A new FVL

Bell helicopter announced on monday, december 18, its tilt rotor has achieved its first flight according to Wired. "This is an exciting time for Bell Helicopter, and I could not be more proud of the progress we have made with first flight of Bell V-280", said Mitch Snyder, President & CEO of Bell Helicopter.
The V-280 is a part of JMR- TD (Joint Multi Role Technology Demonstrator), a submission by Bell Helicopter to the US Army. It is clearly a competitor to Boeing and Sikorsky. It's a Future Vertical Lift hybrid among a plane and a helicopter. It has side loading doors. Including two pilots, the V-280 can occupy a crew of four and has the capacity of transporting up to fourteen troops. It has twice the speed and range of conventional helicopters. Its top speed will be 300 knots and is constructed for a range of 2100 nautical miles and the capability to self deploy 2100 nautical miles at a speed of 230 knots.

Movi for iPhone

Movi gimbal for iPhone

Freefly has introduced a new gimbal specifically designed to use with an iPhone. This wonderful creation will surely help many filmmakers. Priced at $299, Movi stabilising gimbal will be launched in early 2018.
The Freefly Movi is built with gyroscopic technology. The Movi makes it simple and easy for people to get the cinematic effects by not letting the iPhone shake, using a motor at the hand-held unit while recording. It has few control buttons on the handle that controls communication with the iPhone. The app containes different operating modes that aides effects similar to Hollywood level cameras. The majestic mode, which keeps the filming steady without any bumps or shakes affecting it. The echo mode where you can set a start, end point and duration. The orbit mode helps in rotating around the object.
There are many gimbals for smartphones but the controls for Freefly Movi for iPhone is definitely of high quality.

Buzzing data

Buzzing Bees have become tech savvy. Bees with a chip glued on their back, buzz data about their arrival and departure in their hive.This makes it easier for the scientists to observe the pattern of the bees movement.
With the decrease in numbers of the honeybees world wide due to pollution,pesticides and various man made blunders, this new technology can help the scientists study their behavior and help them increase in number.

Data collection in Big Data

In Big Data Analytics, a lot of raw data is available and abundance data collection exists. There are several mechanisms to collect data such as sensor based data collection where unique data will be provided.

For providing unique data using certain mechnisms, maintenance is required which are generally expensive. Computation of data item prices need to be calculated. This is one of the limitation in collecting data. To avoid such limitations, there are approaches auch as application allocation in E-ARL (Early Accurate Result Library). Revenue balance avoids starvation of mobile peers and E-Top incentive system which answers top-k queries in M-P2P networks by stimulating an economic market.

Data quality plays an important role. For good data quality there are key contributions from collaborative and non-collaborative methods. Here comes another limitation, the open research issue. An example for this limitation is the noisy data in photos which doesn't help in car plate recognition of traffic violations. Also, preserving data privacy is necessary to sustain long term data collection. Considering all this, incentives for crowd driven data collection can be linked. Data is obtained from crowd workers when incentives are given, the data obtained must be made into useful information.

However, the limitation incrowd sourcing is data reliability. Crowd sourcing and cloud serving are customer oriented where crowd sourcing is a potential labour.

Google search results for Apple's Siri

Apple is shifting from its default web search provider from Siri which is Microsoft's Bing to Google.

Google and Apple have a deal worth 3 billion dollars and it is unknown if this is a part of that deal or not. 

"Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on MAC will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari" Apple said in a statement to Techcrunch.

Image search being popular in Bing, the video results go to Google's youtube and the search for web images are recieved from Bing for Siri. The "search the web" results in both search interfaces will not point to Bing anymore. 

Beats studio 3

Apple's new pair of Beats studio 3 fetches adaptive noise cancelling (ANC) and battery life. Available at a premium price of $349 in the US, the wireless Beats studio 3 delivers 22hours battery life with pure ANC on and extends to 40 hours with ANC off.

The newest step for a headphone brand company being adaptive noise cancellation makes it a huge success. Using ANC, the headphones continuously assesses the surroundings and the level of noise and adjusts the strength of cancellation accordingly. The Beats studio 3 uses a W1 chip which means users can pair the headphones with iPads, iPhones and other apple devices within seconds.Apple's W1 chip has class 1 bluetooth and can be used with other non-apple devices as well.

Using these headphones users can answer phone calls, activate siri and control music with multifunction on ear controls.  Beats studio 3 has soft over-ear cushions and are available in six colors which are red, shadow grey, blue, white, porcelain rose and matte black.

Astronomical big data

Big Data plays an important role in the field of Astronomy which is immensely data rich. There has been a transformation in the field of astronomy,from traditional collection of data to digital ways of collecting data. Astronomical instruments can look farther into space than before and collect immense data.It is a great challenge to visualise the astronomical data sets.

The data sets are measured in multiple terabytes and in petabytes. One of the components used in this field is the variable tree which is a semantic tree of astronomical variables and transients. The CRTs (Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey) detects and publishes all transients in small amount of time. The volume of data can be observed in different colors with aound 500 million light curves data available. Brightness changes can be observed in examples of CRTs transients.

CRTs transients source:arizona.edu

One of the game changing technology introduced was the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), it uses multiple filters to get IM transients every night and the data rate could be obtained upto 10 petabytes per second. The challenge lies between velocity and volatility. The variations in data obtained shows extreme levels which broadly classify the elements of astronomical observation. The variety of parameters is also a challenge. Crude classification can be ambiguous as different telescope and spectroscope provide different information.

In the data rich astronomy today, lots of data and derived data sets are available which needs early characterisation and incremental classification.These challenges can be taken up globally by groups  of astronomy enthusiasts helping to mine the pre existing data.

The new iPhone X

This year marks the tenth anniversary of iPhone. The iPhone X referred to as "Ten" is priced at 1 lakh rupees in India making it the most expensive iPhone till date.
The fingerprint recognition is replaced by face recognition in the new iPhone X.The Face ID is said to work even in the dark using 30,000  infrared dots to scan. With very serious face recognition tech used, face ID doesn't recognise photos and masks.

Apple explained the features of Face ID

The 256GB storage variant of iPhone X is priced around 1 lakh rupees whereas the 64GB variant of iPhone X is priced around 89000 rupees in India.

It has a 5.8 inch screen with 458 pixels per inch and is branded as "super retina" with the sharpest display. "True Tone" for the display means it will adjust the white balance to match the surrounding light. It doesn't have a home button but a side button to access siri and one has to swipe to access the apps. With no home button, iPhone X looks similar to Samsung galaxy note.

Animoji is a feature that looks like a lot of fun where you can create short clips of your emotions and send them as emojis. The face recognition will make the emoji resemble your facial expression. Watching emojis come to life and speak like you sure is fun!

iPhone X, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus are the first iPhones which have wireless charging feature. The new models coincide with the release of iOS 11 which is the latest version of Apple's operating system. It brings ARKit software development tools which helps developers increase reality features to their apps where graphics join real world views.

iPhone X has two lens in its camera. It has 12 megapixel wide angle lens and a telephoto lens for zooming , improved camera sensors which help in taking improvised pictures in low light. The front facing "true depth" camera can help take fancy portraits with bokeh effect.

Although iPhone X's design was leaked before it's launch it's pretty awesome. It's made with glass and stainless steel. It's available in silver and space grey colors.

 It's official release date is 3 November 2017.

Defining properties of Big Data Analytics

Big Data Analytics gives remarkable business insights to make faster and better decisions by examining large amount of data and varied data sets to uncover hidden patterns, market trends, correlations and many other insights in an organised business environment.

It is important to know the defining properties of Big Data Analytics as it provides the perceived value of data i.e, it provides a platform to businesses The defining properties of Big Data Analytics are Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity.

1. Volume - Big Data infers large amount of data. This need not be in measurements of petabytes. The volume of data is very huge with the usage of machines and networking over the years. Analysing this large set of data is a task to be considered.
2. Velocity is the speed at which the large incoming data is analysed and processed. Social media sites get enormous amount of incoming data. If the velocity of such large flow of data is handled it helps businesses provide strategic outputs.Streaming apps like Netflix is an example.
3. Variety - Big data is obtained from variety of sectors such as  Government, Healthcare, Retail, Telecom, Education and media. Both structured and unstructured data can be described as variety. Structured data such as spreadsheets, information in databases is increased by unstructured data such as photos,media files in twitter. The variety of unstructured data has to be stored, maintained and analysed.
4. Veracity is mostly the data in doubt, uncertainty due to data inconsistency and incompleteness. In other words, varacity is data ambiguity. To achieve data variety is a challenge. A partial set of techniques are cleansing of data, estimation of confidence, stochastic optimisation methods.

When the four V's of Big Data are measured, one can broaden the outcomes of the data to influence upsell, cross-sell, retention, customer acquisition and other revenue indicating generators. Analysing Big Data with the four V's brings value to the business. Big data initiates association with what is not known with what might lead to newer possibilities.