Facebook announces way to “Clear History” of apps and sites you’ve clicked-Analytics to developers

Today is a big day for Facebook . The company is hosting its F8 developer conference in San Jose today and just before the event is scheduled to start, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped a bit of news: the company will soon launch a new privacy feature that will allow users to see and delete the data Facebook has collected from websites and apps that use its ads and analytics tool.

With this, you can scrub at least some of your browsing history from Facebook’s data store. Zuckerberg likens this feature to deleting cookies from your browser history.

“Once we roll out this update, you’ll be able to see information about the apps and websites you’ve interacted with, and you’ll be able to clear this information from your account,” Zuckerberg explains. “You’ll even be able to turn off having this information stored with your account.”

Facebook notes that when you delete information through this feature, the company will remove all identifying data from your history but will still provide aggregated analytics to developers.

The Facebook founder also stresses that his time before Congress taught him that he didn’t have “clear enough answers to some of the questions about data.” Unsurprisingly, he promises to make some changes there and notes that the company is working on new and clearer controls.

The Clear History feature is currently in development and will roll out in the coming months.

March madness: Renewables break the 100 mark in Portugal-Electricity Consumption

Portugal is a formidable newsmaker this month in renewables. The average renewable generation for March exceeded 103% of consumption.

Spelled out further, for the month of March, renewable supplied 103.6 % of the country's electricity demand on the mainland. This marked the first time in at least four decades that Portugal produced over 100% of its electricity from renewable, said Reuters.

The data are from REN, Redes Energéticas Nacionais, the nation's transmission system operator.

Numerous sites including IFLScience examined the results and said hydroelectric power (55%) and wind (42%) provided most of the monthly energy consumption of renewables.

NPR noted "the windy hills north of Lisbon, once filled with grain windmills," were being populated with wind turbines. Reuters noted that "Portugal, with its long Atlantic coast line, was one of the early pioneers in the mass use of wind power."

Portugal generated enough renewable energy to power the whole country in March—on the mainland. Camila Domonoske, NPR reporter, said, "Portugal also includes several islands, which have separate energy systems."

Nonetheless, said Michael Coren in Quartz, "plenty of caveats remain." Applause is due to Portugal for the March numbers but the question remains if the feat can be sustained in the longer run.

He said, "The proposition that a full year's worth of peaks and valleys can be managed with renewables alone has yet to be tested."

The grid ran on 100% renewables for relatively short periods: two 70 hour spans; imports and conventional generation were still needed to balance the grid because solar and wind can vary significantly. "It wasn't a clean run, so to speak," saidIFLScience: "On some days, fossil fuels were required to meet the demand for Portugal's electricity grid, but overall, clean energy won out."

Interestingly, IFLScience reported that extremely heavy rainfall hit Portugal in March, which indubitably filled its hydroelectric reservoirs up to optimum levels.

Reuters said, "March saw four times the monthly averagerainfall, ending a long period of severe drought in the country, according to the Portuguese Sea and Atmosphere Institute. The downpour refilled most of the dammed reservoirs to levels of over 80 percent."

"The real test of Portugal's renewable electricity sector, then, said IFLScience, "will be when the cold revisits the Iberian Peninsula toward the end of the year. If renewables still outpace fossil fuels, then we know we're far more likely to be onto a winner."

Moving forward, Portugal is focused on a renewables future. With all the outside nudges toward caveats, the mainland appears to be focused on good things to come. From Reuters: "'Last month's achievement is an example of what will happen more frequently in the near future. It is expected that by 2040 the production of renewable electricity will be able to guarantee, in a cost-effective way, the total annual electricity consumption of mainland Portugal,' the report said."

Cane roller for visually impaired is designed for exploring virtual worlds-Navigation Abilities

Oh the wonder of it all. Virtual reality is opening us up to experiences that set our imaginations and curiosity on fire to explore the unknown, the untried, in full motion. Beyond headsets and controllers and screens, the fundamental enabler is our eyes, as we step down, leap up, walk through new worlds. But wait. What if you are visually impaired?

Assumption: Virtual reality is unexplorable, so forget about it. Unless—can VR be experienced by vision-impaired people?

Microsoft Research looked for answers, working on a system whereby exploring and understanding unfamiliar virtual spaces could be made possible for the visually impaired.

"Working with interns Yuhang Zhao from Cornell University and Cindy Bennett from the University of Washington, said the Microsoft Research blog, "Microsoft Research developed the Canetroller prototype to enable people who are skilled white cane users in the real world to transfer their navigation abilities into virtual settings."

Their haptic controller simulates the interaction of a white cane as the blind person attempts to navigate a virtual space using their already existing orientation and mobility skills.

The team's approach actually involves both a haptic and auditory cane simulation.

When the virtual cane hits on a virtual object, the brake stops the controller from moving. The voice coil kicks in, to generate a vibration simulating the high frequency vibration when a cane hits a real object. A 3-D spatial sound is also provided. The controller is paired with an HTC Vive headset for tracking head position and delivering 3-D spatial audio through headphones.

The voice coil can also simulate ground texture when the cane is sweeping the ground.

All in all, there are five parts to this system: 1. braking mechanism anchored on the waist 2. The hand-held cane controller 3. slider connecting the brake and controller 4. voice coil mounted on the trip of the cane controller to generate vibrotactile sensations and 5. HTC Vive tracker on the controller to track the controller's movement.

How well does their system work? They conducted a "usability" study.

Participants were asked to experience a room with four walls, carpet, door, table, and trashcan. Eight out of nine participants could understand the layout and could locate the position of all virtual objects by using the cane controller—after a few minutes of practice.

The outdoor test involved a sidewalk, curb with tactile domes, traffic light and street with cars passing. Participants could identify the objects, understand the flow of traffic, and were able to cross the street based on an audio signal from the traffic light.

The researchers mention a practical application of benefit, supporting orientation and mobility training. "The Canetroller enables novel scenarios such as new types of Orientation and Mobility training in which people can practice white cane navigation skills virtually in specific settings before travelling to a real-world location," said the Microsoft Research blog.

From a general technology perspective, the standout characteristic about their work lies in improved haptics. The dream is always having users experience the virtual world more naturally. That includes enabling users' finger and hands to have dynamic haptic feedback.

"The Microsoft Research team – Mike Sinclair, Christian Holz, Eyal Ofek, Hrvoje Benko, Ed Cutrell, and Meredith Ringel Morris – have been exploring ways existing technology can generate a wide range of haptic sensations that can fit within hand-held VR controllers, similar in look and feel to those currently used by consumers."

Christian Holz said, "What you really want is the impression of virtual shapes when you interact with objects in VR, not just the binaryfeedback you get from current devices."

Frostpunk Review: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't(Self-Sufficient Camp)

Huddled together in a crater, they gather around their last hope against the cold–an aging steam generator. Fueled by coal, it can kick out just enough heat to give the last bastion of humanity a faint glimmer of hope. A moment like this illustrates the essence of Frostpunk, a survival-style city-builder where you must lead a lonely band of survivors not against encroaching armies, but against a frigid storm that’s wiped out most of the human race.

As temperatures plunge well below freezing, it’s your job to guide the remaining populace towards establishing a successful, self-sufficient camp. You’ll need hunters and hothouses, mines and saw mills. And you have to keep all of these machines running in temperatures that would make even the hardiest penguins shiver.

The essentials are pretty simple, though. People need houses and jobs. Because this is a survival situation, everyone works on a near-constant basis. The day starts at 5:00 AM, and people have a few hours to finish any construction projects before they head to their primary job for 12 hours. Then they head back home, finish a fewsmall tasks, and go to bed.

This cycle is hugely important because you’ll need to always make sure you have enough fuel to keep the generator running through the night. A major part of this is planning out when and where people need to be to complete their tasks. If you survive, you’ll build outwards in concentric rings, ensuring that, as you expand, your core can keep up with the heating demands and provide enough warmth for your citizens to combat the pervasive chill.

This all works seamlessly, too. There’s a natural pattern to it all, and you’ll be given little challenges throughout the day to help give you a bit more structure. Often, these are emergent consequences of past decisions. If you were able to keep people alive through the night, but not warm enough, then they could get sick–posing a new set of challenges to prioritize for the day after. If any one element of the city is neglected a bit too long, then you’ll start getting more strident demands from your people, which often become more intricate, two-to-three-day goals. The structure for it all is elegant and precise–you always have just enough work, and you’re never left without near and moderate-term goals to help give you direction.

Your mission is also strained by all manner of unavoidable disasters. Everything from sudden cold snaps and necessary amputations to mining disasters and refugee crises crop up, requiring your intervention. This forms what could be called the crux of the game–balancing hope and discontent. Compassionate actions give your people hope. They remind the huddled masses that we (in the general sense) haven’t lost touch with humanity. Dispassionate or draconian acts, however, drain the collective will. Unlike most moral choices in games, neither are unilaterally better.

Compassionate actions are typically better long-term goals for short-term hits. For instance, taking on gravely injured or terminally ill refugees will help hold your people together–reminding them that if they are ever left out or lost, they will be found and cared for. At the same time, medical care in the post-apocalypse is damned near impossible, and if you don’t have the facilities to care for the people, you’ll soon end up with a pile of bodies spreading disease throughoutthe colony. Manage to fix up the wounded, though, and you’ll have an able-bodied workforce embued with the unbreakable spirit of hope.

These are the kinds of choices Frostpunk lives on, and what separates it from every other comparable game. Frostpunk gets a lot of mileage from it, too. It’s hard to cling to the moral high ground–even if you succeed–when you’re reminded of the sacrifices you’ve made along the way. That gives your decisions weight in a way that SimCity and many of its ilk simply can’t. Here, the effects of disasters are tangible, and the game rightly blames you for your personal failures.

One of your citizens approaches you: “Children should be put to work. We’re all in this together, and we need help right now.” Then, you’re shuffled over to a rough-hewn book of laws for your band. There you can, with a click, start putting the kids to work. Or you could build child shelters to house the kids and keep them healthyand safe from the cold. The citizens didn’t present you with that second option–and why would they, they can only see what’s immediately in front of them?

Frostpunk itself, in the tutorial, notes that the people you serve are always looking for a solution, but not necessarily the best one. What’s ultimately best depends on the emergent challenges you face. Do you have a mysterious illness spreading wildly through the camp? Are you struggling to find coal, forcing you to char firewood and construction materials to keep the generator going? These questions are constant and agonizing throughout. Frostpunk drips cynicism and bleakness. And yet it is that hopelessness, that fundamental need of human beings to persist in spite of everything that Frostpunk seeks to embody most. You become the bulwark against fear–even as you look across the land and internalize just how hard this fight will be.

That’s powerful precisely because it hurts. Every time you make a tough call, doubts linger. If you had been better, if you had chosen differently, maybe you’d have been able to save everyone. Adding to the distress, Frostpunk’s Hope meter shows you the consequences of your decisions right as they happen. Send children into the mines and you can watch the camp’s faith evaporate as a whole chunk of meter gets lopped off.

This system–balancing the will of the people against their own needs–works so well precisely because every mechanism in the game is built to support that core idea. Your job is to manage the emotional fortitude of the people as much as it is about anything else. In time, you’ll be able to form scouting parties, outposts, and build a sprawling network of makeshift towns and settlements that stand together. But again, that arc intersects with countless brutal decisions. Should you send a scout to help survivors fight off bears? What about risk turning off an electrical super-weapon that fries everything it touches–but with the potential of a new safe haven from the world outside? The story of your civilization, of your masses hoping, is forged in the choices you make along the way. And they become a part of the narrative you build.

Frostpunk is among the best overall takes on the survival city builder to date. Its theming and consistency create a powerful narrative through line that binds your actions around the struggle to hold onto humanity in uncertain times. Hope is a qualified good, but you may not always be strong enough (or clever enough) to shelter that flame from the cold.

Redmi S2 High-Resolution Images Reportedly Surface in Czech Republic-3GB of RAM and 32GB Inbuilt Storage

Redmi S2is Xiaomi’s upcoming smartphone but the Chinese phone maker has been pretty hush-hush about this budget handset. Having undergone the usual TENAA and 3C certification treatment in China, the Redmi S2 seems ready for an impending launch. However, in an interesting set of developments, the smartphone has been spotted with high-quality product shots in Czech Republic, of all places, and is said to be displayed at Xiaomi’s offline store this week.

Czechpublication SvetAndroida seems to have obtained exclusive access of a pink-coloured unit of the upcoming Redmi S2, reportedly sourced from people at the Xiaomi store opening in Prague on Saturday. From the high-resolution shots, we can see that the phone looks a lot like the Redmi Note 5 Pro or even the recently launched Mi 6X. It has a similar vertical dual rear camera setup, an 18:9 display, and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor.

According to the report, the Redmi S2 will run MIUI on top of Android Oreo out-of-the-box. It will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC, coupled with 3GBof RAM and 32GB inbuilt storage. Storage will be expandable via microSD cards. The phone will reportedly sport a 5.99-inch HD+ (720×1440 pixels) display, aMicro-USB port, and a 16-megapixel selfie camera. On the back, the dual camera setup might get a 12-megapixel primary sensor and a 5-megapixel secondarysensor. Battery will likely have a capacity of 3080mAh.

And, as per the report, the smartphone will be displayed at the new Xiaomi store opening up in Prague. The Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S will also be present at the store.

The smartphone was spotted recently on TENAA. According to the listing, there will be 3 variants of the phone – one with 2GB RAM/ 16GB inbuilt storage, one with 3GB RAM/ 32GB onboard storage, and the top-end variant with 4GB RAM/ 64GB inbuilt storage.

Apple Watch, Fitbit can diagnose hypertension and sleep apnea: study-Cardiogram

A new study from the University of California, San Francisco and a health startup suggests that Apple Watch and Fitbit can accurately diagnose common health issues such as hypertension and sleep apnea.

The study published by the startup, Cardiogram, and UCSF Health Lab said hypertension and sleep apnea were diagnosed on wearables with 82 percent and 90 percent accuracy, respectively. Those rates are slightly lower than the rate for abnormal heart rhythm, which Cardiogram and UCSF diagnosed with 97 percent accuracy in a previous study from May.

Cardiogram - which is not affiliated with Apple or Fitbit - and UCSF determined accuracy levels by using artificial intelligence to pick up abnormal patterns in heart rate.

The study was conducted with more than 6,000 subjects, 37 percent and 17 percent who had hypertension and sleep apnea, respectively. The study will be subjected to months of peer-reviewed clinical research to validate the findings. Cardiogram says it plans to expand its studies into diagnosing pre-diabetes and diabetes.

"What if we could transform wearables people already own - Apple Watches, Android Wears, Garmins, and Fitbits - into inexpensive, everyday screening tools using artificial intelligence?" wrote Cardiogram co-founder Brandon Ballinger in a Medium post.

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, and sleep apnea, in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep, affect millions of Americans - most of whom do not know they have either disorders. More than 80 percent of Americans with sleep apnea are undiagnosed, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association.

More than 18 million Americans are estimated to have sleep apnea, but those with hypertension are far more prevalent. More than 75 million Americans - or 29 percent - have hypertension, according to the Center for Disease Control.

Hypertension and sleep apnea cost the United States $46 billion and $150 billion, respectively, in direct medical spending, lost productivity, and accidents, according to two separate studies by the CDC and American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Apple and Fitbit have been actively looking into expanding their medical research into abnormal heart rhythm, hypertension and sleep apnea. Apple partnered with Stanford School of Medicine to study how Apple Watch can detect abnormal heart rhythm in its proprietary Health apps.

"One of the things that we've learned that we've been really surprised and delighted about is this device ... has essentially alerted people through the collection of the data that they have a problem," said AppleCEO Tim Cook in an interview with Fortune in August. "And that spurred them to go to the doctor and say, 'Look at my heart rate data. Is something wrong?' And a not-insignificant number have found out if they hadn't come into the doctor they would have died."

Fitbit for months has said it is focusing on sleep apnea. The company's new smartwatch, Ionic, has a new optical sensor to better collect data to diagnose sleep apnea.

In an interview with The Verge on Fitbit's sleep apnea efforts in August, Fitbit CEO James Park said the company will need to do many clinical trials to get its technology approval for future diagnoses.

"Diagnostics is a tricky term," said Park. "But definitely over time we hope to progress from screening in conjunction with a medical professional, to more diagnostics or treatment."

In September, both Apple and Fitbit were selected by the Food and Drug Administration to participate in a trial program allowing the companies to skip certain regulations to expedite innovation.

How can help Smartphone ‘scores’ to doctors track severity of Parkinson’s disease symptoms

Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder, is often tough to treat effectively because symptoms, such as tremors and walking difficulties, can vary dramatically over a period of days, or even hours.

To address this challenge, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists, working with an interdisciplinary team of experts from two other institutions, have developed a new approach that uses sensors on a smartphone to generate a score that reliably reflects symptom severity in patients with Parkinson's disease.

In a study published recently online in the journal JAMA Neurology, researchers from Johns Hopkins' Whiting School of Engineering, the University of Rochester Medical Center, and Aston University in the United Kingdom reported that the severity of symptoms among Parkinson's patients seen by neurologists aligned closely with those generated by their smartphone app.

Typically, patients with Parkinson's disease are evaluated by medical specialists during three or four clinic visits annually, with subjective assessments capturing only a brief snapshot of a patient's fluctuating symptoms. In their homes, patients may also be asked to fill out a cumbersome 24-hour "motor diary" in which they keep a written record of their mobility, involuntary twisting movements and other Parkinson's symptoms. The doctor then uses this self-reported or imprecise data to guide treatment.

In the new study, the researchers say patients could use a smartphone app to objectively monitor symptoms in the home and share this data to help doctors fine-tune their treatment.

E. Ray Dorsey, a University of Rochester Medical Center neurologist and a co-author of the research paper, said he welcomes the validation of Parkinson's patient severity scores produced by the smartphone tests.

"If you think about it, it sounds crazy," he said, "but until these types of studies, we had very limited data on how these people function on Saturdays and Sundays because patients don't come to the clinic on Saturdays or Sundays. We also had very limited data about how people with Parkinson's do at two o'clock in the morning or 11 o'clock at night because, unless they're hospitalized, they're generally not being seen in clinics at those times."

About six years ago, while doing medical research at Johns Hopkins, Dorsey was introduced to Suchi Saria, an assistant professor of computer science at the university. Saria, the corresponding author of the study and an expert in a computing technique called machine learning, had been using it to extract useful information from health-related data that was routinely being collected at hospitals. The two researchers, along with some of Saria's students, teamed up to find a way to monitor the health of Parkinson's patients as easily as people with diabetes can check their glucose levels with a pinprick blood test.

The team members knew that neurologists evaluated their Parkinson's patients by gathering information about how they moved, spoke and completed certain daily tasks. "Can we do this with a cellphone?" Saria wondered at the time. "We asked, 'What are the tricks we can use to make that happen?' "

Using existing smartphone components such as its microphone, touch screen and accelerometer, the team members devised five simple tasks involving voice sensing, finger tapping, gait measurement, balance and reaction time. They turned this into a Smartphone app called 'HopkinsPD.' Next, using a machine learning technique that the team devised, they were able to convert the data collected with these tests and turn that into an objective Parkinson's disease severity score—a score that better reflected the overall severity of patients' symptoms and how well they were responding to medication.

The researchers say this smartphone evaluation should be particularly useful because it does not rely on the subjective observations of a medical staff member. Moreover, it can be administered any time or day in a clinic or within the patient's home, where the patient is less likely to be as nervous as in a medical setting.

"The day-to-day variability of Parkinson's symptoms is so high," Saria said. "If you happen to measure a patient at 5 p.m. today and then three months later, again at 5 p.m., how do you know that you didn't catch him at a good time the first time and at a bad time the second time?"

Collecting more frequent smartphone test data in a medical setting as well as in the home, could give doctors a clearer picture of their patients' overall heath and how well their medications are working, Saria and her colleagues suggested.

Summarizing the importance of their finding in the JAMA Neurology report, the researchers said, "A smartphone-derived severity score for Parkinson's disease is feasible and provides an objective measure of motor symptoms inside and outside the clinic that could be valuable for clinical care and therapeutic development."

Patients in the research project used Android smartphones to download the software, available through the Parkinson's Voice Initiative website. The team has now partnered with Apple and Sage Bionetworks to develop mPower, an iPhone version that is available at Apple's App Store.

The study's three co-lead authors included two of Saria's students from the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins: doctoral candidate Andong Zhan and third-year undergraduate Srihari Mohan.

Zahn, who is from Qujing, Yunnan, in China, described the project as "a unique experience of extracting data from the physical world to a digital world and finally seeing it become meaningful clinical information."

Mohan, who is from Redmond, Washington, added, "While not all research gets integrated tangibly into people's lives, what excites me most is the potential for the methods we developed to be deployed seamlessly into a patient's lifestyle and improve the quality of care."

An app for the perfect selfie: Algorithm direct user where to position camera for best photo

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have developed a smartphone app that helps people learn the art of taking great selfies.

Inside the app is an algorithm that directs the user where to position the camera allowing them to take the best shot possible.

"Selfie's have increasingly become a normal way for people to express themselves and their experiences, only not all selfies are created equal," said Dan Vogel, a professor of computer science at Waterloo. "Unlike other apps that enhance a photo after you take it, this system gives direction, meaning the user is actually learning why their photo will be better."

In developing the algorithm, Vogel and Qifan Li, a former Master's student at Waterloo, bought 3D digital scans of "average" looking people. They took hundreds of "virtual selfies" by writing code to control a virtual smartphone camera and computer-generated lighting which allowed them to explore different composition principles, including lighting direction, face position and face size.

Using an online crowdsourcing service, the researchers had thousands of people vote on which of the virtual selfie photos they felt were best, and then mathematically modelled the patterns of votes to develop an algorithm that can guide people to take the best selfie.

They later had real people take selfies with a standard cameraapp, and an app powered by the algorithm. Based on more online ratings, they found a 26 per cent improvement in selfies taken with Waterloo's app.

"This is just the beginning of what is possible," said Vogel. "We can expand the variables to include variables aspects such as hairstyle, types of smile or even the outfit you wear.

"When it comes to teaching people to take better selfies, the sky's the limit."

Vogel and Li recently presented the work in Edinburgh, Scotland at the 2017 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.