process, it’s often the only errand women are able to accomplish in a day. For example, Mnguswn, a 37-year-old Nigerian mom, would walk more than 2 miles round trip every day to get water and wait on line for about two to three hours. When she finally got home, her four kids were just getting back from school and there was often nothing for them to eat, nor did she even have enough water to complete her household chores.
Who’s helping: To cut down on wait times, NextDrop, a social enterprise established in 2011, collects information about water services in India and sends out text alerts to locals about when they’ll receive water, when there’s a delay and when they’ll likely be affected by pipe damage.
Increasing Water Access Gives Women Time To Earn A Living
Across India alone, it’s estimated that the time women spend fetching water costs the country the equivalent of 10 billion rupees ($160 million). But when given the opportunity to work, women reinvest up to 90 percent of their income back into improving their families’ health, nutrition and education prospects.
Who’s helping: Unilever’s Sunshine group partnered with Oxfam to build water centers in the heart of two Nigerian communities, which provides women with both a local water source and jobs. Justina Onyene is employed by one of the centers, and the steady income has enabled her to support her family. When her father’s job was affected by a strike, she stepped in to pay her younger siblings’ school fees and buy them books.
Increasing Water Access Gives Women Time to Heal
It often isn’t their preferred method of transport, but women and girls carry water on their heads because it’s easier to navigate rough, rural terrain that way than by carting heavy loads on their back, Slate reported in 2010. But the slight convenience comes at a heavy cost. They’re more likely to develop musculoskeletal disorders and related disabilities and spinal and neck pain, a study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information concluded.
Though they travel far distances, the water they bring home is often contaminated, which can lead to contracting waterborne illnesses.
Who’s helping: For women and girls who don’t have access to a local water source, PackH20 ships low-cost, efficient backpacks to Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Kenya and Niger so that they can perform the task without injuring their heads and necks. The foldable pack evenly distributes the weight on a person’s back, allowing the carrier to still have use of her hands, and the removable liners are easily sanitized through exposure to sunlight. Find out more about PackH20 and how you can get involved here.
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500,000-Year-Old 'Swiss Army Knife' Sheds New Light On Ancient Animal Butchering
A set of half-a-million-year-old stone tools — including what’s being called a prehistoric “swiss army knife” — have scientists going gaga.
The tools were found alongside the remains of butchered animals, such as an elephant rib bone bearing cut marks (see photo above), at a dig site in Revadimin, Israel in 2004.
Now, researchers who recently analyzed the finds have discovered the tools are covered in animal fat, and are calling them the first direct evidence of the use of stone tools by ancient human ancestors for animal butchery.
“Archaeologists have until now only been able to suggest scenarios about the use and function of such tools. We don’t have a time machine,” Prof. Ran Barkai, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and one of the researchers, said in a written statement. “It makes sense that these tools would be used to break down carcasses, but until evidence was uncovered to prove this, it remained just a theory.”
After examining the wear on the surface of the tools, and conducting experiments with replicas modeled after them, the researchers believe one of the tools was a hand axe, a sort of prehistoric “Swiss army knife” that could cut and break down bone and tissue.
Another tool, called a scraper, was likely used to separate animal fat and fur from muscle.
The hand axe, bearing signs of use (small red dots) and residue of animal fat (blue dots).
The ancient discovery helps shed new light on “a major breakthrough in human evolution,” Barkai said in the statement.
How so? As prehistoric hominins such as Homo erectus developed bigger brains, they required a higher caloric intake, which resulted in a shift from a plant-based diet to a meat-based one, Live Science reported. That required the development of more advanced technology that could extract fat and muscle from animal carcasses.
“To be able to use animal resources, they needed to have tools in order to cut and butcher,” Barkai told Live Science. “They fit the needs of these hominins.”
The research was published online on Mar. 18 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Top Lesbian Dating App Dattch Rebrands Itself As Her
Lesbians, bisexuals and female queers alike, the women-seeking-women dating app you love to hate, Dattch, has now rebranded itself with a new name: HER.
“People didn’t really know what [Dattch] meant,” HER founder Robyn Nexton told HuffPost Live’s Josh Zepps on Thursday. “So HER is kind of our chance to launch a new product, and it kind of represents the community that we’ve grown to become. Dattch stemmed from a word that was about dating, and the way the product has evolved is much more social in its nature.”
With the help of $1 million in funding from business leaders including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the app changed its entire interface and added a section for local events in your area, amongst other developments.
But there’s still the issue of more men using dating apps than women, which Nexton says has to do with the tech industry’s male-dominated climate.
“A lot of these businesses and organizations are set up by men, and so it’s inherently a little bit better suited to the way men behave and targeted more to a male user,” she said, adding that recently there’s been “great surge” in the number of women leading these businesses.
Nexton calls her product “the largest community of women interested in women,” and she touts a simple selling point: “If you want to meet another woman, we are the platform that has been built for women.”
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Watch Obama's Interview With The Huffington Post
President Barack Obama sat down for an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday, covering such topics as pardons, sequestration and pay for college athletes, among other things.
Watch the full interview with Obama above, and see a list of all the stories from the interview below:
Obama Details His Disappointment With Netanyahu In First Post-Election Comments
Obama Says Workers Are Being ‘Cheated’ Out Of Overtime Pay
Obama Vows Not To Sign A Budget Bill That Doesn’t Fix Sequestration
Obama: I’ll Use Clemency Power ‘More Aggressively’
Obama Applauds ‘Quick Reaction’ Against Racist Fraternity Video
Obama: I’m Hoping For A ‘Post-Administration Glow’ After I Leave Office And Can Get More Sleep
Obama On Loretta Lynch: ‘You Don’t Hold Attorney General Nominees Hostage’
Obama Calls On NCAA To Rethink The Way It Protects And Punishes Athletes
Here’s The Full Transcript Of Obama’s Interview With HuffPost
7 More Netflix Hacks Every Binge-Watcher Needs To Know
Leaving the house is about to get a little harder.
Netflix is well on its way to turning everybody in the world into binge-watching homebodies. But really, who cares? Life is just all that inconvenient stuff that happens in between “Breaking Bad” marathons.
With the announcement of the premiere dates for “Orange is the New Black” and “Wet Hot American Summer,” it’s clear the indent you’re making in the couch is about to get a little more permanent. So if the first set of Netflix hacks wasn’t enough for you, here are some more to hold you over:
1. Watch Earlier In The Day For Better Quality
Image: Giphy
Knowing how to stream movies in HD only matters if you’re actually getting HD. According to Digital Trends, one factor influences video quality above all others:
As we experimented with Netflix quality, we discovered that the biggest factor influencing stream quality is time of day, and whether that time falls under typical peak hours for watching. Getting HD at 9 in the evening, for example is next to impossible, let alone 1080p Super HD.
Reports indicate the difference in quality could be as drastic as 1080p during rush-hour traffic and 480p during primetime hours in the evening, so it’s something to keep in mind. You know, not that you were really going to leave your seat anyway.
2. Use “My List” To Keep Track Of What’s Expiring
Image: Giphy
Netflix releases a list of the titles expiring every month, but it can be hard to keep track of everything you need to watch before it’s gone. Like, what’s with all the responsibility, Netflix? We have Cheetos to eat.
An easy way to keep track of everything is by adding those expiring titles on your “My List.” Once in “My List,” the expiration date of the movie will show up underneath. Additionally, there are a variety of sources that keep a full list of what’s leaving the site and when.
3. Binge Like A God By Eliminating Horizontal Scrolling
The Netflix “God Mode” is about to make you see the light … or at least see more movies that you want to watch. Though it’s not affiliated with Netflix, according to The Hollywood Reporter, this is a bookmarklet that eliminates the sideways scrolling.
After dragging the button to your bookmarks bar, you can use it to see a bunch of movies at once, rather than scrolling through them a few dozen times and just re-watching “OITNB,” which, really, you’ll probably do anyway.
4. Change Subtitles To Actually See What People Are Saying
Image: Reddit
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