Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Google’s answer to combatting COVID vaccine misinformation has been to display resources from health authorities like the CDC in information boxes on search result pages.

But the coronavirus — and COVID-related scams and fake news— have blown through international borders and language barriers.

How is Google supposed to serve up that same quality of information when people are using search terms in foreign languages that the algorithm might not recognize?

Enter: MUM. No, not someone’s British mother. It’s Google’s new AI tool, called Multitask Unified Model, that the company says will help the search engine answer complicated queries by (among other things) pulling information from sources in “75+” languages.

First announced at the company’s I/O developer conference in May, Google shared Tuesday that it has put MUM into action for its first job: Surfacing information about the coronavirus vaccine.

MUM has some information to share.
Credit: Google

Google says its analysis shows that there are more than 800 variations of names for the coronavirus vaccine — like “Coronavaccin Pfizer” and “CoVaccine” — in different languages. Identifying the names, and assigning information boxes to them, is a process it says would have normally taken “weeks.” However, MUM was able to do it in “seconds.” Google validated that MUM’s analysis of search terms was accurate, and the technology is being used for searches now.

“This first application of MUM helped us get critical information to users around the world in a timely manner,” Google’s blog post on the topic reads.

Google displays information from the CDC or the World Health Organization in its boxes. Google says it will also display information from “local health authorities, depending on where you’re searching from.”

Disseminating vaccine information is a fairly small-scale example of some potentially big changes under the Google Search hood. MUM needs fewer data inputs to generate answers, so Google Search will theoretically be able to adapt to new trends and information more quickly.

On the user end, MUM will be able to take context from pages in multiple languages to suggest more relevant search results in the user’s language. Google gives the example of someone visiting Mt. Fuji. It might use information from Japanese websites to provide a traveler better results in English.

That’s not all MUM can do. Google explains it will eventually let people ask Google Search increasingly complicated questions. It can also process questions in multimedia formats; for example, it could answer a question, posed by voice, about the contents of an image. You can read a more detailed explanation of how MUM works here. And don’t be surprised if you see more from MUM, soon.

Where Volvo’s going, it’s all electric.

The Swedish car company showed off its electric concept car at a live tech event streamed from Gothenburg, Sweden on Wednesday. The Recharge concept will be the design foundation for future Volvo EVs.

Volvo has already pledged to only produce electric vehicles by 2030. Until then, Volvo has five plug-in hybrid versions and there’s already the Volvo XC40 and forthcoming C40 Recharge, which look like electrified versions of Volvo’s combustion-engine SUVs.

But now electric Volvos will have a completely new look to distinguish them from past traditional gas models.

As seen in the concept photos, the new look even has a roofline LiDAR sensor from Luminar for autonomous driving features. The sensor box on the roof emits light rays to measure distance so the car can “see” what’s around it, like cars, pedestrians, or cyclists.

Glass roof complete with LiDAR.
Credit: volvo

The main feature of the Recharge concept is a flat floor, under which will sit the electric battery. The first EV to be manufactured from the concept design will be an SUV with more space inside, a new glass roof, and a “shield” instead of a grille on the front.

Backside bliss.
Credit: volvo

Come on in.

Credit: Volvo

An inside look at the concept.

Credit: volvo

The seats have been repositioned because of the bigger inside space and flat floor, with a 15-inch touchscreen as the focal point of the interior. As part of Wednesday’s tech event, Volvo also announced its own operating system called VolvoCars.OS to control the screen. There’s even a plan to collect real-time data from actual driving to improve its AI-based automatic driving system. These features should make Volvos feel more like a Tesla.

According to Volvo, the Recharge concept car is intended to have a “Scandinavian living room feeling.”

That’s the electric future.

Stan Schroeder contributed to this report.

When Loki died at the end of Thor, it seemed like a plausible end to his character. It was not. His second sacrifice in Thor: The Dark World was a more obvious fake-out. The third time, when Thanos choked him out in Avengers: Infinity War, seemed to stick, but it only took until Avengers: Endgame to reveal the variant Loki loophole that led to the god of mischief starring in his own TV show. This is all to say that when Loki the TV series killed Loki for the fourth time by pruning his variant from the sacred timeline, you’d have to have some serious pattern recognition deficiencies if you thought he was really gone.

Episode 4 of Loki took a page from Thor‘s book and brought Loki back in a mid credit scene, but this one did a lot more than reveal that the Loki variant was still alive — it changed the game for what the Time Variance Authority is actually up to when they prune variants and might have opened the door to an entirely new corner of the multiverse.

To begin with, that glowing stick thingy that allegedly prunes variants from all timelines is clearly not doing that. Instead of disappearing Loki (and Mobius, one must assume) from all time, the mid-credit scene showed our Loki variant waking up in a never-before-seen dimension that requires a more careful second look to make sense. In addition to showing four more Loki variants (we’ll get to those in a minute), fans pointed out on Twitter that the background of this strange land appears to show a destroyed Avengers Tower.

Tweet may have been deleted

Avengers Tower was never destroyed in the sacred timeline, but it may have been destroyed if Loki’s 2012 invasion of New York had succeeded. If this place is where variant Lokis go when they’re pruned, it may be that this place is a combination of pruned timelines as well — the timelines where Loki actually won.

In the brief moments Episode 4 lets us glimpse this potentially pruned Loki-land, perhaps the Lokiverse, four new characters show up to greet our variant Loki. There’s a tall Black Loki with a Mjolnir-looking hammer of his own, an older Loki wearing the comic book character’s original costume, a kid Loki, and a small alligator wearing Loki’s horns. Let’s break those new characters down.

Boastful Loki

The credits for episode 4 name this guy Boastful Loki and reveal that he is played by Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean actor DeObia Oparei. Boastful Loki has no precedent in the comics, but his hammer is pretty cool and may indicate that he’s a “worthy” Loki variant with a hammer of his own.

Classic Loki

Richard E. Grant himself plays Classic Loki, an obvious throwback to Loki’s original costume complete with underwear over his tights and enormous curved horns. This isn’t the first time the MCU has played with their characters’ classic costumes — remember when Wanda dressed up in the original Scarlet Witch getup for Halloween in WandaVision?

Kid Loki

Would everyone please update their Young Avengers in the Disney+ MCU tallies accordingly? Kid Loki is in the house. This little whippersnapper is a fan favorite version of Loki from the comic books, where Loki was reborn into the body of a child. He still had Loki’s tricky personality but was determined not to become the villain his older self was, which led to him idolizing Thor and becoming a Young Avenger for a while. If this kid sticks around, he’s going to be a huge deal.

Reptile Loki

It’s an alligator, not a crocodile. If you care about that sort of thing.

We don’t know exactly where the mid-credit scene from episode 4 of Loki takes place, or what the part the other variant Lokis will play in the show’s final two episodes, but if the pattern from WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier holds up, a mid-credit scene marks the point where Disney+ Marvel shows start getting real about what’s going on. Whatever that is, it’s sure to be a mischievous good time.

Loki is streaming on Disney+.

Twitter’s making it rain NFTs.

On Wednesday, the social media giant announced its intention to give away 140 non-fungible tokens hosted on the Rarible marketplace. Unlike Reddit, which just last week listed its own NFTs for sale, Twitter decided not to charge for these digital trading cards — perhaps in an unspoken acknowledgment that the longterm NFT value proposition is, at best, unclear.

With the help of Rarible, Twitter minted 20 NFTs (i.e., created ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain describing corresponding pieces of art) for each of the seven different pieces of digital art, sporting titles like “Furry Twitter,” “Vitamin T,” and “Reply Guy.”

Notably, those lucky enough to be gifted one of these things — the prerequisite for which (from all outside appearances) involves simply tweeting at Twitter or tweeting about the giveaway and the company DMing you directions on how to claim the NFT — don’t actually own the art or any rights to it. That’s because NFTs often don’t actually contain any art. Instead, they typically point to or describe something that exists in the world somewhere else.

That appears to be the case here, too.

In its NFT terms of service (which is listed on the InterPlanetary File System), Twitter lays out exactly what it’s giving away.

Tweet may have been deleted

“The Artwork and Brand are neither stored nor embedded in the NFT, but are accessible through the NFT,” explains the TOS. “Although the NFT itself is owned by the recipient of the NFT, the Artwork and Brand associated with the NFT is licensed and not transferred or sold to such recipient.”

When asked about this, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed as much. The spokesperson also added that the NFT recipient doesn’t own the rights to the artwork itself, or any Twitter IP.

This latter point isn’t surprising, and is similar to buying a print of a famous piece of art. You can hang the poster in your dorm room, but you can’t reproduce it and sell copies. Except with Twitter’s NFTs, you don’t even own the poster (to continue the analogy), but rather a digital token describing the contents of the poster and where it’s being kept.

Tweet may have been deleted

Importantly, while Twitter is not selling this batch of 140 NFTs, that doesn’t mean it won’t sell NFTs in the future. When asked about any plans to do so at a later point in time, the spokesperson replied only that the company had nothing to share.

Bloomberg reports that a Twitter spokesperson told the publication it had no NFT plans other than this campaign.

The motivation behind this NFT drop, according to the Twitter spokesperson, was simply to highlight the existing discussion of NFTs on the platform and make it easier for Twitter users to get in on the NFT fun.

The spokesperson did confirm, though, that the recipients (aka new owners) can sell the NFTs on the Rarible marketplace if they choose to do so. Which makes sense, as the Twitter NFT TOS is written in such a way as to cover “a subsequent transfer or purchase.”

Tweet may have been deleted

It’s worth noting that some NFTs are structured in such a way, dubbed the “royalty system,” so that every future sale kicks back a percentage of that sale, in perpetuity, to the NFT’s creator.

We asked Twitter if this current batch of NFTs is set up in a similar way, and the spokesperson replied that recipients can sell them or keep them, and Twitter won’t take a cut.

As of the time of this writing, Twitter has given away at least a few of the NFTs, and one such example is still listed as “Not for sale.” The new owner of the “Furry Twitter” NFT may just be holding onto it for a while before he re-lists it for sale, however.

Still not for sale.
Credit: screenshot / rarible

With this initial batch of 140, it appears that Twitter is testing the water to see what, if anything, Twitter-minted NFTs are worth.

SEE ALSO: So you spent millions on an NFT. Here’s what you actually bought.

The great thing about being in a possible bubble is that the rest of us won’t have to wait long to find out — one way, or another.

Fun fact: Alexa can speak in a variety of languages and accents that you have access to on your Alexa app.

You can change Alexa’s voice settings just for kicks, sure. But the voice settings also come in handy if you have a family member or friend who speaks another language and needs to be able to use the Alexa system. Whether for practicality or just for fun, here’s how to change Alexa’s voice settings:

1. Open the Alexa app.

2. Tap “More” (the three lines icon).

3. Select “Settings.”

4. Select your “Device Settings.”

5. You’ll see all of your Alexa devices on the next screen. Select the device you want to change.

6. Select “Language.”

7. You can then select the language and/or accent you want Alexa to speak in. Pick your preference, and tap “OK.”

The new setting may take a few minutes to implement, but Alexa will then speak in the language/accent you selected. Amazon Help is also there for all of your Alexa needs.

If you’re my best friend, I’m happy to FaceTime you from my most unflattering angle. In fact, I insist on it. But if I’m meeting someone for the first time via video chat, then I’m looking for the best lighting and probably staring at my own little square more than whoever’s on the other end.

With iOS 15, the iPhone’s latest software update (currently available in beta), we all get one more FaceTime trick to feed our egos and look our best: Portrait Mode.

OK, yes, technically Portrait Mode only changes your background and not your actual face. But something about that smoothed-out scene behind you makes everyone look a little better. Think about how good your Portrait Mode photos look!

Whether you’re going on a first date via FaceTime or making a more professional video call, turning on Portrait Mode in FaceTime is worth it and super simple.

Choose your video-chatting partner

On iOS 15, you FaceTime call someone the same ways you always have: Pull up their contact card, find their contact info via iMessage, or go straight into the FaceTime app. There is one slight change: Now when you pull up your texts with someone, the FaceTime icon will display to the right of their name, making FaceTime calls even easier.

Tap on your video feed during calls

Bigger picture of me! Amazing for my already huge ego.
Credit: screenshot: apple

A small window of your video feed should appear in the lower righthand corner as it usually does on FaceTime, although the iOS 15 version seems a bit bigger than the previous version.

Oh, look. It only gets bigger.
Credit: screenshot: apple

When you tap on it, it should get even bigger and display four icons in each corner: Portrait Mode, minimize, effects, and camera view.

Turn on Portrait Mode

Bada bing, bada boom. Bring on the blur.
Credit: screenshot: apple

Tap on the icon in the upper left corner of your video feed, and presto! Your background should immediately blur, effectively hiding any garish details and making your gorgeous face the center of attention.

Related Video: 5 game-changing iPhone hacks for 2021

United States passports and IDs are about to get a long-overdue update.

On Wednesday, just before Pride month came to an end, the Biden administration announced plans to issue passports and IDs that feature “X” gender markers, which can be selected without providing medical documentation.

Per The 19th — a nonprofit that reports on news related to gender, politics, and policy — the American people will soon be able to choose between “M,” “F,” and “X” on these federal documents. The addition will give transgender, non-binary, and intersex individuals the freedom to identify as gender neutral or a gender different from the one listed on their birth certificate. And eliminating the need for transgender people to provide proof of gender transition from a medical professional will allow them to self-identify freely.

Tweet may have been deleted

Those familiar with Joe Biden’s LGBTQ policies will recall that he promised to “affirm one’s gender marker and expand access to accurate identification documents” during his campaign.

“Transgender and non-binary people without identification documents that accurately reflect their gender identity are often exposed to harassment and violence and denied employment, housing, critical public benefits, and even the right to vote,” the president’s campaign website JoeBiden.com explains.

Biden promised that as president he would push for gender-neutral IDs, and this is a noteworthy followthrough on that push for equality.

Though the exact timeframe for when people can expect to have access to “X” gender markers on documents remains unclear, per Reuters, the State Department is “evaluating the best approach to achieve this goal.”

Before any humans head back to the moon in the near future, three dummies are testing it out in NASA’s Artemis 1 mission. One is a full male-bodied manikin; the other two are female-bodied torsos. The varied manikin bodies — made with materials that simulate the stuff that makes up humans, like our skin, bones, and organs — will provide scientists important, inclusive data about radiation for future Artemis astronauts in 2023 and beyond.

NASA announced the name of the full manikin Tuesday: Commander Moonikin Campos. The name was chosen through a public poll that received more than 300,000 votes. The last name of Campos was picked in honor of Arturo Campos, who helped direct the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth after an oxygen tank failed on their spacecraft.

Commander Moonikin Campos will be decked out in a full Orion Crew Survival System suit, the same that astronauts will wear in phases of future Artemis missions. Campos is also donning a couple of sensors to detect the amount of radiation that astronauts could encounter inside the Orion spacecraft.

The female-bodied torsos, aka phantoms, were named Helga and Zohar in 2020 by the German Aerospace Center and Israel Space Agency, respectively. With radiation sensors embedded throughout their bodies, they’ll be testing out an AstroRad vest designed to protect astronauts’ vital organs from radiation. Zohar will be wearing the vest and Helga will not, allowing scientists to determine the effectiveness of the clothing.

Using female-bodied phantoms allows scientists to measure how radiation could effect women, as women tend to have a greater sensitivity to radiation than men, NASA noted in 2020. AstroRad vests have already been worn by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) to test their fit, comfort, and mobility.

Zohar and Helga are pictured here
Credit:

NASA has historically failed women in its astronaut program, excluding them entirely in the first 19 years. Astronaut Sally Ride was the first woman selected for the agency’s program, becoming the first U.S. woman to enter space in 1983. Of the 339 Americans that have been to space, just 45 have been women.

The Artemis program has been touting that it will send the first woman and person of color to the moon in the coming years. Using female-bodied manikins in the Artemis 1 mission is key to creating inclusive designs and compiling inclusive data for scientists and astronauts going forward, and shows that NASA’s promises aren’t empty.

Artemis 1, expected to launch later in 2021, will be a three-week trip around the moon and back. Artemis 2, NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon since the ’70s, is expected to launch in 2023 and will also circle the moon before returning to Earth. The crew for Artemis 2 has not yet been determined.

Sometimes it feels real freaky to open your Maps app and see a list of the latest locations you’ve been at. You don’t want that falling into the wrong hands.

It’s even freakier to think about the myriad apps that are tracking your location pretty much constantly, and doing who-knows-what with that information.

Location services use WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS to figure out your whereabouts. They can really amp up the iPhone experience, especially if you’re an avid Find My app user or use Maps to get around everywhere. But having your location super accessible to every app might not be the best move, privacy-wise.

You should do a semi-regular checkup on which apps you may have absentmindedly enabled location services on, and turn off any you don’t want tracking your every move. Here’s how:

Location services for the iOS system

There are built-in iPhone mechanisms that either rely on location access to function, or are greatly enhanced by location access, like Find My iPhone, Emergency Calls, and Cell Network Search. But if you don’t actively use every built-in service that taps into your location, you can turn them off.

1. Find your Settings, and scroll down to Privacy.

Of course, everything mysterious about the iPhone resides in Settings. Location service settings will be housed under Privacy.

2. Find the System Services

At the very top…

Credit: screenshot: apple

…and at the very bottom.

Credit: screenshot: apple

Tap “Location Services” right at the very top. then scroll down to “System Services” right at the very bottom.

3. Peruse the list, and make your pickings.

The full list of iOS systems that use location services will display, and you can toggle on or off whatever you choose. Your choices should depend on what phone services you use daily. But generally, services that may tap into calling, texting, data browsing, or phone setup (like Setting Time Zone, Emergency Calls & SOS, and Cell Network Search) should probably stay on, while more customized iOS services (like HomeKit, Location-Based Suggestions, and Apple Pay) can be turned off if you don’t use them.

Location services by app

Deciding which apps can access your location follows the same process, minus one step. Instead of going into System Services, stop at the list displayed after you go into Location Services in your Privacy Settings.

Your list of apps with location access.
Credit: screenshot: apple

Tap on any app to change its location access between “Never,” “Always,” “While Using,” and “Ask Next Time,” which are pretty self-explanatory options. Not all apps will have all options, depending on how they operate.

Chipotle doesn’t need to know my location at all times.
Credit: screenshot: apple

When you click on the app, you’ll also see a toggle button for “Precise Location.” Turn this off if you’d rather the app only have access to an approximate location when using its location access.

You can also turn off location services completely simply by toggling off “Location Services” at the very top of the menu of apps. We don’t recommend this, because as we said, there are definitely some iPhone services that tap into location services that we can’t live without.

But if you’re trying to live a really off-the-grid, private lifestyle – at least, as much as you can while still owning an iPhone – going completely location-less is your best bet. So go ahead, hit that toggle, and rest easy knowing that no part of your iPhone is tracking you…even if other people still could.

Recording a Zoom meeting is a helpful way to stay organized. Being able to refer back to important information at any given moment is almost like having a digital notebook on hand to offer help when you need it.

Here’s what you need to do to record a Zoom meeting:

1. Open up Zoom and start a meeting.

2. In the meeting, find your control bar at the bottom of the window and click the “Record” button, the round button with a circle around it.

Credit: screengrab: zoom

3. You’ll get a notification telling you the meeting is being recorded. You can stop recording at any time by pressing “Pause/Stop Recording,” the square button with two lines (Pause) or a box (Stop) in it.

Credit: screengrab: zoom

4. Once the meeting is over, it will automatically save as an mp4 file that you can access on your computer or within your Zoom account.

5. To find it, navigate to your meetings page.

6. Instead of “Upcoming,” click “Recorded.” You’ll find your recorded meeting there.

The file will probably automatically be titled the date of the meeting or “[insert name here]’s Zoom meeting,” but you can change it to whatever will help you find it when you need it.

You can also schedule a meeting ahead of time and set it to record by scrolling down to “Meeting options” at the bottom of the page and clicking “Automatically record meeting on the local computer.”

Credit: screengrab: zoom

If you are not the host of the meeting and you want to record it, the host will have to give you permission to do so by:

1. Moving the cursor over a meeting participant’s video.

2. Clicking the three dots icon.

3. Clicking “Make Co-Host.”

Or…

1. Finding the control bar at the bottom of the meeting window.

2. Clicking “Participants.”

3. Hovering the cursor over the participant wanting to be a co-host.

4. Clicking “More.”

5. Clicking “Make Co-Host.”

That meeting participant will now have the ability to record the meeting using the same steps as above.

If you want to record a meeting without the host being present, the Zoom Help Center indicates you need to enable automatic Cloud Recording and schedule a meeting with the “Enable Join before host option selected.”

When you do this, recording will start when the first participant joins the meeting.