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Google’s AI can detect breast cancer more accurately than experts

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The company trained its AI using de-identified data from patients in both the US and the UK, and showed that it could reduce false positives by 5.7 percent and false negatives by 9.4 percent in the US. Interestingly, a smaller reduction of 1.2 percent and 2.7 percent respectively was seen in the UK, suggesting that the current US detection system has lower accuracy than the current UK system.

Unlike the human experts, who used patient histories and prior mammograms to make their assessments, the AI only had access to the most recent mammogram of each patient. Despite this, it was able to make screening decisions with greater accuracy than the experts, and the model could be generalized to different populations — such as women in the US compared to women in the UK.

The developers of the AI emphasize that this is early stage research and that more studies and cooperation with healthcare providers will be required before the system is ready for widespread use.

DeepMind has been used in the past for medical purposes from spotting eye diseases to predicting kidney illness, however, it has also been the subject of considerable controversy. In 2017, it was revealed that the UK’s National Health System had shared data with DeepMind on an “inappropriate legal basis,” with the company receiving 1.6 million patient records without the direct consent of the patients. This broke privacy laws, the UK data watchdog ruled, so the NHS chose continue working with DeepMind but to anonymize data in future.

In 2018, DeepMind was brought under the Google Health initiative, and concerns about privacy were not assuaged when Google dissolved the review board which was supposed to oversee the company’s relationship with the NHS. For all the potential good that could be done with a medical AI like DeepMind, there seems to be a concerning lack of oversight over the privacy of patient data and a lack of accountability for past data privacy issues.

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EUV will use plasma and lasers to make next-gen chips

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The specific mechanics of making a chip are already insanely complicated, requiring atom-scale accuracy and some of the most precise manufacturing tools ever created, but the current method has its limits. This process has been in use for nearly 15 years, and it’s running out of steam. Parts of the transistors on a chip are now on the order of 7 to 10 nanometers in size, far smaller than the 193nm UV light used to create them.

Manufacturers needed to redesign the process if we were going to keep making better and faster chips, and the new process is extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. Companies have been working for years to develop this next step in chipmaking, and we are just seeing the first devices made with EUV coming to market.

To learn more about this process, I went to two of Intel’s manufacturing facilities where they are developing EUV to see the machines in person, and learn more about this extreme manufacturing.

An evolutionary leap, EUV still projects a chip blueprint onto silicon, but it uses light with an incredibly small wavelength to do so, the better for creating minuscule features.

At these tiny wavelengths, the UV light is absorbed by nearly everything, and it can’t be generated with a typical laser. The process is far more exotic, involving liquid metal and high energy plasma. The technical challenges are immense, but the payoff is a leap in the speed and energy efficiency of our devices.

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BMW’s plug-in hybrid 745e delivers tech and luxury at a price

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The 745e brings some eco-friendliness to the automaker’s high-end sedan via a battery pack that with up to 16 miles of EV range. In combination gas and electric mode, it has a 56 MPGe versus 22 MPG (in gas-only mode). Like most BMWs, the 7 Series is built for speed and to pamper its occupants. The 7 Series is BMW’s pinnacle of comfort, opulence and technology. Yet with all that it has going for it, the 745e’s electric-only range leaves something to be desired and overall it’s a bit overpriced.

But those issues melt from your mind while behind the wheel. The 745e’s 6-cylinder in-line engine is coupled with an electric motor that (together) pushes out an impressive 389 horsepower and 442 pound-feet of torque. While driving, you’ll never want for additional power. Put the hammer down and the 7 Series happily fulfils your desire for acceleration. The eight-speed Sport Steptronic transmission translates all that torque into acceleration that never seems to produce the jarring of a gear change.

While bombing down the highway or cruising city streets, the vehicle’s suspension smoothes out any cracks, ruts or holes in the road. Importantly, it glides over them without jostling the vehicle’s occupants. Cornering is a mixture of composure and smooth sophistication. The 745e is a large sedan and BMW has done a bang-up job reigning in a majority of the heft during tight cornering. It doesn’t compete with the impressive road-sticking power of the 8 Series, but it’ll have you feeling confident on winding roads.

2020 BMW 745e review

The boldness in engineering wavers a bit when it comes to the 12.0kWh battery pack’s range. In electric-mode, the 745e is rated for 16 miles. In the real world, that’s more like 12-13 while cruising. It’s not horrible, until you think about the sticker price of the vehicle. For just shy of 100 grand, a range of at least 20 miles would seem more reasonable. By comparison, the Porsche Panamera 4 E-Hybrid Sport Turismo gets 30 miles between charges. Sure that battery pack is lugging around a lot of car, but if you’re building a state-of-art plug-in hybrid, give driver’s a bit more to crow about to their friends.

Fortunately, the tech inside that car should help owners gloss over the battery range. BMW’s iDrive system is still top-notch. A bonus is that BMW recently announced that it will no longer require a subscription for CarPlay. New owners should be dancing in the street for not paying a yearly rate for something that’s essentially free in other vehicles.

Another bit of CarPlay news: After having issues with BMW’s wireless connection in the last few vehicles I tested, I was able to connect and use my iPhone with the feature without issue.

The rest of the infotainment system works well with additional screens in the back including an Android tablet with controls for climate and media. It’s next-level fancy and I’m here for it.

Also on the tech front, with each use of BMW’s hands-free traffic jam assistant, I became more enamored with the system. At low speeds in traffic and on a freeway, the system allows for true hands-free driving as long as you keep an eye on the road ahead of you. It reduces the stress and cognitive load of driving in the Bay Area’s increasingly dense gridlock. The in-car monitor does a good job making sure I’m paying attention and the on-wheel lights keep me informed of the feature’s status. I will admit that even though I can keep my hands off the wheel at speeds up to 37 miles per hour, I still have at least one hand on the controls.

2020 BMW 745e review

At the heart of the system are the adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assistant features that, while not as robust when it comes to tracking lanes as offerings from Tesla or Mercedes, is a solid system. Tesla and Mercedes are better at keeping their respective vehicles in the center of a lane even around sharper highway curves. BMW is getting better at this, but it’s not quite there yet. Still, the 745e handled cut-ins with grace and tracked the center of a lane well in all but the sharpest curves.

All of this is presented in a package that’s comfortable, luxurious and has enough room for four tall adults without the persistent cries of “Hey, can I put my seat back?” or “Do you have room?” The interior exudes style combined with a layout that’s logical. I was never looking for a button for more than a few seconds — everything is where it should be. Whether around town or on a long road trip, the 745e delivers a sophisticated mode of transportation. Sadly, the battery pack doesn’t offer the pure-electric range that a vehicle of this caliber deserves.

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Samsung’s QLED 8K TV will be one of the first certified by the 8K Association

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The certification is important, as Samsung will be able to promote its 8K TVs as being validated by the 8KA, complete with a logo. “Our goal is to provide consumers with the ability to easily identify premium 8K displays from other devices when making purchasing decisions,” said Samsung Display VP Hyogun Lee.

While this might sound like a non-controversial announcement, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. At IFA 2019, LG made clear that it didn’t think Samsung’s 8K TVs conformed to a true 8K spec, even though it had the correct number of pixels, according to Forbes. It believes that Samsung’s QLED pixels are not clearly distinguishable from one another, so the effective resolution is lower than 8K. Naturally, it thinks its own 88Z9 OLED and LM99 LCD TVs are sharper and do meet a true 8K standard.

LG’s 88-inch 88Z9 OLED TV

While companies like Samsung, Panasonic and Hisense are part of the 8K Association, LG notably is not. Rather, it based its assertions on measurements from the International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM). That group has devised a “contrast modulation” test that displays alternating one-pixel-wide white and black lines, then effectively counts the lines. The more that appear, the clearer the image on an 8K TV.

Experts on resolution both inside the Samsung camp and outside don’t necessarily agree with this. The measurement doesn’t take color data into account and Samsung said it set up its 8K TVs not by counting pixels but by looking at the actual image. And the ICDM recently made a statement that watered down LG’s claims.

While standard disputes aren’t that spicy, this information does matter to buyers. We’ll all be relying on groups like the 8KA for 8K TV purchases, just as we did on the UHD Alliance for 4K sets. As such, it’s important that they’re neutral and subservient to consumers, not manufacturers. All that said, none of this will matter in the foreseeable future, as 8K sets are still crazy expensive and there’s virtually no 8K content.

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Bentley’s first electric car will arrive in 2025 at the earliest

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Bentley is part of Volkswagen, so using one of the platforms in the group’s growing arsenal of architectures isn’t out of the question. And, Hallmark affirmed engineers will take advantage of the innovative packaging possibilities made possible by electric powertrains. He explained the firm isn’t about to release a Mini, but an electric Bentley could have a smaller footprint than, say, a Mulsanne while offering a comparable amount of interior space. He cited the Jaguar I-Pace as an example, which he said is nearly 14 inches shorter than Land Rover’s Range Rover, yet is about as spacious inside because electric motors require less space than a comparable gasoline- or diesel-burning engine.

The trade-off is that an electric Bentley would need a sizable battery pack, and designers would likely have to put the car on stilts to leave enough room in the cabin for people and gear if they were to pen an electric car in 2020. Solid-state battery technology will solve that problem when it’s ready for production, according to Hallmark, though he didn’t reveal whether he’s open to waiting for the new chemistry or if Bentley’s first electric car will ship with a lithium-ion battery pack.


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“I’m not saying we are guaranteed to go solid-state, but that is already on the radar within that mid-2020s period. They are about 30% lighter for the same power as lithium-ion,” he pointed out, adding smaller, lighter batteries solve some of the packaging problems electric cars currently face.

Most electric cars on the market use a single electric motor per axle. Two-wheel drive models have one motor, while those with through-the-road all-wheel drive (like the aforementioned I-Pace) use two. Bentley might take a different path to electrification. The electric, 19-foot long EXP 100 GT concept (pictured) unveiled in 2019 had an electric motor assigned to each wheel for a combined output of 1,100 pound-feet of torque. It was simply a design study, but it might point the way forward.

Bentley isn’t in a rush to release its first battery-powered model. Regardless of what it looks like, or what it’s powered by, it’s not expected to arrive until 2025 at the earliest. The company notably needs to figure out if it can build an electric car on the same assembly line as its piston-powered models, or if it needs to invest in expanding its historic production facility in Crewe, England.

In the meantime, Hallmark predicted 2020 looks even brighter than 2019. “It would be hard not to have a record year,” he said. Bentley will release an updated Bentayga for the 2021 model year, and spy shots suggest the Speed variant of the Flying Spur will arrive packing plug-in hybrid power.

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Streaming now accounts for 80 percent of the US music market

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Spotify landed in the US in 2011 and Apple Music debuted in 2014. There are many other streaming options around, including Tidal, Pandora, YouTube Music and Amazon Prime Music to name a few. Around 81 percent of Americans now have a smartphone, compared with about 35 percent in 2010. Since it’s much easier to use a streaming service than buy digital albums or load MP3s onto a phone (or carry around a separate music player), smartphone adoption has played a key role in the streaming shift.

In 2010, physical sales accounted for 52 percent of the US music market and digital sales 38 percent. Both are now down to a nine percent share. The market share of synch (i.e. licensing music for use in other media) hasn’t changed over the last nine years at three percent. But while people aren’t buying CDs so much anymore, vinyl’s back on the up. Sales rose from a little over $50 million in 2009 to almost $450 million in 2018.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift (who famously pulled her music from Spotify for a while), Adele and Drake claimed eight of the top ten selling albums of the decade between them. It’s not quite clear how their sales figures break down between streams and digital/physical album sales. However, given some of their songs have hundreds of millions of plays on various services, streaming certainly played an important factor.



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WSJ: FDA vape ban will target fruit flavored pods

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A few days ago, the FDA officially raised the minimum age of sale for tobacco products from 18 to 21, and according to a Wall Street Journal report, it’s close to announcing a new set of restrictions specifically for e-cigarettes. In a move that is supposed to address teen vaping by targeting products they’re interested in, the new rules will reportedly apply only to pod-based vaporizers, like Juul or NJOY, and remove any flavors from sale other than tobacco or menthol.

In anticipation of the ban, Juul stopped selling sweet fruit-flavored pods — that represented a significant part of its business — in October, and pulled mint flavors in November. The WSJ report suggests that meeting at this point represents a compromise between the Trump administration and the tobacco industry, avoiding a wider ban on all flavored vapes — that had been suggested — ahead of the 2020 election. It would also avoid banning flavors in “open-tank” systems that allow people to mix their own flavors.

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Tax prep companies can’t hide their free filing software from Google anymore

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Moving forward, the addendum prohibits TurboTax maker Intuit and the other nine companies that make up the Free File Alliance from “engaging in any practice” that would prevent their free software from showing up on Google or any other search engine. Additionally, all 10 companies must now stick to a standardized naming scheme so that you can easily identify their free software. The next time you search for one of their apps, it should be called “IRS Free File program delivered by [product name].”

However, the most significant change is that the IRS is now free to create its own software. Under the previous version of the deal, the agency had agreed not to compete with the industry under the understanding those companies would offer free software for low- and middle-income Americans to use come tax season.

The addendum comes after relentless reporting from ProPublica. In April, the publication published a report that showed Intuit and H&R Block had included code in their free software that prevented the apps from showing up on Google. Intuit also spent years lobbying the government to prevent the IRS from changing the Free File agreement.

In a blog post on its website, Intuit said it “strongly supports these changes to the Free File program and associated Free File offerings because they increase the focus on the taxpayer experience. We applaud the IRS and FFA, who worked together to bring about these important reforms.” The company currently faces several lawsuits for its past behavior.

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Tax prep companies can’t hide their free filing software from Google anymore

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This week, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced changes that will hopefully make it less stressful for a lot of Americans to file their taxes in 2020. In an addendum to the almost 20-year-old Free File agreement, the agency has put new protec…

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US Army is the latest military branch to ban TikTok

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As with the Navy ban, the Army is likely concerned that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance could pose problems. While there’s no evidence of suspicious activity taking place, ByteDance could theoretically be compelled to forward soldiers’ sensitive info to the Chinese government or to recruit soldiers as spies.The company has been eager to fend off such claims, to the point where reports have speculated that it might sell control of TikTok to reassure nervous US officials.

It’s not known if the Air Force or Marine Corps have implemented similar policies, although it’s likely given coordination between the forces.

None of the services can ban TikTok from personal phones, so this might not wreck soldiers’ attempts to document their adventures. However, that still leaves some concerns about security. The Army still asks soldiers to be wary of strange texts, according to Ochoa, but it’s ultimately up to the troops to avoid sharing valuable data.

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