Technology | Ep4records Music

Tag Archives: Technology

Apple MacBook Air review: 2020’s near-perfect consumer laptop

April 14, 2020 – 12:28 pm
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged apple, Computing, Gadgets, laptops, Technology
Leave a Comment

Updated processors, a price drop and an excellent new keyboard only add to this fantastic traditional laptop

Apples latest MacBook Air has a new, fixed and more satisfying keyboard, improved processors and gets a price drop.

From the outside essentially nothing has changed. The new 2020 MacBook Air looks just like the revamped machine launched in 2018, except it costs 200 less than its predecessor, with the base model starting at 999.

In a world filled with convertibles, 2-in-1s and fancy tablet computers, the MacBook Air stands apart as an attractive design that is the pinnacle of the traditional laptop form. An instant classic.

Galaxy Buds+ review: Samsung’s AirPods killers are now for everyone

March 16, 2020 – 3:23 pm
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged Bluetooth, Gadgets, Samsung, Technology
Leave a Comment

Small, comfortable true-wireless earbuds, good sound, last ages, with a pocketable case and iPhone app

Samsungs second-generation Galaxy Buds+ correct a few mistakes and are now fully iPhone compatible, making them some of the very best standard true-wireless earbuds for just about anyone.

There is no shortage of good true-wireless earbuds in 2020, but Samsungs 159 Galaxy Buds+ look to take the crown as the best set without noise cancelling.

Launched alongside the Galaxy Z Flip and S20 line, the earbuds are practically identical to their predecessors, which is a very good thing.

They are exactly the same size and shape as the old ones, but are 0.7g heavier at 6.3g per bud, not that I could tell, even side-by-side. They slot right into the concha with a quick twist, barely protruding from my ear, staying put without the need for any wings. You have to like the silicone-tip fit, of course, but they are one of the most comfortable earbuds available making them easy to forget while wearing.

If you need more stability there are two sizes of wings and three sets of silicone tips in the box, but they stayed put even while running for me.

Specifications

Water resistance: none
Connectivity: Bluetooth 5.0, SBC, AAC
Battery life: 11 hours listening, up to 22 hours with case
Earbud weight: 6.3g
Charging case dimensions: 38.8 x 70 x 26.5mm
Charging case weight: 39.6g
Case charging: USB-C, Qi wireless charging

Case and battery

Samsung — The case has both USB-C and wireless charging, meaning you can quickly top it up from the back of a phone such as the Galaxy Z Flip. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

TikTok viral stars could make up to $1m per post, say researchers

Video apps most popular users could rake in millions by collaborating with brands

Teenagers used to aspire to become astronauts, firefighters, footballers or pop stars, but times change and so do career goals. Today, more than half of millennials and Generation Z-ers those aged 13-38 in the US aspire to become social media influencers, according to recent research.

The Chinese viral video app TikTok is the platform of choice for young people seeking to monetise their talents because it seen as rewarding anyones ability to entertain, whereas Instagram or YouTube tend to reward those who already have celebrity status.

And for a very lucky few, taking to TikTok could be a seriously lucrative career option. Marketeers reckon that the most popular TikTokers could currently charge close to $200,000 (155,000) per post if they promote and collaborate with brands. Researchers at Morning Consult, a US tech research group working on behalf of the games company Online Casino, argue that TikTok is growing so fast in popularity that some influencers might even be able to charge nearly $1m per post by next year.

Loren Gray, a 17-year-old singer from Pennsylvania, is said to be the most marketable current TikToker, with researchers estimating she could charge as much as $197,000 (152,000) per post.

Gray has more than 38 million followers on TikTok which posts videos of between 15 and 60 seconds in length making her one of the most-followed accounts. Gray has used her popularity on the app to secure record deals with Virgin Records and Capitol Records. She posts daily on the platform and her posts have received over 2bn likes.

Last year, the US fast food chain Chipotle paid Gray to participate in a guac song dance-off. The hashtag challenge an official TikTok campaign in which a creator uses a specific hashtag for a sponsored video was called #GuacDance. The campaign centred on a song about guacamole from the childrens music artist Dr Jean, and went viral.

Further down the top 20 is Jiffpom, a Los Angeles-based Pomeranian dog with 20 million followers double his Instagram following who could earn $100,000 per post, the report adds.

The report predicts that in a years time, Aashika Bhatia, a 19-year-old Indian actress, will be the most popular on the platform, with 194 million followers. She currently has 14 million and is gaining tens of thousands per day. The Bollywood actress posts TikTok classic videos of her lip-syncing and joking around. The popularity of posters like Bhatia is explained by the simplicity of the format, says the report: easy video design means short video clips can be created in minutes; music, dance and slapstick humorous clips transcend language barriers, which means they can be viewed on every continent; and the videos automatically loop to the next on the Tiktok feed, making it an easy watch.

Morning Consult estimates that popular TikTok stars could be paid up to $0.005 per follower for sponsored posts, which means a star like Bhatia could charge $973,000 per post if she reached the 194 million mark.

TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, was valued at $75bn in 2018 when Japans richest man Masayoshi Son – invested in it via his SoftBank venture fund. It claims to have about 800 million active users, which would make it more popular than Twitter and Snapchat combined, but trailing Facebook.

The company has been fined $5.7m by US authorities for illegally collecting childrens data. It has also been criticised for censoring videos that might upset the Chinese government, including mentions of Tiananmen Square or Tibetan independence.

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, said this week he was a big fan of TikTok and expected TikTok to surpass Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and said in 2018 it had passed the 1 billion active user mark.

Social media in its original construct is really about status: representing who you are, showing people that youre cool, getting likes and comments, those sorts of things, Spiegel said last month. TikTok instead celebrates talent over status, he said, describing it as a platform for people to make media to entertain other people.

Paying just under $1m to a TikTok influencer for a post may sound like an unbelievable amount of money for a company to spend on marketing, but James Whatley, strategy partner at the marketing agency Digitas UK, said it showed how brands were shifting their attention and spending away from traditional media like TV and billboard advertising to partnering with authentic influencers.

Graphic

I can actually believe those numbers if you look at how much money has been thrown at Instagram, he said. [TikTok] is the hot new thing and tonnes of money is being thrown at it. The fastest way to get traction on TikTok is to get the number-one influencer to promote your stuff. Just this week TikTok and [computer game] Fortnite announced a partnership deal with a competition for a TikTok dance to be recreated on Fortnite.

Every year there is always a new platform and clients want to put 10% of their budget towards it. Last year it was Instagram stories, before that Snapchat. TikTok is the darling of 2020.

Whatley explained that influencers can spread a brand further than their already huge number of followers, which can be greater than the population of small countries. There are challenges on TikTok, for example you could pay an influencer to do a challenge but with a bottle of Diet Coke, he said. As soon as that person does it, all of their followers will see it and want to participate and recreate themselves, and then all their followers will do it also, and youve got yourself a viral sensation.

Paul Lee, the global head of technology research at consultancy firm Deloitte, said he expected only a handful of people would be able to make a lot of money out of TikTok, but he said those who did could really strike it big.

If you have 10 million followers its better than 5 million, obviously, Lee said. Its quite a benign site. Its happy, and of people doing fun videos. You go there to get uplifted, and it feels less commercial, which could actually make partnerships more valuable.

Endorsements are always valuable, but it can be shocking how one persons endorsement is worth lots more than other peoples. I dont think mine would be worth so much. To become an influencer your timing has to be right, your look has to be right and you have to be super lucky.

Fossil Gen 5 review: Googles Wear OS smartwatch at its best

February 16, 2020 – 3:52 am
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged Gadgets, Life and style, Smartwatches, Technology, Watches
Leave a Comment

A days battery, solid performance and watch-first design makes Wear OS a much more attractive option

The Fossil Gen 5 is easily the best Wear OS smartwatch you can buy at the moment, and as long as you dont expect it to be an Apple Watch-beater, it gets the job done and looks the part.

Smartwatches that run Googles Wear OS software have come in many different designs from various different manufacturers, and work with both Android and the iPhone. But they have long been plagued by sluggishness, poor battery life and a software experience that is behind the competition.

Fossil Group, which includes the signature Fossil brand and many others such as Michael Kors, Diesel, Misfit and Skagen, has been making the best of Wear OS, but often that simply hasnt been good enough.

Fossils fifth-generation smartwatch, the Gen 5, is important for the whole of Wear OS, as its internal workings will also form the basis of all of Fossil Groups various smartwatches this year.

A watch made by a watchmaker

The Gen 5 hides its 12mm thickness well, and here in the Julianna HR variant looks good on relatively slim wrists. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The Gen 5 hides its 12mm thickness well, and here in the Julianna HR variant looks good on relatively slim wrists. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Can your phone keep you fit? Our writers try 10 big fitness apps from weightlifting to pilates

January 16, 2020 – 3:24 pm
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged apps, Fitness, health, Health & wellbeing, Life and style, Society, Technology
Leave a Comment

There are a dizzying number of apps promising to get you in shape even if you cant get to a gym. But can any of them keep our writers moving?

Centr

Price 15.49 a month.
What is it? A full-service experience from the Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth: not just workouts, but a complete meal planner with food for breakfast, lunch and dinner a daily guided meditation and a daily motivational article.
The experience I immediately regret declaring myself intermediate as the app launches into a punishing pilates workout. I am not very flexible at all, and it turns out that my baseline fitness leaves much to be desired in terms of core strength.
More frustrating is the fact that the various workouts are introduced as videos. Clearly, this is supposed to emulate a real pilates class, but when my phone tells me to lie face-down on the floor I can no longer see the screen. It is frustrating to have to repeatedly break out of the pose to check the next movement.
Worth a download? Only if you are single, enjoy cooking and are willing to hand control of your life to an app.
AH

Aaptiv

Price $14.99 (11.40) a month or $99.99 a year.
What is it? A cheery selection of audio workouts with curated tunes.
The experience Before I start, the app asks me my fitness level, how many times I work out a week, how many weeks a month, what days I work out on, what machines I have access to, and what equipment I have to hand. None of this stops it from absolutely destroying me with bodyweight exercises but it is the thought that counts.
The instructors are great, with the right level of enthusiasm (read: grating in any other context). I am glad to have clear verbal instructions for how to do the exercises, rather than wishing I could just read a list of workouts from my screen. Video walkthroughs, available before and after the workout, help clear up any lingering concerns about form.
Worth a download? If you want to get fit to the tune of 75 a year, this is the app to spend your money on. AH

Alex gets in the spirit. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

StrongLifts — Alex gets in the spirit. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

AI system outperforms experts in spotting breast cancer

January 14, 2020 – 1:29 pm
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged Artificial intelligence (AI), Breast cancer, Google, health, NHS, Science, Technology, UK news
Leave a Comment

Program developed by Google Health was tested on mammograms of UK and US women

An artificial intelligence program has been developed that is better at spotting breast cancer in mammograms than expert radiologists.

The AI outperformed the specialists by detecting cancers that the radiologists missed in the images, while ignoring features they falsely flagged as possible tumours.

If the program proves its worth in clinical trials, the software, developed by Google Health, could make breast screening more effective and ease the burden on health services such as the NHS where radiologists are in short supply.

This is a great demonstration of how these technologies can enable and augment the human expert, said Dominic King, the UK lead at Google Health. The AI system is saying I think there may be an issue here, do you want to check?

About one in eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. Screening programmes catch more than 18,000 cases each year in England alone, but tumours are still missed, giving false negative results, and some women are wrongly suspected of having cancer, in false positives that lead to unnecessary anxiety and invasive biopsies.

Googles AI program analyses mammograms in three different ways before combing the results to produce an overall risk score. The scientists trained the program on mammograms from more than 76,000 women in the UK and 15,000 women in the US. To see how well it worked, they then asked it to assess nearly 30,000 new mammograms from UK and US women who either had biopsy-confirmed cancer, or no signs of cancer during follow-up at least a year later.

In the US, women who go for breast cancer screening tend to be seen every one or two years and their mammograms are examined by a single radiologist. When compared with the US system, the AI produced 5.7% fewer false positives and 9.4% fewer false negatives.

In the UK, women are screened less often, typically once every three years, but their mammograms are reviewed by two radiologists, and sometimes a third in case of disagreement. The AI performed only marginally better than the UK system, reducing false positives by 1.2% and false negatives by 2.7%.

The results suggest the AI could boost the quality of breast cancer screening in the US and maintain the same level in the UK, with the AI assisting or replacing the second radiologist.

Breast cancer screening in the UK is under particular strain. The Royal College of Radiologists has identified a shortfall of at least 1,104 radiologists. In breast radiology specifically, 8% of hospital posts are unfilled, with much of the shortage due to older radiologists retiring from the NHS faster than new ones join.

Artificial Intelligence has various definitions, but in general it means a program that uses data to build a model of some aspect of the world. This model is then used to make informed decisions and predictions about future events. The technology is used widely, to provide speech and face recognition, language translation, and personal recommendations on music, film and shopping sites. In the future, it could deliver driverless cars, smart personal assistants, and intelligent energy grids. AI has the potential to make organisations more effective and efficient, but the technology raises serious issues of ethics, governance, privacy and law.

Chris Kelly, a clinician scientist at Google Health, said the next major step would be a trial to assess the AI in real-world conditions. Its performance could slip when it is fed images from different mammogram systems. In the latest study, reported in Nature, nearly all of the images came from machines provided by one manufacturer.

Like the rest of the health service, breast imaging, and UK radiology more widely, is understaffed and desperate for help, said Dr Caroline Rubin, vice-president for clinical radiology at the Royal College of Radiologists. AI programs will not solve the human staffing crisis, as radiologists and imaging teams do far more than just look at scans, but they will undoubtedly help by acting as a second pair of eyes and a safety net.

It is a competitive market for developers and these programs will need to be rigorously tested and regulated first. The next step for promising products is for them to be used in clinical trials, evaluated in practice and used on patients screened in real-time, a process that will need to be overseen by the UK public health agencies that have overall responsibility for the breast screening programmes.

Michelle Mitchell, Cancer Research UKs chief executive, said: Screening helps diagnose breast cancer at an early stage, when treatment is more likely to be successful, ensuring more people survive the disease. But it also has harms such as diagnosing cancers that would never have gone on to cause any problems and missing some cancers. This is still early stage research, but it shows how AI could improve breast cancer screening and ease pressure off the NHS.

Ten years of Black Twitter: a merciless watchdog for problematic behavior

December 26, 2019 – 10:16 am
Posted in Ep4Records Music
Tagged Culture, Internet, Media, Race, Technology, Twitter
Leave a Comment

From Black Lives Matter to #OscarsSoWhite, the decade would not have been the same without black voices on social media

There is power in numbers. No internet subsection displayed this fact better than Black Twitter, which touched nearly every sphere of American culture and politics this decade.

In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with.It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as #SayHerName and #ICantBreathe. Its anger over Kevin Harts homophobic tweets pressured him to drop out as a host for the 2018 Oscars ceremony. It pressured Pepsi to retract and apologize for a Kendall Jenner-fronted commercial accused of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement. It created hundreds of delightfully viral moments such as eyebrows on fleek.And it helped a wild 180-tweet thread in which a stripper recounts an adventure-filled road trip to Florida become an A24-produced, feature-length film.

I would absolutely say this decade wouldnt be the same without Black Twitter, says the UVA professor Meredith D Clark, who is currently writing a book on the internet subsection. But I also think it was a continuation of our larger relationship with black American communities. Black culture has been actively mined for hundreds of years for influences on mainstream American culture.

The thrill and intrigue of scrolling through Black Twitter often crossed cultural and racial lines. At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by the Internet, I cannot keep quiet about my obsession with Late Night Black People Twitter, an obsession I know some of you other white people share, because it is awesome, Choire Sicha wrote for The Awl in 2010, before Black Twitter had become the accepted moniker.

Defining Black Twitter continues to be difficult. The meaning is slightly amorphous, but it refers to a particular collective of black identities and voices on Twitter taking part in collective, culturally specific jokes and dialogues that affect the community from discussing colorism to dishing out jokes about common black mom phrases.

The Georgia Tech professor Andr Brock says Black Twitter allowed mainstream, white culture an unprecedented glimpse at how black people talk and joke among each other.It was one of the first spaces that white people could see how creative black people are with our discourse, and how we used a technology that wasnt originally designed for us.

One of the first viral Black Twitter moments of the decade came in response to the documentary Kony 2012, a 30-minute YouTube film that looked at the kidnappings of Ugandan children by a guerrilla group and efforts to find them. The video received over 120m views in only five days and redefined what virality meant, with donations towards the cause quickly surging.

However, members of Black Twitter were some of the first to criticize Invisible Children, the charity behind the film, for its sources of funding and misleading reporting. The critiques were surprisingly nuanced for a social media space, some citing the call for donations as another incident of slacktivism, a term used for low scale, feel-good displays of charity. Invisible Childrens campaign quickly faded in popularity, and the charity later struggled to survive after its viral moment.

This would be the power of Black Twitter over the course of the decade a diligent, occasionally merciless watchdog for problematic behavior.

Calling out cultural appropriation was a chief focus of the space in the early 2010s. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kendall Jenner and Miley Cyrus were critiqued (and roasted) for adopting traditionally black hairstyles and/or dances. Its ability to prevent major business deals would also be flexed. In 2013, Black Twitters outrage was largely responsible for corporations ending their affiliations with chef Paula Deen after she admitted to using the n-word. Later, a juror from the 2013 George Zimmerman trial lost out on a major book deal when Black Twitter voiced disapproval. Users were able to directly put pressure on the jurors literary agent, Sharlene Martin. You know that the stains from blood money dont wash off, right? one user wrote at the time.

Here are just some of the celebrities and companies Black Twitter cancelled this decade: Roseanne, Pepsi, Meghan McCain, Gucci, Don Lemon, Iggy Azalea, Karamo Brown, Jeffree Star, Jussie Smollett, Kevin Hart, Kanye West, TI, Jay-Z, the NFL, Gina Rodriguez, Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Brown, Matt Damon.

Brock says the litany of cancellations that occurred on Black Twitter this decade were not simply rooted in anger and outrage, as media outlets frequently depicted them. They were moments of catharsis. People who have been affronted or hurt or wounded finally had a voice to make gatekeepers take notice, he says.

Clark says the subsection is not a monolith, but actually composed of numerous, small personal communities and networks, which then band together when an incendiary event or something that triggers discussion occurs.

Clark argues the term Black Twitter often led to racial biases (ie, depictions of the group as an angry mob) during media coverage. Whenever you put black in front of anything, people think its deviant from whats mainstream. I think that led to a lot of confusion for folks who were outside of Black Twitter. The term doesnt necessarily signal the cultural richness we found within the space.

Black Twitter has its roots in the low-tech forums and blogs of the early aughts.