Lifeboat Foundation

Inside Samsung’s incredible Gumi Smart City.

In the shade of a coconut palm, Chandrika tilts her smartphone screen to avoid the sun’s glare. It is early morning in Alahalli village in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, but the heat and humidity are rising fast. As Chandrika scrolls, she clicks on several audio clips in succession, demonstrating the simplicity of the app she recently started using. At each tap, the sound of her voice speaking her mother tongue emerges from the phone.

Before she started using this app, 30-year-old Chandrika (who, like many South Indians, uses the first letter of her father’s name, K., instead of a last name) had just 184 rupees ($2.25) in her bank account. But in return for around six hours of work spread over several days in late April, she received 2,570 rupees ($31.30). That’s roughly the same amount she makes in a month of working as a teacher at a distant school, after the cost of the three buses it takes her to get there and back. Unlike her day job, the app doesn’t make her wait until the end of the month for payment; money lands in her bank account in just a few hours. Just by reading text aloud in her native language of Kannada, spoken by around 60 million people mostly in central and southern India, Chandrika has used this app to earn an hourly wage of about $5, nearly 20 times the Indian minimum. And in a few days, more money will arrive—a 50% bonus, awarded once the voice clips are validated as accurate.

Read More: Gig Workers Behind AI Face ‘Unfair Working Conditions,’ Oxford Report Finds

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are now widely used. For use in displays, blue OLEDs are additionally required to supplement the primary colors red and green. Especially in blue OLEDs, impurities give rise to strong electrical losses, which could be partly circumvented by using highly complex and expensive device layouts. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now developed a new material concept that potentially allows efficient blue OLEDs with a strongly simplified structure.

From televisions to smartphones: organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are nowadays finding their way into many devices that we use every day. To display an image, they are needed in the three primary colors red, green and blue. In particular, light-emitting diodes for blue light are still difficult to manufacture because blue light—physically spoken—has a high energy, which makes the development of materials difficult.

Especially the presence of minute quantities of impurities in the material that cannot be removed plays a decisive role in the performance of these materials. These impurities— oxygen molecules, for example—form obstacles for electrons to move inside the diode and participate in the light-generation process. When an electron is captured by such an obstacle, its energy is not converted into light but into heat. This problem, known as “charge trapping”, occurs primarily in blue OLEDs and significantly reduces their efficiency.

Cities can be obstacle courses for communications signals. A radio signal must travel from a cell phone to a router to a cell tower, and onward to its recipient—all while bouncing between walls, buildings and other structures. When it hits an obstacle, the radio wave gets scattered, diminishing the signal. This in turn reduces the bandwidth. At the same time, the signal must compete with the bandwidth needs of numerous other devices in the area. All this reduces the amount of information the signal can communicate.

Newly developed small, lightweight reflective surfaces could revolutionize communications in crowded environments by providing unprecedented control over electromagnetic signals, like radio waves.

Historically, engineers have used repeaters—electronic devices that receive a signal and retransmit it—to help these communications signals cover longer distances and get around obstacles, but this technology is reaching its limits. Now, engineers are looking to modify the behavior of the communications signal itself. Enter reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS).

Apple has rolled out security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari to address several security vulnerabilities, including one actively exploited zero-day bug in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2023–38606, the shortcoming resides in the kernel and permits a malicious app to modify sensitive kernel state potentially. The company said it was addressed with improved state management.

“Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.1,” the tech giant noted in its advisory.

OpenAI is releasing the Android version of the app for ChatGPT next week after launching on iOS in May.

Since launching in November, OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool has reached a number of users at a rate that’s astounding for anything outside of Threads — now the company says it’s ready to release an app for Android.

The ChatGPT for Android app is launching a few months after the free iOS app brought the chatbot to iPhones and iPads.

Continue reading “ChatGPT for Android launches next week” »

Safety first. I’ve read about tech saving lives and this is a step forward along with crash detection and AFib detection and more. Our phones are legit becoming rescue and medical devices. Any experience or thoughts?

The extent of satellite support is still not evident when it comes to smartphones, but I am really looking forward to seeing how Android 14 uses this feature. It is also important to understand that all Android phones are built differently, especially when it comes to manufacturers, and while Samsung might be the biggest, with the most amount of influence, it is possible that other companies won’t introduce the feature despite the latest version of Android supporting the feature.

Whatever the case might be, Android 14 is not far away, as the update will make its debut in October alongside Pixel 8 series. You can expect the Tensor G3 to have this support. In addition to that, new flagship phones are going to start popping up, which means that we will see some compelling hardware from a variety of companies and will perhaps also get a look at which phone does support satellite SMS and other satellite-based communication features and which doesn’t.

Continue reading “Android 14 Will Bring Support For Satellite SMS Starting With Pixel And Galaxy Phones, Will Require Supported Hardware” »

Since I was going to become a Dr before my TBI, or a scientist but there’s this and some devices and apps are pretty accurate. Like Samsung and Apple. Now there’s the Google Pixel, the Pixel watch and of course Fitbit and more.

The same devices used to take selfies and type out tweets are being repurposed and commercialized for quick access to information needed for monitoring a patient’s health. A fingertip pressed against a phone’s camera lens can measure a heart rate. The microphone, kept by the bedside, can screen for sleep apnea. Even the speaker is being tapped, to monitor breathing using sonar technology. Smartphones as medical devices could be the next big thing.

In the best of this new world, the data is conveyed remotely to a medical professional for the convenience and comfort of the patient. Or, in some cases, to support a clinician without the need for costly hardware.

Continue reading “Smartphones as Medical Devices — The Future of Healthcare?” »

Now that’s something mach can use.

MIT researchers have recently developed a portable desalination unit that can remove particles and salts to turn seawater into drinking water.

Continue reading “MIT Scientists Turn Seawater to Drinking Water With the Push of a Button” »