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Phone app detects eye disease in kids through photos

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Scientists tested the app with nearly 53,000 photos of 40 children, half of whom had eye diseases. Out of those, the AI system spotted 16 instances an average of 1.3 years before doctors made a diagnosis. When retinoblastoma can start migrating to the brain in as little as six months after white eye becomes visible, this could save lives or reduce the damage.

The app is useful regardless of age. As IEEE Spectrum noted, though, it works best for kids who can’t always say that they have vision problems. Parents are both more likely to look for issues with their kids’ eyes, frequently in the (many, many) photos they take.

The creators are quick to warn that the app isn’t FDA-approved and doesn’t constitute a diagnosis. Much as with the Apple Watch’s ECG, you’ll still want to go to a doctor to get a more definitive answer. It could give you the impetus to get to the doctor, however, and that may be enough.

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Tesla’s Smart Summon has been used more than half a million times

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NHTSA told the news organization: “We are in ongoing contact with the company and we continue to gather information. Safety is NHTSA’s top priority and the agency will not hesitate to act if it finds evidence of a safety-related defect.”

The agency revealed that it’s keeping an eye on Tesla just as company chief Elon Musk tweeted that the feature was used over 550,000 times in its first few days. His company rolled out Smart Summon with a software update last week, allowing owners to drive their car to where they’re standing simply by touching a button on the Tesla app.

While the feature has the ability to stop the vehicle if it detects an obstacle, it’s still supposed to work with human input. The company told its users to use the feature only if they’re standing around 200 feet from the vehicle and have a clear line of sight. It also warned them to monitor their car and its surroundings at all times and to be “especially careful around quick moving people, bicycles and cars.” In case they do notice an obstacle, they can lift their finger from the Summon button and stop their car from moving before it causes any accident.



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Contractors say they were told to lie while collecting Pixel 4 face scans

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This summer, we learned that Google had embarked on a wide scale project to collect facial recognition data, which the company said was necessary to build “fairness” into face unlocking for its Pixel 4, which will be officially unveiled on October 15th. A new report from the New York Daily News has more details on where Google sent people to collect that data, and what they were told to do by the company that hired them as contractors for the project.

The people collecting the data worked as TVCs — the “temporary, vendor and contractors” who outnumber Google’s own employees on the company’s roster — for an employment firm called Randstad. While the statement Google gave to media this summer indicated that participants signed a consent form allowing for the use of their data, including everything from infrared response to how they picked up the phone from the table, temp workers the paper talked to said they were trained to be pushy, and even lie to people about what was going on.

Google told the News that it was investigating claims that “dubious” tactics were used, as the reporters cited several people who said they participated without any clear idea of what was going on or who the data was for. According to the contractors cited, they had a mandate to pursue “darker skin tones,” which included pushes to collect scans from homeless people and college students — the former because they’d be less likely to talk to the media, and all of them because they’d be willing to do it in exchange for $5 Starbucks gift cards.

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Accudio’s earbuds use an ‘inner mic’ to put phone calls first

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Accudio is not quite available for the public yet — it’ll be on Indiegogo starting next month — but Orfeo did show off a demo of it at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt event. Design-wise, they remind me a little of Amazon’s Echo Buds, except these come in both black and white. They come with interchangeable rubberized tips, and they look and feel pretty comfortable. The charging case design looks pretty sleek and compact as well.

The primary attraction of the Accudio lies in its “Inner-Mic technology”, where a microphone is placed inside the earbud itself. According to a spokesperson, the microphone is able to pick up the vibrations of your voice through the Eustachian tube, rather than from your mouth. That, coupled with an “echo-removal algorithm”, will apparently lead to less ambient noise for the caller on the other end.

Accudio

I tried this out in the crowded expo hall at Moscone North. An Orfeo spokesperson spoke to me on the phone, while she was wearing the earbuds several feet away. I was surprised by how loud and clear she sounded, almost as if she was in a quiet room. Another spokesperson joked that you could theoretically be in the club and pretend that you’re in the library to someone who was calling. That seems a little far-fetched and obviously it’s hard to really test that out in the short time I had with it. But I was still pretty impressed by how much it was able to cancel out the ambient noise.

The Accudio has other features too, such as integration with your phone’s voice assistant, translation support for more than 60 languages and automatic noise-blocking, though I wasn’t able to test out all of these features at the show. According to an Orfeo spokesperson, the retail pricing for Accudio will be less than $100, while early bird pricing for its Indiegogo campaign will be close to $60. She also said that it’ll be at CES next January as well, so hopefully we get to try it out a little more then.

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Americans believe social networks make the news worse

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About 88 percent of those in the study said that social networks favored news outlets with “attention-grabbing articles” — that is, sensationalist fare. Roughly 84 percent said companies liked sites that had many social followers, while 79 percent thought the companies favored news with a specific political stance. There were also gripes about bias, with 53 percent saying one-sided news represented a “very big problem” while 51 percent felt the same about inaccurate or fake news.

And yes, the perceived level of bias depended on political leanings. People who lean Republican were more likely to claim that sites had excessive control (75 percent versus 53 percent), and more likely to argue the sites were liberal. Neither side thought the sites were especially conservative, however, with a mere 18 percent of Democrat supporters claiming social sites generally leaned to the right.

Not that these complaints are deterring people from reading all the same — in fact, they’re more reliant on social networks for news than ever before. Where 18 percent of users said they often relied on social media for news in 2016, 28 percent of them do as of 2019. Unsurprisingly, more than half (52 percent) of Americans sourced news from Facebook, 28 percent from YouTube and 17 percent from Twitter.

This isn’t necessarily a definitive study. Pew was gauging opinions from 5,107 people in its American Trends Panel. That’s a healthy survey size, but it might not be perfectly representative of sentiments. However, it does illustrate the challenges for Facebook, Twitter and others as they try to improve their news. Many people are distrustful, and simply tweaking algorithms or adding human curation may not be enough for those convinced social networks are a destructive influence.

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Tesla’s Q3 electric car deliveries set another record

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And crucially, these are newcomers adding to Tesla’s ranks. Much like in Q2, “nearly all” of the 79,600 Model 3s delivered in the period went to customers who didn’t hold a reservation. That’s a sign of “strong organic demand,” if you ask Tesla.

Not everything is rosy. Model S and X deliveries were down ever so slightly to 17,400. And remember, these are deliveries, not earnings. Q2’s record deliveries helped Tesla narrow its losses, but it didn’t avoid those losses. Although the company has turned a profit before, it’s lately been struggling to overcome its costs. There’s also the matter of continuing the streak. Shrinking US subsidies have made it more expensive to buy a Tesla, and competition is looming in the Porsche Taycan and more accessible EVs like VW’s ID lineup. In a sense, Tesla is racing to snap up buyers before some of them are lost to competitors.

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Leaked Google videos show the Pixel 4’s ‘Motion Sense’ gestures in action

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In the first set of videos, we see how the Pixel 4’s touchless gestures will work. To silence calls and alarms, you simply wave your hand sideways above the phone. Skipping songs is done the same way. The one quirk to the system is that you can silence or snooze an alarm by changing the direction in which you wave your hand over the Pixel 4. The important takeaway here is that the gesture to complete all three actions is the same. Pixel 4 owners won’t need to learn several gestures to use the feature; instead, they just need to learn one gesture that they can use everywhere. All of that is likely to go a long way in making the feature something people will use.

Meanwhile, In the second set of videos, Google demos the capabilities of its next-generation digital assistant. The new videos don’t show anything we haven’t already seen of the updated Google Assistant. They do, however, highlight Assistant’s upcoming ability to process multiple requests one after another. In one video, the person using the phone asks Google what time their flight will land. They then tell Assistant to send the time in a text message. Notably, the person does this all without saying, “Okay Google” multiple times.

Google will announce the Pixel 4 on October 15th. Besides the new phone, we also expect the company to announce a new Pixelbook, Nest-branded Google Home Mini and possibly a new pair of Google Buds.

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Tim Cook disputes Trump immigration policy in Supreme Court filing

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The company also noted that it employed 443 Dreamers (DACA recipients) who “embody Apple’s innovation strategy” by being some of the company’s “most driven and selfless” staff. Moreover, it observed that immigration was central to Apple’s story — the late Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant.

The company has filed amicus briefs before, but an Apple spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that this was the first time Cook had signed his name on one of them.

Courts aren’t obliged to consider briefs like this when making decisions, but they can be influential if judges are receptive. And that’s what Apple is hoping for. It’s clearly betting that the judge will not only see DACA as a compassionate program, but that it makes economic sense by fostering motivated workers.

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ESPN+ was already an insane deal, now it has the Bundesliga

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Right now, if you want to watch every Bundesliga match in the US, you have to pay a lot for it. Fox Sports currently has the rights to the German league and the network typically broadcasts a handful of games spread across Friday, Saturday and Sunday each week. These are usually shared among Fox proper, FS1 and FS2, so you need cable or a live TV subscription (YouTube TV, etc) in order to watch almost all of them. Even then, you wouldn’t have access to every Bundesliga match that week. For that luxury, you’d have to pay $20 a month for the Fox Soccer Match Pass.

ESPN+

I love watching German soccer, and the only reason I don’t have Match Pass is the price. Too rich for my blood. And while you do get access to Bundesliga 2 (which ESPN will also show), some MLS (ESPN does that too) and US Men’s National Team matches that aren’t otherwise on TV, that’s still a lot of money to shell out monthly for essentially comprehensive coverage of one league. It’s way too early in the process, but Fox Sports will either have to replace the Bundesliga with something else or drastically reduce the price of Match Pass to keep people interested.

I’ve said this before, but ESPN+ is truly an amazing deal at $5 a month. And not just for soccer either. The streaming service has a range of live events, including MLB, NHL, UFC and a ton of college games across a range of sports. It also offers a solid library of ESPN’s scripted and studio/analysis content as well — if you’re into that sort of thing.

In terms of soccer, ESPN+ was already home to a large slate of MLS games that aren’t shown on ESPN/ESPN2 or Fox/FS1. The service also has some or all rights to Serie A (Italian league), the EFL Championship (English second division), Liga MX (Mexico), Superliga (Denmark), Eredivisie (Netherlands) and Allsvenskan (Sweden) matches. Even if every game from a league isn’t in the app, that’s still a metric ton of soccer to choose from each week, and well worth the asking price.

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iOS 13.2 beta may shed light on Apple’s new AirPods design

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For the moment, it’s best not to read too much into the icon. That said, if it is representative of what the next-generation AirPods will look like, the one interesting detail we can glean is that they’ll potentially feature interchangeable rubber tips. This would address the one issue almost everyone has with Apple’s Bluetooth headphones: their one size fits all approach.

iOS 13.2 AirPods icon

Elsewhere in iOS 13.2, 9to5Mac found code snippets that detail several different listening modes the headphones will feature. One, for example, is called “focus mode.” According to 9to5, the different modes suggest the new AirPods could include active noise cancellation. Rubber and silicone tips help with noise cancellation since they provide a better seal.

As for when we can expect to see a new pair of AirPods, analyst Ming Ching Kuo has a solid track record when it comes to Apple-related rumors. He recently said the company will launch a new pair of AirPods with an “all-new design” either later this year or early next. With Apple reportedly planning to hold another hardware event later this fall, it’s possible we could see a new pair of AirPods as soon as this month.



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