Tesla is seeing success in China’s electric vehicle market, but native company Xpeng may have a fighting chance to compete. Xpeng’s new P7 sedan is the company’s second production model and has some impressive benchmark results. Some configurations of the car can accelerate to 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) per hour in 4.3 seconds, and it can travel about 200 miles farther on a charge than a Tesla Model 3. (Xpeng is using a different battery benchmarking standard than Tesla, so range comparisons may not be perfect reflections of reality.) Xpeng is also hoping that its vehicles’ pricing makes them more attractive than Tesla’s offerings — the P7 starts at 229,900 yuan (about $36,000), while the Model 3 starts at 344,050 yuan (about $48,500).
Xpeng’s cars are the first to use Nvidia’s Drive AGX Xavier system-on-a-chip to run the P7’s array of sensors and cameras. Each P7 is equipped with 12 ultrasonic sensors, five millimeter-wave radars and 14 cameras. According to the company, these amount to the only 360-degree “multi-perception” system in an electric vehicle.
If you happen to own a pair of Samsung’s original Galaxy Buds, you’ll now be able to do more with them. The company has released a new software update for the true wireless headphones that brings over a couple of features that were previously exclusive to the newer Galaxy Buds+.
The most notable enhancement is the addition of an improved ambient sound mode. You can enable the feature to work automatically, as well as with just one of the earbuds in your ear. Samsung says the enhanced ambient sound functionality gives Galaxy Buds owners more options on how they tune out — or, in this case, tune in — to their surroundings.
“Think of this less as a giant computer in a stark white room and more of an approach to computing that is planetary in scale and allows us to query every aspect of environmental and nature-based solutions available in real time,” Joppa wrote in a Scientific American op-ed last September. “We currently lack the data, compute power and scalability to do so. Only when we have a massive amount of planetary data and compute at a similar scale can we begin to answer one of the most complex questions ever posed—how do we manage the earth’s natural resources equitably and sustainably to ensure a prosperous and climate-stable future?”
As soon as humans could take flight in balloons and tie cameras to kites, we’ve been trying to capture and understand the world from above. The Planetary Computer takes that idea to its logical conclusion, serving as a way to envision everything happening on the planet at once with a combination of satellite imagery, sensors in the air and even robots on the ground.
Microsoft is clearly building on its AI for Earth initiative, which launched in 2018 as a way to use AI tools to help environmental organizations. Joppa says the program now covers over 500 grantees across 80 countries. “Many of those grantees have done incredible things,” he said. “But when we step back… It was really clear that we weren’t allowing our grantees or anyone else, for that matter, to build on the work of each other. To take data that was contributed by one organization, machine learning algorithms that were contributed by another, and put those two together to create a new service that anybody could use. These are all like isolated pockets of information.”
Joppa describes that realization as a humbling experience — his dream project for the last few years basically had no way to scale. So, the idea for a unified data platform was born. Getting there will take some time though. Joppa sees the Planetary Computer as something that could be powered by the data collection tools we already use, but there’s also an urgent need for new technology. Microsoft Research’s Project Premonition, for example, can help track the movement of pathogens with robots that can catch mosquitoes and other bugs, while also listening and chemically “smelling” the environment. And the move towards quantum computing, which Joppa describes as “nature’s code,” could also help us interpret the vast amounts of data that the Planetary Computer receives.
“My ultimate question… is thinking about what humanity’s objective function should be for planet Earth. What do we want to achieve with all of our natural resources?” Joppa said. “And how can we do that in a way that optimally derives human benefit from natural resources, while minimizing human negative impacts. And to do that you are actually talking about the world’s largest optimization experiment.”
There are, of course, potentially enormous issues with such a massive data collection project. Mainly, it’s worrying to think of what governments and intelligence agencies will do with it. We’ve already seen the NSA leap at the chance to invade privacy with its PRISM surveillance network. The prospect of that agency having direct access to everything happening on Earth in real-time is downright terrifying. And what about potentially hard truths? What if it recommends that we keep a nuclear reactor online, despite vocal anti-nuclear opposition, when the replacement power source is likely far more harmful to the environment? (Something New York is currently facing as it plans to close the Indian Point nuclear plant in 2021.)
“I’m prepared for getting to the outcome we want,” Joppa said when asked about challenging results from the Planetary Computer. “We just need to accept that there’s trade offs along the way. But let’s put our human ingenuity towards defining where we want to go, and what we want to be when we get there. And let’s put our computational systems that play in telling us how to most optimally travel in that direction.”
CSAIL’s tech isn’t ready for real-world use. A Parrot Bebop 2 drone responded to 82 percent of over 1,500 gestures — promising, but not what you’d depend on in a vital situation. The scientists intend to refine the technology, though, including the option of custom or more continuous gestures. They’ll ideally learn from the commands to better understand input or learn to navigate on their own.
If the technology does escape the lab, though, it could make robot control more accessible to people who’d otherwise be intimidated. It could also be helpful for remote exploration, personal robots and other tasks where you may want the more organic control of a human for tricky situations.
“I think it’s more knowing what your hair type is and what tools you’re going to need to accomplish the goal,” he continued. “That’s essentially the beginning, I don’t think it’s a dreadful and scary situation.”
In fact, you can keep yourself looking sharp even as your hair gets progressively longer by focusing on two key areas, Whitely noted: the back of your hairline, the bit where your barber would typically square or round off, and your sideburns. “if you can maintain those key areas, just trim those down,” he said, “that will 100 percent maintain whatever hairstyle you had, at least for a little bit longer.”
You may also consider a different do that emphasizes your lengthening locks. Many hairstyles, Pompadours for example, actually work better the longer your hair is. “Really all you need is hair product and a blow dryer,” Whitely explained. “You just go to town, blow dry it, then brush and you literally can flick all that back into a very beautiful Pompadour.”
But if you’re hell-bent on shortening your hair on your own, the simplest and safest cut you can give yourself is a standard men’s burr cut. Whitely strongly recommends using clippers with comb guards to help maintain a uniform length. “You start long and work your way down,” Whitely said, noting that it’s far easier to take more length off than try to add it back on. “If you start long, then you will never, ever see that big mistake, that patchy situation on one side of your head and have to wear a hat for the next three weeks.”
Before you start cutting, you’re going to need some supplies. First, grab an old bed sheet or bath towel to throw over your shoulders to catch all that hair. You’ll also need some scissors such as the Javenproliu Haircutting Shears, a wide-tooth comb like the Kent R7T, a sturdy hand mirror, and some hair clips. Most importantly, you’ll need a quality set of clippers. Whitely recommends either splurging on the $170 Oster Classic 76, “that thing is a workhorse you can literally pass it on to your kid,” or picking up one from Wahl, such as the $80 Peanut. Either way, make sure it includes comb guards. “If you are interested in seeing if you can give yourself a taper, then you’ll have those clipper guards to help guide with that,” he said. “You start long, then go short and then once you’ve kind of figured out the length that you want,” you start at the bottom with the shortest guide and work your way up, getting longer as you go.
Your hand mirror is going to prove indispensable once it comes time to clean up the back, Whitely explained. You’re going to stand in front of a stationary mirror, like the one in your bathroom, and face away from it. Hold the hand mirror in your non-dominant hand and the clippers in the other. Hold the hand mirror in front of you and use it to look into the stationary mirror behind to guide your clipper hand as you shear the back of your head. Easy peasy.
The type of hair you have will directly impact the kind of cut you can give yourself. For example, if you have curly hair never, ever cut it while wet. Curly hair shortens significantly as it dries so you run the very real risk of inadvertently taking off too much if you try to cut it while it’s damp. Whether your hair is curly, straight or wavy, get used to making point cuts. That’s when you hold the scissors vertically and make subtle snips. It’s more forgiving than cutting directly across the hair if you make a mistake and is especially useful when trimming bangs and nipping off split ends. If you’ve got thinning hair, you have two general options.
“You can move and manipulate your hair enough to make it look like you are not thinning,” Whitely said. “The second option is, if you are thinning in the front, the more your hair grows, the more obvious that area of thinning is going to be visible so ideally what I recommend is trying your best to cut your hair to the length of the thinning part.”
Whether you run the clippers with or against the grain of the hair makes a significant difference in how much bulk you’ll remove. Clipping against the grain (ie from your forehead to the crown of your head) will take off much more hair than if you ran it with the grain (crown to forehead). “For example, my hair is wavy,” ‘Whitely said. “So if I go against the grain, I’m picking up a bunch of my hair, it’s going to be really low and you’ll see my scalp. However, if I go with the grain, I’m literally just smoothing out all of the hair down to pick it maybe a 10th of an inch off.”
That quarantine beard you’re growing needs a bit of TLC too. “The most important thing to be mindful of during this period is that we’re locked up in our houses, we don’t necessarily get the opportunity to get the natural sweat that helps moisturize our skin,” Whitely points out. “You want to maintain your skin underneath the beard.” That includes exfoliating at least once a week and washing your face regularly, though you won’t need to scrub as compulsively as with your hands.
Even though we’re not exposed to the sun’s harmful radiation as much these days, it’s still important to moisturize both your beard and the skin underneath it. “Give it [20 – 30 seconds] an opportunity for the beard and the skin to absorb underneath, and then do your finishing move with your pomade or beard wax or whatever it may be.”
Setting boundaries for your beard is also important. Whitely recommends starting an edge a quarter-inch above your Adam’s apple and extending that across and up to the bottoms of your ears. This allows your beard to more seamlessly fade into your neck line. The farther above your Adam’s apple the beard starts, the more pronounced the delineation between your head and neck will be — and that’s not a good thing.
If you are still unsure as to the ins and outs of home haircutting, there’s an entire internet’s worth of walkthroughs and tutorials such as Tips for Clips, Beardbrand, or Regal Gentleman for you to explore. What’s more a number of barbers and stylists who have been sidelined in the quarantine have started offering remote tutorials, walking their clients through the steps of a cut via video chat. If your barber isn’t offering this service, You Probably Need a Haircut can help connect you with a stylist who does. And if all else fails, there’s always the Flowbee.
Similarly, Tarek, a law student in New York, told the MIT Technology Review that after long days of classes via Zoom, the extra video chats with friends and family feel exhausting. What’s more, turning down an invitation for virtual socialization can spur feelings of guilt, because they don’t have much of an excuse amidst the shelter-in-place. Friends have confessed to me that the constant video chats have been tiring them out as well, perhaps even more so than real-life interactions.
Luis Alvarez via Getty Images
The issue is, online video interactions are fundamentally different from face-to-face ones. “When we’re sitting face-to-face with someone, we are physically present and this allows us to be more in-the-moment and not feel so ‘stilted’ or ‘performance-oriented,’” Suzanne Degges-White, a professor and chair of Counseling and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University, told Engadget. “[On video chat] we have to be more conscious of the words we choose and when we jump into conversations.”
That’s different from in-person communications, where there are helpful physical cues. “In face-to-face meetings, we’re able to gauge the climate and better read the room to know when it’s best to jump in and share a diverse or different perspective,” she added. “In video meetings, we don’t get to see the ‘clues’ that body language and facial expressions send nearly as well.” Plus, she said, we lose about 85 percent of communication due to the absence of body language, and we don’t necessarily pick up on others’ non-verbal cues appropriately. Video chats can therefore require a lot more energy and focus, while in-person interactions are a little less demanding.
“Many of us are experiencing non-verbal overload,” said Jeremy Bailenson, a founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, who recently wrote about the topic in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. This is especially true with software like Zoom, which wasn’t really designed for social interaction in the manner we’re doing now. “In a normal workplace, people rarely engage in long bouts of mutual gaze — that is, looking directly into the eyes of another,” he told Engadget. “With Zoom, a grid of people stare right at you from the screen for the entire meeting.”
ake1150sb via Getty Images
In an experiment at Stanford, Bailenson and his colleagues studied the consequences of this “constant gaze” using virtual classrooms. He discovered that while productivity did increase, the students’ discomfort went up. “People report being very uncomfortable getting stared at for an entire meeting,” he said. “The brain is particularly attentive to faces, and when we see large ones close up, we interpret them as being close by. Our ‘fight-or-flight’ reflex responds.”
There’s also often an added pressure to “perform” while on video chats. Marissa Shuffler, an associate professor at Clemson University, told the BBC that there’s often social pressure when you’re on a video conference when you know everyone’s looking at you. “Being performative is nerve-wracking and more stressful,” she said. Plus, silence in a video call can feel more awkward than usual. A 2014 study in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies pointed out that delays on conferencing technologies can sometimes make people think the other person is less friendly, or less focused.
What makes matters more complicated is that most if not all of our socialization is now through the internet. “Most of our social roles happen in different places, but now the context has collapsed,” Gianpiero Petriglieri, an associate professor at Insead, told the BBC. “Imagine if you go to a bar, and in the same bar you talk with your professors, meet your parents or date someone, isn’t it weird? That’s what we’re doing now.”
Jasmin Merdan via Getty Images
There are a few tech innovations that could help mitigate the fatigue. Instead of using your own face for example, Bailenson said that Apple’s Animoji and Samsung’s AR Emoji can help maximize social connectedness while minimizing the aforementioned non-verbal load. He also suggested companies like High Fidelity and Loom.AI, both of which are developing surprisingly life-like 3D avatars that can offer a more realistic version of the same thing.
But if that’s a little too high-tech for you, there are a few steps that you can take today to help reduce video chat exhaustion. “Don’t schedule back-to-back meetings,” suggested Degges-White. “Take a break away from the screen between meetings and get fresh air.” She also recommends making sure that your “office” feels different from your “living area.” You could perhaps change the lighting or switch out your clothes to signify to yourself you’re changing modes. “When you feel you’re working 24/7 and are unable to leave the ‘office’ to see friends, having tricks to help you feel there’s a boundary between work and play can be important.”
You could also simply choose to turn the camera off during your video conferences. In one meeting for example, Bailenson decided to have it so only the person talking needed to stream the video. “It helped,” he said. “Highlighting our wall-hangings behind us is not critical to most meetings.” Additionally, he said that software like Zoom does let you control the positioning and size of the windows that show other people’s faces. “Play around with these settings to find one that creates the right balance for you,” he added.
Last but not least, you could ditch the computer altogether. “There’s always the telephone,” said Bailenson. Degges-White likes that idea too. “It can be less stressful when you ‘show up’ in voice only,” she said. “Cut yourself some slack and phone it in next time. Your overstrained eyes and the muscles you use for that ‘attentive meeting participant face’ will thank you.”
Movies from the online version of Tribeca will be free to stream, along with ones curated by other major festivals, such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Other participants include the BFI London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Annecy International Animation Film Festival and those in Tokyo, Berlin, Sydney, Karlovy Vary, San Sebastian and Mumbai.
Tribeca has already made some of its programming available to watch online, including shorts and virtual reality experiences. South by Southwest, meanwhile, teamed up with Amazon to stream some of its movies for free on Prime Video starting today. While streaming won’t (and shouldn’t) entirely replace film fests, it will at least help many filmmakers get their work seen until physical festivals are up and running again.
The Inspire HR is a mostly frill-free tracker that focuses on step counts, calories and other fundamentals. You won’t find perks like built-in GPS (though it can use your phone) or on-screen workouts here. Heart rate monitoring can be very useful for optimizing your workouts and monitoring stress, however, and this model improves on the basic Inspire with sleep tracking, goal-based exercise modes and workout intensity maps. At $70, it’s easier to justify than a smartwatch if you’re mainly interested in quantifying your exercise.
The Galaxy Watch Active has all of the key features of the flagship Galaxy Watch, including a bright, beautiful screen, great health and fitness tracking capabilities and Samsung Pay. With the Health app, the smartwatch can track a number of different workouts, from resistance training to elliptical sessions. It will even track your stress levels by monitoring your heart rate and calculating the variance.
To keep the costs down, Samsung did make a few minor sacrifices. The Galaxy Watch Active doesn’t have the rotating bezel. It has a smaller face and shorter battery life. But the sport-friendly body is 20 percent smaller and roughly 60 percent lighter than the Galaxy Watch. And even with less battery power, it should last two to three days, depending on how much activity tracking you ask it to do.
Even at $200, we were impressed with the watch and gave it a score of 83. Now, with a price tag of just $120, the Watch Active is even more impressive. It’s not the latest version — the Watch Active 2 came out late last year — but it’s still a good option for anyone who wants a solid, affordable smartwatch that will work well with Android smartphones.
The HomePod is one of the better-sounding smart speakers we’ve tested, with balanced output that automatically adjusts to the device’s placement in the room. It might be your ideal speaker if you’re deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem thanks to its easy setup, Apple Music integration and AirPlay 2 streaming. The company has also addressed gaps in its features since launch with multi-user support, music handoffs, radio streaming and Spotify support, among other upgrades.
With that said, some of the caveats haven’t changed. You’ll need an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch just to set up the speaker, so Android-only households need not apply. Siri and HomeKit are good at many tasks, but they don’t have the sheer flexibility or breadth of hardware support of rivals like Alexa or Google Assistant. And while Spotify support is present, it’s clear the HomePod is designed with Apple Music in mind for on-demand tunes. This is still a good speaker — it’s just not ideal if you want a truly platform-independent setup.
