Facebook Mentions- The Ultra Revolutionary App!

Importance of Facebook in Recent Days

Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular names when it is about being social. Since its inception, Facebook has been quite popular in providing useful and helpful information with respect to various kinds of trending issues and problems. Likewise, Facebook has also recently unveiled an App that is especially dedicated to only famous people.

What is Facebook Mentions App? 

The release of any new App nevertheless gains considerable attention from the entire global media. The rank of prominence goes to another level when it is released by a famous and a worldwide name like Facebook. The App thus released actually becomes more like a platform for the existing celebrities and prominent names. This is because as claimed, with the help of this App, the renowned persons or the celebrities can now stay in touch with their respective fans. This new App is named as Facebook Mentions and is supportable only in the Apple's official App Store.

Multiple Facets of One App

Facebook Mentions is really a unique App. It paves the way for only those public figures and personalities who have a verified page on Facebook. This means not all those fake admins of several pages can have any kind of access to it, thus enabling more authenticity and more privacy. As for now, Facebook has not allowed even the brands and other companies to use Facebook Mentions. However, the company claims that it would do that soon in the near future as this App is introduced to the other countries as well, since for now this App is available only in US.

With the help of this App, people can actually start a conversation with those people, who are most talked and most discussed. All these public figures can share their respective photos, videos and much more. In addition, they can share a Q&A session live only with the help of their phones. Along with that, these respective public figures can also be a part of any important or trending conversation, thus being able to know about the viewpoints of their respective fans and lovers.

A break through Step by Facebook

The introduction of this App is really a wise step by Facebook. Apart from connecting the fans to their beloved figures, this App also serves as a platform for all those who are currently at the infancy of fame. Public figures who have just tasted success and are wanting more limelight from public, can readily use this App.

It seems that Facebook is wanting the famous and the renowned people to stay on easier connections with their help. This App actually breaks out from the conventional ideas and notions that called the famous celebrities to rely only on Media for broadcasting and expressing their respective views. Basically, it serves as the role of a middleman.

In each perspective thus, this new Facebook Mentions App comes to be a great help. It is once a simple application and a good opportunity for staying up and close with fans. By this introduction, Facebook yet again showed it is creating better ideas with better opportunities.

The Attempt of Recreation of Jupiter's Core

Rise of Science and Technology

Science and technology with time has really become advanced and more developed in order to open up larger scope of knowledge for the people at large. Likewise recently, the scientists have also experimented with ways out with the use of laser techniques for the recreation of Jupiter's core.

It may at once sound quite improbable and quite impossible as far as the recreation of the planet's core is involved, but the fact remains unchanged that the scientists have actually taken an endeavour to do such a job.

The Attempt of Recreation

Nevertheless, the very core of Jupiter is something that can be really unpleasant. However, in order to know about the formation of such heavenly bodies like planets, it becomes a matter of importance to get a better understanding on the very components of the planets.

Thus for gaining such information and more, a team or panel of scientists at the famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had recently made the use of diamonds along with the lasers for the recreation of such similar conditions.

Brief Overview on the Experiment

In total, the scientists sued 176 lasers that included the world's largest laser as well, for compressing the diamond. The chosen diamond was actually subjected to about 50 millions atmospheric pressure or 14 times of the pressure that is present at the Earth's centre. The main reason why diamonds were selected in this experiment is because diamonds are made of carbon and carbon is also the fourth most abundant and found element in the whole universe.

The machine that is used in this experiment is sphere has roughly about 30 feet diameter. The diamond is on the side of a can that is one centimetre high at the very end of a cone. Following this, the ultraviolet rays are typically shot into the top as well as the bottom ends of the present coke can.

Having got the laser shots, the coke can later convert these ultraviolet lights into typical x-rays. In simple terms, the can turns into a uniform x-ray oven. This x-ray bath helps in causing a series of many reactions sending pressure waves inside the present diamond, resulting it to compress.

The entire process, at an approximate, lasted for about few nano seconds, after which the diamond got exploded. As Ray Smith, LLNL physicist, says, “The experimental techniques developed here provide a new capability to experimentally reproduce pressure-temperature conditions deep in planetary interiors.” With such experiments, scientists can also be able to know more about conditions in other planets as well.

Multiple Facets

This whole experiment not only gave rise to similar conditions in planets like Jupiter but also gave rise to the capabilities of diamond, the hardest element known to man as well. Some of the scientists also did not think that diamond would become that stiff as it resulted to.

Definitely, it was supposed and expected to get harder and harder as the compressing took place, but the speed was quite unknown. With these experiments, materials are seen to have different perspectives as well. Like these diamonds, it can be rightly expected as well that other materials also may not be as simple as they seem to be.

What Breed does that Dog Belong to? – Let Microsoft Answer that!

Microsoft’s research division is very proactive and always making headways into cutting-edge research and pushing the boundaries of software and hardware. One such innovation is Microsoft’s project Adam – an advanced AI with a manifold performance increment over its predecessors and its competitors along with advanced object recognition technology it incorporates.

Project Adam

At Microsoft’s 5th Research Faculty Summit keynote, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Technology and Research, demonstrated the power of the AI along with its various capabilities. Its primary goal was to recognize any object given to it. It was achieved by culling a massive 14 million image database from Flickr made up of 22k different user-generated tag categories. Using 30 times fewer machines than average, it was used to train Adam – a 2 billion connection neural network and it produces results 50 times faster than the competition.

Adam’s Capabilities

As actions speak louder than words, so a prompt demonstration was given and dogs definitely steal the show. In main aim was to recognize the dog’s breed. In order to make it more interactive it was integrated with Cortana, Microsoft’s very own personal assistant for their windows phone 8.1 lineups. Project Adam researcher Johnson Apacible pointed the phone’s camera at a Dalmatian named Cowboy and it was quick to identify the breed. He then showed a Rhodesian Ridgeback and it was spot-on to identify it too. A Cobberdog lead to some confusion as people said it was Labradoodle whereas Cortana said terrier but both were right. Just for some fun, he then pointed at Shum and Cortana was quick to reply with a negative.

The Possibilities

At the end, Shum quoted that there was a paradigm shift from personal computing to a future where user is the centre and hence it’s not about computing power or storage but people’s time and attention. One day Project Adam might make it possible for people to snap pictures of their skin or infection, identify the cause, and take appropriate medication based on the suggestions. It can also identify the calories contained in a meal by pointing it at the food. Another scenario would be when you are in woods; you would like to differentiate between poisonous and edible plants where it can help too.

Competition

However, as always the case, Microsoft is not alone in this race. In January, Google outbid Facebook to buy “DeepMind” – a London based AI Lab for 400 million. Further Google launched Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab to further study how quantum computing can lead to advances in artificial intelligence. HartmutNeven, Director of engineering for Research team at Google, was quoted saying that machine learning will gain utmost importance in near future with more accurate predictions and better models, which will also help them to produce a more useful search engine.

The Future 

In future, we might see Microsoft integrating it with smartphones and Cortana for a richer user experience and make them stand apart from the competition where product differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult.

Get your Eyes Ready for Google Smart Lens!

Over the past few years, Google has exponentially increased its footprints in the field of ubiquitous computing and wearable/embedded technology – a move that is in line with its look towards the future strategy. Google X Project will now collaborate with Alcon (a Novartis child) to bring smart lens to the consumer market. Alcon produces some of the most wide-selling contact lens products including the likes of Air Optix, FreshLook and Dailies. And now both will lock-step to work together to materialize the product. The deal is almost complete, though financial details were not disclosed; only anti-trust approval remains left for the transaction.

What is Smart Lens? 

A product of Google research, smart lenses look like traditional lenses but have embedded miniature electronic circuits in them running sophisticated software, which makes them “smart”. This merger will see the coming together of Google’s efforts in circuit miniaturization of circuits and Novartis’s deep pharmaceuticals and medical device expertise. This technology involves non-invasive sensors and miniature microchips, which are embedded in the lens. Ophthalmic electrochemical sensors are designed to measure glucose levels and provide real-time feedback, which will be sent to your smartphone. In addition, the lens may also offer adaptive vision corrective measures for presbyopic patients.

The Aims

Novartis interest in this technology is focused currently on two key areas i.e.
• Helping diabetic patients to continuously monitor their blood glucose levels using their “smart lens” which those levels from tear fluids in eyes and then beams it to your smartphone.

• For people with presbyopia, it can provide accommodative vision correction to help restore eye’s normal focus, either as a, accommodative contact lens or intraocular lens as part of the refractive cataract treatment.

Both Google and Alcon are expecting to break new grounds using their combined strength and help millions who suffer from diabetes. In addition, it may fit into Google’s “Android Wear” wearable device paradigm, which is rapidly gaining headways and ubiquity.

Novartis Chief Executive Joe Jimenez hopes that the product will be out by the next 5 years.Though Alcon’s global external communications director Elizabeth Harness Murphy was quick to point out that they still don’t have exact time frames as to when it may hit the market for consumers as they are working on a prototype right now.

The Future 

With Google already making headways with its Google Glass product and other wearable technology, it was inevitable and who better then Novartis. This deal fits perfectly in Google’s scheme of things. With the rise of health conscious gadgets and many competitors slowly starting to enter the market (which also might include their fiercest rival Apple), this deal was of utmost importance.

The deal has indeed come in time when drug makers and healthcare companies are looking for modern diagnostic methods to lower the cost of chronic disease monitoring for patients. While this deal only seems to be the eye, Novartis is looking towards remote patient monitoring in heart failure.

With major giants aligning interests together, the future of wearable computing and innovative disease monitoring seems to be ushering.

The role of communication in effective cybersecurity

A recent study of 5,000 cybersecurity professionals has found that ineffective communication between security specialists and company executives is one of the biggest barriers to reducing the number of cyber attacks made on company computer systems.

Of the 5,000 respondents to the survey, 31 percent said that they had never sat down with an organisation’s top brass to talk about cybersecurity, while 23 percent said they met execs to discuss cybersecurity just once a year.

This is a cause for concern for cybersecurity professionals who share a common gripe about the general lack of understanding about the link between loss of data, and loss of revenue. This is hardly surprising given just how infrequently the two parties communicate.

To combat this lack of understanding and the scarcity of skills which is particularly prevalent in the public sector, private ftp alternative providers such as Thru are being hired, via the G-Cloud, to increase awareness and improve the level of cybersecurity within government agencies.

The increase in agility

In an increasingly agile world where businesses want to be able to respond instantly to new opportunities or a change in customer demand, security can often come as an afterthought.

However, as attackers change their tactics, it is essential that cybersecurity professionals are in regular contact with company executives to increase their understanding of the new threats that arise as a result of new opportunities.

Executive teams should understand what threats the business faces, what the capabilities are within the company to defend against those threats, and whether a threat is industry specific or targeted at the business in particular. This approach makes it easier to identify weaknesses within the organisation and improve cybersecurity in the future.

Cybersecurity discontentment 

The research also revealed an underlying discontentment harboured by a good proportion of the survey’s respondents with the current security systems in place. In fact, some 29 percent of respondents said they’d like to overhaul their current security, while 13 percent said there would be no point changing anything about their current system as a determined attacker would be able to breakthrough whatever systems were in place.

These statistics are quite telling and reveal just how underprepared many cybersecurity professionals feel in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks.

New advice on passwords

To change the subject slightly, Microsoft has managed to increase the discontentment of a few security experts with its latest advice on passwords.

The recommendation, which flies in the face of the advice many cybersecurity professionals have been dishing out for the past decade or so, advises users to identify the importance of a particular application, and assign a password which is comparative in strength. So, relatively weak passwords should be used to protect less important websites, while strong passwords should be used to access important applications, such as banking.

However, some experts have come to the defence of conventional wisdom, claiming this approach would be just as burdensome for consumers as choosing a strong password for every site.

In an article in TechNewsWorld, the senior director of a leading cybersecurity provider, said: “Regular users have trouble distinguishing what ‘important’ and ‘non-important’ services are. Most people understand that banking is important – but the distinction is not always clear on other services.

“Password re-use is a significant threat, both to individual users and organisations. As users choose the same passwords for online and organisational services, the organisation’s exposure to attack grows.”

Does your cybersecurity team regularly communicate with the top brass? If not, do you think this approach would help to improve your security? And what do you make of this latest advice on passwords? We’d love to hear from you, so please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

AUTHOR BIO

James Davies is a tech blogger and internet start-up owner based in Southend-On-Sea. When he’s not blogging for some of the UK’s most authoritative websites, James can be found paddle boarding and windsurfing. He’s not very good at either, but that’s by-the-by.